We can now tell how much CO2 in the air is due to fossil fuel burning

Michael Le Page is a person.

A way of directly measuring the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels could help cities and countries monitor their efforts to reduce emissions.

We are in a small window of time to do this, so we really need to know what the situation is as quickly and accurately as possible.

Governments and research organizations use data such as how much oil or gas has been sold to estimate emissions. It can take years to fullyCompile this information and estimates can vary substantially.

Fossil fuel emissions can be measured directly to confirm the accuracy of inventory-based estimates. It could allow us to track the amount of emissions from specific regions.

Plants take up or release different amounts of CO2 as the seasons shift and the weather changes. It's like standing on a beach and trying to tell whether the tide is going in or out as waves are constantly coming and going.

The long-term rise in atmospheric CO2 due to human activity is crystal clear, but the short-term picture is less so.

Various ways of directly measuring fossil fuel emissions have been tried by researchers. The radioactive isotope carbon-14 is not found in fossil fuels because it decays over time and oil and gas supplies are millions of years old. Continuous measurement is not possible because the collection of samples in flasks is required. Some types of nuclear reactor emit carbon-14, which obscures the picture.

Pickers' team has used an alternative approach to measure atmospheric oxygen and CO2 at the same time. The ratio of oxygen lost from the atmosphere to increased CO2 when plant matter is used as food is around 1.1. It is 1.2 for coal and 2 for gas.

The Weybourne Atmospheric Observatory on the Norfolk coast was used by the researchers to calculate emissions from the southern UK since 2020. They used machine learning to estimate how the weather and wind will affect oxygen and CO2 levels in the area.

Read more: UK greenhouse gas emissions jumped by a record amount last year

Pickers says that covid has been a great example of sudden change.

She says it would be possible to measure emissions from Britain. It would be necessary to monitor individual cities.

Brad says the study makes a strong case that the method is effective. He says building monitoring stations around the world would take a lot of time and money.

If we are going to have a fossil-fuel-carbon-monitoring system, it will start with satellites.

There are plans to launch more missions focused on detecting this gas in the coming years after his team reported last year that falls in carbon dioxide emissions due to the Pandemic were detected using existing CO2sensing satellites.

Pickers says the problem with satellites is that they can't distinguish between CO2 and fossil fuel emissions. Satellite estimates use computer models of natural processes to determine fossil fuel emissions.

The models are informed by data and can be very accurate, as shown by the fact that Pickers' team relies on machine learning.

Pickers says that the best results may come from using all the different methods.

We are going to have to integrate all of these observations.

Science Advances is a journal.

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