Dec. 5, 2008 -- The occasionally acrimonious debate about the planet's climate has been missing a key component: accurate measurements of how much carbon dioxide is in the air and how it is being recycled by Earth.
That is the heart of a new NASA mission called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which is set to launch early next year.
"We will uncover all kinds of patterns and cycles in carbon dioxide that people never thought existed. It'll be just like when the first ozone measurements were made," said project scientist Chip Miller, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"We get at the question of the sources of carbon dioxide and see how much is pulled out (of the atmosphere) by land and how much by seas," he said.
Many scientists consider carbon dioxide to be the telltale gas of global warming. Once it is released into the air, there is little chemistry to remove it. Its presence traps reflected sunlight. Plants, soils and the oceans of Earth reabsorb the gas, but that takes a while. Miller says that the average lifetime for carbon dioxide is about 300 years. About 20 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide, however, lasts for 10,000 years or longer.
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