NASA Holds Media Briefing on Carbon’s Role in Earth’s Future Climate

NASA simulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

NASA is advancing new tools like the supercomputer model that created this simulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to better understand what will happen to Earth’s climate if the land and ocean can no longer absorb nearly half of all climate-warming CO2 emissions.

Credits: NASA/GSFC

NASA will host a media teleconference at noon EST on Thursday, Nov. 12 to discuss the latest insights into how Earth is responding to rising levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, and what this means for our future climate.

Later this month, a United Nations climate meeting in Paris will focus on setting limits on future levels of human-produced carbon emissions. This NASA briefing will present new observations from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission, NASA’s first satellite dedicated to measuring carbon dioxide, and preview field work planned in the North Atlantic and Alaska.

The panelists will be:

Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division at the agency’s headquarters in Washington
Mike Behrenfeld, principal investigator for NASA’s NAAMES field campaign, Oregon State University in Corvallis
George Hurtt, lead for NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, University of Maryland in College Park
Annmarie Eldering, deputy project scientist for NASA’s OCO-2 mission at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California
Lesley Ott, research scientist in the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland

To participate, media must email their name and affiliation to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov by 11 a.m. on Thursday. Media and the public also may ask questions during the briefing on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA.

Earth’s land and ocean currently absorb about half of all carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, but it’s uncertain whether the planet can keep this up in the future. NASA’s Earth science program works to improve our understanding of how carbon absorption and emission processes work in nature and how they could change in a warming world with increasing levels of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from human activities.

Audio of the briefing will stream live at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

For more information about NASA's Earth science programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/earth

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Steve Cole
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0918
stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov

Last Updated: Nov. 9, 2015

Editor: Karen Northon