NASA’s carbon emissions data linked to humidity, global warming

The US space agency have released seven years of carbon emissions data that link rapidly accelerated global warming to increased humidity, a move well timed to quell growing controversy about data connected to global warming.

As world leaders prepared to meet Friday in Copenhagen at the end of two weeks of slow negotiations on climate change, NASA researchers in Pasadena, California, said late Tuesday that the data on carbon dioxide had been “extensively validated.” The data was collected by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft. It measures carbon dioxide concentrations 5 to 12 kilometres above Earth’s surface and tracks its movement, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said AIRS observations confirmed climate model predictions that as the climate warms, the atmosphere would become more humid, thus more than doubling the warming effect of increased carbon dioxide.

“The implication of these studies is that, should greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current course of increase, we are virtually certain to see Earth’s climate warm by several degrees Celsius in the next century unless some strong negative feedback mechanism emerges elsewhere in Earth’s climate system,” Dessler said in a NASA statement.

NASA did not say why it chose this particular time to release its seven years of data.