In 2009, NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite designed to take precise measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to help guide the response to climate change. Unfortunately, the satellite did not make it into its planned orbit. So, in 2014, NASA launched the replacement OCO-2, which has been collecting a huge number of high-resolution measurements, which provides greater spatial distribution of carbon dioxide over the entire planet. These measurements are combined with data from the ground-based network to provide scientists with the information that they need to better understand the processes that regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide. This enhanced understanding is essential for improving predictions of future atmospheric carbon dioxide increases and its impact on the climate. The satellite actually performed a lot better than anyone expected, becoming the ‘gold standard’ in space-based carbon dioxide measurements1.
The additional OCO-3, is a sensor designed to investigate important questions about the distribution of carbon dioxide especially relating to growing urban populations and changing patterns of fossil fuel combustion. This was developed and assembled using spare materials from the successful development and launch of OCO-2 and was launched in May, 2019, and is hosted in the Japanese Experiment Module aboard the International Space Station2.
NASA is planning to decommission this satellite, and others, beginning as soon as October this year. These satellites will be ‘abandoned’ and allowed to eventually burn up in the atmosphere as their orbits decay. This is supposedly simply a budget cut, but people involved in climate science state that it marks the latest step by the Mango Paedo administration to scale back federal climate science3.
In Mango Paedo world, if you don’t know about it, then it isn’t happening. This is typical of those who want to deny science, whether it be vaccines, evolution, biological sex, gender, or climate science. They are the enemies of knowledge.
Sources
I have often wondered, with all the things humans have messed up, can it be assumed that the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is decreasing.
Warren,
Atmospheric oxygen levels are very slowly decreasing today due to the burning of fossil fuels, which consumes oxygen, and deforestation which reduces oxygen production, but not enough to alter biological processes. However, in aquatic environments, decreased water oxygen levels, which can be caused by the human input of excess nutrients (see below), can decrease species populations and alter ecosystems. The preceding is copied from here: https://ugc.berkeley.edu/background-content/oxygen-levels/
(Australian) Scientists slam budget cuts that ‘threaten Nobel Prize-generating research
https://archive.is/D7O7Y
“Future Made In Australia” More CSIRO cuts
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-07/more-job-cuts-on-the-horizon-for-csiro-union-warns/105622456
Seems Trump’s STUPIDITY is spreading like a virus. Or, it could be a master strategy by ANSTO management to provoke the Albanese govt into providing more resources. Given what we’ve seen happen at CSIRO over decades, sadly the former is more likely than the latter. Decisions are yet to be made, but to have instruments/facilities like synchrotrons on a kite-flying ANSTO cuts menu smacks of management incompetence. So much for Albanese’s much touted “Future Made In Australia” policy, which appears to be as thin as Turnbull’s “innovation nation” waffle about an “agile, innovative and creative” – which of course failed to deliver anything significant and saw Australia actually slip in WIPO global innovation rankings.
If our lack of national innovation wasn’t concerning enough, our economic complexity ranking ought to be a wake-up call. While the Opposition waffles about short-term budgets, taxes, and deficits there has been next to no significant economic reform since Hawke-Keating’s dollar float , derugulation, removal of trade barriers and universal superannuation. We certainly won’t be getting any significant reform under steady-as-she-goes Albanese. As the Harvard Growth Lab’s Economic Complexity Index ranking shows, our economic base is firmly stuck in the dark ages of ‘she’ll be right mate, we’ll just dig it up and send it overseas’.
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/rankings
I feel for our youth and future generations. Housing might seem to be our/their biggest (domestic) social/economic challenge but for those to come that will pale into insignificance, especially with an apparent growing distaste for high immigration.
Jon,
Why doesn’t that bloody surprise me? Politicians of almost all persuasions seem to be getting dumber. The digging it up and sending it overseas stems from a Menzies era report by some pommy which said we’d be better off as a quarry and a farm than actually adding value to anything. That attitude has been had to shift.