MEGACITY CARBON
Paris, L. A. track where emissions originate.
LOS ANGELES — Every time Los Angeles exhales, odd- looking gadgets anchored in the mountains above the city trace the invisible puffs of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that waft skyward.
Halfway around the globe, similar contraptions atop the Eiffel Tower and elsewhere around Paris keep a pulse on emissions from smokestacks and automobile tailpipes. And there is talk of outfitting Sao Paulo, Brazil, with sensors that sniff the byproducts of burning fossil fuels.
It’s part of a budding effort to track the carbon footprints of megacities, urban hubs with over 10 million people that are increasingly responsible for human- caused global warming.
For years, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse pollutants have been closely monitored around the planet by stations on the ground and in space. Last week, worldwide levels of carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million at a Hawaii station that sets the global benchmark — a concentration not seen in millions of years.
Now, some scientists are eyeing large cities — with L. A. and Paris as guinea pigs — and aiming to observe emissions in the atmosphere as a first step toward independently verifying whether local — and often lofty — climate goals are being met.
For the past year, a high- tech sensor poking out from a converted shipping container has stared at the Los Angeles basin from its 1.4 kilometre- high perch on Mount Wilson, a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains that’s home to a famous observatory and communication towers.
Like a satellite gazing down on Earth, it scans more than two dozen points from the inland desert to the coast. Every few minutes, it rumbles to life
There are some days where we can see 150 miles, way out to the Channel Islands, and there are some days where we have trouble even seeing what’s down here in the foreground.
STANLEY SANDER SCIENTIST, NASA JPL
as it automatically sweeps the horizon, measuring sunlight bouncing off the surface for the unique fingerprint of carbon dioxide and other heat- trapping gases.
In a storage room next door, commercially available instruments that monitor air quality double as climate sniffers. And in nearby Pasadena, a refurbished vintage solar telescope on the roof of a laboratory on the California Institute of Technology campus captures sunlight and sends it down a shaft 18 metres below where a prism-like instrument separates out carbon dioxide molecules.
On a recent April afternoon atop Mount Wilson, a brown haze hung over the city, the accumulation of dust and smoke particles in the atmosphere. “There are some days
where we can see 150 miles, way out to the Channel Islands, and there are some days where we have trouble even seeing what’s down here in the foreground,” said Stanley Sander,
a senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
What Sander and others are after are the mostly invisible greenhouse gases spewing from
factories and freeways below.
There are plans to expand the network. This summer, technicians will install commercial gas analyzers at a dozen more rooftops around the greater L. A. region. Scientists also plan to drive around the city in a Prius outfitted with a portable emission- measuring device and fly a research aircraft to pinpoint methane hot spots from the sky ( A well- known natural source is the La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of L. A. where underground bacteria burp bubbles of methane gas to the surface.)
Six years ago, elected officials vowed to reduce emissions to 35 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030 by shifting to renewable energy and weaning the city’s dependence on out- ofstate coal- fired plants, greening the twin port complex and
airports and retrofitting city buildings.
Scientists rely on a handful of sensors and use computer models to work backward to determine the sources of the emissions and whether they’re increasing. They won’t be able to zero in on an offending street or landfill, but they hope to determine whether switching buses from diesel to alternative fuel has made a dent.
It’ll take years of monitoring to know whether L. A. is on track to reach its goal.
Allen Robinson, an air quality expert at Carnegie Mellon University, said he prefers more attention would be paid to measuring a city’s methane emissions since scientists know less about them than carbon dioxide release.
Nearly 58 per cent of California’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 came from gasolinepowered vehicles, according to the U. S. Energy Department. In much of the country, coal — usually as fuel for electric power — is a major source of carbon dioxide pollution. But in California, it’s responsible for a tad more than one per cent of the state’s carbon dioxide emissions. In 2010, California put nearly 11 tons of carbon dioxide into the air for every person, which is lower than the national average of 20 tons per person.