First Name | Pieter |
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Last Name | Tans |
Email Address | Pieter.Tans@noaa.gov |
Affiliation | NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory |
Subject | Section IV D Tracking and Measuring Progress |
Comment | Section IV D of the proposed scoping plan can be improved in essential ways in my opinion. In the process of severely reducing emissions, enormous investments will be made by government, the private sector, and individual citizens. We need to know to what extent each of these policies or strategies is really successful as opposed to what is being claimed for them or desired. It would be foolish to rely primarily, as the current plan appears to do, on claimed reductions. These accounting practices are indeed necessary, but society needs independent verification, on the scale of counties and states, of the accounting in the place where it counts, namely the atmosphere itself. There is too much money at stake, nor can we afford the climate risk of mitigation measures being not as effective as we hope they are. I'll mention just two examples, out of many, pertaining to emissions inventories. There is overwhelming evidence from atmospheric measurements that the EPA overestimates U.S. emissions of carbon monoxide by a factor 2-3. There is also good evidence that they underestimate sulfur hexafluoride emissions (reported to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) by a factor of ~two. What I would like to see CARB propose is a plan to combine GHG measurements with many other chemical species, many of which are already being measured, such as HCFCs, HFCs, CO, hydrocarbons, etc. The observation of correlated variations in the atmosphere helps to apportion the variation of GHGs to specific processes, and simultaneously it allows for better quantification of the emissions of species contributing to air pollution. To be fully effective, all of these measurements need to be a part of, and embedded in, a larger framework. Air flows into, above, and out of California, contributing to information about emissions in California. |
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Date and Time Comment Was Submitted | 2008-11-10 09:09:10 |
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