Pirate's Cove

In all my years of blogging on anthropogenic climate change, and watching it long before that, I don’t think I’ve ever run across this. It just goes to show that the Cult of Climastrology will blame/link everything to the doomy cult beliefs

Astronomy’s Environmental Toll Is Surprisingly High. But There Are Ways to Clean it Up

It’s hard not to love the Kepler Space Telescope. Launched in 2009, the venerable spacecraft discovered nearly 5,000 suspected or confirmed exoplanets—or worlds orbiting other stars—during its 11-year lifetime. Built and launched at a relative bargain price of $600 million, it generated 4,306 scientific papers written by 9,606 authors. So all good, right? Well, not entirely.

In that same 11 years, the telescope that discovered so many other worlds did no favors for our own, generating an annual total of 4,784 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or a hefty 52,620 tons over its lifetime, mostly as a result of the electricity and supercomputing power it took to keep it operating. That also comes out to 12 tons of CO2 per paper and five tons per author.

Astronomy, in some ways, seems like the cleanest of sciences. After all, it costs nothing to look at the sky. But both ground-based and space-based observatories extract a huge environmental toll—in terms of construction, launch, energy generation and consumption, and even, at least before the pandemic, in the air miles burned as the world’s estimated 30,000 astronomers flew from conference to conference around the globe.

Science is bad for ‘climate change’.

Now, a new paper in Nature Astronomy has taken the full measure of the greenhouse gas footprint of the skygazing discipline. For the study, researchers analyzed the total CO2 output of 46 space-based missions and 39 ground observatories, dating as far back as the the 62-year old Observatoire de Haute Provence, in southeastern France and as recently as the new InSight observatory in New Mexico, which went online in 2017. In that time, the researchers—affiliated with the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Plane?tologie (IRAP), in Toulouse, France—concluded that the 85 observatories have generated a prodigious 20.3 million tons of CO2, or an average of 1.2 million tons per year.

Sigh. Anyway, there’s a lot of Concern from a few climate cultists over this footprint. All the fossil fuels and concrete used to construct the telescopes/observatories, how many are far from civilization, so must rely on fossil fuels for power.

The paper stresses that the astronomy community must take dramatic steps to address its carbon footprint and not simply consider it the cost of doing business. The 20.3 million tons of CO2 emitted overall by the 85 observatories is, after all, the equivalent of the annual greenhouse gas output of entire countries such as Croatia, Bulgaria or Estonia. There are ways to bring those numbers down.

“The first step,” said IRAP astronomer and co-author Lyigi Tibaldo, “is that existing structures are decarbonized, by switching to renewable energy sources.” Sun is abundant in the Atacama, making solar power a viable option. And the more the overall energy grid, especially in Europe, comes to rely on renewables, the more the telescopes located there will be able to operate without so much of a greenhouse impact. Most space-based observatories already rely on solar panels to keep them going, but a cleaner grid means their observations can be conducted and their data analyzed with a smaller carbon footprint too.

So, the paper is an advocacy one, activist, not serious science. Is anyone surprised? I suppose some cultists brainstormed what they could drag into their little cult that hadn’t been already.

Another answer, the authors argue, is to slow down the current building boom in new observatories in the Atacama and elsewhere, relying more on the astronomical infrastructure that already exists. “The strong reduction of emissions that are required in the next decade will not be achieved if we continue building new infrastructure at the pace that is occurring now,” said Tibaldo. “That will also give us more time to perform more comprehensive exploration of the data we have from existing infrastructure.”

Stop doing science, people! The Cult has spoken.