Symposium by ISPRS and the U-M College of E...( October 7 1999 ANN ARBOR--World's s...)

October 7, 1999, ANN ARBOR--World's scientists to seek big picture in Ann Arbor. To make sense of a complex picture, sometimes it helps to take a step back and get the long view. But when it comes to seeing the complex picture of the world's carbon budget--where human activity releases greenhouse gases, and where the Earth's natural systems gobble them back up again--that long view is fraught with technical problems: How do you measure something as small as an atom of carbon in an area as large as the entire world?

An international group of scientists will be meeting at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, Oct. 20-22, to figure those problems out. The three-day technical symposium is sponsored by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and the U-M.

The session is intended as a follow-up to last fall's global warming conference in Buenos Aires and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a worldwide agreement on setting greenhouse gas goals for the developed and underdeveloped world. The Kyoto agreement, which has yet to be ratified by the United States, built a framework for global carbon dioxide emission reductions, and set goals for 38 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. One of the innovative approaches hammered out at Kyoto was the notion of creating a world market for "carbon credits." Parties that could certify they were reducing carbon emissions beyond defined levels would be able to sell or trade their credits to parties that were not able to achieve CO2 emission reduction limits. But measurement and verifying compliance are unresolved technical problems for such a system.

Measuring compliance and figuring out where carbon comes from and where it goes is a huge technical task, said remote sensing expert Craig Dobson, an associate research scientist in U-M's College of Engineering. Part of the measurement problem is that the carbon question isn't limited to easily quantifiable
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Contact: Karl Leif Bates
batesk@umich.edu
734-647-7088
University of Michigan
7-Oct-1999