The team at NASA made three animations, all showing the carbon dioxide levels throughout the year 2021. Each one shows four major contributors: fossil fuels, burning biomass, land ecosystems, and the oceans. In the view showing North and South America, we can see the results of plants absorbing the gas via photosynthesis and then releasing it during winter months. There are intense contributions along the northeastern seaboard of the U.S. mainly by emissions from fossil fuels burning. There’s also a rise and fall of the gas over the Amazon rainforest. The team also interprets this as plants absorbing carbon during the day and then releasing it at night.
Carbon dioxide measurements over North and South America in 2021. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio [NB: for the impatient, skip forward through the videos to see how fast this stuff is covering more and more of the planet]
The animations also show sources and sinks (where CO2 is absorbed) in Asia and show an incredible amount of fossil fuel emissions over China. In other parts of the world, such as Australia, the absorption of this gas is much higher, with lower emissions due to lower populations.
This greenhouse-induced climate change is a complex process to study, but it’s clear that carbon dioxide is part of it. There are two sources of it here on Earth: natural and human-caused. Natural CO2 sources provide most of this gas released into the atmosphere. These include oceans, animal and plant respiration, decomposition of organic matter, forest fires, and volcanic eruptions. Scientists know of some naturally occurring CO2 deposits in Earth’s crust that could also serve as CO2 sources. There are also “sinks”, where the gas gets trapped for some period of time. The oceans, (particularly the southern ocean), soil, and forests all “suck it in”, along with other plants. Those same sinks can release their stores of this gas.
Human-caused (or “anthropogenic”) sources include power generation, chemical production, agricultural practices, and transportation. Note that most of these involve fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuels are natural gas, coal, and oil.
How CO2 Cycles Over Time
The carbon cycle, which helps trace carbon dioxide on Earth. Courtesy: NOAA
So, we know that carbon dioxide goes through a natural “cycle” where it is exchanged in the air, ground, oceans, plants, humans, and animals. Throughout most of history, this cycle kept the seasonal average of CO2 in the atmosphere around an estimated 280 parts per million (ppm). In modern times, fossil fuel burning and other human activities added more CO2 to the cycle and changed the amount of it in the atmosphere. That pace has accelerated to the point where the levels are up by 50% in less than 200 years. Today the amount of CO2 is around 441 ppm and it continues to rise as we pump more of the gas into the air. Climatologists predict that as it rises, the average global temperature will continue to rise along with it.
If we look at average global temperatures since historical measurements began (when we were pumping less CO2 into the air), Earth’s temperature has risen about 0.08 C (0.14 F) each decade. Natural variability plays some role, but the addition of more carbon dioxide plays an increasing role. Over time, heating has added up to a 2-degree rise over more than a century. It tracks with the increasing amounts of this gas in our air. Two degrees is a lot; even one degree is enough to cause significant effects. To give you an idea, in the distant past, when global averages dropped by a degree or two, Earth suffered what’s called the Little Ice Age.
Warming Drives Change
A chart showing how global temperatures changed from 1880 to 2020. Courtesy MET Office Hadley Centre/Climactic Research Unit.
It may not sound like much, but two degrees is enough to drive change in our weather patterns, water cycles, and other environmental processes. That gradual warming is why experts often refer to “global warming”. It’s not that everywhere gets hot at once. It means that the average annual air temperature is rising. To give you an idea, the year 2022 was the sixth warmest year since people began keeping global records in 1880.
Maps and animations of CO2 sources, sinks, and cycles like the ones from NASA satellite data show in stark detail the cycle of this particular gas. The idea is to help people understand visually and intellectually what changes our atmosphere experiences over time.
The concept of Continuous Integration (CI) is a powerful tool in software development, and it’s not every day we get a look at how someone integrated automated hardware testing into their system. [Michael Orenstein] brought to our attention the Hardware CI Arena, a framework for doing exactly that across a variety of host OSes and microcontroller architectures.
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The Hardware CI Arena (GitHub repository) was created to allow automated testing to be done across a variety of common OS and hardware configurations. It does this by allowing software-controlled interactions to a bank of actual, physical hardware options. It’s purpose-built for a specific need, but the level of detail and frank discussion of the issues involved is an interesting look at what it took to get this kind of thing up and running.
The value of automatic hardware testing with custom rigs is familiar ground to anyone who develops hardware, but tying that idea into a testing and CI framework for a software product expands the idea in a useful way. When it comes to identifying problems, earlier is always better.
A US-based fraud prevention company is in hot water over allegations it not only collected data from millions of EU citizens and processed it using automated tools without their knowledge, but that it did so in the United States, all in violation of the EU’s data protection rules.
The complaint was filed by Austrian privacy advocacy group noyb, helmed by lawyer Max Schrems, and it doesn’t pull any punches in its claims that TeleSign, through its former Belgian parent company BICS, secretly collected data on cellphone users around the world.
That data, noyb alleges, was fed into an automated system that generates “reputation scores” that TeleSign sells to its customers, which includes TikTok, Salesforce, Microsoft and AWS, among others, for verifying the identity of a person behind a phone number and preventing fraud.
BICS, which acquired TeleSign in 2017, describes itself as “a global provider of international wholesale connectivity and interoperability services,” in essence operating as an interchange for various national cellular networks. Per noyb, BICS operates in more than 200 countries around the world and “gets detailed information (e.g. the regularity of completed calls, call duration, long-term inactivity, range activity, or successful incoming traffic) [on] about half of the worldwide mobile phone users.”
That data is regularly shared with TeleSign, noyb alleges, without any notification to the customers whose data is being collected and used.
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In its complaint, an auto-translated English version of which was reviewed by The Register, noyb alleges that TeleSign is in violation of the GDPR’s provisions that ban use of automated profiling tools, as well as rules that require affirmative consent be given to process EU citizen’s data.
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When BICS acquired TeleSign in 2017, it began to fall under the partial control of BICS’ parent company, Belgian telecom giant Proximus. Proximus held a partial stake in BICS, which Proximus spun off from its own operations in 1997.
In 2021, Proximus bought out BICS’ other shareholders, making it the sole owner of both the telecom interchange and TeleSign.
With that in mind, noyb is also leveling charges against Proximus and BICS. In its complaint, noyb said Proximus was asked by EU citizens from various countries to provide records of the data TeleSign processed, as is their right under Article 15 of the GDPR.
The complainants weren’t given the information they requested, says noyb, and claims what was handed over was simply a template copy of the EU’s standard contractual clause (SCC), which has been used by businesses transmitting data between the EU and US while the pair try to work out data transfer rules that Schrems won’t get struck down in court.
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Noyb is seeking cessation of all data transfers from BICS to TeleSign, processing of said data, and is requesting deletion of all unlawfully transmitted data. It’s also asking for Belgian data protection authorities to fine Proximus, which noyb said could reach as high as €236 million ($257 million) – a mere 4 percent of Proximus’s global turnover.
