Making sense of C02 data: A scientific collaboration

This week on Perspectives, I explore the partnership between Dennis Baldocchi, a Berkeley climate scientist, and Catharine van Ingen, an MSR researcher. They’ve been working together on Fluxnet, a scientific data server and collaboration service for hundreds of scientists around the world who are measuring C02 flux in the atmosphere and trying to understand the dynamics of that flux.

Science in the twenty-first century is increasingly a game of data curation and analysis, involving hundreds or thousands of players distributed all around the world. To make progress, teams will need to coordinate online. The coordination systems will emerge from partnerships like the one Dennis Baldocchi and Catharine van Ingen discuss in this interview.

It’s also fascinating to hear, from the horse’s mouth, what we actually know, and don’t know, about atmospheric CO2. And about how and why we know or don’t know. On key issues like global warming, there’s a huge gap between scientific knowledge and public understanding. Projects like this one can help close that gap.