"‘This is becoming real,’ one scientist says. ‘It is real. And it’s super exciting.’"

"GLASGOW, Scotland — On a recent day inside the sprawling conference center where United Nations climate talks are taking place, a small crowd gathered to hear a panel with an intriguing title: “The Space Race to Save the Planet.”

It wasn’t, despite the name, a tale of science fiction. Rather, the event was about satellites and the promising ways that scientists are using them to track greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

“If you had told me this a decade ago, you could have knocked me over with a feather,” Riley Duren, a University of Arizona research scientist and engineering fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said of the boom in emissions-monitoring satellites.

“This is becoming real,” he said. “It is real. And it’s super exciting.”"

Brady Dennis reports for the Washington Post November 9, 2021. [2]