How does astronomy make its carbon footprint in the climate?

To fill these gaps, his team used the “financial ratios” approach developed by the Agency for Climate Change (Ademe) and the Carbon Credit Association (ABC), which functionalized the amount of carbon released in proportion to its price and volume.

Thus, the group’s estimates suggest that the $ 10 billion James Webb space telescope and future square kilometer series radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia will emit at least 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

Jürgen Knodelsider believes that “thinking about greenhouse gas reduction” should be one of the tools of scientists.

“Everyone, including astronomers who are not in their own ivory towers, should do their part,” Annie Hughes, one of the authors of the study at Max Planck, told a news conference.

“Random Accounts”

“I know this may come as a shock, but we need to control carbon if we want to reduce emissions by 50 percent by 2030,” says fellow astronomer Luigi Dipaldo.

Eric Lagadek, president of the French Society for Astronomy and Astronomy, which is not involved in the study, said: “Astronomy as a whole leads to significant carbon emissions, so our challenge is to slow down the infrastructure construction process. Continue to find the best solution.”

In an article about the results of the study, Andrew Rose Wilson wrote that the proposed approach is highly controversial because estimating carbon emissions by following the “financial ratios” approach creates a large amount of uncertainty (up to 80 percent). “Affect the reliability of the results”.

According to Franோois Gombe, an astronomer at the Paris-PSL laboratory, he says, “Researchers’ random calculations indicate a failure to obtain details of the quantities consumed by any facility.”

The scientist opposes dividing the total cost by the number of astronomers, and said, “This laboratory was built for scientific purposes and provides benefits to millions of people, so dividing the cost of scientists is like dividing the cost by one. Opera party only for those who attend.”

Eric Lagadek insists that “the proposed method is debatable, but its approach is the first step he will take to rethink how to deal with this problem.”