Climate Coffee Hour with Dr. Tomohiro Oda

Satellites have rewritten the rules of climate science. What changed? Take the iconic Keeling Curve: it began from just a few ground stations, and for decades that was essentially all we had to go on. Now satellites are gathering data everywhere, telling a far richer story about our planet and how its greenhouse gases are changing. Watching the planet from orbit went from a novelty to a necessity. My own start in this field was almost embarrassingly naive: I just wanted to build a beautiful, absurdly high-resolution map of the world's carbon emissions from satellite data, something simply useful for people. That same impulse, to resolve emissions at a scale no one had managed before, still drives me today. This talk traces the path from there: beginning as a scientist chasing resolution and detail to advance science, then getting pulled steadily toward policy, and learning, sometimes the hard way, that the boundary between science and policy is real, and worth taking seriously. Measuring greenhouse gas emissions with scientific rigor turns out to be the tractable problem. Convincing policy to act on what we measure is the stubborn one, and why should rigorous science not speak for itself? I'll walk through using satellite observations for climate monitoring, focusing on greenhouse gases, especially CO2, and the structural obstacles that keep good science from becoming usable policy support. What comes next isn't mine to dictate. I'd rather figure it out together, as collaborators thinking alongside one another, not as a speaker handing down instructions to an audience.