The Apollo moon missions planted seismometers on the Moon beginning in 1969 and collected data until 1977. Apparently those data were not fully analyzed until recently.

Modern, “State-of-the-art seismological techniques applied to Apollo-era data suggest our moon has a core similar to Earth’s.”

As a result of that analysis, NASA says:

the moon possesses a solid, iron-rich inner core with a radius of nearly 150 miles and a fluid, primarily liquid-iron outer core with a radius of roughly 205 miles. Where it differs from Earth is a partially molten boundary layer around the core estimated to have a radius of nearly 300 miles. The research indicates the core contains a small percentage of light elements such as sulfur, echoing new seismology research on Earth that suggests the presence of light elements — such as sulfur and oxygen — in a layer around our own core.

The inner iron core and fluid outer core explains how the Moon developed and maintains its strong magnetic field. By analyzing how seismic signals from Moonquakes were passed through or reflected, the researchers were able to deduce the composition and location of layer interfaces within the Moon.

A primary limitation to past lunar seismic studies was the wash of “noise” caused by overlapping signals bouncing repeatedly off structures in the moon’s fractionated crust. To mitigate this challenge, …the team employed an approach called seismogram stacking, or the digital partitioning of signals. Stacking improved the signal-to-noise ratio and enabled the researchers to more clearly track the path and behavior of each unique signal as it passed through the lunar interior.

Future NASA missions will help gather more detailed data. The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, is a NASA Discovery-class mission set to launch this year. The mission consists of twin spacecraft that will enter tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure the gravity field in unprecedented detail. The mission also will answer longstanding questions about Earth’s moon and provide scientists a better understanding of the satellite from crust to core, revealing subsurface structures and, indirectly, its thermal history.

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In a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters, NASA scientists estimate that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide will result in 1.64 degrees Celsius of warming over the next 200 years. Estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) range from 3-to 5 degrees Celsius.

The problems with IPCC climate models, NASA says, is that they “did not allow the vegetation to increase its leaf density as a response to the physiological effects of increased CO2 and consequent changes in climate. Other assessments included these interactions but did not account for the vegetation down regulation to reduce plant’s photosynthetic activity and as such resulted in a weak vegetation negative response. When we combine these interactions in climate simulations with 2 × CO2, the associated increase in precipitation contributes primarily to increase evapotranspiration rather than surface runoff, consistent with observations, and results in an additional cooling effect not fully accounted for in previous simulations with elevated CO2.”

Reference: Bounoua, L., F. G. Hall, P. J. Sellers, A. Kumar, G. J. Collatz, C. J. Tucker, and M. L. Imhoff (2010), Quantifying the negative feedback of vegetation to greenhouse warming: A modeling approach, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L23701, doi:10.1029/2010GL045338.

It seems that as climate models get more sophisticated, the carbon dioxide effect gets closer to zero, which would be consistent with the geologic record.

There are many modeling estimates of the warming effect of carbon dioxide, but there is no physical evidence that human carbon dioxide emissions have a significant effect on global temperature.

For more background, see my blog Natural Climate Cycles and Your Carbon Footprint Doesn’t Matter. See also my Quick Link Index to read more articles about climate, natural history, geology, and energy.