NASA, the American agency which landed men on the moon, and Google, the go-to company of the early 21st Century, are trying to give the world the ability to monitor both the carbon dioxide pollution and the levels of forest destruction that contribute to global warming.

NASA plans to launch a satellite which could help monitor deforestation and carbon emissions. For its part, Google has rolled out a new program call Earth Engine which essentially is a massive storehouse for satellite and other data that forest countries will be able to access for free by the time of the next UN climate conference in Mexico next year.

"Just having the thing flying around there imaging would just about make everybody act differently," said professor Steve Pacala, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute. "The idea that you could pull a fast one would be different."

Deforestation is the biggest cause of climate change in much of the developing world, and industrial countries plan to pay billions of dollars to poor countries to stop deforestation. The Google system could help many keep track of what forests are saved.

"The science is out there, but the ability to run it on large numbers of machines by countries in previous years who couldn't afford it is now possible," said Brian McClen, vice president of engineering for the Google Geo Group, who demonstrated the new program in Copenhagen.

The relaunch of the NASA satellite is awaiting White House approval and is going through the budget process for next year.

"I'm optimistic," White House science adviser John Holdren told reporters at climate talks Wednesday.

Until another satellite actually gets into the air, the way the world knows about carbon dioxide involves a lot of guesswork, math and monitoring machines and a good amount of trust.

Experts' estimates of carbon dioxide emissions are based on fuel going into power plants and complex formulas that calculate power plant efficiency. But those estimates are also dependent on reliable information about fuel and efficiency, so they could be skewed by inaccurate input.

(Read by Dan.Chinoy. Dan.Chinoy is a multimedia journalist at the China Daily Web site.)

(Agencies)