Biglen, Chris

Chris Biglen

Chem-106

8 May 2017

Our Global Warming Footprint

Earth's atmosphere does pretty much the same thing as an actual greenhouse. Gases in the atmosphere like carbon dioxide do what the roof of a greenhouse does. The sun shines through the atmosphere during the day, and the Earth's surface warms from that sunlight. At night, Earth's surface cools, releasing the heat back into the air. But the greenhouse gases trap some of the heat within the atmosphere. That's what keeps our Earth a warm and cozy 59 degrees Fahrenheit, on average. These greenhouse gases include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. There are other gases, however, they are synthetic and are from human activity. The reason why such small concentrations of these gases do so much work is because everyday the concentrations are getting larger and larger from us humans. Take CO2 for example; which has a current concentration of about 0.04%, or 400 parts per million by volume (ppm). There is an annual fluctuation of CO2 of 3-9 ppm, which is also negatively correlated to the Northern Hemisphere’s growing season.

Over the past 150 years, CO2 concentrations have risen from 280 ppm to 380 ppm. We are actually able to see even farther back as to how the Earth’s climate was by looking at ancient air bubbles trapped in ice. They tell us that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher than they have been at any time in the past 400,000 years. CO2 levels during the ice age were around 200 ppm, and then around 280 ppm during the warmer interglacial periods. So without a doubt, CO2 levels have risen an incredible amount, and the reason for this has mainly been pointed to fossil fuels. The reason for this is that it has been shown that 60% of fossil fuel emissions stay in the air.

The average household in the United States uses around 47.9 tons of CO2 a year in fossil fuels. For myself, I use about 23 tons of CO2. A few of the categories that add up to this are travel (0 tons), housing (6.4 tons), food and diet (9.1 tons), and shopping for goods and services (11.6 tons). Some ways of reducing these would include carpooling, printing double sided, turning off lights, reducing my waste, line drying clothing, and getting a low flowing toilet.

Fossil fuels also affect the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is the series of processes by which carbon compounds are interconverted in the environment, chiefly involving the incorporation of carbon dioxide into living tissue by photosynthesis and its return to the atmosphere through respiration, the decay of dead organisms, and the burning of fossil fuels. If fossil-fuel burning continues at the same rate as it has, CO2 will continue to rise to levels as high as 1500 ppm. The atmosphere would then not return to pre-industrial levels even tens of thousands of years into the future. Even with this scary thought, a lot of people aren't turning to easy alternatives: Geothermal, water, nuclear, wind, and solar. Out of all of these, solar should definitely be the best choice, and here's why. Energy from the sun is captured using cells made from special materials and then converted into electricity. How easy is that? With solar or any of the other alternatives, we wouldn't have to worry about carbon affecting the ocean acidity either. Ocean acidification is the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth's oceans, caused by the uptake of CO2. Carbon dioxide enters the water through equilibrium with the atmosphere and biological degradation/photosynthesis involving organic carbon. Ocean acidification is sometimes called “climate change’s equally evil twin”. If the carbon cycle equilibrium cannot change, then the big issue is the natural (unforced) internal variability that will come from it.