carbon dioxide

The U.S. and much of the Western world have a dirty secret.

While we claim to be working diligently to decrease our emissions and switch to cleaner, non-fossil fuel energies, we are actually just exporting emissions to other countries, most notably China. We don’t talk about it. We get on our soapboxes at international meetings and claim to be making great progress to halt ever-increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. And we complain vociferously about developing countries — again, most notably China — not doing the same.

“Volcanoes add far more carbon dioxide to the oceans and atmosphere than humans.” So says geologist Ian Plimer of the University of Adelaide in his 2009 best seller “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming — the Missing Science.” With this assertion, Plimer brings volcanic carbon dioxide degassing front and center in the climate change debate, reviving and reinforcing this wildly mistaken notion.

Last Wednesday, Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman unveiled a comprehensive energy bill (PDF) called the American Power Act. The central purpose of the proposed legislation (along with a similar bill passed by the House of Representatives in June 2009) is to significantly curb the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions.

When measured in terms of annual Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, the United States is the richest country in the world, followed at a distance by China and Japan, and then several European countries, including Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The GDP — the value of all final goods and services produced in a country during a given year — is a simple computation that allows a direct comparison of wealth between countries.

Humans have harnessed wind energy throughout history for milling, pumping and transportation — in a way you could say it’s the “original” form of industrial energy. But only recently have we built massive, powerful turbines to convert that wind into electricity. As concerns about pollution, carbon emissions, resource depletion and energy security mount, wind farms are an increasingly attractive alternative for meeting growing energy demand.

If you’re a frequent flyer, the script of plane travel is probably so familiar you may mumble it along with the flight attendant: “Please raise your tray tables and return your seatbacks to their full upright position. We’re beginning our descent.” The sounds of that descent are probably just as familiar: The whir of landing gear descending, the loud drone of engine power rising and falling as the plane makes a series of stair-step descents to lower and lower altitudes before landing on the runway.

In eastern India, north of the Damodar River, approximately 70 fires are burning in the Jharia coalfield, the largest coalmine fire complex in the world. The majority of fires in Jharia ignite when coal, exposed to air during mining operations, spontaneously combusts. Particulate matter and noxious gases emitted from the burning coal — including sulfur, carbon and nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons released at the surface from gas vents, ground fissures and the soil — have caused illnesses that range from stroke to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

By some accounts, Hell on Earth is located directly below Centralia, Pa.: Smoke rises from the cracked ground, smoldering sinkholes open without warning, and what is left of the town’s abandoned houses and surrounding woodlands is scorched and covered in a layer of smelly sulfur. Once a productive mining town in eastern Pennsylvania’s valuable anthracite coal region, Centralia has been reduced to a smoky ghost town, lacking even a zip code, by an underground coal fire that has been burning for nearly 50 years.

To survive in the ocean, soft-bodied organisms must possess one of five traits: big teeth, toxic flesh, invisibility, quickness or a hard shell. Most marine organisms that employ the latter, called calcifiers, build their hard shells from the mineral calcium carbonate. However, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are making the oceans more acidic — which, in turn, is reducing the concentration of carbonate ions dissolved in seawater that organisms use to build their protective shells and skeletons.

SAN FRANCISCO: In the ongoing climate negotiations, one issue that keeps coming up is that developing countries should be held to the same standards as the developed world.

But that’s not quite fair, say Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira (both at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif.): Much of the carbon dioxide emitted by those developing countries goes into producing goods that are exported to the developed world — which means the developing world ends up paying for others’ consumerism. In other words, we’re outsourcing our carbon dioxide emissions.

Thanks to a bit of luck, the key to carbon sequestration may lie in a circular, bowl-shaped compound that draws carbon dioxide right out of the air.

Burying carbon dioxide in underground geologic formations is an attractive option for dealing with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But before employing such schemes, researchers need to be sure that the greenhouse gas will actually stay put. Scientists have done everything from computer modeling to pumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the subsurface to find out if — and how — the gas might be trapped, but gauging how sealed the formations are over geologic time scales is difficult.

Blogging on EARTH

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced today at a meeting of the National Coal Council that $2.4 billion in stimulus money will go to developing carbon capture and storage technologies.

On a remote patch of rolling plain in western North Dakota lies a massive labyrinth of buildings, tanks, towers, pipes and conveyors. This industrial behemoth — the Great Plains Synfuels Plant — is designed to turn the vast deposits of lignite coal that lie in the ground into substitute natural gas.

The argument over whether ocean iron fertilization is a good way to sequester carbon dioxide may be coming to an end. Last month, a group of researchers seeded 300 square kilometers of the southwestern Atlantic Ocean with six metric tons of dissolved iron. Just as researchers hoped, algae bloomed, doubling in biomass within the first two weeks of the fertilization. But then, an unexpected guest showed up: tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that dined on the algae.

Don’t look now, but a slumbering beast rests in the north. It’s not news that the North American Arctic, where trees dare not grow, contains immense amounts of organic carbon in its soils. But according to a new study, past estimates of organic carbon concentrations in Arctic soils are too low — and that has some scientists worried about vast amounts of carbon being released as temperatures warm.

There are no miracle cures, it would seem. Nitrogen trifluoride is a colorless, nontoxic gas that has helped make the semiconductor industry greener by replacing a well-known greenhouse gas threat. But nitrogen trifluoride is a powerful greenhouse gas in its own right, with a potential impact on climate 17,000 times greater than carbon dioxide — and it is currently unregulated.

Black carbon — fine particles of soot in the atmosphere produced from the burning of fossil fuels or biomass — has been known to be a health hazard for decades, a major contributor to the thick hazes of pollution hovering over cities around the world.