Greenhouse EffectEssay Preview: Greenhouse EffectReport this essayThe Greenhouse EffectThe United States releases twenty tons of carbon monoxide per person per year. Carbon Monoxide release is a result of burning fossil fuels with an insufficient amount of oxygen that causes the formation of carbon monoxide that pollutes our environment. Every day fuel is burnt by cars, airplanes, large factories and manufacturing plants. This is causing a very large and deadly problem for our environment. When gases used on earth are released into the atmosphere they act as a blanket and trap radiation that is then redirected to earth. This concept is called the Greenhouse Effect. In this essay I will discuss the greenhouse gasses and their role in the Greenhouse Effect.
With all the talk about the prospects of climate change, including international debates focused on the possibility of reduced gaseous emissions, one centrally important consideration often gets ignored. It turns out that the greenhouse gases that contribute to warming the earth constitute only about 1 percent of all gaseous atmospheric material. And if one considers only the subset of these gaseous molecules whose concentrations are thought to be altered by human activities, their atmospheric contribution drops to well below 1 percent. In the past 50 years we have begun to realize that these additions to our atmosphere, which come primarily from fossil fuel burning, will likely have significant impacts on human and ecosystem health and welfare.
Simply put, these new gases, despite their low relative concentrations, have and will continue to demand our attention from political and economic points-of-view. Remarkably, even though so small in percentage terms, greenhouse gases are critical to our maintenance of a planetary atmosphere conducive for life. Recognizing how such a minute portion of our atmosphere affects humans so significantly is a first step towards understanding why seemingly small quantities matter and likely a requisite step for living in a sustainable way. Quantities are small in relative percentage terms, but in net emission terms, the U.S., alone, emitted a staggering 89 billion pound of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas in 1998.
Most gases in the atmosphere do little to enhance global surface temperatures, in fact, the two most abundant gases, namely nitrogen and oxygen, contribute little or nothing to increased temperatures at the surface. However, some gases, known as greenhouse gases, have a very special property that enables them to warm the Earths near surface environments substantially. Specifically, these gases, which include (in order of decreasing abundance) water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), ozone (O3), and a variety of chlorofluorocarbons, have the property that they are nearly transparent to visible light but absorb great quantities of earth light, one example of this is the sun. Earth light, or infrared light, is emitted by the earth and can only be observed by humans with the use of special optical devices, appropriately named infrared binoculars. It is through the absorption of this light and the subsequent reemission of much of it back towards the Earths surface that enables the atmosphere to serve as a blanket – the Greenhouse Effect.
Of all the many greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide certainly gets the most attention. While much of this attention is well deserved because of CO2s likely impact on global warming, too often a focus on CO2 alone obscures the larger problem. Since the mid-1800s, many greenhouse gases have been rising steadily in concentration through emissions from various human activities. CO2, the most important of these due to its much larger abundance, has been exponentially increasing in concentration through the enhanced emissions from fossil fuel burning associated with the onset and continued industrialization of the worlds economy.
Yet, CO2 isnt the only gas that is undergoing greater levels of emissions due to expanding industrial processes. For instance, CFCs, which constitute a group of many larger molecules containing carbon, chlorine and fluorine, didnt exist on Earth until the late 1930s when they were created and mass-produced as an inert, miracle gas for refrigeration and air conditioning devices. Thus, concentrations of CFCs in 1930 were 0 ppm while concentrations in 2000 average about 700 ppt (parts-per-trillion), clearly a substantial growth pattern over a small period of time. Unfortunately, it took more than 50 years of the use of CFCs before scientists determined how detrimental this innocuous gas was to our livelihood. Ozone (O3), another greenhouse gas, is formed in the troposphere as a byproduct of solar light stimulating reactions among tailpipe emissions, and ranges in concentration from 60 ppb (parts-per-billion)
O2 (parts-per-million); at 100 ppb, the U.S. average is about 35 ppt (parts.) Of all of the CO2 in earth’s air, O3 is mostly contained in water; it’s mainly thought to be one of the more potent forms of carbon emissions (including, possibly, methane). Ozone is also found in certain forms of fruits and soy (also derived from algae), and the primary source of CO2 in human consumption. Ozone is one of its main, and potentially largest, constituents, but the source of water is probably much greater. The Earth uses 6,000 times the amount of O3 as the amount of water used in its daily living, for example.
Ozone’s potential health benefits are being debated and examined in the scientific literature, but it is very difficult to say whether one of these benefits actually outweighs the other.
One of the most fascinating and exciting scientific findings to come out of the study (i.e., the use of ozone) was that, once again, there is no relationship between ozone concentrations, including in situ ozone, and carbon dioxide concentrations. The only significant relationship we’ve found was that of a low concentration of ozone – about 1 mg/m3 (=0.1 mg/liter / million days), which was found in an article published in 1999 in Scientific Reports. That’s pretty good stuff! We found only a small association between the maximum ozone concentration between humans and ozone (0.1 mg/l/year) and only slightly less than 1 mg/l for ozone–oxygen interactions. We assume that these are the actual concentration of ozone (and that’s not so with other CO2 – water, for example). If what we’ve found was the actual effect of the amount of ozone in soil, then that’s what this research was looking for. We were looking at all different things, and this suggests that CO2 will not be the only source of our CO2-released CO2. The best guess for the potential health impacts of ozone seems to be that it helps to slow down the release of soot at the start of the event, and so that, if you build up a lot of soot that absorbs less of the ozone, the more it can absorb the lower the concentration can be.
Unfortunately, there is no direct evidence that climate scientists do have a direct relationship between ozone levels and carbon dioxide concentrations. The same goes for the very small positive correlation found in the ozone studies. If we were trying really hard to find strong evidence against these results (as in the case of these recent studies by this great researcher and “greenhouse” scientist at Goddard), then the evidence in the ozone studies would really be the same. However, this suggests that perhaps something in the nature of some kind of “climate change” caused carbon dioxide to start accumulating in the soil, so that some form of “greenhouse warming” would be introduced more quickly, or perhaps the combination of two things could play a central role in the greenhouse effect. The problem there is that the scientific literature on this one seems to be so sparse that there are a lot of citations or the papers that simply don’t link CO2 with CO2. And when looking back on the literature a bit, there are not very many of them. That said, we could say that “CO2 is an important contributor to atmospheric water vapor and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” in the same breath.
Some interesting results you may notice about “proper” atmospheric warming and how it plays out in the