CO2 emissions

it's fairly simple:

while global warming is a fact, MAN has nothing to do with the cause, and nothing man can do will make it go away.

archaeologists have shown that this is a NORMAL cycle that this planet goes through, albeit a long period one.

now heres the kicker: most everything you hear and read about man being the cause is a lie. not sure why the political machine has decided to use this as a diversionary tactic, or from what( what is it they want to hide from us?).

You seem quite sure, although I'd be suprised if man has nothing to do with G.W. since we do, at least, add some of the culprits to the atmosphere.

Is there some factual reason you think this way? If yes, What is it? Jeff

Whats this got to do with the question asked? See number three. Pure & easy.

oooh - you're so close.

There are cycles in the earth's temperature to be sure, although it's not archaeologists who tell us about them (archeology only goes back a few thousand years, paleoclimatology goes back 100's of millions). And you are correct that we are right on time for a warm stretch - the usual warm peak before the next ice age.

But, it is also true that the current rate of temperature rise is extreme compared to the past cycles. It is also true that the increase in temperature exactly tracks the increase in man made green house gases.

So, reputable scientists - who have looked at all the information - have assigned a probability of 90% that our greenhouse gas production is responsible for the historically extreme increases in temperature we are experiencing.

I don't expect you to believe any of this, of course, because you prefer to believe in a vast conspiracy involving 1000's of scientists in dozens of fields, and the machinations of sinister and secret cabals.

If you want think about man's impact on CO2 emissions, make a calculation of the amount of CO2 emitted by each additional person breathing on this planet, in addition to the animals breathing to support that life. You will find it informative.

If you assume each person consumes 1 liter/minute of air into lungs at 21% O2 and out at ~16% O2 and assume the CO2 comes from the balance of reacting that oxygen, it is possible to provide some numbers to talk from.

You can then estimate from the rate of population change over the last 30 years the amount of additional CO2 generated then vrs now. Quite informative.

I would like to suggest that those who want to control the impact of manmade CO2 increases that they could assist by having their colleagues breath every second day...

Because when things burn, they combine with oxygen.

When coal is burned, the carbon in the coal combines with oxygen from the air supplied to burn the coal.

The chemical equation for the burning of coal is:

C + O₂ = CO₂

Since the molecular weights are: Carbon = 12, O₂ = 32, and CO₂ = 44, the above equation says that 12 tonnes of pure carbon combines with 32 tonnes of oxygen from the combustion air to yield 44 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Since many typical coals may have only 50 to 70 percent carbon, the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions to coal burned is less than the above ratio of 44/12 = 3.7 ... for example, a coal with 60 percent carbon would produce only 2.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of coal.

The example you gave of 114 tonnes of carbon dioxide per 50 tonnes of coal is a ratio of 114/50 = 2.3 ... which is perfectly reasonable. So the answer to your question is "No, you are not on to something ... and you are missing the chemistry involved."

Hi Milton, Thanks for the reply. I really did not want to go through the arguments of cause and blame for GW, although I must admit that some of the views are interesting to say the least.

Your reply however has provided even more questions (someone once said that the more we know lets us realise just how much we dont know) I didnt know much to start with, so it will be a slow process for me! I got the maths part of your reply OK, but its the logic that I am having trouble with.

For the guest, yes I did miss out on chemistry as a young bloke, so please dont be too hard on me for this.

If I were to get a container of sand, say 10 kg net. To this I add say 5 kg of water. Pure distilled 1.00 sg of the type I add to my whisky. Isn't the total net weight going to be 15 kg? If I get sand, cement, some bricks and build a wall, doesn't the same law apply? How then can you chemists make 1 + 1 = 3?

Surely the Carbon and the Oxygen were both there before we burned the coal? The one thing I do remember from the day I went to chemistry class at school, was that matter can not be created nor destroyed. Maybe I should have gone back for the next day. btw, I now have a head ache and its all your fault!! I visited your web site, enlarged the cover of your book, and that was enough to give me a headache.

Seriously though thanks to all of you...Isn't that what this is all about...learning

The "bucket" in the real-world case is the (local) atmosphere, so there's plenty of raw material flying around already. The trick is the chemistry that moves carbon from where it is (molecules of whatever) into CO₂, which is the "output" being measured.

Exactly - you add the weight of the carbon in the coal to the weight of the oxygen in the air that it takes to burn the coal. 2/3 of the atoms in each molecule of CO₂ come from the air - the O₂ part, only the C part comes from the coal.

How then can you chemists make 1 + 1 = 3?

I think you'd have to admit that Milton's answer was very clear, right? There is nothing in it that suggests that 1+1=3, and everything that suggests that 1+1=2.

I wonder if the short hand "carbon emissions" has you confused. Carbon, by itself, is not a greenhouse gas. When carbon is chemically combined with oxygen (burned) it forms a gas, CO2. That gas is a greenhouse gas. That gas has different properties than either of the constituents alone. We are not worried about O2 alone; we are not worried about C alone. We are worried about CO2.

Over time (a very very long time), plants help convert CO2 back into coal. In an early step in that process, the C's from CO2 become the C's in C6H12O6, sugar. Very late in the process there's heat and compaction. Unfortunately, we are not only burning lots of things to create CO2, we are also cutting down lots of plants, so the CO2 is more likely to accumulate in the atmosphere, as it has done.

Surely the Carbon and the Oxygen were both there before we burned the coal?

I'm not sure what point you are tying to make here. Sure, all the naturally occurring elements have been around a long time. Most chemical reactions are reversible by some means. Consider salt. As you know, table salt is sodium chloride. Sodium is a metal so reactive that it will burn a damp hand (as it reacts with water). Chlorine is a deadly gas. When combined into table salt, the combination is pretty benign. The fact that chlorine, sodium and sodium chloride have all been around a long time does not make chlorine gas any safer: the ACGIH puts the short term exposure limit at 1 part per million. From that, you could conclude that 100 ppm would probably be very bad for you, but chlorine nevertheless has many beneficial uses. CO2 is just another gas, and it can be beneficial in some ways and harmful in others. Current atmospheric levels (380ppm) appear to be harmful to the earth as a whole. Current atmospheric levels appear to be caused by man's activities.

Quite.

It appears that the radical environmentalists have some agenda. From all that I know, if CO2 is released into the atmosphere, it would lay on the ground causing ground warming and not the filtering effect at high altitude the so-called scientists would have us believe. CO2 is approximately 1.2 times heavier than air so the CO2 cannot exist in our upper atmosphere.

I believe that the world is going through one of the ecological changes of the past, ie Ice age to present.

It has to be admitted that Man's flora distruction has changed the capability of plant photosynthusis to convert CO2/Co back to Carbon and Oxygen and this may cause issues at a later time in the world's lifetime but this can be accommodated by the farming practice changes of the world.

Deforestation seems to be irreversible and increasing and creating more jobs. We don't have a solution for bee mites (which threaten US pollination meaning if the frost didn't kill it wouldn't have reproduced anyway) or for an insect which is killing millions trees from New Mexico to Canada. What will produce fresh oxygen? The agreed upon political solution is to bitch slap automobile owners at the gas pump and say there, we got more of your tax money but your guilt is increased since you did not object to this new punishment, you knew you were guilty. When will you ever learn? You now owe us more. See the smog? Separating the current pop-science from our future scientific needs would require something not related to the two-party system I gather. Imagination has worked in the past, perhaps we can dust it off and try again. For now the all or nothing seesaw helps pass the time when science meets politics.

From all that I know, if CO2 is released into the atmosphere, it would lay on the ground causing ground warming and not the filtering effect at high altitude the so-called scientists would have us believe.

I assume you are saying this tongue in cheek, and are not so profoundly ignorant of the science as the statement would lead one to think. For the benefit of others who might inadvertently take you seriously:

Air is about .9% argon, 04% CO2, 78 % nitrogen and 21% oxygen. If the CO2 settled to the bottom, we'd all die from suffocation. Likewise, we'd suffocate if the argon settled to the bottom, given that it is also much heavier than oxygen. The mixture of these gases is quite uniform up to about 100km. Thus the name homosphere is given to this part of the atmosphere.

Again, I am sure you are kidding, but occasionally we have some visitors who are actually so unfamiliar with even the most basic science that they would swallow what you say tongue in cheek, as fact! For them, there is this reference, in case they slept through elementary school.

It appears that you have not had the experience of what CO2 is and how it always layers from the ground up. In coal mines, men have died and I have direct knowlege of this having rescued a deputy that had checked a closed coal extracted panel of the underground mine and he was in the disorientated state. This is becaues the CO2 had filtered down & filled the panel being the lower portion of the mine where the gas had flowed down (like water moves to the lowest level). The area was such that the legs felt warm as one moves through the gaseous area. It does not float or combine into our natural atmosphere:- AKA .9% argon, 04% CO2, 78 % nitrogen and 21% oxygen. (I do not see CO2 as part of our atmosphere). As the CO2 is emitted from any source, it stays close to ground level and moves with the natural air currents in small enough percentages, in the lowest parts of the atmosphere, and our natural flora then converts this back into Wood (Primarily Carbon) and releases the O2 back into our atmosphere. If we keep cutting the trees and do not replace them with equally efficient vegetation, we would then be at risk of suffocation on CO2. As I mentioned prior, we need to change the farming practices throughout the world to counteract the increasing population of the world and industry CO2 emmissions. (I repeat, the Scientist that say that we have an increased layer of CO2 in the upper atmosphere which is filtering the sun are talking with forked tongues) Of more concern to me is the Political decision to force everyone to use unleaded fuel as this has now started to become a medical issue for everyone as the emissions are far greater impact on the health and well-being of everyone than the tetra ethyl lead of the leaded fuels era. This could be another thread for discussion at a latter time.

There is not much wind in mines.

There is a slight difference in the concentrations of CO2 at low and high altitudes. Slight.

I guess you don't believe that we have ozone in the upper atmosphere either, since O₃ is even heavier than CO₂.

Ozone does exist at upper levels but from known scientific reports, undiluted sunlight helps create O3 from O2 but its life expectancy is short lived and it quickly converts back to O2 as it falls from the outer atmosphere and the sunlight begins to be filtered. O3 can also exists on the surface boundary layer of our seas (sunlight and salt water create this phenominin at sea level only) but never rises far as it quickly reverts back to O2 as the ideal state for it's manufacture diminishes as it moves aloft via wind currents.

By your illogic, one would never find methane in coal mines, because methane is lighter than air, and would only be found somewhere high in the atmosphere in a methane layer.

Nitrogen is a hazard in the trenches below "gas" tire presses because it displaces oxygen. Given a large leak, anyone working in the trench can suffocate. But before long, that nitrogen mixes with the air above, in predictable ways, and eventually disperses entirely, with no measurable difference in concentration in the trench versus outside the plant. If you read Milton's book (see above) or google for gas dispersion mechanisms, you might come to understand some of the principles at work.

Even in a still, closed container, gases will naturally mix uniformly. For example, if you put the constituent gases of air individually into a tank in the standard percentages, and then let the tank sit undisturbed, (assuming a temperature well above absolute zero) Brownian movement alone will mix these gases completely, and in a relatively short period of time, if you withdrew a sample from anywhere in the tank, it would be indistinguishable from what we call air. (In fact, most of the mixing will have occurred simply by the mechanics of getting one gas into the tank with another -- the natural fluid turbulence will do this; Brownian movement then "perfects" the mixing.) (A good analogy is the creation of a Pousse Cafe a multi-colored drink in which liqueurs of different sg are layered. It is extremely difficult to avoid their natural tendency to mix.)

This natural uniform mixing occurs with alcohol and water*. If you buy a bottle of rubbing alcohol, you are buying a mixture of alcohol and water. (The same is true when you but a bottle of Jack Daniels.) If you let that bottle sit, undisturbed on a shelf, it will never settle out: the physics and chemistry involved prevent that from happening. Certainly through freezing, or distillation, you can separate one from the other, but the natural state is that they mix completely and remain mixed. The same is true with CO2, nitrogen, oxygen, and argon in the atmosphere -- the mixture is effectively uniform all the way up to 100km. Thousands of balloon studies have shown this.

I repeat, the Scientist that say that we have an increased layer of CO2 in the upper atmosphere which is filtering the sun are talking with forked tongues.

I am unaware of any legitimate scientist who claims that there is an increased layer of CO2 in the upper atmosphere. You'll need to supply a reference. All the reports I've read indicate, as I've said, that the mixture is uniform in the region of the atmosphere in which the greenhouse effects occur.

You are not alone among the anti-science contingent in believing in atmospheric CO2 layers, or that all man-made CO2 hugs the ground (who knows how mice survive?). You are not alone in seeing scientists as part of a conspiracy. You might be alone in your assertion: I do not see CO2 as part of our atmosphere (unless you mean it in the obvious sense that CO2 is transparent). But being alone is not necessarily a bad thing.

You might be interested in several other threads here, in which various anti-science theories (and countering scientific theories) are proposed:

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/4193/Global-Warming-is-a-political-hoax

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/5139/90-Sure-Global-Warming-is-Man-made

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/4978/Is-Scientific-Consensus-an-oxymoron

* or in the non-polar world, with gasoline and oil, etc

Methane is found in coal mines and in underground mining it and other certain gases formed actual layer in undisturbed air or gases movement, form CO2 on the floor through to Methane, Ethane etc on the roof of the sealed, closed or return headings in the mine. These are monitored by various methods eg Tube Bundle where the concentrations are controlled to move the explosive gases (enrichen or dilute the mixture) to below or above the explosive range percentages. ie <4% - >16%. Nitrogen is a gas that is a natural constituant of the atmosphere and is readily absorbed into the normal air whereby CO2, Methane ethane etc. do not. In the ITABS and Londonary Testing facilities in Australia, it has been shown(Hence the Tube bundling Monitoring systems we used in our underground mines) that in still air, CO2 sits on the bottom to the sealed container and the lighter gases dispurse into layers excepting the natural gases that constitute the atmosphere sitting some where in-between. If the Scientists said that it was Methane or Ethane that was causing the Global Warming, I could abide with that, but they and all reports of the scientists dialogue is that it is solely CO2 which is totally wrong.

It might be noted: The Australian Medical Association finally took notice of an engineer when he stated that SIDS may be caused from CO2 build up or pooling in the cot environment and that babies were actually drowning in CO2 concentrations from their own expelled air (Breathing) , and now all new borns are recommended to be placed on their back when placed in their cribs with plenty of ventilation to prevent such conditions occurring.

Lighter gases, Methane Ethane etc. do rise into the atmosphere and I am not sure of what actually happend to them or whether they just leak from our world into outer space to be gone forever.

If the Scientists said that it was Methane or Ethane that was causing the Global Warming, I could abide with that, but they and all reports of the scientists dialogue is that it is solely CO2 which is totally wrong.

This is gibberish. You really should do some reading. The average 7th grader can recite at least CO2, methane, H2O, and nitrous oxide as being the major greenhouse gases. H2O is one we have little control over, but we do have some control over the others. Here's the IPCC list of anthropogenic greenhouse gases that those wacko scientists use. You'll see that methane is in the list. This article is about a Nobel Laureate's (wacko scientist, in your view I suppose) findings that methane levels have stabilized over the last seven years, probably as a result of tightening up emissions. Many people have taken this as encouraging news that we can have an effect on global warming by reducing emissions.

Nitrogen is a gas that is a natural constituant of the atmosphere and is readily absorbed into the normal air whereby CO2, Methane ethane etc. do not.

This is so bizarre. It is as if you think there is some chemical compound called air. There is not. Air is a mixture of many gasses (and includes methane, krypton, neon, and even hydrogen, as well as the ones every kid knows: CO2, Nitrogen, Oxygen.

Wikipedia offers a good definition of air:

• Earth's atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding the planet Earth and retained by the Earth's gravity. It contains roughly (by molar content/volume) 78% nitrogen, (normally inert except upon electrolysis by lightning^[1] and in certain biochemical processes of nitrogen fixation), 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, trace amounts of other gases, and a variable amount (average around 1%) of water vapor. This mixture of gases is commonly known as air. The atmosphere protects life on Earth by absorbing ultraviolet solar radiation and reducing temperature extremes between day and night.

This Wikipedia article goes on to list the actual constituents in more detail. In the homosphere, all these constituents are mixed throughly and evenly. OF COURSE, there are temporary local concentrations. You can get dangerous concentrations of gases in a room, or in a mine, or in a crib, or under curing presses, or around a pipeline leaking methane -- even normal concentrations of people in an auditorium can bring the CO2 level to 1000 ppm, making people feel tired -- but all these gases fairly quickly disperse into the atmosphere.

You seem to think there is something magical about CO2 that makes it cling to the earth (but somehow does not smother us or mice in the process). There is no magic at play here. CO2 is just another part of air, taking its place among oxygen, nitrogen, methane, neon, krypton, helium, hydrogen, argon, and others.

This is an engineering forum, and good engineering is based on science, not gut feel beliefs. You are certainly welcome to post your theories here, even if they seem pretty wild to people with even the most basic of science educations. But I suspect you will not get a lot of support for such theories, unless you can back them up with pier-reviewed studies, or plausible logic.

You are burning cabon (coal) and in an exothermic reaction that "C" is combining with O2 to form Co2 thus gaining weight.

The answer is that you are missing something: chemistry.

It is probably a good practice to burn coal so as to produce carbon dioxide if we could eliminate harmful emissions such as soot. Burning oxygen combines with the carbon to form a carbon gas, CO2, which the wind carries to growing plants all over the world. From time to time, rains wash the CO2 into the soil where it supplies nutrients to our primary food source. If we cease the power plant generation of CO2, we must increase the production of CO2 by soil bacteria by adding fertilizers to the soil. Despite the adding of 10 billion tons of annual CO2 emissions, there is hardly enough CO2 in the atmosphere to add fizz to the drinks humans consume each year, which is why the beverage industry must manufacture their own CO2. Somewhere in the Bible it says that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for atmospheric CO2 to enter the leaf of a plant. My personal preference is to replace some of the nitrogen in the atmosphere with CO2 so that we can maintain about 20 percent CO2 in the atmosphere for plant nourishment. We need to have atmospheric CO2 available for rain to wash into the soil. I would accept the theory of CO2 as the cause of global warming if somebody could demonstrate the effect in a laboratory. My own tests indicate that CO2 is only slightly better than nitrogen and oxygen for absorbing long wave radiation.

Burning coal also creates airborne sulfur compounds which combine with rain water to create acid rain. Every time it rains here the acidity level of my swimming pool goes (literally) off the chart.

The four major warming gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

Overall, water vapor plays the most important role in keeping the planet warm, but humans have little influence over how much water vapor is in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is the most important warming gas that we do influence, because we create it by burning fossil fuels, cutting or burning forests, and draining wetlands. We also help produce vast amounts of methane and nitrous oxide through farming and industrial practices.

Scientists studying air bubbles trapped in ice cores have found that over the last 650,000 years, CO2 levels in the atmosphere ranged from about 180 parts per million (ppm) to 300 ppm. Just prior to the Industrial Revolution, levels hovered at 280 ppm. In 2005, CO2 levels had risen to 379 ppm by 2005, and are increasing at an average of nearly 2 ppm per year.

As for the other major greenhouse gases produced by human activities - methane up from 715 ppb i to 1774 ppb in 2005. And nitrous oxide levels from 270 ppb to 319 ppb.

And here's a simple CO2 experiment you'll want to try:

http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_watexpgreenhouse.htm

Thank you, Bhankiii, for directing me to the CO2 experiment. I have performed a similar experiment about two years ago. Their experiment has two major flaws: First, they haven't considered that pure CO2 has a much greater mass than air, and it will absorb more heat than air as it did in my experiment. Second, they have insulated the top of the chamber with water which is the equivalent of dense cloud cover. We already know that cloud cover is a very efficient heat insulator because night temperatures under clouds are always warmer unless cold air is blowing in under them. I urge you to build on what you already know about water vapor contribution to global warming. Consider the vapor trails of high-flying jets. Those white contrails are water vapor, and they are the same as clouds. Clouds are evidence of water vapor below them. We see only the visible condensation because that is where the temperature is low enough for the condensation to take place. Look at the emissions from natural gas power stations. That white vapor coming from the chimneys is water vapor, a natural result of combustion. Anything that absorbs heat easily also gives up heat easily. If the vast heat sink of outer space is visible, even the Sahara desert will lose its heat after sunset.

It took me a while to gather the information, but:

This is the spectral irradiance of sunlight and it's absorption spectrum in air:

It's hard to read at this scale but you can see it here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/MODIS_ATM_solar_irradiance.jpg

This graph was created by NASA using data from their MODIS project.

This shows clearly that the absorption in longer wavelengths is a function of CO₂ and water vapor. There are lesser effects from other triatomic gases such as N₂O and CH₄. Diatomic gases such as O₂ and N₂ simply do not absorb much IR energy. I'm sorry if your experiments show otherwise.

My personal preference is to replace some of the nitrogen in the atmosphere with CO2 so that we can maintain about 20 percent CO2 in the atmosphere for plant nourishment.

Congratulations - you've just killed every animal on the earth. Typical levels of CO2 are between .03% and .06%. 1% makes you sleepy. 5% kills you.

My personal preference is to replace some of the nitrogen in the atmosphere with CO2 so that we can maintain about 20 percent CO2 in the atmosphere for plant nourishment.

Actually, up to about 1000 ppm, (rather than the now standard 380 ppm) CO2 can help plants grow faster. However, to bump CO2 from .038% to 20% seems a bit extreme: NIOSH recommends 1% max for a work shift, and 3% for a ten minute limit. No point in killing off people, just to make plants grow better.

C (At. Wt. 12) + 2 O ( At Wt. 16) = CO2 (Mol. Wt. 44)

Nough Said ???

So how's the oxygen supply compared to what it should be or has been? That is my main concern.

That's a good question. Oxygen combines so easily with so many things: it ruins your wine, turns your food grey, rusts your car, burns down your house, etc. etc. But still, it makes up about the same amount of the atmosphere as it always has, even with plants being cut back. I don't have an explanation for why we have as much gaseous O2 as we do. I should look into it.