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BBC: 'Unexpected growth' in CO2 found
International scientists found that inefficiency in the use of fossil fuels increased levels of CO2 by 17%.
The other 18% came from a decline in the natural ability of land and oceans to soak up CO2 from the atmosphere.
About half of emissions from human activity are absorbed by natural "sinks" but the efficiency of these sinks has fallen, the study suggests.
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I wonder if anyone has calculated the "carbon credits owed" to offset Bushfire 10/07 in Southern CA...
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That is very unsettling indeed. I wonder if the calculations included the CO2 emitted from all the fires in coal mines in India and China; the impact on CO2 levels from those fires is enormous (http://www.post-gazette.com/healthsc...nviro4p4.asp):
We need to just freakin' outlaw coal mining. The energy provided by the coal doesn't make up for the costs to the environment and the human cost of all the lives lost mining the coal.Concern and action is needed, he said, because of the environmental impact -- especially of mega-fires burning in India, China and elsewhere in Asia. One coal fire in northern China, for instance, is burning over an area more than 3,000 miles wide and almost 450 miles long....He estimated that the Chinese fires alone consume 120 million tons of coal annually. That's almost as much as the annual coal production in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois combined....Each year they release 360 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as much as all the cars and light trucks in the United States.
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Zero.Originally Posted by randycat99
I wonder if anyone has calculated the "carbon credits owed" to offset Bushfire 10/07 in Southern CA...
Biomass is a considered a carbon neutral technology.
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Wasn't unexpected by me. Carbon footprint growth comes from consumption growth, in the absence of any serious effective scheme to reduce its carbon footprint. And economic growth goeth on, even though developed countries increasingly conceal the growth in the carbon-footprint of their consumption by outsourcing it to China and India, etc. Typical consumers make a few minor feel-good changes, (eg by buying a few low-energy bulbs, whose life-cycle carbon footprint is probably of dubious benefit given the manufacturing cost) and still go out and buy that SUV. Governments have done little to address the underlying issue of consumption growth leading to carbon growth, for example as a wide-ranging cap-and-trade scheme.
My employer recently ran a local competition based upon the concept of green office/carbon footprint. We are a management consultancy, so we don't have any carbon gulching machinery. We even have quite a small office because lots of us sit in clients' offices much of the time. Some of us (engineers and economists - a minority among the better paid business strategists) built a little model, which demonstrated that much the largest component of our carbon footprint was the weekly journey many consultants make to remote client sites. We therefore proposed methods to reduce the carbon footprint of that. They - the business strategists - laughed at us. Nothing was going to interfere with their collection of frequent traveller bribe-scheme points from airlines. The winner of the competition was someone who suggested that Christmas gifts to clients should have a green theme. That's how much we care about our carbon footprint in my company.
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From the linked article:
It's not the amount of CO2 that has risen 35% but the expected rate of rise. Too bad they didn't use some numbers nor state how the computation was made. If the rate of increase is taken to be 1.4 ppmv per year (Mauna Loa) and the rate of increase is accurate, the new rate is ~1.9 ppmv per year. It would help if they said how many measuring points were averaged to get their data and how the expected rate of increase was computed.Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere have risen 35% faster than expected since 2000, says a study.
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It sure has done some nasty things to the air for it to be "neutral". Something doesn't sound right about that.
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Hey, Kullat, did you know that your avatar is in this month's issue of National Geographic?
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Depends if they grow the trees back. Here trees survive most fires, but in a big one like that they can go up like torches and sometimes the eucalypts can even explode. Sorry about the exploding eucalpts America.I wonder if anyone has calculated the "carbon credits owed" to offset Bushfire 10/07 in Southern CA...
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Did you mean brushfire or were you being political?I wonder if anyone has calculated the "carbon credits owed" to offset Bushfire 10/07 in Southern CA...
Order of Kilopi
In Australia we have bushfires all the time on account of there being a lot of bush. I understand there is a lot of eucalyptus in California so the term bushfire may be quite appropriate.Did you mean brushfire or were you being political?
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