Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to determine its concentration of carbon dioxide, known scientii cally
as CO 2 . h e pat ern that has emerged from this experiment, the sec-
ond oldest of its kind in the world, is unmistakable: the concentra-
tion of CO 2 wiggles from month to month, but year at er year it has
been rising, at a steadily accelerating pace. When the gathering station
opened in 1968, the concentration had just crossed 320 parts per mil-
lion (ppm)—if you divided a cube of atmosphere into a million lit le
cells, 320 of those would have been full of CO 2 —a i gure substantially
higher than 280, roughly where it had been until industrialization began
in the eighteenth century. 12 Every year, as people burn coal, oil, and
natural gas and cut down the world's forests, the number rises. When
I visited the ridge in 2012, it was quickly closing in on 400. It will
continue to rise, by two or three parts per million every year, unless
there are fundamental changes in how energy is produced throughout
the world.
It has been known for more than a century that carbon dioxide and
other so-called greenhouse gases such as methane, water vapor, and
nitrous oxide concentrate in the atmosphere and trap heat. Without
them, the average temperature on earth would be well below zero; the
fact that there has long been a blanket of greenhouse gases surround-
ing the planet is a big reason we are here. But human activities—most
prominently the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas to generate
usable energy—produce massive amounts of carbon dioxide. Some
is absorbed in the oceans and in trees, but much of it collects in the
atmosphere, further insulating the earth and raising global tempera-
tures. With that come changes in weather pat erns and sea level and,
as a consequence, impacts on societies and people. Despite at empts by
some people to confuse the public, this much is basically uncontested.
Even Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and MIT professor
best known for arguing that climate change isn't a signii cant problem,
says that there is nothing controversial among “serious climate scien-
tists” about claims that the world has been warming and that increases
in carbon dioxide, which have been extensively documented, ought to
cause temperatures to rise. 13
h e fact that burning oil and gas intensii es climate change, though,
doesn't tell you much about whether booming U.S. oil and gas
 
 
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