CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE. OH MY!
The concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere were measured in the bubbles from an Antarctic ice core from Law Dome near Australia’s Casey Station.
Some of you in the Waynedale area were fortunate enough to have Mrs. Wimmer as a high school teacher ‘back in the good old days.’ She taught chemistry at Elmhurst High School and she taught us about carbon. It is an element that is all around us. Recently everyone has been talking about carbon in the atmosphere. CO2 is a non-toxic gas that has been increasing since the early 1800s. It is obvious that there has been an increase of CO2 due to industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels. Also, we breathe in air and breathe out CO2, so one solution to decrease carbon in the atmosphere would be to simply quit breathing.
Those who don’t want to quit breathing may want to analyze the situation further to see if this increased level of CO2 is really a problem.
Imagine the composition of the earth’s atmosphere as a football field. Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen. So, starting from the goal line, nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight yard line. And most of what is left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what is left is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That’s pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of that remaining three and a half inches is CO2? One inch! That’s how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere, one inch in a hundred yard football field.
We are told that CO2 has increased in the last two hundred years. How much has that one inch of carbon dioxide increased? Three eights of an inch…which is less than the thickness of a pencil. And the global warming experts are trying to tell us that that tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern. Do you really want to spend two or more billion dollars of your tax revenue to eliminate 60 parts per million of CO2 from the atmosphere? And, can the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere even be accomplished, or will this just be another $500 toilet seat? We need more education from chemistry teachers the likes of Mrs. Wimmer.
Monthly Variation of Carbon Dioxide Concentration:
The monthly variation of carbon dioxide over the period of a year is an interesting set of data. The cyclic change is caused by the seasonal variation of the growth of vegetation from the Northern Hemisphere. Starting in May the growth of plants and trees uses carbon dioxide, so the concentration decreases a little bit. Starting in October, November the growth ceases, thus causing the carbon dioxide to increase.
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