Interesting facts about carbon dioxide (CO2)

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas mostly responsible for climate change issue. Because of our dependence on fossil fuels the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is constantly growing and as of November 2011, carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is at a concentration of 390 ppm by volume. Cutting CO2 emissions is the key factor that will decide the outcome of our fight against climate change.

The recent American study has shown that reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would give Earth a wetter climate in the short term. Cutting CO2 emissions now would see an almost instant precipitation increase (within one year), but it would take many decades for climate to show the signs of cooling.

One of the proposed solutions on how to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions is carbon capture and storage, or in other words storing carbon dioxide underground. Most of currently proposed carbon capture and storage projects still lack feasibility necessary for wider implementation.

The scientists have calculated that in order to stabilize the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere world would have to cut around 80 percent of current human-caused CO2 emissions.

Forests are together with our seas and oceans the largest carbon sinkers. Scientists have calculated that in period between 1990 and 2007, the global forests stored about 2.4 gigatons of carbon per year. Trees as well as plants sink carbon dioxide during photosynthesis (carbon dioxide is an important component of photosynthesis, which converts the energy from sunlight and a major part of the carbon cycle).

Scientists fear that the Earth's polar regions such as Arctic could in years to come cause massive emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is because Earth's polar regions have gigantic deposits of frozen carbon that could be eventually released with the further thawing of permafrost. The scientists estimate that these deposits contain over 1.5 trillion tons of trapped carbon, almost twice as much of carbon as currently contained in Earth's atmosphere.

In past, our planet has already experienced periods characterized with huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Our planet has so far been always able to recover but it always took ten thousands of years before enough carbon was pulled from the Earth's atmosphere.

According to a 2008 study the burning of fossil fuels accounts for about 8.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. Deforestation of the tropical forests (including the replacement of the forest with land used for agriculture) accounts for about 1.5 billion tons per year.

Our oceans sink approximately one-third of all human carbon emissions. Some scientists fear that the increased climate change impact could significantly reduce our oceans ability to sink carbon. The scientists have already discovered that rising temperatures are slowing the carbon sinking across a large portion of the subtropical North Atlantic.

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Science one step closer to less energy intensive artificial photosynthesis

Artificial photosynthesis is the process with the main purpose of converting carbon dioxide into some useful chemical(s), most notably fuel. The primary goal of artificial photosynthesis is not to find new ways to get more fuel but to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and reduce climate change impact.

The main problem with artificial photosynthesis has always been the fact that this process is too energy intensive. This mainly refers to the first step of artificial photosynthesis, namely converting carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide because this process requires so much electricity that the end result is that the bigger amount of energy is being used to produce the fuel than can be stored in the fuel.

Because of this issue science has a demanding task of finding a right catalyst that will improve artificial photosynthesis and make it less energy intensive.

The latest research on this field comes from the University of Illinois where scientists have used an ionic liquid to catalyze the reaction which has significantly reduced the amount of energy needed to turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide because the ionic liquids stabilize the intermediates in the reaction so that less electricity is needed to complete the conversion.

However this is still not enough to make the process of artificial photosynthesis economically viable because researchers still need to find the way to speed up the reaction and maximize conversion.

But as University of Illinois chemical and biological engineering professor Paul Kenis said : "More work is needed, but this research brings us a significant step closer to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels while simultaneously reducing CO2 emissions that are linked to unwanted climate change."

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Perfect solution for climate change - Transform CO2 into something useful

There are many different scientific theories featuring variety of different climate change solutions but none sounds as good as transforming harmful carbon dioxide (CO2), the greenhouse gas mostly responsible for climate change, into some useful form of energy.

Joel Rosenthal, a chemist at the University of Delaware, is convinced that this solution is very much possible, and that this would not only decrease the CO2 levels in the atmosphere but would also offer an excellent new method to produce renewable energy.

Rosenthal's team is currently designing electrocatalysts from metals such as nickel and palladium, and these metals should freely give away electrons when they react with carbon dioxide, therefore chemically reducing this greenhouse gas into energy-rich carbon monoxide or methanol.

Carbon monoxide and methanol could be later used for many useful purposes such as production of plastics and solvents, detergents, drug manufacturing, etc.

Rosenthal said :" It's my hope to be able to map out the molecular design principles for efficient CO2 conversion into fuels. Then you can think about doing this on a commercially relevant scale."

If science were to come up with the commercially viable option to transform CO2 into useful fuels, this would mean several different benefits: first of all this would help tackle climate change and second this would improve future energy security and energy independence.

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Turning carbon dioxide into some useful form - Possible or not?

The rise of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is mostly the result of fossil fuels burning has urged science to come up with the different solutions on how to reduce the level of carbon emissions that end up in our atmosphere because these emissions are giving more impact to climate change in form of increased temperatures. One of the best solutions would definitely be if science can somehow turn carbon dioxide into some useful form before it reaches the atmosphere. Is such solution possible in reality?

There may be a way for this after all as it was demonstrated by the scientists from the university of Michigan that have figured out how to efficiently turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, and the most amazing part in the whole story is that they have managed this by using visible light.

The scientists used for this experiment an enzyme-modified titanium oxide to get carbon dioxide's electrons excited and able to jump to the enzyme, and once this is dome the enzyme then catalyzes the reduction of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide. A photosensitizer that binds to the titanium allows the use of visible light for the process. The enzyme is more robust than other catalysts, willing to facilitate the conversion again and again.

The direct product of this process is carbon monoxide, a chemical that can be used in other processes to produce electricity or hydrogen. Carbon monoxide has significant fuel value and readily can be converted by known catalysts into hydrocarbons or into methanol for use as a liquid fuel.

So turning carbon dioxide into some useful form is really possible, and with the more advancement in science this could perhaps in the best possible scenario be used to solve the climate change problem.

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Earth is extremely sensitive to carbon dioxide

The new study published in Nature Geoscience has come up with the conclusion that in the long-term our planet's temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated. Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, and colleagues compared results from a global climate model to temperature reconstructions of the Earth's environment three million years ago when global temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations were relatively high, significantly higher than today. The temperature reconstructions were calculated using data from three million-year-old sediments on the ocean floor.

What scientists found out was that given the concentrations of carbon dioxide prevailing three million years ago, the model originally predicted a significantly smaller temperature increase than that indicated by the reconstructions, meaning some important factors were missing from the model. These important factors that need to be included in the model are land-ice and vegetation because changes in vegetation and ice lead to more sunlight being absorbed, which in turn increases warming on our planet.

Most of current climate models do not fully include these long-term processes, thus these models do not entirely represent the sensitivity of the Earth's temperature to carbon dioxide, and if we want to avoid dangerous climate change, this high sensitivity of the Earth to carbon dioxide should be taken into account when defining targets for the long-term atmospheric CO2 stabilization.

This study is also an important indicator on how studying Earth's past climate can provide important insights into how the Earth's climate and temperatures might change in the future.

Our planet's temperature is much more sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously thought.

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