Leave the carbon in the ground! (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Leave the carbon in the ground!

8:51am Wednesday 21st December 2011 in Enviro Watch By Keith Thomson

Despite the fact that the science explaining climate change is very robust, and has been understood for well over a century, there are still those who doubt that human activity has much to do with it and so think it reasonable to keep on using the atmosphere as a waste dump.

One of the arguments that the doubters, and those in the fossil fuel industries, put forward, is that as CO2 is such a small proportion of the atmosphere it really can’t be doing much harm, and anyway, it’s all to do with the sun. The fact that for every million parts of the atmosphere, only 394 are CO2, seems to support this view, though it looks a little different when one realises that in each cubic metre of the atmosphere there are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of carbon dioxide – yes, that is 21 noughts after the 10.

So if CO2 is the culprit, then it should have left some fingerprints and a CSI look at the atmosphere and the oceans should give us enough evidence for a guilty verdict.

The crime scene is the land mass and what grows on it, the oceans, and the lower layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, with the stratosphere above it before you reach space more than ten miles up.

Normally we would expect everything to be in balance, with the heat from the sun being more or less balanced by that escaping, so providing us with a comfortable average global temperature of about 15 degrees celsius. But that’s not the case as all measurements show an increase of about one degree in the last century. CO2 is a crafty little operator, with its cluster of three atoms that effectively stop the heat in the infrared range escaping to space and reflect some of it back towards the earth’s surface. We know that most of the extra CO2 in our current atmosphere must have come from fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, as the carbon is the lighter isotope that plants prefer rather than the heavier version that can come from volcanoes.

The fact that nights are warming more than days and that the troposphere is warming while higher up it’s cooling, suggests that the sun is not the culprit and that the extra CO2 is responsible.

We know that the 30 per cent increase of CO2 in the atmosphere in the last two centuries is the explanation why there has been a reduction in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere – it’s stored away with the carbon to make the CO2.

Guilty as charged, and the sentence is that all fossil carbon should be left where it is, in the ground.