RISE: Climate Change, Global Warming, and Rising CO2 Levels

CO2 Levels and the Greenhouse Effect

Carbon dioxide level is specifically referred as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And human activities such as combustion of fossil fuel or emission from industry have strongly influenced it by adding a new "branch" to the Carbon Cycle.

Fig.1. Carbon Cycle

Carbon Cycle is nothing but a cycle of carbon as it is written. Carbon is one of the element cycles that is fundamental to our survival and everything that is alive on this planet because we all need carbon to survive and to obtain energy. As it is illustrated in Fig.1. , the carbon cycle is complex as everything in nature, but there is a better and easier way to look at it – investigate it by examining its fundamental parts which are the atmosphere, plants, animals, and decomposers. However, there are still multiple processes happening between these parts of the carbon cycle.

The processes are mainly photosynthesis, cellular respiration, ingestion and death and decay. The photosynthesis is the only way of how carbon is absorbed by the plants from the atmosphere and stored in a form of carbohydrates such as glucose or sucrose in the plant. Then the plant either respire the carbon back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide to make energy through respiration or get eaten by the animal through the process of ingestion, with an additional process to be decomposed by the decomposer. If the plant is ingested by an animal, then the carbon in the plant is converted into energy (ATP) by the process of cellular respiration which provides the animals the energy to do work. Afterward, the animal died and decomposed by the decomposer through the process of death and decay which transport the carbon from animal to the decomposer and then the decomposer respire to make energy to survive and release the carbon back to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.

As mentioned above, the carbon cycle has been added a new branch by human activities which are the combustion of fossil fuel. When the plant and animal are dead and decomposed, they become fossil fuels after millions of year under a strong pressure and heat. This fossil fuels such as coal and gas are extracted from the soil and combusted in the factories or industries to make energy to produce products for the market.

However, if it is only an add-on to the carbon cycle then it wouldn't be such a severe problem as it is nowadays, the problem is that people combust the fossil fuel and emit the carbon dioxide to atmosphere in such excessive amount that the plants can't keep up with the rate to absorb the carbon dioxide away from atmosphere. This imbalance caused the increase of carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere. Moreover, what causes the problem to be more severely is that regardless that the plants can't keep up with the rate of carbon dioxide emission through combustion of fossil fuels, people also chopping the trees and plants down and destroys the habitat to make it suitable for people to build cities. This caused the imbalance of carbon cycle furthermore and even reached a level that causing the destruction of the cycle.

Fig.2. The Global CO2 Emission graph from 1850 to 2011 by World Resources Institute.

According to World Resources Institute, the emission of carbon dioxide have increased from 198 MtCO2 in 1850 to 32274 MtCO2 in 2011; in other words, the carbon dioxide emission has increased 163 times since 1850 which is a terrifying statistic. And this number is continuously increasing since then.

Fig.3. The graph of CO2Emission Excluding LUCF against year since 1960.

Maybe I am telling you all this statistic is terrifying and scares you numerically, but you might still doubt that "what do these numbers mean? How they influence the Earth?". This is the other main point that is included here – "Greenhouse Effect".

Fig.4. A visual of "Greenhouse Effect"

"Greenhouse Effect" might be also familiar to you as you hear them and see them in almost everyday in the news. It is basically the trapping of solar energy into our planet Earth or more specifically the atmosphere. The sunlight is trapped in the atmosphere because "greater transparency of the atmosphere to visible radiation from the sun than to infrared radiation emitted from the planet's surface" (Wikipedia). What is meant by it is the as sunlight pass through the atmosphere and reflected back from the ground, some of the sunlight is reflected back to Earth and trapped in the atmosphere because it hits certain gases molecules (greenhouse gases) which are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone.

Hence, as the concentration of these gases increases, there are going to be more sunlight be trapped in the atmosphere and for a longer period. As the carbon dioxide emission increases nowadays in an excessive amount, the concentration of it also increases excessively in the atmosphere which causes stronger "greenhouse effect". This also has led to the climate change and global warming as more sunlight is trapped in the earth's atmosphere and continuously heating the atmosphere.

As examine the correlation between carbon dioxide emission and "greenhouse effect", the importance of controlling the human activities such as combustion of fossil fuels have to be limited to a level that the carbon cycle can recover itself and sustain balanced. But with the growing population, is it feasible to do so?

Work Cited:

"Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?" NASA, NASA, 4 Apr. 2018, climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.

"The History of Carbon Dioxide Emissions." The History of Carbon Dioxide Emissions | World Resources Institute, www.wri.org/blog/2014/05/history-carbon-dioxide-emissions.

"1.6 Growing Carbon Dioxide Emissions." doi:10.1787/888932320770.

"Greenhouse Effect." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Apr. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect.