Too much CO2 polluting our oceans

Our oceans are huge carbon sinkers and they absorb approximately one third of carbon dioxide (C02) from the atmosphere. The problem is that CO2 emissions continue to grow (the atmospheric levels of CO2 have increased by approximately 40% since the start of industrial revolution) which in turn leads to increased acidity of our oceans.

Carbon dioxide isn't only making its way into our oceans from the atmosphere but also because of growing water pollution with nutrients (nutrient runoff from fertilizer, human and animal waste).

The CO2 pollution coming from nutrients is often overlooked despite the fact that we are talking here about the major source of carbon dioxide in our oceans.

The increased level of nutrients in seawater also leads to algae bloom which is harmful for marine ecosystems because it results in depletion of oxygen from the water, which in turn leads to formation of ocean dead zones.

The U.S. scientists have developed computer models that showed that higher CO2 levels will substantially increase the acidity of ocean waters, which could even have major negative impact on commercial fisheries in coastal regions receiving nutrient inputs, such as the northern Gulf of Mexico and Baltic Sea.

Many marine species that play vital role at the bottom of marine food web could be adversely affected with increased acidity of our oceans with clams, oysters, scallops and mussels being likely the most heavily impacted.

The scientists have also expressed fears that these changes in ocean acidity could be already impacting commercial fish and shellfish populations.

As long as our society remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels, carbon dioxide levels will continue to grow, meaning that the climate change impact will further grow in size. This could spell danger for entire planet and our oceans are sadly no exception.

Capturing CO2 from the air to halt climate change

The climate change impact is increasing because global carbon emissions continue to grow. The increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (mostly the result of burning fossil fuels) has resulted in warmer average temperatures across the globe, which has led to melting of glaciers, raising sea levels and producing more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes.

The transition to renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuels burning still looks many years away and therefore world needs to find other ways to remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and stop further warming of our planet.

There has been plenty of talk about different techniques to pull carbon dioxide from the air and store it away but these technologies have yet to become commercially viable.

The currently discussed techniques to capture carbon dioxide from the air all have very high upfront costs but given the fact that climate change impact is becoming increasingly stronger we'll soon be forced to stop worry about costs and focus solely on one thing- reducing the climate change impact regardless of the money involved.

Some scientists fear that the world has already crossed the point where the climate can be stabilized by just reducing greenhouse gas emissions and see techniques to capture carbon dioxide from the air as the only solution to halt further strengthening of the climate change impact.

The science needs to find the way to commercialize techniques to capture carbon dioxide from the air. So far there have been many proposed solutions but we are yet to find one that would be commercially viable.

Many proposed techniques aim to extract CO₂ directly from stationary sources such as coal-fired power plants but these techniques do not cover for emissions coming from vehicles and other mobile sources.

The additional problem is that CO2, once it ends in the atmosphere, can stay there for centuries, meaning that any proposal to decrease the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere needs to be long-term solution.

Developing systems to capture CO₂ directly from the air is by far the best solution against climate change if science finds the way to capture a lot of CO₂ out of the air with a minimum amount of energy used in the process.

The scientists have major tasks ahead of them because climate change is by far the biggest environmental issue of our time, one that could result in catastrophic consequences for our future generations. The politicians have failed to agree on new climate deal, and now all hope lies on science. Let us hope science will be able to find the way to help us all and save this planet from climate change.

Is carbon dioxide really a pollutant?

In the last decade or so there have certainly been plenty of talks about carbon dioxide (CO2), particularly carbon dioxide emissions that are believed to be the main factor contributing to climate change and global warming impact. Does this make carbon dioxide a pollutant or not?

According to the U.S. environmental protection agency (EPA) carbon dioxide is pollutant, together with other greenhouse gases because primarily because of its role in contributing to climate change, and not because of any direct health effects (like this is the case with some other pollutants).

CO2 is indeed an essential ingredient of all life on our planet, a gas that humans exhale and plants inhale, the gas of vital importance for one of the most important processes on Earth- photosynthesis.

Carbon dioxide is no doubt a natural component of our atmosphere but in „normal levels“, meaning that branding CO2 as pollutant refers only to increased levels of CO2 in our atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is thought by many scientists to be the greenhouse gas mostly responsible for climate change. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped, leading to climate change and global temperature increase.

This means that carbon dioxide can even be considered as the main pollutant that is warming our planet, opening door for the future environmental disaster of enormous proportions.

In order to curb global warming world needs to decrease the level of CO2 emissions, and this can't be done without the transition to cleaner technologies (the ones emitting less CO2 and other greenhouse gases).

The higher than normal CO2 concentrations are big threat to our future. The scientists fear that the world could soon cross the point of no return (the global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius) after which climate change will become irreversible.

World has to find the way to significantly reduce the level of CO2 emissions, and whether this is done by switching to renewable energy or using different carbon capture and storage (CSS) techniques really doesn't matter much in the end, the most important thing is the result, namely less CO2 in our atmosphere.

If we were to significantly reduce the level of carbon emissions, up to a measure that would halt further climate change impact, then it wouldn’t be necessary to tag carbon dioxide as pollutant. But at this point of time, when carbon emissions continue to increase each year, carbon dioxide is with reason branded as one of the most harmful pollutants.

How is air pollution affecting climate change?

Air pollution is still a major environmental issue in many countries of the world, particularly fast developing economies such as China. Air pollution can increase the impact of climate change as according to the scientists from the University of Maryland excessive air pollution can worsen droughts and flooding simultaneously in different regions by strongly affecting cloud development.

The scientists have discovered that certain air pollutants such as soot and dust can have severe effect on weather and climate, reducing precipitation in dry regions while increasing rain, snowfall and the intensity of severe storms in wet regions.

This means that the developing regions susceptible to extreme events such as drought and flood must do necessary steps to prevent excessive air pollution.

This also means that the policies which aim to protect climate and limit global temperature must also include possible solutions to reduce air pollution levels, or in other words climate change and air pollution are environmental issues that need to be solved simultaneously.

The role of greenhouse gases in global climate change phenomenon has been very thoroughly studied and the same cannot be said for the role of air pollutants which have been very rarely put in a correlation with climate change.

Pursuing ambitious climate change policies and focusing on renewable energy can not only reduce the level of carbon emissions in our atmosphere but can also reduce a number of other air pollutants that are not only harmful to our environment but also to our health.

The world leaders so far haven't showed a desire to tackle both these issues in a tandem. In fact, even tackling climate change alone seems to be a mission impossible because the world is still very much divided in two blocks - developed and developing countries.

The world has reached a critical point where all environmental issues seem to be heavily interconnected which means that policies to tackle different environmental issues must complement each other, with of course the main emphasis being on climate change.

Humans are bigger CO2 emitters than volcanoes

There are many climate change deniers who say that volcanoes release as much or even more carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions than humans. And although volcanoes represent the mighty force of nature they are still very tiny CO2 polluters when compared with emissions resulting from human activity.

According to the latest US Geological Survey humans release roughly 135 times more CO2 annually than volcanoes. What this means is that the human activity emits in under three days the amount that volcanoes release in an entire year.

The scientists have come to this conclusion by making the compilation of the available estimates of CO2 emissions from all global volcanic activity on land and undersea and then comparing this data with the estimates for human emissions.

The scientists measured the level of CO2 emissions in volcanoes by remote sensing or flying through clouds of erupting volcanic gas, and by measuring certain isotope concentrations near undersea volcanoes.

This latest study proves that the myth of volcanoes emitting more carbon emissions than humans is very far from the real world, lacking any scientific backing.

Climate change deniers are actually using the image of the tremendous force of volcanoes and massive volcanic eruptions in order to try to convince the people that the enormous amount of CO2 are being emitted to the atmosphere. They seem to be forgetting that unlike volcanoes humans emit CO2 24-7 which results in massive global level of emissions.

And since the volcanoes are the largest natural source of CO2 emissions in the world it is very unrealistic to accept the theory that the ongoing climate change is natural process. Man-made climate change is certainly more plausible explanation.

China remains the world's biggest CO2 polluter

China is still the world's biggest CO2 polluter, not only that, China has also managed to significantly increase its carbon emissions, and compared to decade ago China's carbon emissions rose by staggering 171 %.

Despite the strong development of renewable energy China's carbon emission continue to grow because coal is still the most dominant fuel in China. The coal will very likely remain the dominant fuel in China for at least the next decade.

India, another fast developing country is also polluting world with carbon emissions more than ever before, and is now the third largest CO2 polluter in the world, behind China and United States, and before Russia.

The remaining top ten CO2 polluters include Japan, Germany, Canada, South Korea, Iran and United Kingdom.

Though the United States has had declining CO2 emissions for two years running it is still the number one in terms of per capita emissions among the top ten polluters with 18 tonnes emitted per person, while world's largest polluter China has little less than 6 tonnes, and third ranked India only 1,38. By looking at the global picture, world currently emits around 4.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions per person.

The environmentalists believe that the only way world can reduce CO2 emissions is by agreeing the new international climate deal, a successor for Kyoto protocol. The climate talks have so far been just that (talks), and international climate deal is still more in the sphere of dreams than the reality. This is mostly because there is a big difference in opinion between the developed and developing world, and until this is sorted out new climate deal looks almost impossible.

World still heavily depends on fossil fuels and renewable energy sector is still to weak to satisfy world's ever-growing hunger for energy. Until this changes, carbon emissions will likely grow even further, strengthening the impact of climate change and global warming.

Carbon emissions causing huge ocean acidification

Majority of world's leading marine scientists agree that immediate action in reducing CO2 emissions is necessary if we want to slow down current levels of ocean acidification and give chance for survival to many different marine ecosystems. Ocean acidification is widely spreading doing severe damage to many sea creatures, and only way we can slow down this accelerating process is to limit future atmospheric CO2 levels. Without this we could see serious problems for many marine ecosystems, and many marine species will be push to the very edge of extinction.

Increased amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere are making ocean water more acidic as the gas dissolves to create carbonic acid. Scientists have calculated that ocean chemistry is changing 100 times faster than in the 650,000 years that preceded the modern industrial era and since the late 1980s an overall drop in the pH of the oceans fell from 8.16 to 8.05.

CO2 emissions are causing ocean acidification that threatens survival of wide variety marine organisms.

This rapidly increasing acidity has potential to hamper the ability of many different marine creatures (such as corals) to form calcium carbonate shells and skeletal structures. Scientists are warning that ocean acidification is exceptionally harmful in the larval and juvenile stages in the lives of many marine invertebrates, because ocean acidification not only inhibits calcification, but also affects reproduction and growth in some marine organisms.

As you can see scientists are as usually warning the world, but politics as usually fails to listen their warnings. Reducing carbon emissions is not only important because of ocean acidification but for the whole climate change issue, and all problems related to global warming and climate change. World still awaits obligatory international agreement that would really make the difference, and ensure that all world countries reduce carbon emission levels.