The long awaited climate change bill, called the “American Power Act,” was introduced to the senate last week. So it is a good time to assemble a few simple facts that are relevant to the debate. We will address rational points of contention, myths and outright absurdities in subsequent articles.
Fact 1: When heated, the temperature of carbon dioxide increases about 20% faster than does the temperature of air (air is a combination of many gases: about 75% nitrogen, 20% Oxygen and tiny bits of everything else, including CO2 at about 0.04%).
- Here’s a simple experiment: fill one balloon with carbon dioxide and another with air. Next, subject each to sunlight and measure their temperatures. Since the heat capacity of carbon dioxide is 15% to 30% lower than that of air at atmospheric temperatures – the temperature of the balloon with CO2 increases about 20% faster than the balloon with air. This is the defining property of a green house gas.
Fact 2: When gas and coal burns CO2 is emitted in the atmosphere.
- Gasoline and coal are made of hydrocarbons. One of the remarkable things about carbon (closely related to why it enables the existence of life) is that it is capable of forming 4 separate chemical bonds. Gasoline and coal, in addition to impurities that must be “refined” out of the mix, are composed of chains of carbon atoms that are decorated with two hydrogen atoms each, except at the ends of the chain where there are three. When mixed with oxygen and the nudge of a spark, energy is released when the hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water and the carbon combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide CO2 and carbon monoxide, CO. The CO, which is poisonous, eventually gets hold of another oxygen atom to form CO2.
Fact 3: The amount of oil and coal that people burn injects enough CO2 in the atmosphere to increase its concentration by more than 1% each year.
- If you can recall your tenth grade chemistry, you can make this calculation yourself, or follow along here.
Fact 4: The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 35% in the last 100 years.
- Records on CO2 concentrations have been kept for well over a hundred years. In fact, the venerable CRC handbook of Chemistry and Physics has been publishing this sort of data for 90 years now.
With these inarguable facts in hand, common sense clearly indicates that by burning oil and coal human beings are injecting non-negligible quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which, reason would dictate, might have some affect on the exchange of heat between the sun, the atmosphere, the continents and oceans. However, while "common sense" is not an unreasonable starting point to position assumptions, it's hardly conclusive evidence. Stay tuned for examination of the myths and hoaxes...
(You are welcome to republish the text of this article, but not the images, without needing further permission, provided that you attribute the work to its author, Ransom Stephens, Ph.D. – the author of The God Patent, a novel set in the trenches of the science-religion culture war.)
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