Green House effect:
- Carbon Dioxide from Power Plants :
Coal emits around 1.7 times as much carbon per unit of energy when burned as does natural gas and 1.25 times as much as oil. Natural gas gives off 50% of the carbon dioxide, the “principal greenhouse gas”, released by coal and 25% less carbon dioxide than oil, for the same amount of energy produced. Coal contains about 80 % more carbon per unit of energy than gas does, and oil contains about 40 percent more. For the typical U.S. household, a metric ton of carbon equals about 10,000 miles of driving at 25 miles per gallon of gasoline or about one year of home heating using a natural gas-fired furnace or about four months of electricity from coal-fired generation.
Carbon Dioxide Emitted from Cars : - Vehicles with poor gas mileage contribute the most to global warming. For example for each gallon of gas a vehicle consumes, 19.6 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted into the air. Sports utility vehicles were built for rough terrain, off road driving in mountains and deserts. When they are used for city driving, they are so much overkill to the environment.
Carbon Dioxide from Airplanes: - The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that aviation causes 3.5 percent of global warming, and that the figure could rise to 15 percent by 2050.
Carbon Dioxide from Buildings. Buildings structure account for about 12% of carbon dioxide emissions.
other Gases:
Methane:
- While carbon dioxide is the principal greenhouse gas, methane is second most important. According to the IPCC, Methane is more than 20 times as effective as CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Levels of atmospheric methane have risen 145% in the last 100 years. Methane is derived from sources such as rice paddies, bovine
flatulence, bacteria in bogs and fossil fuel production.
Nitrous oxide: - another greenhouse gas is Nitrous oxide (N2O). Nitrous oxide is naturally produced by oceans and rainforests. Man-made sources of nitrous oxide include nylon and nitric acid production, the use of fertilizers in agriculture, cars with catalytic converters and the burning of organic matter. Nitrous oxide is broken down in the atmosphere by chemical reactions that involve sunlight.
- Deforestation:
deforestation is the second principle cause of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Deforestation is responsible for 25% of all carbon emissions entering the atmosphere, by the burning and cutting of about 34 million acres of trees each year. The destroying of tropical forests alone is throwing hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. We are also losing temperate forests. The temperate forests of the world account for an absorption rate of 2 billion tons of carbon annually.
- City Gridlock:
Cities are tolerating gridlock. In 1996 according to an annual study by traffic engineers from Texas A and M University, it was found that drivers in Los Angeles and New York City alone wasted 600 million gallons of gas annually while just sitting in traffic. The 600 million gallons of gas translates to about 7.5 million tons of carbon dioxide in just those two cities.
- Carbon in Atmosphere and Ocean:
The atmosphere contains about 750 billion tons of carbon, while 800 billion tons are dissolved in the surface layers of the world's oceans.
http://www.ecobridge.org/content/g_cse.htm
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