Tag Archives: carbon dioxide

Unsustainable Energy and Climate Reality

“Climate models,” according to Daniel Baer and Noah Gordon, in the Washington Post, here, “are complicated things. They must consider a staggering number of mathematical and physical variables to predict, for instance, how emitting a given amount of carbon dioxide will change the flows of air, water and heat between the atmosphere and the oceans. More sophisticated projections go further, showing how temperature changes will affect rainfall in a certain region, which in turn will affect crop yields and, as a result, the carbon cycle.”

However, as illustrated above, from “Climate.gov,” here, atmospheric Carbon Dioxide concentrations have increased close to 50% since 1750, when they were under 280 ppm, to around 420 ppm today.

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1 Pound of Gasoline = 3 Pounds of Carbon Dioxide

) which is approximately 360 billion pounds of gas (each gallon of gas is 5.8 to 6.5 pounds).

Water isn’t normally thought of as a pollutant.  Up till November 13, the EPA refused to think of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, but big storms and rising sea levels are among the problems associated with global warming.  Storms, very simply, are water vapor in the air condensing and falling to the ground. More on this next time.

Data in this post came from Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economics, and one of the driving forces behind 350.org. Data on Gasoline came from Mad Sci Network and California Energy Quest.
Information on the chemical make-up of gasoline came from Wikipedia.

Bioengineered E. Coli – Smells like Bananas

Bioengineers at MIT have modified e. coli bacteria in two ways: rather than smell like human fecal matter, their E. coli cultures smell like mint when they’re growing, and banana when they are mature.

If they can do that, can should be able to devise metabolic pathways that breaks down plastics into carbon dioxide, which then can be metabolized, which will render plastic biodegradable.  However, to mitigate the global warming effects of the carbon dioxide, they also need to figure out ways to sequester the carbon.