Carbon Dioxide

Soldiers here fired off 12 million pieces of mortar, rifle and artillery ammunition on the training range last year, exercises the Army now knows generated 58.8 tons of carbon dioxide. This post south of Colorado Springs is the first in the Army to begin tracking greenhouse gases emitted by its barracks, tanks and training activities. The next step: cutting emissions by nearly a third. "What we're doing at Ft. Carson is the first deliberate effort to calculate our carbon 'bootprint' and do it in a way that's based on real data," said Tad Davis, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for environment, safety and occupational health.

POOLESVILLE, Md.  - On a curve of the Potomac River 37 miles northwest of Washington, the Dickerson power plant has stood sentry over small villages, crop fields and horse farms for more than half a century. Burning mostly coal and some natural gas, Dickerson emitted about 1.5 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2011, akin to the pollution of about 275,000 cars. How much longer Dickerson will run depends in no small measure on the steps President Obama takes to fulfill the pledge he made in his State of the Union address to tackle climate change.

POOLESVILLE, Md.  - On a curve of the Potomac River 37 miles northwest of Washington, the Dickerson power plant has stood sentry over small villages, crop fields and horse farms for more than half a century. Burning mostly coal and some natural gas, Dickerson emitted about 1.5 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2011, akin to the pollution of about 275,000 cars. How much longer Dickerson will run depends in no small measure on the steps President Obama takes to fulfill the pledge he made in his State of the Union address to tackle climate change.

Wondering where Earth's climate is headed with an atmosphere that is 400 parts per million carbon dioxide ? An arctic bare of ice sheets, forested in pine and fir, with summer temperatures about 14 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today were typical some 3.5 million years ago, when atmospheric CO2 measures hovered around the 400 ppm range, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The findings, based on sediment cores drilled from a Russian lake, don't bode well for the current model of human-forced climate change, the researchers warn.

I have read several articles in The Times about the gas cloud that has killed many people in Cameroon, Africa. That gas, carbon dioxide, has been labeled as "poisonous." I submit to you that carbon dioxide is not poisonous. When one dies in an atmosphere of high concentration of carbon dioxide, he has not been poisoned by the carbon dioxide; he dies from lack of oxygen, and has suffocated or asphyxiated, just as if he had been strangled, or if he had drowned. Carbon dioxide is no more poisonous to the person who dies in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide than is the water in which a person drowns.

It is time for more of us to step forward. By "us" I mean the growing number of thoughtful Americans who have recognized the threat of global warming but have tried not to worry about it too much or get involved. Even our president, who talks eloquently about the need to reduce our fossil-fuel consumption, initially rebuffed an environmental group's efforts to have the White House install solar panels (as detailed by Bill McKibben in his Sept. 16 Times Op-Ed article, "This is how they treat their friends?"

Emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide reached an all-time high last year, further reducing the chances that the world could avoid a dangerous rise in global average temperature by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, the energy analysis group for the world's most industrialized states. Global emissions of carbon-dioxide, or CO2, from fossil-fuel combustion hit a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes  in 2011, according to the IEA's preliminary estimates, an increase of 1 Gt, or 3.2% from 2010.

Ancient plant and animal matter trapped within Arctic permafrost can be converted rapidly into climate-warming carbon dioxide when melted and exposed to sunlight, according to a new study. In a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , a team of environmental and biological scientists examined 27 melting permafrost sites in Alaska and found that bacteria converted dissolved organic carbon materials into the greenhouse gas CO2 40% faster when exposed to ultraviolet light.

The notion of mitigating harmful carbon dioxide emissions by storing the gas underground is not practical because the process is likely to cause earthquakes that would release the gas anyway, according to a commentary published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While the scientists do not expect that the approach would cause any large and dangerous seismic activity, they say it is likely that the earthquakes would be severe enough to jeopardize the ability to store the gas underground over the long term.

In California's first auction of greenhouse gas pollution credits, companies paid just a few cents more than the minimum price per ton of carbon, generating almost $290 million from the sale held last week. The state Air Resources Board announced Monday that it sold all 23.1 million allowances available for 2013 at $10.09 each, generating $233.3 million. The minimum price was $10. Additionally, the state sold only 14% of almost 40 million credits available for 2015. That generated an additional $55.8 million.

Re "A tax everyone can love," Opinion, April 21 If folks are leery of paying taxes to cover the actual costs of burning oil, there are two things they can do to mitigate the effects of the carbon tax that Doyle McManus discusses in his column. To start, our national fleet of vehicles is grossly inefficient. In 2012, the average fuel economy for new cars sold in the U.S. was about 24 miles per gallon. This problem is compounded by inefficient driving - hard accelerations, speeding and accelerating toward a stop rather than coasting.

SACRAMENTO - California's air quality officials soon may be adding a new phrase to their bureaucratic vocabulary: " le rechauffement climatique . " That's French for global warming. The California Air Resources Board on Friday linked its program for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and curbing climate change with one in the French-speaking, Canadian province of Quebec. The merger starts Jan. 1. On April 8, Gov. Jerry Brown certified the two cap-and-trade systems as compatible.

The chairmen of Congress' primary tax committees, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), have launched a bipartisan effort to reform our messy, inefficient federal tax law. They've agreed to look for ways to lower tax rates on both individuals and corporations and at the same time "close loopholes. " But Baucus and Camp are going to run into a big problem: One taxpayer's "loophole" is another's sacred birthright. The only deductions in the personal income tax code big enough to make a significant difference in revenue are the ones for home mortgage interest, charitable contributions and state and local taxes.

WASHINGTON -- The push to produce more energy from renewable sources has stalled, and “the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago,” according to Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization that researches the energy sector and holds reserves of oil in case of supply disruptions. Van der Hoeven's statement pointed to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the world's power plants, the greatest source of the greenhouse gases driving climate change.

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency says greenhouse gas emissions in the United States showed a 1.6% decline from 2010 to 2011. The decrease continued an overall decline in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, down 6.9% since 2005. The EPA said the drop from 2010 to 2011 is driven mostly by power plants switching from coal to natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide when burned. Additionally, a mild winter in the south Atlantic region of the U.S., where much of the heating is electric, resulted in lower electricity demand.

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency has delayed indefinitely a much-anticipated final rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants. Proposed a year ago, the rule was the first to set limits on carbon dioxide emissions from new plants. Once a limit is set for new facilities, the EPA is legally obligated to address existing plants, which pose the true climate threat for now. The United States' power plant fleet is the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

Re "Wise Line on Curbing Emissions," editorial, Dec. 2: Although compromise between two ends of the spectrum often seems to be the best resolution in most situations, in the case of environment and pollution that is not so. I was delighted to find out that the European Union was taking such a bold stand in the fight for lower fossil fuel emissions. Unfortunately, I was soon disappointed to discover that the U.S. was not. The world's nations need to pursue a goal that may seem harder to achieve, but will have a better payoff.

Listen up! Carbon dioxide being absorbed by the oceans is having a puzzling effect on fish -- their ears get bigger. The ear structure in fish, known as an otolith, is made up of minerals. Scientists knew that increasing carbon dioxide in the oceans -- absorbed from the atmosphere -- is making the sea more acidic, which can dissolve and weaken shells. They wondered if it also would reduce the size of the otoliths.

Gesundheit! If it seems to you allergy sufferers that you're reaching for Kleenex and hay fever pills earlier and earlier each spring to ward off sneezing fits, you may be right. A panel of climate scientists and plant physiologists said Tuesday that higher temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are linked to longer and more intense pollen production. "What we're seeing with additional warming and earlier springs is that the trees are flowering earlier and producing more pollen," said Lewis Ziska, a research plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A study into the chemical composition of marine plankton is challenging a long-held assumption on how much carbon dioxide the organisms consume. The study, published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience , calls into question the textbook ratio of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous contained in all plankton. This so-called "Redfield ratio," named for oceanographer Alfred Redfield, holds that those compounds are fixed at 106:16:1 units respectively. However, after examining over 700 ocean water samples from the North Atlantic, the Bearing Sea, the Carribean and other locations, researchers found that the chemical composition varied widely according to temperature, and global lattitude.