Carbon Dioxide

Three states sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday to force the federal government to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide permitted in the air. The lawsuit seeks to add carbon dioxide to the list of pollutants that are regulated under the Clean Air Act. The current list includes carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen oxides, ozone, particulates and sulfur oxides. Connecticut Atty. Gen.

Reversing eons of natural history, Earth's Arctic tundra regions and northernmost forests are no longer absorbing carbon dioxide but are instead releasing it into the atmosphere, possibly accelerating global warming, scientists from San Diego State University have discovered. The conclusion concerns climate researchers because carbon dioxide is the "greenhouse gas" considered the chief culprit in the scientific debate over the possibility of disastrous global warming.

Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the last year, say scientists monitoring the sky from this 2-mile-high station atop a Hawaiian volcano. The reason for the faster buildup of the most important "greenhouse gas" will require further analysis, the U.S. government experts say.

The United States, previously thought to be making headway in curbing carbon dioxide emissions, produced sharply greater amounts of the gas last year and became an even bigger contributor to the global greenhouse effect, a new analysis concluded Friday.

Carbon dioxide emissions, a major contributor to global warming, jumped nearly 3% in the United States last year while declining in other industrialized nations, according to preliminary estimates released Friday. The new figures, compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, show that the United States released 1,558 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2000, up 41 million tons from 1999. It was the biggest U.S. increase in years.

The oceans burped ... twice. About 13,000 and 18,000 years ago, carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere in two giant belches that drove concentrations of the greenhouse gas from 180 to 265 parts per million, where it held relatively steady until the Industrial Revolution. Scientists have long known about the jump in gas levels from looking at ice cores.

The victims of a volcanic gas leak in northwestern Cameroon were asphyxiated by a cloud of carbon dioxide and sulfur compounds that emerged from a crater lake and filled the valley, a U.S. medical team said Monday. "Basically, the gas cloud replaced the air that they ordinarily breathe," said Navy Cmdr. Michael A. Clark, chief of forensic pathology at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington and a member of the team.

I HAD ALWAYS thought that nobody had a lower opinion than I as to the analytical capacities of the American public. Then I discovered the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The institute is a conservative think tank in Washington that is less embarrassed than most conservative think tanks about raking in gobs of money from oil companies and propagating views that happen to comport precisely with those of their donors.

Six months ago, presidential candidate George W. Bush promised to improve the nation's air quality and ease the threat of global warming by setting "mandatory reduction targets" for carbon dioxide. President Bush now has abandoned that promise. It was a "mistake," says a White House spokesman, for Bush to have described carbon dioxide as a pollutant in need of regulation. Actually, the mistake Bush made came this week when he caved in to the coal industry and other big campaign contributors.

The Southern Ocean, a massive storehouse for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, is slowly losing its capacity to buffer the world from rising concentrations of the greenhouse gas, researchers reported Thursday. As a result, the study said, carbon dioxide could accumulate in the atmosphere faster than expected over the coming decades. The ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, accounts for about a third of all carbon stored in the world's five oceans.