Quo Vadis Anthropogenic CO2? Part 1: Greenhouse gas emissions and global warming
Hello there! My name is Konrad Eichhorn Colombo and I recently started as a blog editor for GE’s Edison’s desk. I am a member of the Renewable Energy Systems Lab in Munich and work on technologies for power, oil and gas as well as aviation. One hot topic we are currently addressing is how to cope with the large amount of man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 being emitted by large point sources such as power plants.
In this blog entry I decided to tell the CO2 story from the beginning to encourage people, who are not deeply involved in this topic, to contribute to a lively discussion.
Our world depends heavily on energy, in particular industrial and developing countries. In 2010, the total world consumption of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) corresponded to 10.4 billion tons oil equivalent. Future energy consumption is likely to be increased, in view of the expected growth of the global economy combined with the need to compensate for declining soil fertility and fresh water availability (I can recommend Ajilli’s blog entry ‘Water Scarcity around the World’ if you want to learn more about challenges of fresh water systems). At the same time, society has access to reserves of fossil fuels and mineral ores so that more than 80% of the globe’s primary energy still comes from those energy sources which are expected to remain dominant in the next decades. On a global scale, humans emit over 7 billion tons of CO2 every year [Normile2009].
Climate models predict that if man-made greenhouse gases (GHG) are not reduced, extreme climate events including droughts and intense storms will occur more often, with significant consequences for the global ecosystem and human welfare. The dominant man-made GHG is CO2 and one of its biggest problems is simply the huge amount being released to the atmosphere. However, other gases like methane, nitrous oxide and hydrofluorcarbons have a non-negligible warming effect too [Meinshausen2009]. If pollutants, which are chemically much more reactive than CO2 do not gain comparable attention, any efforts to address the climate problem in the near-term will be proved insufficient.
The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from a pre-industrial level of approximately 270ppm to more than 370ppm [Hoffert2002]. It was estimated that the most damaging climate change can be avoided with a CO2 concentration below 500±50ppm [Pacala2004]. But much lower limits have also been suggested by several environmental scientists. In that case, the CO2 levels already exceeded those that would provide long-term safety.
References
[Hoffert2002] Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet; Science; 2002
[IPCC2005] IPCC; 2005
[Meinshausen2009] Greenhouse-gas emissions targets for limiting global warming to 2°C; Meinshausen et al.; Nature; 2009.
[Normile2009] Round and round – A guide to the carbon cycle; Science; Vol.325; 2009
[Pacala2004] Pacala, S. et al.; Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies; Science; 2004
