Carbon dioxide is not just the odorless, colorless gas, which is faintly acidic and non-flammable but the gas that very worries climate scientists. Increasing carbon dioxide emissions cause about 50-60% of the global warming. Carbon dioxide emissions have risen from 280 ppm in 1850 to 364 ppm in the 1990s. The first person who predicted that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other burning processes would cause global warming was Svante Arrhenius, who published the paper “On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground” in 1896.
In the beginning of the 1930 it was confirmed that atmospheric carbon dioxide was actually increasing. In the late 1950s when highly accurate measurement techniques were developed, even more confirmation was found. By the 1990s, the global warming theory was widely accepted, although not by everyone. Whether global warming is truly caused by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is still debated. Also there is other climet bad influencing potent gas — one from ancient plants, the other from flat-panel screen technology — that is on the rise, as well. All these factors got scientists concerned about accelerated global warming.

The troposphere is the lower part of the atmosphere, of about 10-15 kilometers thick. Within the troposphere there are gasses called greenhouse gasses. Methane is considered the No. 2 greenhouse gas based on the amount of warming it causes and the amount in the atmosphere. The total effect of methane on global warming is about one-third that of man-made carbon dioxide. “Whenever methane increases, you are accelerating climate change,” MIT atmospheric scientist Ron Prinn said. Still, methane and the potential of future increases is a worry.

The highest methane level increases were seen in monitoring stations in Alert, Canada, which with recent anecdotal evidence points to plants in permafrost thawing and decaying.

Stanford University environmental scientist Stephen Schneider cautioned that the recent increase is new and that “it is pretty hard to be very confident of any trend or big story yet on methane.” Methane levels have kept scientists guessing for the past decade. They were on the rise until about 1997, then soared in 1998 and then leveled off until jumping again in 2006.

The E.U. voted to relax biofuels targets following widespread criticism of their social, economic, and environmental impacts, news.mongabay.com reports.

Thursday the European Parliament’s Industry and Energy Committee said it would push a plan calling for a 5 percent share of renewables in transport fuel by 2015 and a 10 percent target by 2020, a reduction from the 20 percent target set forth in March 2007. The plan effectively cuts targets for biofuels produced from conventional feedstocks to four percent in 2015 and six percent in 2020. The remainder of the goal would come from renewable electricity and hydrogen (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) as well as energy feedstocks that do not compete with food production (potentially cellulosic ethanol). Critics say that the rush to produce ethanol and biodiesel from grains and oilseeds has caused food prices to surge worldwide.

Palm oil and palm fruit.
The new plan includes social sustainability criteria, including respect for the land rights of local communities and fair remuneration for workers, as well as environmental standards, including offering at least 45 percent carbon emission savings compared to conventional fossil fuels, a figure that would rise to 60 percent in 2015. The plan would seem to address some of the criticism raised by environmentalists and human rights groups who say that biofuels are triggering displacement of local people and driving the conversion of important ecosystems, including peatlands and rainforests in the Amazon and Southeast Asia.

The 2020 target will be up for review again in 2014.

It appears that there is a temporary 50 kilometers wide “chemical equator” that separates the heavily polluted air of the Northern Hemisphere from the cleaner air of the Southern Hemisphere over the Western Pacific.Scientists have found a temporary “chemical equator” that separates the heavily polluted air of the Northern Hemisphere from the cleaner air of the Southern Hemisphere over the Western Pacific – only it isn’t where they expected to find it. No wonder that values of CO and CO2 in Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere have essential distinctions, 0,00160 and 0,0040 promille. Scientists say the situation is in order because 70% big cities and large-scale industries are placed in Northern Hemisphere.

These boundaries, or chemical equators, can typically be found at a “wall” created by global air circulation patterns that separates Northern and Southern hemispheric air. Called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), it is a belt of low pressure that circles the Earth roughly at the equator.

This is a good place to look for chemical equators, or partial ones, between the two hemispheres, but it is not where Geraint Vaughan of the University of Manchester in England and his colleagues found one in the Western Pacific.

Confining air

To see why Vaughan and his fellow researchers wanted to look at the ITCZ, it helps to know that it is effectively where parts of each hemisphere’s circulation pattern meet. These parts are called Hadley cells and they feature the rise of warm, moist air on either side of the equator, which then travels poleward, descends at around 30 degrees North and South latitude respectively and finally travels back toward Earth’s geographic equator as the trade winds.

Though the location of the ITCZ can vary over time, this circulation keeps the air – and any pollution it contains – confined to its own hemisphere.

But this schematic is an “over-simplification,” said Geraint Vaughan of the University of Manchester in England, a member of the team that discovered the chemical equator, which will be detailed in an upcoming issued of the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres. The team’s work was funded by the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council. Just looking at the ITCZ can oversimplify things because air masses aren’t always that neatly separated, especially in the Pacific Ocean where Vaughan and his colleagues did their work.

Monsoon effects

Over parts of the Pacific Ocean, the clear band of the ITCZ visible over other oceans gives way to a “big blob of convection,” Vaughan told LiveScience. Around Northern Australia, this convection is dominated by the Australian-Indonesian monsoon (a reversal in the usual surface wind direction) in the Southern Hemisphere summer.

When Vaughan and his team were in Darwin, on the northern coast of Australia, in January and February of 2006, the monsoon flow meant that the ITCZ was situated to the south of Darwin over central Australia. The team expected to see dirty, Northern Hemisphere air there, marking a local chemical equator, but the air was surprisingly clean.

So, they used a specially-equipped plane to fly north of Darwin to “find some dirty air,” as Vaughan put it, when they happened upon a steep gradient in carbon monoxide levels – an indicator of a chemical equator of sorts. Carbon monoxide is a toxic gas found in polluted air and therefore more strongly associated with the Northern Hemisphere.

Strange appearance

While the ITCZ is cloudy because of the convection there, the chemical equator over the western Pacific was in cloudless skies, surprising Vaughan’s team. The equator was also narrower than the ITCZ, with a width of about 31 miles (50 kilometers).

Vaughan and his colleagues think that this chemical equator formed because the monsoon flow brought clean air from over the southern Indian Ocean, while a stormy region over the western Pacific pumped in highly polluted air from over Indonesia.

This equator only persists for a short time during the monsoon season; Vaughan and his colleagues don’t yet know whether other chemical equators outside the ITCZ are present in other areas of the world.

The World’s Weirdest Weather
Quiz: Global Weather Extremes
What is a Monsoon?
Original Story: Earth’s Air Divided by Chemical Equator
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