Carbon Counter
What effect are you having on the environment? If you buy Kenyan green beans what is the CO2 cost? What about your journey to work, your fridge or your clothes? The Gem Carbon Counter is your portable instant green reckoner.This handy little book includes:• Introduction by Mark Lynas author of Hide Tide: News from a Warming World• Welcome to the Greenhouse: Explains what the Greenhouse effect actually is, all the issues surrounding global warming and your carbon footprint?• Your Carbon Footprint: Measure your own carbon footprint covering all aspects of your life from your food shopping to your work, holidays and clothes. Starting with your home gas and electricity supplies and usage, the handy green reckoner takes you through each part of your life and helps you add up the impact you are making on the environment. So, in turn, it allows you to identify the key parts of your life which you’ll need to adapt to reduce your carbon footprint: from which coffee you drink to how often you go on holiday.• Sustainability: How do you measure up in comparison to the average person’s carbon footprint? What can you do to generate your own energy and therefore reduce your footprint and what sort of targets can you set yourself?• Helpful Appendices: Includes information on carbon emissions for journeys by car, train and plane. A list of corporate companies, their emissions and what they are doing to reduce their carbon footprint so that as a consumer, you can make decisions on who you support. A helpful carbon diary where you can record your carbon footprint for the year. Useful websites where you can read more about green issues.
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Table of Contents
Youâve heard of counting carbs. This book is about counting carbon. Itâs not the health of your body that is the object of our interest this time, but the health of the planet. Carbon dioxide is the main gas responsible for global warming, and humans are producing 25 billion tonnes of the stuff every year, raising the temperature of the planet to dangerous levels. This book will help you bring down your personal contribution to this rather daunting problem.
According to the governmentâs chief scientist Sir David King, global warming is the greatest problem facing humanity. Itâs therefore a bit of a tall order to solve it all on your own. But if enough people begin to count and reduce their carbon, the rate of climate change can be slowed down dramatically.
This could save countless species from extinction, as animals like the polar bear and Bengal tiger will have nowhere to go as the world warms. It could also save the lives of the millions of people who are at risk from rising seas in low-lying areas. But if we donât act, vast swathes of the globe could be rendered uninhabitable because of flood, drought and searing heatwaves.
So by ceasing to be part of the problem and instead becoming part of the solution, you can join a growing movement to cut back humanityâs carbon emissions before it is too late â and many scientists suggest that the atmosphereâs âtipping pointâ will come within the next decade, giving us no time to dither before making dramatic cutbacks. The lifestyle change that this implies doesnât necessarily mean misery and sacrifice: low-carbon living means that we should all end up fitter and healthier too. So maybe â the planet aside â counting carbs and counting carbon arenât so different after all.
THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT
Contrary to what you might have heard, the greenhouse effect is not all bad. Without the heat-trapping effect of certain gases, the average temperature of the planet would be a decidedly chilly -18°C. Nor is it a new discovery. The Irish physicist John Tyndall was the first to realize, back in 1859, that without greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, things would quickly turn unpleasantly cold. As he wrote (a little melodramatically), without these heat-trapping gases, âthe warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frostâ. (Tyndall did well on the lecture circuit.)
Tyndall correctly identified that the two most common gases in the air, nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to heat radiation. Instead, it is gases present in much smaller quantities â water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and others â which have the heat-trapping effect. No one disputes this ânatural greenhouse effectâ, as it can be demonstrated easily enough in the laboratory. The arguments (for climate change is nothing if not controversial) come later.
Not all greenhouse gases are born equal. Carbon dioxide gets most attention because it is the most abundant, and lasts a long time in the atmosphere. Water vapour is also a greenhouse gas, but its emissions are more or less irrelevant because it condenses out as rain in a matter of hours or days. (The exception to this is water vapour emitted high in the atmosphere by aircraft, where it can have a longer-term warming effect.) The table below details the different gases and their ability to trap heat â their âglobal warming potentialsâ â as well as their atmospheric lifetimes.
GREENHOUSE GASES
âGlobal warming potentialâ means the potential each gas has to trap heat over a given period of time, just as different ratings are applied to measure the heat-trapping strength of different duvets on a bed!
The greenhouse effect can also be observed on other planets in the solar system. Venus has a hotter surface temperature than Mercury, despite being much further away from the sun. Because the Venusian atmosphere is almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide, this gives it a phenomenally strong greenhouse effect â keeping surface temperatures at 460°C, hot enough to melt lead.
All of this would interest no one other than chemists and astronomers if the amounts of these gases in the earthâs atmosphere were to stay fixed. From the Industrial Revolution, humans began exploiting fossil fuels â coal, then oil and gas â for energy. These fossil fuels burn to produce carbon dioxide, which then accumulates in the atmosphere over the decades and centuries.
In 1750 there were 278 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the earthâs atmosphere. Now that figure has risen to 380ppm, and it is continuing to rise at 1.5 to 2ppm per year. Methane levels have risen from 700 to 1745 parts per billion, while nitrous oxide has jumped from 270 to 314ppb. The other gases â CFCs, HFCs and SF
