Question about Global Warming and the Greenhouse effect?

Question

In terms of the biogeochemical cycle of carbon, why is global warming/the greenhouse effect increasing?

Answer 1

more CO2 is being put into the air by all the factories and vehicles on the road.

Answer 2

Please refer this site http://savetheglobefromwarming.blogspot....

to get more information about Global warming and GreenHouse Gases.

Answer 3

The warming up and cooling down of the earth is a natural process.  Humans have escalated this process by emissions, etc.  There is no balance anymore to offset the CO2. We need to plant heaps more trees.

Answer 4

It's going up all right, just like if you spit in the ocean the sea level rises.

Is it going up enough to measure though?

Answer 5

Carbon Cycle

The movement of carbon, in its many forms, between the biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and geosphere is described by the carbon cycle, illustrated in the adjacent diagram. The carbon cycle is one of the biogeochemical cycles. In the cycle there are various sinks, or stores, of carbon (represented by the boxes) and processes by which the various sinks exchange carbon (the arrows).

We are all familiar with how the atmosphere and vegetation exchange carbon. Plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis, also called primary production, and release CO2 back in to the atmosphere during respiration. Another major exchange of CO2 occurs between the oceans and the atmosphere. The dissolved CO2 in the oceans is used by marine biota in photosynthesis.

Two other important processes are fossil fuel burning and changing land use. In fossil fuel burning, coal, oil, natural gas, and gasoline are consumed by industry, power plants, and automobiles. Notice that the arrow goes only one way: from industry to the atmosphere. Changing land use is a broad term which encompasses a host of essentially human activities. They include agriculture, deforestation, and reforestation.

The adjacent diagram shows the carbon cycle with the mass of carbon, in gigatons of carbon (Gt C), in each sink and for each process, if known. The amount of carbon being exchanged in each process determines whether the specific sink is growing or shrinking. For instance, the ocean absorbs 2.5 Gt C more from the atmosphere than it gives off to the atmosphere. All other things being equal, the ocean sink is growing at a rate of 2.5 Gt C per year and the atmospheric sink is decreasing at an equal rate. But other things are not equal. Fossil fuel burning is increasing the atmosphere's store of carbon by 6.1 Gt C each year, and the atmosphere is also interacting with vegetation and soil. Furthermore, there is changing land use.

The carbon cycle is obviously very complex, and each process has an impact on the other processes. If primary production drops, then decay to the soil drops. But does this mean that decay from the soil to the atmosphere will also drop and thus balance out the cycle so that the store of carbon in the atmosphere will remain constant? Not necessarily; it could continue at its current rate for a number of years, and thus the atmosphere would have to absorb the excess carbon being released from the soil. But this increase of atmospheric carbon (in the form of CO2) may stimulate the ocean to increase its uptake of CO2 .

What is known is that the carbon cycle must be a closed system; in other words, there is a fixed amount of carbon in the world and it must be somewhere. Scientists are actively investigating the carbon cycle to see if their data does indeed indicate a balancing of the cycle. These types of investigations have led many scientists to believe that the forests of the Northern Hemisphere are, in fact, absorbing 3.5 Gt C per year, and so changing land use is actually removing carbon from the atmosphere (~2 Gt C/year), not increasing it as the diagram shows. Experiments are ongoing to confirm this information.

Answer 6

There are a great many natural sources and sinks for carbon dioxide.  But the present global warming is (mostly) the result of man made CO2 from burning fossil fuels.

There is a natural "carbon cycle" that recycles CO2.  But it's a delicate balance and we're messing it up.

Look at this graph.

http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/cgi-bin/wdcgg/qu...

The little squiggles are nature doing its' thing. CO2 falls a bit during summer when plants are active, and rises during the winter. The huge increase is us, burning fossil fuels. The scientists can actually show that the increased CO2 in the air comes from burning fossil fuels by using "isotopic ratios" to identify that CO2.  The natural carbon cycle buried carbon in fossil fuels over a very long time, little bit by little bit. We dig them up and burn them, real fast.  That's a problem.

Man is upsetting the balance of nature.  We need to fix that.

More info here:

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

Google "carbon cycle" for more.