the planet
Sustainable and renewable technology
Our social mission is to provide an explanation of why our planets environment is under threat, what causes carbon dioxide gas and how to remove it from our atmosphere. We also investigate and provide information about sustainable and renewable technology, which helps protect our planet. We take the mystery out of terms like carbon sequestration and what effect the greenhouse effect can have. Finally we discuss a large number of options for how every individual can help protect our planet.
Why can't trees keep
taking up carbon dioxide?
What has been happening in recent decades is that the balance has changed between how much carbon dioxide (What is carbon dioxide ?) the earth naturally produces and how much it can absorb. This is because there are a lot more humans around than there have been in the past. The earth could naturally deal with all carbon dioxide produced by all the fires we made, all the trees we cut down and so on because there weren’t so many of us.
The human population explosion shown in thee chart above has only been around the last two hundred years. From about 4000BC to 1800AD or 5,800 years, we added about one billion people. Because the earth is a large place, it could cope with the pollution we made from having to make fire to keep our families warm. Also from our cutting down trees for us to build our homes and keep our families safe and comfortable. The earth also coped with our mining and burning of coal.
From 1800 to 2000 the worlds population grew from 1.6 billion to about 6 billion people. At the same time a large number of these people started to change jobs as our economies evolved. They went from farming and manual work into services and technology work and a large number moved from our farms to our cities to find work.
Clark’s Sector Model
The diagram above is Clark’s Sector Model which shows us how most people in the US have moved out of farming and manufacture into working in the service industries. During most of those years we could observe an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, just like we did with CFC’s in our refrigerators.
We are pretty good at finding things wrong with our earth and fixing them. We don’t even need scientists or engineers. For example, people enjoy beaches so they form work committees to go and clean up rubbish at our beaches. We like trees so we plant them around our houses. We wash ourselves, our families and our yards because we like to keep clean and prevent illness. We keep our house gutters clean and we paint our houses. We do it naturally.
The earth cleans itself naturally too but it can only do so much. It is expected that three billion more people will live on earth by 2039, only 20 years away! That’s nine billion in total. The earth just can’t cope with any more carbon dioxide from:
Humans cutting down trees and forests for farmland
Humans burning coal and gas and timber to heat our homes and generate power
Over 4 billion more humans
Six and a half billion people are now contributing to the removal of our forests which used to clean our air and at the same time adding more carbon dioxide by burning coal and gas because we need electricity to run our lives.
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