Just4Fun

I got a number of interesting questions from our activity on Monday, but I felt that one of them in particular which showed up a number of times was outside of my topic. Therefore, I decided to answer it here just for the fun of it.


Are there other affects of Carbon Dioxide on the environment?


Absolutely. Carbon Dioxide is a key reactant in the process of photo synthesis, the method plants use to convert electromagnetic energy from the sun into chemical energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. The increase in atmospheric concentrations of Carbon Dioxide has resulted in a stimulation of plant growth, which has obvious implications for domestic plants as well as wild ones.  In fact, increasing temperature and increasing Carbon Dioxide are two great ways to fertilize plants world wide, and sense plants filter Carbon Dioxide out of the air and replace it with oxygen, nature does have ways of mitigating the affects of Carbon Dioxide emissions on its own.  Carbon Dioxide should really be looked at as a fertilizer rather than a pollutant.  But don't go out and buy a hummer because of that.  Your emissions don't really make a difference any way.  

Although Carbon Dioxide does dissolve in water to create Carbonic Acid, which moves the pH of rain water from 7 to approximately 5.7.  (Yes, a smaller pH means that the solution is more acidic).  Despite this fact, I have not heard anyone attribute increasingly acidic rain to higher concentrations of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.  Most attribute the increase in the acidity of rain to a pH below 5.7 to higher concentrations to Sulfur Dioxide, which creates Sulfuric Acid, and contributes to the already present acidity due to Carbon Dioxide.  Therefore, I would be hesitant to assert that Carbon Dioxide attributes to increasingly acidic rain, although I would be open to any information that suggested it was the case.  One related speculation that I have heard is that the increase in atmospheric concentrations of Carbon Dioxide could lead to increasing acidity in the ocean, due to the same process, which would have extremely detrimental affects on hard coral, which is composed mainly of Calcium Carbonate, which dissolves in acidic solutions.  However, there has not been a measured increase in the acidity of the ocean to my knowledge, and there are certainly huge amounts of Calcium Carbonate present in the form of discarded shells, such as one finds along the beach, that would act as a buffer against any acids, including Carbonic Acid.  Sorry, but I don't currently have any articles on these topics that I can point you to, but you can probably find good stuff pretty easily with a quick google search if your interested in any of this.  (Which you probably aren't, since it's chemistry.)

Please feel free to ask questions by commenting on this post.  I love talking about chemistry.