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ClimateBiz - Glossary (1727 words) |
 | Carbon dioxide: A colorless, odorless noncombustible gas with the formula CO2 that is present in the atmosphere. |
| It is formed by the combustion of carbon and carbon compounds (such as fossil fuels and biomass), by respiration of animals and plants, and by the gradual oxidation of organic matter in the soil. |
| Carbon equivalent: A measure used to compare the emissions of the different greenhouse gases based upon relating their global warming potential to that of carbon dioxide. |
| Physics Today August 2002 (3285 words) |
| Organic carbon buried in sediments as coal, natural gas, and oil over literally hundreds of millions of years is being consumed as a result of human activities and returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO) on a time scale of a few centuries. |
| Inverse models use information about how CO is currently distributed in the atmosphere and knowledge of how the atmosphere transports CO to infer the spatial distribution of carbon sources and sinks at Earth's surface. |
| Despite the development of innovative new methods to measure in situ fluxes (as seen on the cover and as described at http://www.as.harvard.edu/chemistry/hf) and detailed distributions of atmospheric CO from aircraft, it continues to be difficult to close the gap between lower in situ estimates and the large sinks inferred from the models. |
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