Hello! Welcome to a brief introduction.
- Carbonoi
- Aug 30, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 7, 2024
The life of carbon is quite simple: it arises, persists, but never truly disappears. It endlessly cycles, changing forms and combining with different elements.
Some people have nicknamed carbon the "Element of Life" because it exists in all living things, down to bacteria. It changes its form in water, air, and on land.
In the air, it exists as carbon dioxide. In the soil, it's organic carbon. In water, it can be either carbonate salts (neutral) or carbonic acid (acidic), depending on the balance of carbon.
Humans exhale carbon every time they breathe. On average, a person exhales about 0.9 kg of carbon per day, which is equivalent to a volume of 440-500 liters or around 30-35 balloons.
Trees, on the other hand, absorb carbon when they breathe in and release oxygen when they breathe out. Forests are therefore powerful forces in maintaining carbon balance.
But today, there's #TooMuchCarbon! Due to human activities and production, excess carbon is stuck in the Earth's atmosphere, in the oceans, and even in people's lungs.
How much carbon is there? It's invisible and uncountable, but we know it's making life difficult for living beings. Eventually, humans, the polluters, realized they needed to find ways to measure carbon and reduce it as much as possible.
When the numbers became clear, it startled everyone. In 2023, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reached over 419 ppm, the highest ever recorded since 1958 when it was just 315 ppm. It's no wonder the heat from the sun feels more intense — it can't escape through the thickened atmosphere!
Reducing carbon will never reach zero, but we aim to reduce it and repurpose it, much like how trees use carbon in photosynthesis to produce oxygen for us.
The #GlobalGoal is to balance carbon emissions and carbon absorption, aiming for Net Zero.
If we achieve this, our world will return to balance.
-Carbonoi -
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Note:
PPM stands for "parts per million," a unit used to measure very low concentrations of something. For example, if there is one part of carbon in a million parts of air mass, the carbon concentration would be 1 ppm, which can also be referred to as "one in a million."
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