Hungry hungry heavens

With heavy industries, vehicles and even cows producing gigatonnes of global greenhouse gas emissions every year, it’s natural to wonder where it all goes. Certainly, the fear is that every unity of global warming potential (GWP) Canada produces (720 megatonnes in 2006) will rise straight into the air and eventually either suffocate us all or drown us in a flurry of climate change catastrophe. But continuing research suggests that the model isn’t as simple as “what happens in the atmosphere, stays in the atmosphere.”

Scientists at the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory, for example, recently observed that more than 50 per cent more ozone was being destroyed than originally projected. It was a revelation with major implications for climate models based on atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases and humanity’s role in putting them there.

Now, a team of researchers at Purdue University have found a molecule that breaks down pollutants in the air in a process not unlike the human body’s metabolizing of food. Breaking down nitrogen oxide, which, together with sulphur dioxide creates acid rain, the molecule helps mitigate the effects of pollutant-laden emissions.

In discovering a molecule that scientists had been researching for some 40 years Marsha Lester and Joseph Francisco were able to explain why, despite the fact that one third of global atmospheric nitrous oxide is estimated to be of human origin, we aren’t under constant torrents of acid rain.

But like the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory’s revelation about atmospheric ozone, the molecule’s discovery isn’t about suddenly feeling free to pump as many pollutants into the air as we want. It certainly isn’t. Instead, it represents one more step in pointing our climate models and other measurements toward a more complete understanding the complexities of our atmosphere — the repository for our billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.