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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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[Below is the original script. But a few changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.]
There's a whole lot of laughing gas in the atmosphere these days. But it's no laughing matter. Nitrous oxide, or N2O, wafts up from manure and the chemical fertilizer sprayed on fields. Industry contributes as well.
Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a new study in Science today confirming that this gas is chewing away at the ozone layer as well as contributing to climate change.
In fact, now that the world has banded together to eliminate chlorofluorocarbons and the other volatile gases previously responsible for carving out the seasonal hole in the ozone layer, laughing gas is the lead culprit, according to the researchers.
While we don't much like ozone in the air we breathe, higher up it helps shield the planet from high-energy ultraviolet sunshine, which, among other things, can cause skin cancer. And nitrous oxide also traps heat very well. Over a century it has more than 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.
So restraining the more than 10 million metric tons of N2O derived from human activity might be a good idea. How? More judicious use of fertilizer on fields and capturing N2O when it's produced industrially could reduce laughing gas significantly. Seriously.
—David Biello
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8 Comments
Add CommentWhat's a good process for trapping the NO2 in the air?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow. Surprise, surprise. We get rid of CFCs and now something else produced by industry is going to destroy the ozone layer and kill us all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe actors changes, but the play is always the same.
@frgough Although this article doesn't make it as clear as it probably should, the ozone hole (as caused by CFC's) and global warming (CO2 and N2O) are two separate and distinct issues that both happen to be effects caused (or greatly exacerbated) by human activity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe nature has up and down nature like sinusoidal wave, some time good and followed by bad. The human activity is cause of all good and bad, human being itself is responsible for all these kind of miseries. The excessive materialistic desire, the desire to take over the nature, the desire to manipulate the nature, and the poor fund of knowledge about material nature is primary cause for these kind of troublesome. Until and unless the human being is addressing and questioning above listed causes there is no chance of solving the concerned problems.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe CO2, N2O and other such gaseus compound are just the external cause of global warming, the primary cause is the mischivious acitivity of human being.
This is more anti-progress, anti-capitalist eco wacko bullshit that want to shit on all of the progress made by mankind since the dawn of Industrial Revolution. They lie and our gullible news media will print their load of garbage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@CrossoverManiac. Yes, that's true. They just hate progress in the same way that the terrorists only hate us for our freedom. Everybody knows that reality has a clear liberal bias.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, David, that certainly would explain the current financial crises, eh?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd, of course, its public bail0ut.
N2O is emitted by the fertilizer used to grow corn for ethanol. And N2O is 298 times more effective as a global warmng gas than CO2. Eliminate food to biofuel, and you will dramatically reduce N2O.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh wait...Obama wants to INCREASE ethanol production, and Gore is heavily invested in ethanol plants.