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Friday, May 10, 2024

What is Net Zero Emissions Really Mean?

 Net Zero Emissions refers to a "state of balance" where the quantity of greenhouse gasses that are released into the atmosphere equals the amount removed from it. It's a critical belief in order to fight against global warming.

Let's see, can this ever be possible?

Net zero emissions occurs when an entity such as a country, company, or a regular person that produces these greenhouse gasses balances these actions by taking steps to remove the gasses from the atmosphere.

What are theses greenhouse gasses? They are gasses such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide (funny), and industrial processes which are caused by humans and released into the atmosphere. 

How do we measure emissions? Measuring these green house gas emissions is achieved by gas chromatographs, spectrometers, and gas analyzers. Oh yea they use satellites too, big science! Measuring emissions is at best a guestimate.  There a likely few chromatographs in places like India, China, West Africa, or south Texas. Remote monitoring done by satellites measure "deforestations" or industrial activities.

So measuring greenhouse gasses is not accurate. How de we come up with numbers to calculate the Balance? Modeling and remote sensing are used to quantify greenhouse gas emissions from various sources.

 So what? Emissions have been around for geologic time. 

We're smarter now! They use their models to come up with "Carbon dioxide equivalents". Impressive!

The best part is next.

You multiply the mass of each greenhouse gas (GHG)  by it's GLOBAL WARMING POTENTIAL (GWP). 

Who knew.  CO2 has a GWP of 1, easy peasy. CH4, methane, has a GWP of 25-28 which means it warms the atmosphere 25-28 times more than CO2 over every 100 years.

Some genius figured this out for us so you can figure out how to buy your Tesla.

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