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If we cut Carbon in the air, wont that hurt the growth of plants life.?

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  • 8 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Plants have been doing great with the carbon drawn out of nature well before humans ever arrived. I am going to assume this is about global warming and the increased concern about carbon in the air and water.

    Please assume all numbers are subscripts since Yahoo won't let me type them out.

    Carbon in the air is never* (*rarely, uncommonly) straight carbon. It is always combined with something such as CO(subscript)2. Carbon bonds with almost everything. It is a basic building block of life. When it is commonly found as CO(subscript)2 or CO (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide) and it enters the atmosphere, it creates a surplus. Combined with the fact that we are getting rid of plant life faster than we are restoring it - deforestation, clear cutting, farming, what have you - there is less and less plant life to remove the excess carbon.

    The concern is that after this point too much carbon will build up to the point where no plant prefers to pull it out of the air and the air is too acidic for any plant to grow. This is already happening to some extent with CO(subscript)2 buildup in the oceans, often referred to as ocean acidification, from wiki:

    Ocean acidification is the name given to the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth's oceans, caused by the uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO(subscript)2) from the atmosphere.[1]

    This is already causing problems as the acidity rises, it begins to do things such as eat through certain species shells in the ocean, disrupting the life cycle, and inevitably has the very real potential of disrupting the food chain which will cause problems for us.

    I personally enjoy eating shellfish and other sea life so I want to maintain their habitat as much as possible.

    How to cut carbon in the air? Plant more plants. Don't plant grass, plant trees. Larger plants that live longer draw more carbon out of the air and turn out more oxygen. Turn your backyard into a small forest. Encourage recycling and re-use of materials and don't buy from companies that clear-cut forest and especially cut rainforest.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    8 years ago

    No. The whole world is full of carbon. The'll be fine.

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