The Carbon Cycle and Climate Change

All living things contain carbon.  Carbon is also a part of the ocean, air, and even rocks.  In the atmosphere, carbon is attached to some oxygen in a gas called carbon dioxide.

 Plants use carbon dioxide and sunlight to make their own food and grow. The carbon becomes part of the plant.  Plants that die and are buried may turn into fossil fuels made of carbon like coal and oil over millions of years.

 When humans burn fossil fuels, most of the carbon quickly enters the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Increased levels of carbon dioxide can cause changes to the climate.

 Increasing levels of carbon dioxide can act like a blanket to trap the Earth’s heat leading to an increase in the Earth’s temperature. This is known as the “Greenhouse Effect” and gases like carbon dioxide which produce this effect are called “Greenhouse Gases”.

 This information can be put together to form the carbon cycle, as shown in the image below.

An overview of the carbon cycle is shown in the video below.

This is the end of topic 2.