What is carbon dioxide?
Why is it important? Carbon dioxide is very important to our scientists. Our scientists use carbon dioxide as a tool for cleaning things and making products in better ways. But what is carbon dioxide? Do you know? Most of the time carbon dioxide is a gas. It is in the air around you. Plants use carbon dioxide. People breathe it out. Carbon dioxide is not dangerous by itself. Carbon dioxide is often written by scientists as CO2. Writing carbon dioxide as CO2 is useful because it helps us to see what is in carbon dioxide. The C means there is one atom of carbon and the O2 means there are two atoms of oxygen. Atoms make up everything around us. Ask your teacher or do some research at the library if you have more questions about atoms. Can you see carbon dioxide? Can you pick it up? Carbon dioxide is hard to see as a gas. These activities will help you “see” carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide can also be found as a solid. Solid CO2 is called dry ice. It is very cold and is unsafe to touch. Liq
You can’t see it, smell it, taste it or touch it, but you darn sure can hear about it. Carbon dioxide – the gas that makes your pop fizzy and keeps the office ficus alive – has been collecting in concentrated amounts in the headlines as much as it is in the atmosphere. And it’s getting a bad rap. But the greenhouse gas most associated with global warming is instrumental in making life on this planet livable. As its name suggests, and as you might recall from high school chemistry, carbon dioxide is made up of one atom of carbon and two of oxygen. The gas is essential for plants, which “breathe” it in and then exhale the oxygen. They keep the carbon to help them grow. When the plants die, some of the carbon goes back into the air and recombines with the oxygen to make CO2 again. People recycle carbon dioxide, too. The gas exists in very small amounts in the air we breathe, but when we exhale we release 100 times more CO2 than we took in. Left to its own devices, carbon dioxide occurs in
Carbon dioxide is an inorganic chemical compound with a wide range of commercial uses, from the production of lasers to the carbonation of soft drinks. This compound exists naturally from the Earth’s environment, and it is produced in a variety of ways; commercial carbon dioxide is usually derived from the byproducts of industrial processes. This humble gas has become a topic of interest for humans because it is classified among the greenhouse gases, gases which impact the Earth’s environment when they reach high concentrations in the atmosphere. The chemical formula for carbon dioxide is CO2, and it takes the form of two oxygen molecules covalently bonded to a single carbon molecule. This compound is produced through decomposition of organic materials as well as through respiration and combustion. Amounts of carbon dioxide in the environment prior to the advent of the 20th century were kept stable by plants, which were capable of absorbing carbon dioxide as it was produced for use in
