Question: what acctually is carbon dioxide?

Zahara Mortimer answered on 3 Dec 2020:

Great question!

Carbon dioxide is a chemical compound made up of 1 carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms – if you have a look at the periodic table of elements, you’ll see that carbon is represented by the letter “C” and oxygen is represented by the letter “O”, so we often shorten carbon dioxide to CO2!

CO2 is a gas in the air around us and actually only makes up less than 1% of all the gases in our atmosphere (the atmosphere is the name given to the gas blanket that surrounds the earth). CO2 is produced naturally, like when animals breathe out, they produce CO2! However, in recent times certain human activities, like burning fossil fuels to make electricity and more people driving cars, have increased the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere.

This is a problem because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which means that like a greenhouse traps heat to keep the plants inside warm,  gases like CO2 trap heat around our planet causing it to warm up! This is what is known as as the greenhouse effect which causes global warming and speeds up climate change. The earth’s climate naturally changes over a long time but because of global warming, the climate is changing a lot quicker than normal!

Global warming is causing ice caps to melt, sea levels to rise and loss of homes for people and wildlife. This is why people across the world, including me, are trying their best to find ways to remove CO2 from our atmosphere to prevent global warming effects from getting worse.

I hope this answers your question!