Greenhouse warming potentials

Did you know that 40% of the worlds CO2 pollution comes from power plants? And another 20% comes from the use of cars? Who knew that using our lights in our homes could cause us so much harm. It is unfortunate that the use of electricity and vehicles have become very important in our everyday lives because they are the two biggest contributers to Global warming. Global warming is the warming of the earth’s climate and is estimated to cause severe climate changes in the coming decades. There are many gases that contribute to global warming, but some of the most important include: water vapor, methane, and nitrous oxide, and CO2. Today, we know the causes of Global warming but not much more is known about its future impact because we have yet to see any damages. Furthermore, the only thing that can be done is to predict what may happen and figure out how to stop it. In this lab, several common green house gases were tested to calculate their global warming potentials (GWP). Calculations of GWP are a great way to predict the impact a certain green house gas will have on the green house effect. The gases tested were CH4, CCl4 CH2Cl2, CHCl3, and Freon TF. They were diluted and measured by the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR ) machine. That information was then put into a spreadsheet that calculated the GWP’s for the gases.
the results are as follows
Gases Experimental Actual
Methane, Group1 1.349 23
Methane, Group2 2.798 23
Chloroform 0.0459 5
Freon TF 1.589 1
CH2Cl2 0.590232 9
CCl4 3.770566 1400
Carbon Dioxide 1
From the data collected it is obvious that the gases yielded very low values for the GWP of the gases. Despite that, the values did reflect the general trend of actual GWP values relative to each other with the highest being CCl4 having a value of 3.8 followed by methane with an average of 2.1 and chloroform being the least at 0.05. The halon mixture did not follow the GWP trend but had the lowest percent error.
In conclusion, we may not have found all the answers to global warming but from this lab we were able to predict what gases are contributing more to the greenhouse effect.