BACKGROUND The periods of fetal and child development arguably represent the stages of greatest vulnerability to the dual impacts of fossil fuel combustion: the multiple toxic effects of emitted pollutants (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, particles, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, metals) and the broad health impacts of global climate change attributable in large part to carbon dioxide releas...

[1] Estimates of fossil fuel CO2 are a critical component in atmospheric CO2 inversions. Rather than solving for this portion of the atmospheric CO2 budget, inversions typically include estimates of fossil fuel CO2 as a known quantity. However, this assumption may not be appropriate, particularly as inversions continue to solve for fluxes at reduced space and timescales. In this study, two diff...

We assess the large-scale, top-down constraints on regional fossil fuel emissions provided by observations of atmospheric total column CO2, XCO2 . Using an atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) with underlying fossil emissions, we determine the influence of regional fossil fuel emissions on global XCO2 fields. We quantify the regional contrasts between source and upwind regions and probe ...

45 ISSN 1758-3004 10.4155/CMT.10.7 © 2010 Future Science Ltd CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion are the largest net annual flux of carbon in the earth–atmosphere system and represent the dominant source of greenhouse gas forcing [1]. In order to better understand other components of carbon exchange between the land, oceans and atmosphere, improved quantification of fossil fuel CO2 fluxes...

Humans use combustion for heating and cooking, managing lands, and, more recently, for fuelling the industrial economy. As a shift to fossil-fuel-based energy occurs, we expect that anthropogenic biomass burning in open landscapes will decline as it becomes less fundamental to energy acquisition and livelihoods. Using global data on both fossil fuel and biomass burning emissions, we tested this...

Development of regional policies to reduce net emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would benefit from the quantification of the major components of the region's carbon balance--fossil fuel CO2 emissions and net fluxes between land ecosystems and the atmosphere. Through spatially detailed inventories of fossil fuel CO2 emissions and a terrestrial biogeochemistry model, we produce the first estimat...

Quantification of fossil fuel CO2 emissions at fine space and time resolution is emerging as a critical need in carbon cycle and climate change research. As atmospheric CO2 measurements expand with the advent of a dedicated remote sensing platform and denser in situ measurements, the ability to close the carbon budget at spatial scales of approximately 100 km2 and daily time scales requires fos...

This study examines the potential change in primary emissions and energy use from replacing the current U.S. fleet of fossil-fuel on-road vehicles (FFOV) with hybrid electric fossil fuel vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCV). Emissions and energy usage are analyzed for three different HFCV scenarios, with hydrogen produced from: (1) steam reforming of natural gas, (2) electrolysis powe...