Why is a natural and essential element like carbon so bad for the environment?
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As with nearly everything, things aren’t about good and bad. Things need to be balanced.
There is a carbon cycle – a certain amount of it is held in plants and animals. Some of it is in very small lifeforms like algae, plankton. A lot of it is held in things like rocks, fossil fuels (like coal, gas, oil) and in the soil (peat etc). Some of it is in the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.
What is happening is that, because of industrialization, humans have been releasing a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – a lot of it by burning fossil fuel for energy. Deforestation for agriculture also contributes. There are, of course, natural sources of carbon dioxide but it appears that things are going out of balance.
Too much carbon dioxide increases the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere, heat that would otherwise be radiated back into space. This is called the greenhouse effect. The major concern is that this results in changes to the climate. The problem is that this might further unbalance the carbon cycle leading to a very drastic and hard to reverse climate change affecting all life on this planet.
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