Discussions

Your CO2 Footprint - Grab the Microscope - an Illustration

+
0 Votes
Locked

Your CO2 Footprint - Grab the Microscope - an Illustration

maxwell edison
Carbon footprint. Carbon credits. Funny looking light bulbs. They say that human-produced CO2 in the atmosphere is causing accelerated global warming and/or climate change. Yea, right! If you buy into this ludicrous notion, it may be time to give the claim a reality check.

If the Earth's atmosphere were to be represented on a 100 yard (91.44 meters) football field (an American football field), the make-up would look like something this:

From the goal line, go down 78 yards to the 22 yard line on the other end, and you have nitrogen.

Go 21 yards further, to the 1 yard line, and you have oxygen (99 yards total so far).

From the 1 yard line to the 3 inch line, you have argon.

From the 3 inch line to the 1 inch line, you have other gasses.

The last 1" would be representative of the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Let's switch our units from inch to millimeters. One inch equals 25.4mm

95 percent of that last inch (25.4mm) is CO2 that comes from water vapor - that is, evaporation from oceans, lakes, rain water, and so on.

That leaves 1.27mm left on the field.

Out of that remainder, 0.678mm is CO2 from natural sources - volcanoes and other stuff from the earth.

That leaves 0.591mm - just over one-half of one millimeter - which is CO2 produced by human (and other creature) activity.

Out of that 0.591mm, about half is from CO2 exhaled (and/or exhausted) from living creatures, including us dastardly, planet-destroying, humans.

Which leaves 0.295mm - about one-fourth of one millimeter - of CO2 emissions from automobiles, power plants, SUVs, and anyone driving a Toyota Prius. (I wonder what the overall percentage difference would be between a Ford F250 pick-up and a Toyota Prius? It probably couldn't even be measured as a percentage of the whole.)

And they claim we're destroying the planet. Yea, right. The more you look into the claim, the sillier it gets. And the more you consider the real motives ........ the more it makes you wonder.
  • +
    0 Votes
    john d swallow

    Deepsand is a fool and then they think that they can chastise someone for putting this issue of CO2 and just how minor of a constituent of the total atmosphere into some kind of perspective for idiots such as what they appear to be.
    There are some obsessed with the supposed increase of 280 ppm to 392ppm of CO2 and I hope that this information will help you to sleep better at nights.
    This, I hope, will put this into some kind of a perspective that makes one understand just how insignificant this increase is.
    A part per million is like 1 drop of ink in a large
    kitchen sink.
    A large kitchen sink is about 13-14 gallons. There
    are 100 drops in one teaspoon, and 768 teaspoons
    per gallon.
    Some other things that are one part per million are???
    One drop in the fuel tank of a mid-sized car
    One inch in 16 miles
    About one minute in two years
    One car in a line of bumper-to-bumper traffic from
    Cleveland to San Francisco.
    One penny in $10,000.
    I know that you understand that these 112 additional ppm are spread out over this 16 miles in different one inch segments and wouldn't it be a task to be told to sort out the 392 pennies from the number that it would take to make up $10,000.
    At 392 parts per million CO2 is a minor constituent of earth's atmosphere-- less than 4/100ths of 1% of all gases present. Compared to former geologic times, earth's current atmosphere is CO2- impoverished.

    Let???s picture this in another way to really get an idea of the scale of CO2 compared to the total atmosphere. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is 324 metres high (1063ft). If the hight of the Eiffel Tower represented the total size of the atmosphere then the natural level of CO2 would be 8.75 centimetres of that hight (3.4 inches) and the amount added by humans up until today would be an extra 3.76 centimetres (1.5 inches)
    http://a-sceptical-mind.com/co2-the-basic-facts

    Have a nice delusional day, you brainwashed dud and I doubt that you even know that CO2 is 1 & 1/2 times heavier than the rest of the atmosphere.

    +
    0 Votes
    deepsand

    You've no understanding of the Sciences, and probably never will, because you're too damn pigheaded to learn what you don't want to know.

    Absolute numbers, in the manner that you present them, don't mean ****.

    Get your head out of your **** and study the damn Physics of Radiative Forcing.

    +
    0 Votes
    NickNielsen Moderator

    Middle school, you said?

    +
    0 Votes
    jdclyde

    at least your mother likes you, maybe.

    +
    0 Votes
    $$$$$$$$$$

    Have been for some time, and have always been, and always will be, better than you.

    +
    0 Votes
    $$$$$$$$$$

    You're just not smart enough to talk about anything interesting.

    Inaccuracy with small facts calls into question the remainder of your work.

    You wish, lamebrain.

    +
    0 Votes
    jdclyde

    <a href="http://s54.photobucket.com/albums/g92/jdclyde/?action=view¤t=rothlol.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g92/jdclyde/rothlol.gif" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>

    +
    0 Votes
    NickNielsen Moderator

    One is a band (http://tinyurl.com/4mnut8), the other was shoe polish (http://tinyurl.com/7ny4w).

    Inaccuracy with small facts calls into question the remainder of your work.

    +
    0 Votes
    $$$$$$$$$$

    You have contributed nothing, but detracted significantly from worthwhile dialog.

    +
    0 Votes
    $$$$$$$$$$

    You cannot justify that "4.5 Billion" is a relevant number to this conversation, and when asked, you have evaded with speculation about my motives, religious beliefs, and nit-picking about my phrasing instead of the science you presume to dismiss.

  • +
    1 Votes
    santeewelding

    Did you calculate, in addition to linear percentage of the whole, the quadratic and the cubic? May they be leveraged into a statement?

    +
    0 Votes
    neilb@uk

    Bollocks ^2 = Total Crap
    Bollocks ^3 = Maxwell's Post

    +
    0 Votes
    Locrian_Lyric

    geez, at least refute the stats.

    +
    0 Votes
    neilb@uk

    I was just answering Santee's cryptic utterance. I think I pointed out the crap-factor in Max's stats in another post which I posted before wasting pixels on the answer to Santee's. Put my response down to annoyance that the "football field" analogy is still being posted.

    Neil

    Edit to remove the first line of crap as it was a bit unfair.

    +
    1 Votes
    santeewelding

    To put down the football field analogy to annoyance is to put down any linear stab at understanding.

    You would likewise need to put down Sagan's walk on the calendar of earth history; scoff at him kneeling to point out the last seconds of the last minutes of our presence. His stab was linear, and startling to me, then and still now.

    While I don't rank him with Sagan, I do appreciate Maxwell's as a first stab, regardless of where he got it, or if he did it himself.

    My cryptic reference was based on the linear of his helpful stab. My questions were confined, as was his approach, to the number line, i.e., natural, rational, irrational, real, imaginary, complex.

    In a word, or a stab, the reason you get less topping on a pizza the further you go from the center along linear r is that the area near c increases dramatically by the square of r. Volume increases more so by the cube of r. Costs too much out there.

    I didn't do the math. I did see that his reliance on percentage could be affected.

    Do you like pizza?

    I do.

    +
    0 Votes
    neilb@uk

    Stuffed crust is the answer. Especially the pepperoni stuffed crust which we now have in Pizza Hut over here. Pepperoni stuffed crust is equivalent to Einstein's modifications of Newton's Laws in a relativistic environment - makes it all nice again under any circumstance.

    I don't have any problem with Sagan's walk or other similar analogies but Maxwell's stab - and it's not original Maxwell as he can do better - falls on the fact that all but the final three inches are irrelevant in a discussion about Global Warming. All of the gases up to three inches from Touchdown are neutral to IR.

    Sagan's Planet Walk (I've heard of it but never been to NY) doesn't have a meaningless extra hundred miles tacked on representing the distance between Sirius and Alpha Centauri.

    Neil

    +
    0 Votes
    NickNielsen Moderator

    ...but I've never actually run the numbers. So, using your example, atmospheric gases by percentage:

    - Nitrogen - 78%
    - Oxygen - 21%
    - Argon - .916666...%
    - Other Gases - .05555...%
    - CO2 - .027777...%

    Percentage of CO2 by source

    * Water vapor - 95%
    * Natural sources - 2.669%
    * Respiration - 1.1634%
    * Mechanical Combustion - 1.1634%

    As a percentage of the whole atmosphere, the CO2 created by mechanical combustion is, let me see, 1.1634% of .027777% or .011 634 * .000 277 77 gives .000 003 231 6 or .000 323 16% of the atmosphere. CO2 created by mechanical combustion is less than 4 parts per million of atmospheric gases? In any other arena, this would be statistically insignificant!

    What's the source for your figures, Max? I found a site which says my percentages are a bit low, but agrees that humans cannot have a statistically significant effect on climate.

    http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

    Edit: format

    +
    0 Votes
    neilb@uk

    as to the "relationship" whereby you list water vapour as a source of CO2.

    As for Maxwell's post, it is, as usual on this subject, a waste of good pixels. He should stick to US politics. Nitrogen, Oxygen (except for Ozone) and Argon are neutral to infra-red.

    The common greenhouse gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and CFCs.

    Carbon dioxide is responsible for between 10% and 25% of the total greenhouse effect - the wide variation is because it varies with the water vapour contribution.

    You can bring out as many wonderful examples about the relatively small concentration of CO2 - such as Max's "Football Field" - but it's all trash. Misleading, at best mistaken but more likely deliberately dishonest.

    Neil

    Not that I'm accusing Max of being disingenuous.

    Oh, no. Not for a moment...

    Yet.

    +
    0 Votes
    NickNielsen Moderator

    95 percent of that last inch (25.4mm) is CO2 that comes from water vapor - that is, evaporation from oceans, lakes, rain water, and so on.

    He didn't provide a source.

    I don't argue climate change, Neil. I don't even argue the disproportionate effects of CO2 or methane as greenhouse gases. But I find it both arrogant and ignorant to attribute climate change solely to the actions of mankind and think it's disingenuous (at best) for people to argue that we can have an affect on such change by reducing atmospheric levels of a single contributor when we don't know all the interactions. I'll reiterate my position here: I think we should do what we can to reduce greenhouse gas generation and develop alternative fuels; I don't think we should bankrupt the world economy on the altar of CO2. And CO2 credit trading is spelled "h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y."

    The Earth's climate has changed constantly over the 4+ billion years of the Earth's existence; man has been around for the last 1% or so of that existence. Given the recent attention paid to extracting climate data from ice packs and the fossil record, I wouldn't be a bit surprised to hear speculation that the Earth is actually returning to normal after an epoch of abnormally cool temperatures.

    +
    0 Votes
    Dr Dij

    of the gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere, we've slowly increased in last 150 years since the beginning of the industrial age to pumping out 8% of the total natural CO2 yearly MORE CO2 into the atmosphere, so in little over 10 years we pump out double the amount in existance. About a third is absorbed into the ocean so the remaining amount is not all we spew forth.

    It is quite simple: all that carbon was laid down in deposits, after periods that were much warmer. oil and coal are fossilized hydrogenated carbonaceous plant materials. Us putting it back in the atmosphere incredibly quickly by natural standards is setting up the atmosphere to the same times when there were steaming jungles covering the planet, and the US was split in two with the center covered by a shallow sea from the rockies to the appalacian mountains.

    Arrogant to think we affect the climate? Arrogant and self centered to think we DON'T when you look at the facts.

    We are increasing CO2 at a rate 10,000 times faster than any CO2 change in history. Which means we are affecting climate alot faster.

    At one time short sighted people also viewed the ocean as infinite. Large it is, but not infinite. And now the most remote reaches of the ocean for example have a high density of plastic bits floating in them, along with chemical contaminants.

    Bankrupt us? we will go bankrupt fighting wars started by people starving and who have run out of drinking water. We will likely loose much of our own fresh water for same reason and while we have the resources to pay for it, we won't like to. Esp since the water systems, typically run by govt entities have not invested money just to keep their pipes from leaking; pipes that were designed to last 50 years now have an average age of 54+ years.