I don’t see much I can do to influence the conversation over global warming, but I have to do everything I can. So this morning, I emailed the following to Stephen Harper, Jim Prentice, Bob Dechert (my MP), The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail and The National Post. Ideally, I want everyone to know about this, and I want everyone to know that everyone knows. I believe this clearly shows that 1) the composition of the atmosphere is changing and 2) it is us that’s causing that change, two hurdles for many people to accept AGW.
Anyway, it’s quite long and has some basic calculations. If you can, please take time to familiarize yourself with the numbers, I think this is how we should be trying to get the message out. The extreme short version is that global annual CO2 emissions equal 1% of total atmospheric CO2, and CO2 is rising by about 0.5% every year but you should go through the numbers for yourself.
Dear sirs,
I am writing to beg you to take this letter seriously, listen to what I have to say and check the numbers for yourselves. It may sound like hyperbole but I truly believe this may be one of the most important letters you will ever receive. We are at a critical time, where we need a fair, ambitious and binding deal very soon or it may be too late. Obviously the media isn’t responsible for educating the public, but there are people that should be held acccountable for actively misinforming. Of course, I apologize in advance for sounding condescending if you already understand these numbers.
As you know there is substantial public confusion about whether climate change is real and whether it’s being caused by us. Part of the blame certainly lies with the scientists and their poor communication but the media in general is also partly to blame because of their instinct to provide “balance”. Of course, business and government have lead the disinformation campaign, as thoroughly documented in “Climate Cover-Up” by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore. The issue has been completely politicised, but it’s not a political issue and it’s not appropriate to treat it as one. That said, though I’m *completely* opposed to the development of the tar sands at all, I think the future of humanity is important enough that everyone at least understand the issues and negotiate in good faith.
There are really two aspects, both quite unintuitive, that must be understood. First, that we are actually changing the composition of the atmosphere and second that changing the atmosphere is capable of changing the climate itself. Every scientific explanation I’ve ever seen focuses on the complicated physics of “radiative forcing” and how CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas. Meanwhile, activists assume people understand the science and that it’s just a matter of convincing them to take action. but I don’t think 1 person in 100 understands any of it, aside from their position on whether it’s a problem or not. This is the crux of the problem, if it doesn’t intuitively make sense, it’s easy to dismiss as a scam, which is exactly what many have done.
I can’t help with the physics part because I’ve never made much of an attempt to really understand it myself. I’m just a guy sitting on my couch and for the life of me I don’t understand how this angle hasn’t been publicized more but I’ve read a lot and have never seen these calculations. When I thought of it this way, it seemed so much more obvious. I hope you agree. I’ll just give you the numbers and let you confirm them in any way you seem fit. Contact an appropriate scientist to help.
First, the mass of the atmosphere. It seems like a completely impossible calculation, but it’s actually quite trivial to at least get an estimate. The mass of a column of air to the edge of the atmosphere is about 14.7 psi, the average air pressure at sea level. Calculate the surface area of the Earth in square inches, multiple by 14.7 psi, and presto, there’s the mass of the atmosphere. The Earth’s radius is about 3,960 miles and the area of a sphere is 4 π r2 (obviously the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere because of mountains, etc but as seen from space, it’s close enough for this calculation). So the surface area comes out to about 197,000,000 square miles, or about 7.91 x10^17 square inches! Times 14.7 gives the mass of about (from now on, I won’t continue repeating “about”) 11.6 x 10^18 pounds or 5.28 x 10^18 kg. It’s easier to call that 5,280,000 gigatonnes (divide by 1,000 for tonnes, divide by another billion for gigatonnes). This is easily verifiable fact #1, the atmosphere weights a bit more than 5,000,000 gigatonnes.
The atmosphere is currently approximately 390 parts per million CO2 *by volume*. At first, I thought that meant * 390 / 1,000,000, but CO2 is denser than air so you have to multiply the result by 44 / 29, the ratio of the density of CO2 to the density of “air”.
5,280,000 * 390 /1,000,000 * 44 /29 gives 3,100 gigatonnes total CO2 in the atmosphere, another easily verifiable fact (here’s a reference, http://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-co2-by-weight-in-the-atmosphere/ and it also lists the weight of CO2 for a few different concentrations). Wikipedia confirms both of these numbers.
Now, find the global total CO2 emissions for 2008. One source is at http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9023772&contentId=7044468 click on the map on the right where it says download the excel workbook. In the contents worsheet, click on “carbon dioxide emissions”, it will take you to worksheet 40. Row 87 gives the total CO2 emissions each year from 1965 to 2008. Cell AS87 gives the value for 2008, 31,577.8 million tonnes, i.e. about 31.6 gigatonnes CO2. Here’s another reference that gives the same value http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5793BB20090810
I can again show you a calculation that helps make sense of this number. It’s more complicated, and quite shocking, but completely real. Let’s consider regular gasoline, which is basically 89% octane and 11% heptane. For order of magnitude calculations, let’s just consider the octane. The chemical formula for octane is C8H18 and the combustion equation is 2C8H18 + 25O2 = 16CO2 + 18H2O. Ignoring the oxygen consumed and water produced because they’re irrelevant here, for every 2 molecules of octane burned, 16 molecules of CO2 are produced! The atomic weights of H, C and O are 1, 12 and 16 respectively, so the molecular weight of octane is 8 * 12 + 18 * 1 = 114. Similarly, the molecular weight of CO2 is (12 + 2 * 16) = 44. The end result is that for every 2 * 114 = 228 g of gasoline, 16 * 44 = 704 g of CO2 is produced. This is “conservation of mass”, and is completely unintuitive because we tend to think the gas is burned up and disappears. The reality is the reaction consumes a lot of oxygen from the atmosphere, and we are converting gasoline into 704 / 228 = 3.1 times as much CO2 by mass! It doesn’t matter how fuel efficient your car is, either, regardless much gas you use, 3 times the mass is released as CO2 (this doesn’t even include the “carbon footprint” of producing, refining and transporting the fuel). Now, go to http://fueleconomy.gov pick a car and see how much CO2 it produces. For a 2010 Lexus RX 350 AWD with the default driving assumptions, 9.2 tonnes of CO2 a year would be produced. Now multiply by maybe 500,000,000 for the total number of cars in the world, very roughly 4.6 gigatonnes of CO2 a year, just from cars.
Add all the other uses of jet fuel, coal, natural gas etc., I think the 31 gigatonne number starts to seem more reasonable. That’s about 5 tonnes of CO2 for every human on the planet, *every year*.
Therefore, the numbers tell us that in 2008, we dumped 31 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere that already had 3,100 gigatonnes in it, i.e. 1% of the total. How did that affect the ppm? Check ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt In 2007 it was 383.71 ppm, in 2008, 385.57, an increase of 1.86 ppm or 0.48% (the reason it’s less than 1% is that about 50% is consumed by plants or absorbed into the ocean, causing acidification, another problem). That doesn’t sound like much, but consider that before the Industrial Revolution it’s been estimated to have been about 280 ppm, in 1959 it was 315.98 and in May 2009, it topped 390 ppm.
The argument that CO2 is “plant food” is misleading at best, because we’re creating way more of it than plants can use, simply because the CO2 level is rising. The benefit to plant growth is also likely to be offset by more severe weather. If you even want to try to blame volcanoes, you need to account for how the 1% that we’re emitting does nothing while only the volcanoes contribute to the increase. Finally, there is one difference that you must account for any other “natural cycles” argument – that difference is that it’s us changing the atmosphere faster than any natural cycle ever has.
Furthermore, once you have these numbers in front of you, saying things “CO2 is an infinitessimal part of the atmosphere” becomes deliberately misleading. I’ve shown you exactly how much it is. And despite what Michele Bachmann says, CO2 is a dangerous gas to humans and animal life in general. At 1,000 ppm, the effects of CO2 poisoning begin to be felt. The IPCC has predicted that CO2 could be as high as 970 ppm by 2100, when your grandchildren might still be alive.
The IPCC (and science in general) is very cautious about claiming certainty, but I believe that I’ve shown clearly 1) how the atmosphere is changing, and 2) that it’s human activity that’s causing it.
As for the “greenhouse effect”, CO2 has been known to be a greenhouse gas for over 150 years (see John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius). To claim otherwise, you need a lot of very good evidence. In fact, Arrhenius calculated that doubling CO2 (from about 290 ppm at the time) would cause 5-6C of warming, *very* close to today’s estimates. As the atmosphere warms, the ocean has actually been absorbing a lot of the heat, this is what leads to more severe hurricanes, more extreme rain or snow events, etc. The next time you catch yourself thinking “What happened to global warming?” during a really extreme winter storm, this is exactly what has been predicted.
Now, what to do with this info? As I suggested, verify it with a scientist. Even more interesting would be to see if the denier scientists can confirm any of this. I expect Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, Fraser Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cooler Heads Coalition etc. won’t be able to because they’re not scientists, they’re conservative think tanks dedicated to the principals of free markets and limited government (see the About page on their websites). Might even make a good bit of investigative journalism for the newspapers.
If I’ve made a significant mistake, please let me know, otherwise, now that you have the facts, if you use contradictory numbers as “science” without the required proof, I will consider it deliberate fraud. By all means, debate the costs, the mechanisms, the checks & balances, etc, but government and the media have to start accepting facts as facts and being accountable for deliberate misinformation.
Jeff Stone
stone1343@gmail.com
