Today, for Blog Action Day 2009, I’d like to appeal to those who may be “on the fence” to get committed and take action.

The Problem, in a nutshell:

The atmosphere is currently about 390 parts per million CO2, and the world’s best climate experts believe we need to get back to 350 ppm. It was around 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. Our global emissions amount to about 1% of the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, every year. Regardless of all other natural factors, that has to have an effect. CO2 has been known to been a greenhouse gas for 150 years.

The Solution:

The experts recommend a reduction in CO2 emissions of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. To accomplish this, we need government, business and the public all committed to taking action. We all need to demand that our governments step up to the challenge and become part of the solution not part of the problem.

I have such a bad headache that I’m going to leave it at that for now.

Lost in all the talk about global warming, is some simple math that can help you understand the carbon dioxide (CO2) problem more intuitively. The executive summary of this post is as follows:
- Every gallon of gasoline used produces about 20 pounds of CO2.
- A car could produce 20 tonnes or more of CO2 per year.
- The world’s 500,000,000 vehicles could produce about 10,000,000,000 tonnes (10 gigatonnes) of CO2 per year.
- When you factor in all the other uses of fossil fuels, the estimate of global CO2 emissions of 27 gigatonnes per year seems reasonable.
- The entire atmosphere weighs approx 5,000,000 gigatonnes and it is currently about 390 parts per million (ppm) CO2, which would be around 2,000 to 3,000 gigatonnes CO2.
- 27 gigatonnes of human-created CO2 will actually affect the composition of the atmosphere, possibly causing the level to rise by about 1%/year.
- The pre-industrial CO2 concentration is estimated at around 270ppm, we are currently at about 390ppm, almost a 50% increase in 200 years.
- It has been known for 150 years that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas, in the concentration currently found in the atmosphere. Anyone who says it’s a trace gas or a naturally-occurring by-product of life is misleading you, either deliberately lying or because of their own ignorance.

So far, you don’t need to be a scientist to comprehend the numbers, but the shock comes when you look at the number that scientists are starting to agree on that CO2 needs to stabilize at: 350ppm.

The worst part is that it’s mostly only in the US and Canada that acceptance of these numbers is split largely on political boundaries. Conservative leaders in both countries are absolutely willing to lie to the public to maintain the status quo, and regular people don’t have the ability to do the calculations for themselves. Now ask yourself why they’ve been lying to you – the answer is the same as it was for tobacco: money, politics and “free markets”.

Before the lying, astroturfing trolls get here and accuse me of incorrect science, let me say that I’m just a home dad who put this together in an afternoon of Google research. I’m sure I’ve made mistakes and it’s much more complicated than I’ve shown, but I think you’ll agree that we’re dumping CO2 at a scale that is actually capable of changing the atmosphere. Given that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, even at the current “minute” level, you can see that increasing it without boundaries could have potentially catastrophic consequences.

If you haven’t seen the numbers presented this way, verify them for yourself, learn about the subject and you’ll begin to see how blatantly the misinformation has been propagated. To me, there is no other conclusion but that the people who’ve made this a political issue have miscalculated and our children and grand-children will be paying the price for decades of obstruction. This is not something I’m willing to forgive and I hold you partly responsible (assuming you are what I call a “denier” and I am what you might call an “alarmist”).

I’ll even go so far as to issue a challenge to the despicable, lying, Astroturfing frauds, similar to the one at Greenfyre’s, show me evidence that I’m substantially wrong about any of these basic numbers:
- 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas
- up to 20 tonnes or more of CO2 yearly for a single vehicle, or perhaps 10 gigatonnes for 500,000,000 vehicles.
- total global CO2 emissions of about 27 gigatonnes a year
- total CO2 in the atmosphere about 3,000 gigatonnes
- explain a natural mechanism that accounts for measured increases in atmospheric CO2 since 1959 while somehow excluding the substantial amount of man-made CO2
- provide evidence that CO2 does not act as a greenhouse gas at current levels, and that doubling it (or more) will make no difference to melting ice caps and glaciers, sea level rise, climate patterns, etc.

I don’t want politics (“the lefties just want socialism”), anything about Al Gore (because I hate to tell you this, but regardless of how you feel about his politics, he has the facts on his side and all you have are lies), economics (“it’s too expensive”) or propaganda (“just a bunch of alarmists”), I want evidence, backed by scientific research, not just something that you read on someone’s blog.

However, if you don’t have any evidence, but you still just don’t see the possibility that it’s a problem we’re creating and that we have to get under control, take a stand for your position. Comment below for the rest of us to laugh at your stupidity. Who knows, maybe in 20 years I’ll be eating my words.

“Back of the envelope” calculations:

Generally, the gasoline your car uses is about 90% “octane” (that’s what the octane rating indicates, it’s more complicated than this, but for these calculations, it’s close enough) and 10% “heptane”.

The molecular formula for octane is C8H18, meaning it’s composed of 8 carbon atoms and 18 hydrogen atoms, while heptane is C7H16.

Octane combustion is given by this equation:

2C8H18 + 25O2= 16CO2 + 18H2O

which means that 2 octane molecules and 25 oxygen molecules from the atmosphere combine to produce 16 CO2 molecules and 18 water (H2O) molecules. The result of the reaction is energy released that is used to move the car.

Now, if you look at the “Periodic Table of the Elements“, you can find the atomic weights of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, which I will round off to 1, 12 and 16, respectively. You can use these numbers to compare the relative mass of the inputs and the outputs:

Octane: 8 C atoms x atomic mass of 12 + 18 H atoms x atomic mass of 1 = 8 x 12 + 18 x 1 = 114
O2 (an oxygen molecule in the atmosphere): 2 O atoms x 16 = 32
CO2: 1 C atom x 12 + 2 O atoms x 16 = 44
H2O: 2 H x 1 + 1 O x 16 = 18

You can verify that the equation balances:

2 x 114 + 25 x 32 = 16 x 44 + 18 x 18
1028 = 1028

This is conservation of mass, and this is the key part that doesn’t seem intuitively obvious to us. We tend to think we put gas in, it’s burned up and “disappears” because we don’t realize the mass of the exhaust. In fact, the equation tells us if you burn 228g (2 x 114) of gasoline, you consume 800g (25 x 32) of oxygen and the result is 704g (16 x 44) of CO2 plus 324g (18 x 18) of water. Expressed another way, for every gram of gas, you consume 800 / 228 (about 3.5g) of oxygen from the atmosphere and produce 704 / 228 (about 3.1g) of CO2 and 324 / 228 (about 1.4g) water. A litre of gas weighs approximately 770g and the resultant CO2 would weigh 770 x 3.1 (about 2.4kg).

For comparison, the combustion equation for heptane is:

C7H16+11O2 = 7CO2+8H2O

You can do the calculations yourself if you want to, but the end result for the purpose of this post is that it’s close enough to the octane equation and it’s a relatively small fraction of the gasoline, so it can be ignored.

There’s the bottom line, 1 litre of gasoline in produces about 2.4kg of CO2 out.

In gallons, 1 US gallon of gas produces almost 20 pounds of CO2!!! Here’s a separate citation for this number.

Depending on your vehicle and the number of miles you drive, you can easily produce 20 tonnes of CO2 each year (for example, assuming 15 mpg x 25,000 miles/year). Using fueleconomy.gov, you can estimate your own annual “carbon footprint”.

That’s one vehicle, multiply that by the number of cars on the road in the world, say 500,000,000 (estimates vary, but we’re looking for rough numbers here), you get 10,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2, just from vehicles, i.e. not including heating and generating electricity from fossil fuels or even burning wood. Current estimates of total CO2 emissions from human activity are about 27,000,000,000, or 27 gigatonnes, per year, so you can see that my numbers are close enough.

Now, the weight of Earth’s atmosphere is 5,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes or 5,000,000 gigatonnes, and it is approximately 390ppm CO2, which would translate to 5,000,000 x 390/1,000,000, or about 2,000 gigatonnes CO2. Here, Wikipedia says 3,000 gigatonnes, so I’ll use that number, but again you can see how close my calculations are.

So there’s currently 3,000 gigatonnes CO2 in the atmosphere, and we’re creating about 27 gigatonnes more each and every year. You might notice that’s 0.9% (27/3000), so if CO2 is increasing by that much each year, then it would seem from these calculations that it’s caused by us. In fact, it’s not even that much. In two years, from July 2007 to July 2009, CO2 went from 384.4ppm to 387.8ppm, >1.5ppm per year, but only an increase of 0.8%.

I’m not a climate scientist, but I think my methodology is close enough, and I believe it shows that the amount of CO2 we’re currently dumping into the atmosphere is actually significant enough to change its composition, which is another point that just doesn’t seem intuitive because we tend to think of the atmosphere as basically infinite. Remember that before the Industrial Revolution, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was relatively stable, the natural “sources” and “sinks” more or less balanced each other, the one thing that has changed is us producing almost 30,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

We’re currently at about 390ppm, and increasing by more than 1ppm each year, imagine where we’ll be in 10, 50 or 100 years.

At around 600ppm, people perceive the air as “stuffy” and CO2 poisoning starts around 1000ppm. We are in fact on a path to extinction. But the problem is not dying of CO2 poisoning, it’s the greenhouse effect, which John Tyndall discovered in 1859, exactly 150 years ago this year. It doesn’t matter whether CO2 is a naturally-occurring by-product of life or how minute the concentration of CO2 is, the point is, it does act as a greenhouse gas at the level currently in the atmosphere.

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius calculated that if CO2 were to double, it would increase the temperature by up to 6C (almost 11 degrees F).

Any talk about “natural cycles” is also invalidated by this one point: The one difference between past climate changes and the current one is the amount of CO2 we’re creating.

The pre-industrial level of CO2 has been estimated at about 270ppm, so it has already increased by almost 50%. Anyone who tells you the CO2 level hasn’t changed since pre-industrial times is assuming you’re not smart enough to follow the basic math above. They would also have to account for how CO2 went from 390ppm down to 315ppm when measurements at Mauna Kea began in 1959, then has gradually increased back to 390.

I’ve had a couple trolls comment on my post about the individuals and institutions involved in global warming denial, one in particular accuses me of “slandering” Ross McKitrick and Bjorn Lomborg.

Here’s what desmogblog’s “denier database” has to say about McKitrick and Lomborg. Therefore, they are both high enough profile deniers to warrant my including them in the original post.

The commenter makes the perfectly valid point that economists should be involved in analyzing the economic impacts, but that actually reinforces my point. McKitrick is an economist, not a climate scientist, and is in no position to make claims regarding the reality of climate change, only the costs involved in taking action compared with the cost of doing nothing. The fact that McKitrick is associated with both the George C. Marshall Institute and Fraser Institute implies to me that he’s deliberately confusing the science because of his right wing ideology. This is part of what I find so completely fraudulent (I use that word deliberately) about this point of view – conservatives are so obsessed with free markets, deregulation and lowering taxes that they think it’s okay to counter the real climate science with their distortions and pseudo-science. The comment itself reveals this mindset,

a suspicion that some of the leftists taking the alarmists position want to use the global warming issue to bring in socialistic government by the “Back door”

so it’s ok to lie, because it’s just politics. The problem is, just as with tobacco and health care, they deny reality purely because of their ideology.

And they’ve been successful – instead of the debate being what level of CO2 do we need to stabilize at (350 ppm) and how do we get there, we debate the costs of doing anything at all.

I have to remind myself, as progressives express their dissatisfaction with Obama, he’s a universe better than what we would’ve had. Also, he promised “change” and I think a big part of that change is bi-partisanship. Now, the Republicans have shown they won’t work with him anyway, but at least he tried, and it’s time to take off the gloves and fight back.

This was predictable, Bill Donohue coming to the defense of the Catholic Church over the Irish report on systemic abuse in Catholic institutions. Here’s the full text of his release [emphasis added]:

HYSTERIA OVER IRISH CLERGY ABUSE

May 20, 2009

After nine years of investigation, Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has published its findings. More than 30,000 children, most of them delinquents, passed through one or more of Ireland’s Catholic-run institutions from the 1920s through the 1980s.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the report today:

Reuters is reporting that “Irish Priests Beat, Raped Children,” yet the report does not justify this wild and irresponsible claim. Four types of abuse are noted: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional. Physical abuse includes “being kicked”; neglect includes “inadequate heating”; and emotional abuse includes “lack of attachment and affection.” Not nice, to be sure, but hardly draconian, especially given the time line: fully 82 percent of the incidents took place before 1970. As the New York Times noted, “many of them [are] now more than 70 years old.” And quite frankly, corporal punishment was not exactly unknown in many homes during these times, and this is doubly true when dealing with miscreants.

Regarding sexual abuse, “kissing,” and “non-contact including voyeurism” (e.g., what it labels as “inappropriate sexual talk”) make the grade as constituting sexual abuse. Moreover, one-third of the cases involved “inappropriate fondling and contact.” None of this is defensible, but none of it qualifies as rape. Rape, on the other hand, constituted 12 percent of the cases. As for the charge that “Irish Priests” were responsible, some of the abuse was carried out by lay persons, much of it was done by Brothers, and about 12 percent of the abusers were priests (most of whom were not rapists).

The Irish report suffers from conflating minor instances of abuse with serious ones, thus demeaning the latter. When most people hear of the term abuse, they do not think about being slapped, being chilly, being ignored or, for that matter, having someone stare at you in the shower. They think about rape.

By cheapening rape, the report demeans the big victims. But, of course, there is a huge market for such distortions, especially when the accused is the Catholic Church.

Is there no crime so heinous that these people will not stand up for each other over?

[Edit: Here are just a couple articles that go into further detail, from vjack and PZ.]

The funny thing is, up until a few years ago, I was always a small-c conservative, and I’m still generally a fiscal conservative. But the current crop of conservatives in North America have me so enraged with both the Republican Fascist Party (that’s my new name for them) and Canada’s Neo-Con Party (led by George Bush’s lap dog, Stephen Harper) that I hope for the permanent demise of both parties.

It seems inevitable that, at least in some way, my dream is going to come true south of the border. The Republican Party is (probably) smart enough to realize that they’ll never win another election until they distance themselves from the extremist American Taliban and KKKhristian factions. I really do hope the racist, ignorant, homophobic anti-science, apocalyptic theocrats spend the next 40 years “wandering in the desert” without a political voice (or secede and become the Mexican State of “Tay-has”). The “moderate” Republicans will just pin the whole global warming denial thing on the Jesus Freaks, and move on.

Canada’s a completely different story. We have a Conservative government, who seem to have learned all their tricks from Dubya, Darth Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Phil Gramm and friends. They don’t believe in evolution, and they don’t believe in global warming. Their only reading material seems to come from Republican think tanks and they’ve already started their “elitist” attack ads and we aren’t even in an election campaign. Unfortunately, there’s no internal rift to hope will explode.

It’s the climate change issue that I think has the best potential to destroy the party and end neo-conservatism in North America forever. Recently, Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act, passed first reading, since we have a minority government and the majority of our MPs actually have principles. Every single Conservative MP voted against the bill.

But things have changed quickly, I think. The public support for action on global warming has recently become overwhelming. The Conservatives will have to do the biggest flip-flop in history or risk losing support everywhere but our oil-producing areas. It is a given to me that most people in the oil business will continue to deny global warming as long as it is in their narrow short-term self-interest, regardless of future consequences. But the rest of Canada has caught on, and I hope they punish the Conservatives severely for putting short-term financial gain against the future of humanity.

BTW, a word on “flip-flopping”, before I finish. Everyone, including the media, seems to treat changing your mind as one of the worst things a politician can do, even worse than lying. Personally, I respect when someone looks at the situation in depth and says, “I was wrong.” Breaking campaign “promises” is not much different, we all know that party platforms are based on what the party thinks has the best chance of getting them elected. Once they get in power, a good politician will do what he has to do, regardless of his ideology. That’s the problem with the Conservatives, they will never let evidence get in the way of their ideology, and that’s what makes them bad for the country.

Conservatism: Where the rich get a free ride; where programs that I don’t need are wasteful; where regulations that get in the way of me making more money are evil; where liberty means I get to do the torturing to justify illegal wars and where freedom of speech means I get to push my religion in your face but everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi, a socialist, a fascist, a communist or just plain unpatriotic. In other words, it’s all about me.

Apologists for torture; apologists for bigots, homophobes and hate criminals; apologists for global climate disaster; apologists for any and all forms of wrongdoing by religious officials; actively working to destroy public education and reduce America’s competitiveness.

A classic tactic the deniers use is “I haven’t seen any research that shows…”

Take Michele Bachmann’s mind-numbingly stupid “There’s not a single piece of evidence that CO2 is harmful, it’s natural, it’s only 3% of the atmosphere” rant (I know those are not her exact words, but YOU know that was the message) . It’s so appallingly stupid, I’ll let others address it.

I’ve been accused by a commenter of hating people who disagree with me, but to be more accurate, I agree (to some degree) with Alonzo that global warming denialism is evil because of the devastating impact it will have on future generations, including my descendants and those of so many people whose lives will be ruined because anti-regulation free-market capitalists want to make more money today.

Here’s a story about a climate change denier organization’s own scientists accepting the global warming science, in 1995!!!

Ok, to those who claim to never have seen the research, I’ll do your homework for you. Google “global warming research”. For me, the #1 hit was the Stanford Solar Centre. Page down to the FAQ’s, and follow some of the links.

Beware, the real research gets very technical, very fast. For the non-scientist, like me, I let the experts figure it out. This gets back to my original post – on one side, we have almost every credible climate scientist on the planet, and on the other, we have James Inhofe’s debunked list of economists, TV weathermen, dead people and people who even objected to being on his list. Before you give both sides a chance to express themselves, you have to decide if both sides are credible, and the deniers flatly are not credible, for reasons that I addressed in my original post.

Anyway, believe what you want, because I think the tide has turned and you are now on the wrong side, just like you (or at least many of your fellow global warming deniers) are wrong about evolution, gay rights, vaccinations and crimes against humanity (torture and starting illegal wars). Don’t feel bad if you’ve fallen for it all, the Republican lie machine is a very powerful force of malevolent hatred, all designed to manipulate ignorant, bigoted people into keeping them in power.

I don’t need to re-hash everything, if you want my general opinion on issues, read my shared items from the blogs that I read.

And remember, I’m not here for readers and I don’t want to get into arguments in the comments. My comment section is for respectful, intelligent discussion. I’ll discuss any issues, but “I haven’t seen any research” is no longer good enough.

I’ve met enough people who’ve said, in effect, “I’ve done the research and I’ve concluded that global warming is not real/not caused by humans/not such a bad thing.”

Before you start your own research, I suggest you look into some of the people and organizations involved in global warming denial.

I’ll tell you some of the individuals you’ll find:
Sen. James Inhofe, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Fred Seitz, S. Fred Singer, Ross McKitrick and Bjørn Lomborg, among many, many others.

Or, don’t believe Wikipedia? Check SourceWatch.

Among the organizations involved in global warming denial, four of the most prominent are: George C. Marshall Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Cato Institute.

Let’s be clear, these are primarily conservative think tanks, aimed at reducing regulation. We all know how that worked out for the banking industry…

For example, CEI (though their website is off-line as I write this) believes “that people improve their lives not through government regulation, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.”. So they’re not about science or climate, they’re a conservative think tank and they’re all about deregulation. They strive to deny the science behind global warming, in the interest of corporate profit.

Now, check out ExxonSecrets.org, once you’re past the intro, check out the pre-saved maps, sucn as “Biggest Exxon $$ Winners”, “Fred Singer, Skeptic-in-Chief”, “CEI web”, “Sen. Inhofe and friends” or my favourite, “Climate Science Skeptic Roundup”.

If you’re not convinced, try googling “seitz singer tobacco“, 2 of the top hits today are “The Indisputable Corruption of Frederick Seitz“, “The Corrupt S. Fred Singer, corrupt Fred Seitz…” and “No apology is owed Dr. S. Fred Singer, and none will…” The last one is interesting, as it shows the connection between S. Fred Singer and tobacco lobbyists, whose “product” was doubt.

Or google “inhofe 400 debunked“.

If you still want more reading, here are the environment posts from my other blog, or one from What I Learned Today or, if you prefer, a video.

I can save you a lot of time and confusion in doing your research, because there’s only one factual conclusion: The parties involved in climate change denial are well-connected, well-funded, highly-motivated and not at all concerned about lying or distorting facts. Their ideology is based entirely on free markets and reducing regulation, not about science or protecting future generations. Their method is the same as was used by the tobacco industry, create doubt.

Obviously, I’m proud to have scored 309/400 on this quiz.