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For Earth Day. How Much Carbon Anyway?
04/22/09 3:59am
You see the numbers all the time. Carbon dioxide emmisions of mankind into the atmosphere. Expressed in metric tons it looks pretty ruinous (for the record man releases around 27,245,758 metric tons, by fossel fuels, a year depending on economic activity). But how much IS that anyway. Really. How much CO2 are we adding to the atmosphere? After all, the earth is a pretty big place and the atmosphere takes up a huge amount of area around it. The figures I have are that of the total earth's atmosphere, 2% of that is greenhouse gasses. Of that percentage, 3.67% is the CO2 that everybody talks about. Of that percentage, 3.97% is CO2 that man contributes. But how much is that exactly? It is an obviously a small percentage of a small percentage of a small percentage but what does it look like? Big as a house or the size of the sun? A pimple on a bull's butt? What? It's hard to visualize and, you know, visuals make things much easier to understand.

So show me the money.

So I busted out the old TI-1795 (solar powered) and a drawing program to see what 3.97 of 3.67 of 2 percent looks like. Below is what I got, illustrated as best I could figure out. Take a good look. (copy continued below)

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So you see what we've got here? The end result is that little black square in the middle of the yellow square (directly above). That my friends is man's contribution of CO2 into the earth's atmosphere. I had to break it down in this way because, at the starting scale (the blue square up there), man's contribution would show up as an area much smaller than a period (.) on this page.

This is why I say that nothing about Anthropogenic Global Warming (or Climate Change or whatever they are calling it these days) passes the common sense test when you look at any of the real numbers. This also reinforces the much more commonly held view (among the real adults) that the sun and the oceans are the primary drivers of climate temperature. Perfectly natural.