One of the biggest problems we ‘deniers’ face is that few real facts are ever given by the AGW crowd. This is intentional, of course. For instance, they throw around labels like ‘green’ and ‘clean’ but never define them. It can be demonstrated that the atmosphere is ‘cleaner’ today that it has been in decades (in the U.S.), if not centuries (parts of Europe). How can something like CO2, necessary for life itself, be labeled ‘dirty’? It boggles the mind.
I’ve come up with (what I think is) a simple, understandable-by-anyone concept to explain why folks should stop being ‘afraid’ of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere.
Here’s the line of thinking:
Question1:
What are the molecules that compose air? Name them in order of most-to-least abundant. [By the way, few folks will get any of this right without looking it up.]
Answer:
Nitrogen, Oxygen, Water, Argon, Carbon Dioxide, and Other.
Question2:
If you take a random (or average) sampling of 10,000 molecules of air and assume that each molecule is worth a penny, approximately how much would each of the different components of the air be worth?
(Note: 10,000 pennies is the same as $100.00. If you couch the discussion in dollars and cents rather than, say, PPM - folks will have an easier time grasping the numbers. Even a second grader understands completely the difference between a $20. bill and 4 pennies.)
Answer:
Nitrogen: $77.00
Oxygen: $20.00 (animals NEED this to live)
Water: $ 2.00 (this is the ‘real’ GHG)
Argon: $ 0.95 (that’s right, 25x the amount of CO2)
CO2: 4 cents (plants NEED this to live)
Other: 1 penny
Question3:
As you’ve heard, Humans have pumped MASSIVE amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet it only makes up 4 cents of the entire $100.00 of the atmosphere. (That’s 4 CO2 molecules per 10,000 air molecules). How much of these 4 cents worth of CO2 has been added by Humans?
Answer:
1 penny. (280ppm to 380ppm)
Question4:
Let’s say that Humans had subtracted a penny’s worth of CO2 from the $100.00 worth of our entire atmosphere, instead of adding CO2. Would there be any impact?
Answer:
Plants would be severly impacted and dying.
There are many more points that can be made, you get the idea. Feel free to steal the concept, if you find it useful...
save!
cheee wrote:Your figures are a bit off. I'm not sure, but you might be doing it by mass (weight), though it doesn't look right for that even.
Answer:
Nitrogen: $77.00
Oxygen: $20.00 (animals NEED this to live)
Water: $ 2.00 (this is the ‘real’ GHG)
Argon: $ 0.95 (that’s right, 25x the amount of CO2)
CO2: 4 cents (plants NEED this to live)
Other: 1 penny
By volume (which would be your molecule count), for dry air, it should be:
Nitrogen (N2) $78.08
Oxygen (O2) $20.95
Argon (AR) $0.93
Carbond Dioxide (CO2) $0.03
Other $0.01
I've left out water (H2O) because it's so variable. Water content is highly dependent on air temperature, as well as on humidity. The relationship is fairly complex. If you specify a temperature and a relative humidity, H2O content can be calculated. And additional H20 will pull a few cents from the Nitrogen and Oxygen "budget" to keep your total at $100.00.
Very good! I have seen this done abstractly, but people UNDERSTAND $100!
I have another item to add.....
ALL of the fossil fuel reserves, known and unknown, contain carbon that was in the atmosphere. We only know a portion of the fossil fuel reserves and of that we have only burned some of it.
If we have only burned a portion of the known reserves, and there remains carbon to be found, then we have only put a small amount of the carbon back into the atmosphere.
If the world survived when ALL that carbon was in the atmosphere, it will certainly survive the small amount we are putting back.
To take it a step further, if the earth is recovering carbon by plant and animal growth, the amount of carbon permanently released is smaller than the enviro-mentals would have us believe. Yes, somewhere there is a coal mine or oil well that is being depleted. But somewhere else, there is a considerable amount of carbon being stored for a future coal mine or oil well. Hence the "1 penny out of $100" human related rise of carbon in the atmosphere since the industrial age began.
This assumes that the rise in CO2 is due to man, which may not even be the case.