The Carbon Dioxide molecule is the perfect heat storage method, nature could devise and we use it against the basic maker’s instructions. Yes, the CO2 molecule is the perfect heat storage mechanism. But Nature didn’t evolve it to just regulate the Earth’s Atmosphere. It was created as a perfect heat trap. That is until we decided to burn up all fossil fuels we could lay our hands on… and we end up sending it all up in the Atmosphere to trap the heat… and cause Climate and Planetary Warming of the runaway variety.
Specifically in science terms: The fossil fuel CO2 molecules trap 100,000 times more climate heat than is given off at the moment of burning. This implies three very basic things for your understanding of Life and Climate:
1) We are using these molecules in an extremely wasteful way. Better chemical ways of extracting value and heat out of these CO2 molecules exist. And by using those techniques and thus solving our Energy and climate woes at the same time would be the intelligent species’ argument and choice. Burning isn’t one of them. Duh…
2) We are causing our own doom by unleashing the CO2 molecules on ourselves. Because these tiny molecules of CO2 work tirelessly night and day for decades and even eons, constantly catching heat that would have escaped into space and sending it right back to us – thus changing our climate and warming our planet.
3) Our hundreds of millions of tonnes of previously emitted CO2 are still up there in the atmosphere, trapping a raging inferno of heat round the clock. That is the debt that the wealthy developed industrialized nations of the world owe to the underdeveloped ones.
These three simple points will suffice to understand your own individual Climate debt to the world and what You can do to stop global warming.
And the bottom line here is that the heat-trapping effect of CO2 is the 800-pound gorilla in climate change, that forgets to be mentioned in all the carbon fights. Don’t you wish You better had more chemistry and science in your school days? Never too late. That’s why we are here eh?
If you want a quick ballpark estimate for climate heat resulting from any fossil fuel you are burning, use 100,000 as your multiplier for an accurate picture of the consequences of your fossil fueled choices. Each American’s personally unleashed climate inferno, relentlessly heats mostly the oceans and continents, but a small percentage goes to the poles and melts away our planet’s remaining ice covered extremities. Even this ”smallish” portion of our fossil burning inferno is enough to remove half a tonne of ice every single day. That is for every person living in America every day. And that’s a lot of heat…
Science is basic and still misunderstood – but simplified it goes like this: When we burn carbon and release the CO2 to the atmosphere, only 0.001% of the total warming comes directly from the release of chemical energy during burning. The remaining 99.999% of the warming is associated with the trapping of outgoing longwave radiation by those released CO2 molecules when they are way up in the atmosphere.
To put this amount of heat & BTUs unleashed in the atmosphere in some reasonable human understanding and personal perspective, please consider this: In 2003, the Iraqi army defending against American invading forces and to create a cloud and smog cover, lit over 700 oil wells on fire. Each oil well flame was averaging 8,000 barrels of oil, burning each day of the invasion. And some of these oil wells on a burning diet of an 8.000 barrel a day, continued for quite a bit after the invasion and untill they were put out with significant effort. In reality it took a year to put them all out. Still on average, every day, every American unleashes searing climate heat equivalent to the initial heat coming off one of these oil well fires.
Now for your favourite and very personal 8.000 barrels of heat your personal fossil fuel oil blast furnace generates per day, forget it. Because America has abandoned any national and international efforts to attempt to put these personal ”oil well fires” out. The Senate and the White House don’t think it’s a priority now.
And you thought You lived Green eh? You thought you lived the Change…
Strutting around your righteousness and sharing your woes about those developed world people trying to get some growth Energy too.
Shame on you and your haughty ideas. F. fool…
But then again what do you expect? As the over zealous critics of the Uber American behaviour readily claim: America is a country of overgrown boys, stunted and warped, who, left to their own devices, are fit to do little more than play video games, stare at pornography, and crack jokes about genitals, flatulence, and defecation. Mostly rednecks with low self esteem prefer the couch potato stance of Monday morning quarterbacks than engaging real life’s issues. And all that burping – between beer gulps and giant hamburger chews with the occasional jelly donut intervals – driving the climate changing 18 wheeler titanic pick up truck solo, with a shotgun at the back window rack – handy – in case the road kill resists.
But that isn’t my experience. Well mostly…
So it is up to the American women to save the day again. Mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and girlfriends and the best of leaders, can come out swinging and save the day from these testosterone ladden immature pubescent boys and perpetual teenagers. Teenagers shooting up and burning up everything on site: From the spiderwebs and the ants of infancy, to all the available carbon. Pyromaniacs with friends in high places. Arsonists of the planet is an apt description. And that goes for the leaders too – not just the followers.
Killing everything in the process, just like playing Xbox live and snipping every one else. All the time. The average American has a Master’s degree in game playing with at least ten thousand hours of video games under his belt. And that is eclipsed by the Doctorate each American gets on TV watching, with a whooping One hundred thousand hours of exposure to the stupidity inducing pacifier. Who has time to think, let alone act on Climate Change with such busy schedules watching X-factor on the telly?
Each and every American [to be fair - including women and children], on each and every day, unleashes an inferno of climate heat equal to the searing blast of heat coming off an 8,000-barrel-a-day oil fire. That isn’t a typo. It isn’t a wrong maths derivative. It’s the freakin reality of your footprint. Your share of the mighty machine that the American nation unleashes on the world. All the incessant consumerism. The world’s Power and Utility industry and Energy Consortiums that are predominantly American along with the giant fleets of coal electricity factories dotting the lands of this earth. All their machinery is manufactured in America. And sold abroad with Imp-Exp Bank finance, with World Bank Finance, with Wall Street finance and even InterAmerican bank finance. Yes today they are the prime financiers of Coal burning factories across the globe. Those electricity generators burning coal and other cheap fossil fuels along with the zillions of inefficient internal combustion engines clogging up the freeways and motorways with several tonnes of steel transporting a single chair bound occupant to another cubicle or another couch, are changing the climate drastically. Those jet airplanes whose manufacturers fight even the most rudimentary emissions controls along with the all powerful airline operators are the idiots du jour. And take an example from the people who supposedly will advance your security needs. The venerable army and the department of Defence that further destabilizes your security than any terrorist ever could simply by their illogical consumption of burning fuels. With their cheap access to oil burning up in their interminable convoys of millions of, Humvees, Hummers and humdingers operating in the deserts and the lands, paved and unpaved all over the world, they alter the climate and cause insecurity for You. Get it? All these scrambled jets, the three biggest airforces in the world [all American], and the navy and marines and army corps, and their mechanized armies rooting around the world like little wiener dogs to find the turbaned badgers… are the main source of your insecurity. What a mess. They burn up more fossil fuels and warm up the planet more, that the entire nation of England and France combined. Just the DoD alone can change the Climate for the better, if they mature and change their act and MO. Yep. My American friends. This isn’t a misprint, nor a defense of the French fries and the English chippies… it’s just God’s awful truth.
So you can see now that each and every American, warms up the planet more than anyone else…
And that really is how much our fossil fuel burning pollution cooks our biosphere, warms up our planet and kills off these cute critters you watch on the Beeb.
If there is just one climate fact you hang onto as you navigate your energy choices, let it be the image of that brutal inferno unleashed by everyday individual’s fossil fuel use. Yes and this personally apportioned and per capita – per day, portion of our fossil burning inferno removes half a tonne of ice every single day per person from the world’s ice caps. That’s a lot of ice lost. And the resulting heat causes more heat because of the diminished albedo effect and the exposure of methane and other even more harmful green house gases that cause even more heat than the heat generated by the trapped CO2 in the atmosphere.
There is almost twenty million people living in and around New york city today. Actually there are 19,541,453 individuals living around Manhattan. And these nineteen and a half million people create their own personal climate infernos in the New York City area alone with a measurable output in BTUs. The 19,541,453 people of New York, create the equivalent of 840 quadrillion BTUs of atmospheric heat, each and every day.
I knew it all along that NYC had some Hot Mammas. Just didn’t know how Hot though…
Is it any wonder that the last 12 months were the hottest months that humans have ever recorded? Or that every year and each decade grows increasingly hotter? Or that record-breaking heat waves are now commonplace while record cold spells are rare?
The searing results of our individual fossil fueled choices are becoming clearer with each season.
Can our individual choices of energy sources really cook up such global chaos?
It used to be that we were cooking the biosphere unknowingly, but we now know, the consequences. It is a conscious choice by each one of us, each and every day to ignore this. To ignore the truth of these widely available information. Yet as Americans we now unleash more climate heat per person than we did ten or even twenty years ago. We are increasing our individual climate burning 8,000 barrels per day oil fires, even though we see images of unprecedented floods, typhoons, droughts, hunger, misery, forest fires, peat fires, bog fires, and terrible droughts sweeping across the earth and people being swept away by flood waters to their deaths on TV each and every night with the news…
Our fossil fuel pollution is burning up all of what you and I care about.
If you are just as sick and tired of burning your planet up, along with the people you care about. And if you want to change that as much as we are, then Stop. Stop it, by making choices that are not fossil fueled. Make a different choice. It is that simple. Fight against Climate Change. Fight against Tar Sands and Coal pits and oil wars. Fight against the financiers of these…
Put a stop to your addiction for fossil fuels.
You’ve seen what it does to the planet and it’s people. Get off the couch. Chop some wood for heat. It’ll warm you three times. Chopping it, carrying it and enjoying it.
Turn off the AC. Sweat a little. You’ll rid your body of toxins.
Get a pen-pal from one of the countries you find comfortable to hate. Hell, start skyping with people from the ”enemy nations”. Choose to communicate with the other. The stranger, the enemy, the different religion believer. Who nows? You just might learn something.
At least You’ll learn that Hate against whole Peoples is racism. Simple. Duh…
Stop bitching and moaning and be happy with simple things. Don’t be a consumerist advocate all the time. Let some I-idiot new Apple product go unsought, unbought and unsold.
No need to buy all things all the time just to declare you are alive. - Let your existence manifest itself through humanity.
We are fortunate that we have much more than what we need - Way more than we need to be CONTENT.
Let’s try not to feed this endless cycle of consumerism and immorality, in which this so called advanced society, willfully forsakes, or perhaps, forgets and ignores the other two thirds of humanity.
Our lack of compassion, fairness and understanding of the rest of the world is what defines us as RACIST and MEAN.
Not our dismal lack of human rights awareness alone. This is way more than Political Correctness. This about avoiding the next Genocides.
Genocides that will sit squarely on your head you ignorant fools…
Say no more.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
And if you think am negative and pessimistic – please reconsider.
Because here are the facts:
Russia’s wheat crop withers under a heat wave unmatched in at least a thousand years. The landscape burns uncontrollably. Australia’s mega-drought now has a locust swarm the size of Spain hunting the parched landscape. A record 17 nations covering 20% of the earth’s surface smashed their all time hottest temperatures in just the last six months. Ice disappears at an unprecedented rate, ten tonnes for every each tonne of fossil fuel CO2 we pollute.
We’ve heated earth’s air so relentlessly that it now packs in 5% more moisture. What goes up comes down – in record breaking downpours, storm fury and flooding disasters. Pakistan is the latest to suffer from our newly moisture laden atmosphere. A third of that nation is now underwater and tens of millions need help.
We’ve also managed to simmer the global ocean hot enough to kill off 40% of the plant plankton in the last 50 years, threatening the viability of the vast ocean biosphere on which terrestrial life ultimately depends. We’ve warmed the south Atlantic enough to bring hurricanes to a new part of the globe. Worldwide ocean acidity is already up 30% from fossil fuel pollution. Dead zones mushroom outwards year after year. Oysters haven’t spawned in the wild in six years on the Oregon and Washington coasts. Permafrost is thawing rapidly. Titanic islands of ice are breaking free.
And the Human Misery has shot up tremendously. Across the world people get poorer and hungrier. Starvation is the climate lot and worse. Russia’s destroyed wheat crop will not feed anyone outside of the bounds drawn by Kremlin. With Russia traditionally being the greatest wheat donor nation of the world that shift will leave many hungry souls.
The number of climate refugees now exceeds the number of war refugees.
These recurring and Deadly climate consequences have to be viewed as human rights violations.
Terrible Human Rights violations visited upon the weaker Peoples. Violations inflicted by wealthy nations upon poorer nations.
Keep this in mind: The future Nuremberg trials will be centered around these… stark Human Rights violations.
