So how much CO2 is released when a politician farts? As much as when he or she speaks? It's a conundrum and no mistake, but let's just take a little look at the whole environmental thing. I don't like it. It smacks of religion.
Regular readers will be painfully aware that I'm a sceptic. I am sceptical of many things of which this is just one. But I also hope those same readers will attest that I'm perfectly happy to stand corrected if the math proves me wrong.
I've been wanting to vent my frustration at this subject for quite some time so within the spirit of being proven wrong, I thought I'd best dig a little deeper before I opened my big mouth and spilled type and invective all over my blog. Alas, I'm none the wiser but none the less, here I am...
Did you know that man, with everything he does in this world, produces bugger all in the overall carbon emission stakes? Really. We deforest and burn hydrocarbons at unprecedented rates and consequently produce an estimated 26.4 giga tons a year. Now that sounds like a lot but when you consider that just the respiration of plants globally produces an estimated 220gt a year, add 100gt or so for rotting vegetation and dead animals, and it doesn't seem like so much anymore.
Then there's volcanoes. I used to like volcanoes but now I'm not so sure. Stick your probe in a volcanic vent at a new eruption and you will find amazing concentrations of CO2 spewing forth. Check the local atmospheric ground station nearby however, and there's no spike at all in local concentrations of atmospheric CO2. How can this be? Where does it go? Do the rocks reabsorb it? Is it averaged in the atmosphere somehow? Does convection drive it to the troposphere where we don't measure it? We simply don't know, but if even half the concentrations we measure at various ground level vents are mixing with the atmosphere, we're talking thousands's of giga tons, not tens or hundreds, so you see why it's an issue, even if some say it isn't.
Then there's evidence from the Vostok ice core that would tend to suggest that global warming and the resulting "ice age" is cyclical. About every 10,000 to 12,000 years, or so it seems, the earth suffers a short (geologically) but intense period of global warming, followed by rapid cooling that seems to result in a major glaciation (ice age) that lasts for about 10,000 years. Evidence would suggest that this has happened at least four times in the last 100,000 years or so and that the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago. So could it be a cyclical event we're witnessing? The timing seems about right but once again, we really don't know.
So you can see my problem. It seems to me that we're being extolled to believe something that as yet, has not been entirely proven and that my friends, is what smacks of religion. It's as if we've simply employed Pascal's wager and are just believing because it's better to believe than to take the chance.
But unlike the god of Pascal's wager, these claims are provable, one way or the other, if we get the science right. The math so far suggests that in the context of global emissions, man's activities may account for as little as 0.1% of the total carbon footprint produced at ground level. That really doesn't sound like much, but there is such a thing as "the straw that broke the camel's back". Are we that straw? It wouldn't seem so, but who really knows? The answer unfortunately, just as it is with god, is "no-one knows...yet".
I'm all for being cautious and responsible but if the net effect of this argument is simply to make my life more expensive, I shall be extremely annoyed.
A couple of references I used:
Google "carbon emissions" for a myriad more links and references but 'ware the doomsayers...On both sides...
