A simple arithmetic proof of global warming

Too many people deny that our atmosphere is warming.  Many of these do so because they are making lots of money contributing to global warming.  They also spend lots of money convincing people of a certain political view that the promotion of the idea of global warming is the plot of people of a certain other political view.

It is relatively simple to prove that there is global warming with one simple assumption: increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause the globe to be warmer.

For centuries there has been a certain balance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  People have used plants for food and fuel for eons.  As people use the plant carbon as food, they breathe out carbon dioxide.  As they use plant carbon as fuel, their fires give off carbon dioxide.  Plants, in turn, use the atmospheric carbon dioxide as food to grow.  The balance is such, that even with huge forest fires and volcanoes, the excess carbon dioxide is used up over a few years or decades with the new growth of plants.

We could express this as

CB-CU=0

That is, carbon burned minus carbon used by plants equals zero.  That is, we have a long term balance.

Then people took coal, oil, and gas from under the ground.  Now are equation is

CB-CU=CG

where CG is carbon from underground: coal, oil and gas.  That is, the carbon from coal, oil, and gas is not used up by the existing plants.

To make matters worse, human activity doesn't increase the amount of plant life to absorb the extra carbon.  To the contrary, human activity reduces the volume of plant life.  Humans cut down huge forests without replacing them with plants of equal volume.  Sometimes they replace the huge forests with sugar cane, coffee plants, or corn.  Sometimes they don't even replace the plants but cover the same ground with highways, parking lots, and mammoth buildings.  Now our equation becomes

CB-CU=CG+CL

where CL is carbon uptake lost.  CB, CG, and CL keep getting bigger, and CU keeps getting smaller. 

If you assume the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide doesn't cause global warming, consider that  residents of many cities are having breathing problems because of all the pollutants, including carbon dioxide, that are in the air because of the cities' dependence on fossil fuels.

Save a tree? Why?

One of the popular green advertising slogans is "Save a tree, use" less of this paper product or other. One of the extremes is not to take a receipt from a gas pump or any other place.

I am one that recycles a lot of stuff. Junk mail, newspapers, toilet paper rolls, beer bottles, beer caps, and on and on. I do feel that it is important that we recycle as much as convenient.

Every so often I wonder if we're trading one resource for another. Does the water needed to properly rinse food containers offset the value obtained by recycling the glass or plastic. Does anyone really get a tomato juice bottle or cap really clean? If so, what is the cost of the water (and time) against the marginal cost of producing new glass.

On save a tree, which trees are we saving? Those in parklands? In national forests? Or those on private land? If on many private lands and even some public land, for every tree cut down, one of more trees are replanted. If the trees weren't cut down, they might die, fall over, and rot. That has its benefits, but its sort of six of one, a half dozen of the other. Worse, the trees could get dry in a drought and put a hell of a lot of carbon back in the atmosphere.

We are currently cutting about a dozen trees a year for firewood. On the other hand we are planting 25 trees a year. Even if only half survive, we are replacing what we cut.

The economics can get really interesting on this. We drive a 14-16 mpg truck on a round trip of less than 100 miles. We cut a tree and haul back wood from previous cuttings. We burn the wood in our fireplace. If we burn wood in our fireplace then we are not burning gas in our furnace (or oil in our previous furnace). Is the saving in fossil fuel for heat offsetting the cost of fossil fuel for travel. Probably so, because we would go to our cabin just for recreation. In the winter or when we have lots of stuff to haul we take the pickup truck over the Prius.

Another tricky calculation is the capacity of trees to absorb carbon vs. the amount of heat reflected by snow covered ground. Someone suggested cutting down the trees in snow country would allow more heat to be reflected back into space. We do know that it was warmer last month in Montana where there was little snow on the ground than in North Dakota where the ground was covered. This was also in the same day when we traveled from Bozeman to Bismarck.

Somewhere in between the global warming skeptics and the global warming alarmists there is a common sense attitude towards having a climatologically comfortable and productive planet.

See also "Mission Impossible: Global warming debunking debunking", Reader Weekly, 2008-03-13