A little amateur climatology

Well surprise, surprise: US and Canadian negotiators have rejected the idea of imposing greenhouse gas emissions targets as a part of the Bali negotiations. Cutting GHG emissions means using less energy, and no matter what you say, using less energy means making less money, having less fun, doing less travelling, and buying fewer things. And that would just be cray-zee.

Worse still, in order to curb our baser instincts to do all of those things, government would have to enact policies to make it so. Even if a majority of the population were theoretically on side with that, doing nothing is electorally safer than doing something that could be perceived as a disaster. The notion that individual, average, citizens shouldn't be permitted to pursue self-interest over the global public good is pretty foreign to politics in the United States, and unfortunately, we're losing touch with it in Canada as well. But, as usual, I digress.

Of course, the entire problem with the global warming argument is that no conclusive proof that it is anthropogenic has ever been presented. I didn't see Al Gore's movie, but I don't think I really need to - even if we were to have 10 Earth-like planets and pump them all full of CO2 over the course of 50 years, and even if they were all to turn into Venus at year 51, the study could still be criticized for having too many confounders - and it would be empirical evidence. Today we're trying to draw conclusions from incomplete observation of one planet. You can never satisfy everyone even with good data - with shaky data the argument that this is "just a phase we're going through" is only strengthened.

But to those who are firmly convinced that human beings aren't changing the climate of this planet, here's a few numbers that I've calculated for you - not to convince you to support any policy or conclusion, but just to make you stop and ask yourself how sure you are of your position.

According to the CIA Factbook, this species consumes roughly 63,180,000 barrels of oil every day (2004 figures - it's gone up since then). So, in 2004 alone, we consumed about 23,060,700,000 barrels of oil. A barrel of Brent Crude, which is an average sort of oil that is found in the North Sea (but like all the rest of the stuff, it's running out), has a volume of about 158L, and, using a density of 0.835kg/L, would have a mass of about 133kg.

So in 2004, we burned 3,061,024,174,616 - or 3 trillion, 61 billion, 24 million, 175 thousand, to round it off - kg of crude oil. Let's be conservative now say that oh, 50% of that mass is pure carbon, and let the rest be impurities, hydrogen, and other elements. So we have about 1.53 trillion kg of carbon. Let's further say that 10% of it doesn't get burned (plastics and what-have-you). So we have 1.38 trillion kg of carbon released into the atmosphere in 2004.

Stay with me now.

So the first question is, where did all that carbon go? Well, the obvious answer is that it was photosynthesized back into virgin Brazilian rainforest, which have been expanding at an alarming rate. Curbing this expansion will be the next great challenge faced by the human race.

Remember I'm just talking about oil here. I haven't said a word about wood, coal, natural gas, or any of the other things that this pyromaniacal species likes to turn into smoke.

But let's stick with oil, and imagine that we did 10 years like 2004 - we've been burning more since, but we burned less per annum in the '90s, and let's pretend that before that, we didn't burn anything at all.

So we have 13.8 trillion kg of carbon. As CO2, that's going to have a mass of about 50.6 trillion kg. Let's convert to tonnes and say 50.6 billion tonnes. The total mass of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 2.9 trillion tonnes. So that's an increase of about 1.7%, attributable to just oil, in just 10 years.

So we've had this party for 10 years, and guess what, it's only changed our atmospheric CO2 by 1.7% (I'm sure you can actually find better figures on the web somewhere). This is, however, a ridiculously conservative estimate, as you'll remember that I left out every other fuel, assumed that only 50% of the barrel was carbon, that only 90% of it wound up the atmosphere, and that 100% of that was cleanly burned into CO2 - instead of the thousands of other worse compounds that pour out of tailpipes and smokestacks.

The second question, however, is: how much longer do we intend to do this? How long until we've really fundamentally changed the composition of the atmosphere? I'm not a climate scientist or a policy wonk - but if anyone tells you that the notion is just an unfounded assertion, you know they're either lying or dumb.

The third question is, do we need to worry about this? After all, the oil is going to run out.

Unless all that brand new Brazilian rainforest gets fossilized in time.