A Short Climate Change Primer

And the four right answers to yesterday's question.

You might remember from grammar school that air is made up of Nitrogen mostly, at ~78% with Oxygen at ~21%. That totals 99%. What about the other percent?

It’s almost all Argon at .93%.

There are other tiny contributors such as CO2 at .04% (actually it has worked its way up to .042% but for the arithmetic, we’ll knock off the 2 one-thousandths of one percent or .00002 ( two one-hundred-thousandths of the atmosphere).

You may have heard CO2’s concentration expressed as 400 ppm or “parts per million” which is the equivalent of .04%.

But that’s not the whole story. Almost all of that .04% is not subject to man’s influence and since it is man’s contribution to the CO2 in the atmosphere that is the supposed culprit in man-made Climate Change, we need to be looking at what fraction of that .04% man could reduce by eliminating fossil fuels.

It turns out only about 3% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is there because of man’s activity. (the rest comes from the balance with air of the CO2 dissolved in the oceans and other places which I’ll talk about in a minute) Thus, to talk about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that man could eliminate by driving electric cars, flying in electric planes, converting all military vehicles to electric, and all excavating equipment to electric- the excavating equipment that digs up the iron ore and other elements to build all those planes, trains, automobiles, military vehicles, batteries and boats and ships (oh gosh, I forgot about boats and ships!)- you have to multiply .04% by .03.

That leaves .04 x .01 x .03 = .000012

What this means is, if man somehow found a way to eliminate ALL OF THE CO2 it currently produces- ALL OF IT-, it would change the atmosphere by .000012 or .0012 of 1% of the atmosphere

Anyone who thinks changing the amount of a minor greenhouse gas by .0012 of 1% could change the climate, has completely lost their ability to reason. Remember this is the figure we arrive at if we eliminated ALL of man’s contribution to the CO2 in the atmosphere- I guess we’d have to stop breathing too, wouldn’t we??

or at least exhaling. We could still inhale but we couldn’t exhale any more…

Let me put it in perspective for you. .0012 of 1 % is 1.2 per 100,000.

There are about 100,000 people in this stadium if you go all the way around (I’m only showing 1/4 of it so quadruple what you see.)

See the guy in the white cap in the lower right? He represents the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that man has control over. If we could remove ALL of the CO2 we produce, - eliminating ALL fossil fuels and stop exhaling along with some other things- it would be the same as that guy getting up and leaving the stadium. Remember the stadium is four times as big as what you see. Would you expect the average of any measurable human characteristic to change much when he leaves- say, the average number of fingers on the right hands of all the people in the stadium of 100,000 people?

No. The change would be negligible.

And the amount of CO2 we are removing from or adding to the atmosphere isn’t changing anything either, not even the temperature, to any appreciable degree. It is completely negligible. And Obama and Biden want to spend ONE 0.00%↑ trillion a year for the next 100 years to guard against a 2 degree increase in temperature when we don’t even know whether a 1 or 2 degree increase would increase or decrease quality of life measures. (I do know the 1 degree centigrade increase in the last 100 years has improved quality of life on Earth by leaps and bounds.)

Remember there are the same people who encouraged grammar school children to get the Covid vaccines (Obama) and mandated them for all ages (Biden). Biden is so dumb, he thought 98% of the population needed to get the vaccines before we could reach herd immunity. (The MDTV Mafia (Drs, Reiner, Wen, Hotez, Sanjay Gupta, Birx, Fauci, etc.) was just a little bit dumber. They thought the figure was 90%.)

I proved we reached herd immunity to the Wuhan strain without a single person- not a single percent, a single PERSON- being fully-vaccinated.

Here’s the bigger issue with CO2 and temperature change. CO2 increases follow temperature increases, not the other way around. Yes, Al Gore had it backwards in his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”. It was right there on the graphs for all to see.

It reminds me of something I did in medical school I probably shouldn’t have done. A distinguished visiting pulmonologist was giving a lecture in a big auditorium to about 700 attending doctors, residents and students in a thing we call Grand Rounds. He was pointing at the left lung saying “this is why he was having symptoms on his left. You can see the signs of inflammation here that you don’t see on the right.”

Something wasn’t right…

I turned around to see all these doctors nodding in agreement as they are rubbing their chins. I was sitting down front like a good nerd. He’s pointing along the left edge of the pleura with a stick at an x-ray projected up on a big screen while he’s showing them the pathology.

I could tell by the position of the heart in the x-ray that he had the thing flipped around on the lightbox, backwards. When he paused to have a drink of water, I popped up out of my seat and went right by him without saying a word to the lightbox and flipped the x-ray around to increasing chuckles and rhubarb coming from behind me.

“And now for our next case, we have an 87 year-old lady with a history of…”

I expected my attending to lay into me the next day and when I did see him, he had a stern look on his face when he said, “That was quite a stunt you pulled in Grand Rounds yesterday”. Then he said, “Nice going!”, and laughed as he walked down the hall.

The thing with Gore was the same. You could see it right there on the graphs. The CO2 rose about 700 million years after the warm periods. Why does it take so long? Because it takes water a long time to warm up after the air warms. Water in the oceans is very deep and it has the highest specific heat there is. That means, while it takes one calorie of heat to raise the temperature of one cubic centimeter one centigrade degree, that same calorie of heat will raise one cubic centimeter of wood about 2 1/2 degrees, steel about 10 degrees, and sand a whopping 17 degrees! Anyone who has gone to the beach having forgotten their flip-flops knows this. Walk on the wood as far as you can, then run across the sand!

Did our CO2 double from 200 ppm to 400ppm, soon to be 800ppm because the CO2 man has control over went up .02 of 1%. No, it was because it was very hot 700 million years ago. It was called the Neoprotanozoic Period (or something like that). The average temp on Earth was > 90 degrees F then. (For reference, the average temperature, worldwide, is now < 60 degrees F.) The oceans are getting warmer and more CO2 is getting released into the atmosphere (because warm ocean water can’t hold as much CO2 as cold water). Now that really WILL raise the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Ask yourself this question: With the trillions of dollars we have already spent, worldwide, on Climate change, has the CO2 gone down?

No, it has more that doubled. From 200 ppm to 420 ppm. and that’s with the US producing way less CO2 because of the increased use of natural gas due to fracking. China and India have increased but how could you double the total of something you have control of some small fraction of 3 % of? Their theory makes no sense.

Gates believes in manmade climate change but I don’t exactly trust him anymore after Covid. Musk does too and this has me confused. I guess I could be wrong because he is a lot smarter than me, but he also had covid all wrong early on until he listened to reason and changed his pronouns to, “Prosecute Fauci”…

The four correct answers to yesterday’s question are:

5, 1, 4, 8, 6, 2, 7, 3

5, 1, 8, 4, 6, 2, 7, 3

5, 1, 4, 8, 6, 7, 2, 3

5, 1, 8, 4, 6, 7, 2, 3