More inconvenient truths

Planting trees won't save us, ethanol isn't cool, and rebuilding a city below sea level is insane

The more you research global warming, the more you realize we're being told things that don't add up.

"Green" celebrities often claim to reduce their carbon imprint to zero when flying around the world by buying "carbon offsets". One popular way of doing this is by planting trees.

Let's do the math. It takes 15 trees 40 to 50 years to absorb five tons of carbon.

A return flight from Toronto to Vancouver injects 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per passenger. Carbon dioxide takes 50 to 200 years to dissipate naturally.

Therefore, to absorb most of the carbon dioxide caused by one passenger taking one domestic round-trip flight across Canada in 2007, requires planting 15 trees today that won't complete the job until 2047-2057, assuming none is destroyed by fire, disease or insects. If they are, they'll release their carbon back into the atmosphere.

As Guy Dauncy and Patrick Mazza write in Stormy Weather, 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change, from which I took these figures: "(I)f we imagine that tree planting can be the solution to the world's climate problems, we may be making a massive miscalculation."

Flying is also just about the worst way to emit greenhouse gases. Taking one long flight can easily exceed a year's worth of car emissions. Plus, it injects the gas into the atmosphere at high altitude, heightening the greenhouse effect. The only way to be "carbon neutral" when flying is to get off the plane before it takes off.

Then there's Kyoto's "clean development mechanism" allowing developed countries to obtain "carbon credits" to emit more greenhouse gases by bankrolling projects to reduce them in developing nations. But we can't even be sure our foreign aid is reaching the people who most need it now. How can we possibly know these projects will ever happen, or do what we're told they'll do, particularly in corrupt dictatorships? Remember the widespread fraud in the UN's oil-for-food program in Iraq? Wait until Kyoto, a UN treaty, is fully operational.

We're told ethanol added to gasoline reduces greenhouse gases. Most ethanol in the U.S., the world's biggest emitter, comes from corn. It takes about 74 units of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuel energy to produce 100 units of ethanol energy. You also lose the carbon dioxide absorption value of the corn. While ethanol added to gas produces a net of 30% less carbon dioxide emissions compared to plain gas, to plant enough corn to make this significant for global warming, would, as Robert Henson writes in The Rough Guide to Climate Change, require covering 15% of the world's agricultural land -- a country the size of India -- with nothing but corn, solely for ethanol. That would cause starvation.

There's also a war between proponents of "adaptation" and "mitigation" in addressing global warming.

Supporters of "adaptation" argue people living below sea level near any large body of water, especially the oceans, will always be vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding, tsunamis, with or without global warming. They want to start moving the most vulnerable populations inland. For them, rebuilding New Orleans where it is, is madness.

They also argue that since we cannot abandon fossil fuels overnight, we must invest in new technology to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide burning them emits. They note global warming has some positive effects -- for example, a longer growing season in Canada -- of which we must take advantage.

Incredibly, some "environmentalists" who advocate "mitigation" -- focusing only on reducing emissions -- describe these strategies as worthless, even sinister, arguing they distract from the crisis.

Their logic is insane. Man-made greenhouse gases last up to thousands of years. No matter how fast we reduce them, their concentrations in the atmosphere will rise for decades, the earth's temperatures for centuries.

That's what the science says. If it's right, the only policy that makes sense is mitigation and adaptation. Unless you think ideology is more important than humanity.

1. Water vapor has a much greater greenhouse effect than CO2, so that CO2 is quite a bit smaller contributor. 2. Most of the production of CO2 is from natural sources, man-made CO2 is less than 10%. You are right regarding the balance, except for the fact that we are digging up carbon from the ground where it was probably produced from CO2 gas many centuries earlier (but see above).

ALL occuring CO2 is less than 1% of our entire atmosphere.

Man made CO2 is estimated to be between 3-5% of total CO2.

Man made CO2 equals about 0.036% of the entire earths atmosphere.

That's what the science says

No. That's what the computer models suggest, not the same thing at all. The computer models operate on their input which is not representative of all the factors that go into climate, and can't be because many factors are simply not understood well enough to "model" them. The models have to be constantly tweaked to allow for the present reality as it has differed from past projections.

I don't think your post was retarded, but I do think you were in error.

At one time there were alot more trees. In cities, there used to be nothing but forests or fields, but they've been paved over.

Forest have been removed or thinned to make more farm fields.

Planting trees would just replace what was naturally there to begin with. Unless of course your trying to plant a forest in a desert or a prairie, where nature never supported one.

If one goes back to the 1600s...the land mass east of the Mississippi was heavily forested. There is no doubt that a large forestation program would shift the numbers...although it would take 30 years to prove that point. But thats alot better than destroying our economy.

Personally...I can't see why Bush doesn't start a mass 1-billion trees per year program...and get the Canadians also into the same scheme. Between the two countries...in five years....thats 10 billion trees. The same logic in China, Asia, South America, and Europe would fix the problem in a efficient manner.

That would mean it has to carry far more than 120,000 lbs. of fuel to burn up, which is more than the weight of the plane itself??

More than 2/3 the weight of CO2 is from the oxygen drawn from the atmosphere during the combustion of the fuel.

Carbon has an atomic weight of 12. Oxygen has an atomic weight of 16. Hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1.

So, if (for demonstration's sake)you burn one unit of CH2 [atomic weight 18], you have generated one unit of water (atomic weight 18 [1 oxygen plus 2 hydrogen] and one unit of CO2 [atomic weight 44].

You car uses about 15 pounds of air for every pound of gasoline it burns, because air is only 20.9% oxygen, 79% nitrogen, and 0.1% ALL OTHER GASES.This includes water vapour, CO2, methane, ozone, the works.

To think that we tiny humans have ANY effect on climate is the height of hubris.

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