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Death by CO2? The maths of the madhouse?

(Monday blog)

Obviously I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not even a scientist. But I like to think I still have a few small remnants of common sense in what little is left of my rapidly-declining, alcohol-addled brain.

At the weekend, I started trying to quantify the threat that increasing CO2 levels could have on our planet and whether rising CO2 really could lead to the hysterical claims of those screaming about “Climate Crisis” and “Climate Breakdown” and “Extinction”.

Let’s accept that since industrialisation, the volume of CO2 has risen from around 300 ppm (parts per million) to around 400 ppm. A figure of 400 ppm represents (I think) 0.04%. That’s why CO2 is often referred to as a “trace gas” – because there’s really not very much of it compared to all the other stuff in the atmosphere.

How about a 4 pence a year pay rise?

Now let’s change measurements for a moment. Imagine you are a public-sector employee like most of the howling, mouth-frothing, snarling Greenies. And imagine you were being paid £30,000 a year. Well, if the bureaucracy you worked for offered you a pay rise equivalent to the rise in CO2 as part of the atmosphere from 300 ppm to 400 ppm over the last 100 or so years, you would get 33% of 0.04% of your salary – around £0.33p a month (£3.96 a year) gradually over the next 100 years. That’s about 4 pence a year.

If you were offered that, I’ve no doubt you’d be calling this “an insult” and “paltry” and “worthless” and going on strike. Yet somehow we’re expected to believe that a similar rate of increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere will lead to the extinction of the human race in just 12 years?

Cutting CO2 emissions – saving mankind?

The next claim of the Greenies, the mainstream media and our supine, pandering politicians is that humans can influence the climate by cutting CO2 emissions. Let’s quickly test that proposition.

The Earth produces about 750 gigatons of CO2 each year. Somewhere between 30 and 40 gigatons – between 4% and 5% – are estimated to come from human activity. Apparently termites release much more CO2 than humans.

The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing by around 2 ppm per year – 0.0002%.  Therefore, were all human activity to cease and were we to become extinct, CO2 levels in the atmosphere would be just an almost infinitessimal 0.0002% lower each year than they are on current trends (I think – my calculator isn’t powerful enough to measure the tiny changes in CO2 levels that the Greenies claim will destroy us all). And if we were to just cut human CO2 emissions by an unlikely 10% – unlikely because the world’s population is growing so fast and China and India couldn’t give a monkey’s arse about growing CO2 emissions – this would only represent a 0.00002% reduction in CO2 as a percentage of the atmosphere.

These figures are so small that the Greenies’ claims of imminent catastrophe can start to look totally ludicrous.

Britain leads the way into lunacy

Now let’s look at our little UK. The UK produces about 1.02% of man-made CO2. Therefore, if we were to shut the UK down immediately and all live in solar-powered caves with no meat to eat, the difference in atmospheric CO2 would be something like (0.04%) x (5%) x (1.02%). This equals……. actually I haven’t a clue. And I’ve probably got the equation wrong anyway. My brain hurts and I’m getting confused by such mind-blowingly small numbers.

So, let’s just conclude that totally shutting down the UK would make “f**k all difference” (that’s a technical expression used by all the greatest mathematicians) to anything anywhere ever.

Three hottish days don’t make a global catastrophe

Oh dear. Anyway, here’s Tony Heller explaining why just three hot July days in Britain and a week or so of hot weather in Europe don’t mean we’re all about to die:

4 comments to Death by CO2? The maths of the madhouse?

  • A Thorpe

    A good video which says it all and raises the question – why doesn’t the media raise this and why the silence from scientists who know that we are not responsible. The scientists would not have jobs because money is in the control of the IPCC and politicians.

    One of the issues of this fraud it it gets people talking about nonsense. CO2 cannot cause any heating. There are only two ways known to man for heating anything, one is to add thermal energy which can come from various sources and the less obvious one is to do work. An example of work is pumping up a bicycle tyre with a hand pump. Anybody who has done this know that the pump gets warmer. This is work compressing the air and this raises the temperature through a well known law of physics called the gas law. In the atmosphere gravity does the work by compressing the atmosphere and the temperature at the surface becomes warmer than from just the sun. This effect continues underground and in deep mines the temperatures get higher still, even after allowing for the heat from the earth’s interior. This is the real greenhouse effect.

    If CO2 had any heat trapping properties we would seal it in double glazing or in glass boxes on the ceilings of our homes. This heat trapping nonsense comes from the 19th century from people like John Tyndall and Arrhenius (a relative of the new darling of the climate alarmists, Greta Thunberg). Tyndall did an experiment with gases in a tube. It is easy to find details on the internet. He measured the infrared radiation and though it was trapped in the gases. It wasn’t. It was being absorbed and emitted so some was going back down the tube and some into the walls. Significantly he did not measure the temperature in the tube. Modern recreations of this include the tube and candle experiment performed by Prof Iain Stewart for the BBC. It is also easy to find on YouTube. He used a thermal camera tuned to detect CO2 and so the BBC added to the fraud. All this results in endless debate that perpetuates nonsense.

    It is important to understand the difference between temperature and heat. Effectively this is what the video is describing. A high temperature on a few days does not tell us about the heat in the earth’s system. I would happily put my hand in a container of CO2 at 200C. It would not burn me. I would not consider putting my hand in water at 60C. This is because it is energy not temperature that is important in thermodynamics. Energy burns, not temperature. In the climate the oceans contain the heat not the atmosphere. The sun and the oceans warm the atmosphere.

    The greenhouses gases actually cool the planet. They do not warm it. This another great trick of the warmists. When water evaporates from the surface it needs latent heat to change water from a liquid to a gas. The vapour rises taking the heat with it – this is cooling. When it condenses to form clouds the latent heat is released and is emitted to space. The clouds cool the surface as everyone knows when they obscure the sun. CO2 acts in the same way. It radiates infrared energy into space. It also radiates it back to the surface, but this is not heat. It is electromagnetic energy and it can only be converted to heat if the radiation is from a hot to lower temperature. This is a fundamental law of physics but the warmists claim that heat is a net exchange of heat which is not correct. This is how they pervert the laws of physics.

    This is all basic physics. It is astonishing that we have an education system that is better than it has ever been and we live in a technically advanced world but the simplest concepts seem beyond the majority.

  • twi5ted

    The science is usefully complicated and is a smoke screen anyway. Once the younger turkeys vote for christmas we will live much restricted lives, travel and freedom will be expensive, energy limited and extremely expensive, cars banned. Incomes will be taken for basic living as food, clothing, housing, heating and travel will be made exorbitantly expensive. Interestingly in this scenario both new labour and new conservatives want the same thing. Leaving the EU will allow our government to ramp up the green taxes and regulations and it seems we have gone a lot further already than the EU with carbon floors etc.

  • William Boreham

    I see Mad May’s last lunatic act was to reduce Britain’s CO2 emissions to zero by 2050, described as a £1 trillion suicide note. Even Zimbabwe has zero CO2 emissions, so I’m glad I won’t be around by 2050 as life in this country will be at like living in Venezuela right now. I see subsidies for ‘renewable energy’ will cost we poor consumers £12.2bn this year, (according to official figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility) – this equates to £450 per household! And unbelievably, while we are closing down our reliable old coal burning power stations, because of their CO2 emissions, (or making them burn wood) part of our overseas aid programme spends billions to help build coal power plants in third world countries. Presumably, being third world, they don’t emit CO2

  • Julia Green

    Brilliant writing

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