Democrat Senator wants to see the end of mankind?

From the Washington Examiner (h/t Tom Nelson), my bold

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said that his colleagues want to pass a carbon tax in order to fight global warming and provide extra revenue as lawmakers debate debt and spending issues.

“We’re looking for revenue sources that are positive that we could get bipartisan support [for] such as a carbon tax to help finance the next transportation bill,” Cardin said during a National Institutes of Health town hall meeting today. He was responding to an NIH employing [sic] who suggested Congress “increase public health by eliminating carbon in our atmosphere and then also raise needed revenues to help stabilize the budget” in a question after during the town hall.

“I agree with your point,” he said. His office explained that the carbon tax “is connected to the public health impacts of climate change,” adding that “reducing carbon in the air would reduce the pollutants that are typically emitted at the same time, also reducing health costs.”

Does this loon (and his loony questioner) not realise that we're "carbon-based life-forms"? Do they not understand that plants, including the weed they must be smoking, get all their carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide? That at the bottom of all food chains there are plants, whether it's grass for cattle or algae for fish or berries for birds?

There are certain things that need to be eliminated from this shining blue globe of ours, but carbon dioxide is most certainly not one of them. I have a short list of candidates however.

A Question of Scale (2)

The atmosphere is, as I have previously said, very large. It extends tens of kilometres above the Earth's surface, though because of rapidly decreasing density, half the total mass is contained in the first 5 km. Ocean volume is less, almost exactly half of the "normalised" (1 atmosphere pressure) atmosphere. A good illustration can be seen here, which shows the relative size of the Earth and spheres representing ocean and atmosphere.

However, while the atmosphere has a larger volume, it has a much smaller mass; the atmosphere is a mixture of gases, and the ocean is liquid water with small amounts of dissolved solids. Normal atmospheric pressure at the Earth's surface can balance a column of mercury (which is a very dense liquid metal) 760 mm high (just over 3/4 metre); this equates to a column of water 10.33 metres high. Another way to envisage this is to consider that the atmosphere exerts a pressure equal to the weight of the column of air above a given area. The pressure is 1.03325 kilograms per square centimetre; the height of a column of water weighing 1.033 kg, and therefore exerting the same pressure on 1 sq.cm is 1033 cm or 10.33 metres. The mass of the atmosphere is equivalent to a depth of just 10.33 metres of sea water. When the ocean area is taken into account (71% of the earth's surface), this equates to 14.5 metres depth of ocean.

When heat content or capacity is considered, the disparity is even larger. The specific heat (amount of heat needed to heat one gram of a substance one degree Celsius) of sea water is 3.93, the specific heat of dry air is 1.006.

So what does all this mean? It means that the heat capacity of the atmosphere is equivalent to just 14.5 x 1.006/3.93 or just 3.7 metres of ocean depth. The ocean's heat capacity is hundreds of times greater than that of the atmosphere. When he was explaining about the logic of lighter electrons orbiting the relatively massive atomic nucleus (rather than the opposite as had been claimed by some), Ernest Rutherford said “When you’ve got an elephant and a flea, you assume it’s the flea that jumps.”

When considering the internal driving factors in Earth's climate, the atmosphere is the flea, and the ocean the elephant.

A Question of Scale

In considering physical systems I find it essential to have a concept of the relative size of things and quantities. For example, the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration I referred to in my last (and first) post is usually quoted in parts per million (ppm) - actually measured by volume, so more accurately ppmv. Strictly, ppm refers to concentration by weight. The currently accepted concentration is 390 ppmv, which sounds a lot, until it's expressed as a percentage; 0.039% or just under four-hundredths of one percent. As a fraction it's 1/2564.

However, the atmosphere is very large, and that 0.039% represents about 2,500 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of CO2. That seems pretty big, until it's compared with CO2 dissolved in the world's oceans - about 50 times as much, carbon in the biosphere (all living things, including bacteria and plants) - several hundred times as much, and in carbonate rocks in the earth's crust - several thousand times as much. For comparison, the amount of CO2 emitted annually as a result of mankind's activities is estimated to be about 32 gigatonnes.

So is that 0.039% important, or at all significant? Of course it is - the question though, is how significant. Despite contrary assertions, there is strong disagreement about the relative importance of that (increasing) amount on Earth's climate and ecology. Someone once said "There's what we know about the climate, there's what we don't know about the climate, and there's what we don't know we don't know about the climate. Of these three, the last is by far the largest". I would suggest that applies to every area of scientific theory and research, though perhaps in different proportions.