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.

Stop Blogging and Emailing - you're killing us!

Tempo has an important message for all who use email, edit blogs or forums, or who comment online.

Earth Hour dilemma: When the ‘Like’ button harms the planet 

Green groups around the world are turning to social networking to drive their campaign for Earth Hour tomorow, when lights are turned off for an hour to signal concern about global warming.

But here’s the irony. With every email, every tweet, every appeal watched on YouTube or “liked“ on Facebook, environmentalists are stoking the very problem they want to resolve.

Each time we network, we emit carbon dioxide through the fossil fuels that are burned to power our computers and the servers and databanks that store or relay our message. That poses a small dilemma for the Australian-led campaign for Saturday’s switch-off.

In 130 countries around the world, people are being urged to turn off the lights for one hour at 8:30 p.m. local time as a show of concern about climate change. In emails alone, the typical office worker is responsible for 13.6 tons of CO2 or its equivalent per year, a French government agency for energy efficiency, ADEME, calculated last year.

That figure is based on a French company of 100 people who work 220 days a year and each receive 58 mails a day and send 33 per day, with an average mail size of one megabyte.

That's 91 emails a day for 220 days =  20020 emails a year per person, and it's apparently responsible for a staggering 13.6 tons of CO2, or 679 grams of CO2 per email.

That seemed a lot of CO2 to send or receive a few dozen lines of text. 1 megabyte also seemed rather large for an average email, as I've rarely sent or received one larger than 100kb in size, but we'll let that pass, perhaps French office workers send lots of pictures as attachments.

How much electricity does 679 grams of CO2 represent? The EPA says that a gas-powered station produces 1135 lbs CO2 per MWh (megawatt-hour). One pound is 453.6  grams, so 1 MWh produces 514826.92 grams, therefore I calculate 0.758 KWh per email. That's around 3 desktop computers running for an hour, the equivalent of a one-bar electric fire for 45.5 minutes, to send or receive a one megabyte email?

Every time I come across this type of claim, the maths doesn't support the claim, not just a little bit out, but often whole orders of magnitude.

Feel free to comment, safe in the knowledge you're not fuelling irreversible climate change (but stop breathing out CO2, just in case).

Clutching at Straws, or "Scraping the Barrel"

I used to like the Hockey Schtick, often first with news of new scientific papers or articles on global warming, until the blog became a mouthpiece for the Dragon Slayers with their distortions and pseudo-science. A recent post there claims that a climate scientist  "inadvertently explains why greenhouse theory is wrong". The post links to a video of Professor David Archer of the University of Chicago giving a lecture to non-science majors on modelling the "greenhouse effect":

In lecture 5, The Greenhouse Effect, Archer uses the Stefan-Boltzmann equation to calculate the supposed temperatures of Venus, Earth, and Mars with and without a greenhouse effect. Archer's calculations show the greenhouse effect on Venus is wildly underestimated by 415C and wildly overestimated on both Earth (by 23C) and on Mars (by 19C) in comparison to actual observed temperatures. This is despite the fact that CO2 levels are very high and virtually the same on Venus and Mars (around 96%) and only trace (0.039%) on Earth. Archer says in the lecture that one would have to assume the Venus atmosphere behaves like multiple panes of glass in order to obtain an answer near the observed temperature, yet on both Earth and Mars one would have to assume the atmospheres behave like much less than one pane of glass. 

What is not said is that in the lecture, Archer develops a very simple atmospheric model, using a "pane of glass" to represent a totally absorbing atmosphere, and at the end shows that its results are wrong for all three planets. So this post is claiming that a very simple "one-layer" atmospheric model, which as Archer explains is being used as a step towards a more accurate "multi-layer" model, and which produces the wrong results somehow disproves the "greenhouse effect"! Give me a break! Incidentally, what's "much less than one pane of glass", which it's implied Archer has said (he does not)? The post continues:

H/T Professor Claes Johnson, who explains why Archer also uses the Stefan-Boltzmann equation incorrectly (and here)

The first link which purportedly "explains why Archer also uses the Stefan-Boltzmann equation incorrectly" doesn't mention Stefan-Boltzmann at all. Misrepresent what was being taught in the lecture, leave out relevant parts, come to an unsupported conclusion. and supply a link which doesn't address what you claim it does.The entire post is really scraping the barrel.

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.