Saturday, July 25, 2009

Research Project: Atmospheric Carbon

I'm thinking about undertaking a bit of research on global warming . . . er . . . climate change. Despite evidence that global warming has stopped our politicians want to push ahead with the cap and tax bill. Here's my research project: How much global atmospheric carbon would this program prevent? How much atmospheric carbon does a volcano put out? Now wouldn't it just be a bitch if the USA is beggared by stopping a relatively small amount of carbon getting into the air and have all that canceled out by some Mexican volcano?

2 comments:

Joanna said...

"How much global atmospheric carbon would this program prevent? How much atmospheric carbon does a volcano put out? Now wouldn't it just be a bitch if the USA is beggared by stopping a relatively small amount of carbon getting into the air and have all that canceled out by some Mexican volcano?"

In order:

a) a statistically negligible amount;

b) a metric ass-ton;

c) yes, but it's the principle of the thing.

I read once that a standard volcanic eruption puts out more carbon dioxide in one day than all the cars on earth put together in a year. And yet somehow, earth abides ...

Hagbard Celine said...

Another key issue in these climate models is the degree of error and loss of significant digits in the results. When doing any sort of decimal operations on a computer (that's what these super computer climate models are doing), you lose accuracy over time due to the fact computers cannot represent decimal numbers exactly. You don't hear about this in the newspapers.