Five Percent of Three Percent of Three Percent of Two Degrees Works Out To Not A Whole Lot -- Nothing About the Bakken -- Okay -- I'll Put the Word Flaring In At the End

Assuming the premise is correct, and, of course, I don't, the story is still irrelevant.

CO2 makes up 3% of green house gases (the number one greenhouse gas is water vapor, about 95 to 97%). An inconvenient truth.

It is claimed that man-made activity contributes about 3% of that 3% of that "greenhouse gas" CO2. I don't know if that includes "breathing." The rest of the 97% of the 3% "greenhouse gas" CO2 is from non-man made sources. So, now we're down to 3% of 3%. [Don't confuse the percent of greenhouse gas with the actual amount of CO2 in the atmosphere: CO2 exists in Earth's atmosphere as a trace gas at a concentration of 0.039 per cent by volume -- wiki, or any good science textbook.] [By the way: 0.039 percent --> 0.00039 ml/ml of air.]

Then, this, at the linked NY Times article,

Though air travel emissions now account for only about 5 percent of warming, that fraction is projected to rise significantly, since the volume of air travel is increasing much faster than gains in flight fuel efficiency. (Also, emissions from most other sectors are falling.) 

I assume when the NY Times says "5 percent of warming" they are converting CO2 emissions to warming. If they are not, it's even more ridiculous. It is estimated that global warming will result in a one to two-degree increase in global temperature over the next century. Let's say five degrees, just to get way outside the range of argument. Five percent of five degrees is ... 0.25 degree; a fourth of a degree.

A fourth of a degree over the next 100 years.

And that's the filler we get in the NY Times: New Yorkers who don't own a car, live in a small apartment, and listen to Al Gore, are now distraught that they fly five times a year.

So if you take five long flights a year, they may well account for three-quarters of the emissions you create. “For many people in New York City, who don’t drive much and live in apartments, this is probably going to be by far the largest part of their carbon footprint,” says Anja Kollmuss, a Zurich-based environmental consultant. 

Meanwhile, I assume Anja is on the ski slopes today laughing at the crazy Americans who actually worry about these things. Five percent of three percent of three percent of two degrees over the next century. New Yorkers -- some of the highest taxed folks in the world -- who worry about this, or take Anja seriously -- need to move to an income-tax-free state ASAP.

Now, add this to your data base: the number of people taking five long flights/year is minuscule compared to the number of folks on the planet, so any one individual contributing to that 5% of 3% of 3% of 2 degrees over 100 years is ... well, that's why we have calculus. Knowing that most readers are not interested in the math behind the linked article, I have completed the calculus in the margins of another one of my blog sites.

The NY Times writes this and is taken seriously; bloggers .... well, that's another story.

Disclaimer: The NY Times story was accessed through The Drudge Report or something like that; I've now forgotten how I dragged myself over to the NYT.

Note: the article did not state a) the optimal global temperature; and, b) who/what sets the global thermostat each day. I assume the optimal global temperature varies from organism to organism. And I assume the Hubble telescope was really sent up to look for the thermostat.

Flaring.

By the way, it was the NY Times that said the cellulose-to-diesel fuel may be gaining momentum: it cited a cellulose-to-diesel fuel company that in December sold 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel made from cellulose. Yes, a 1,000 gallons of diesel sold in one month and the NY Times suggests this could mean that the industry is taking off. I can't make this stuff up.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

I continue to enjoy David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In chapter seven he talks about honor and degradation, and discusses the legal system in Ireland during the Middle (Medieval) Ages at length. It turns out that ...

... the Irish material is all spelled out so clearly. This is partly because Irish law codes were the work of a class of legal specialists who seem to have turned the whole thing almost into a form of entertainment, devoting endless hours to coming up with every possible abstract possibility. Some of the provisos are so whimsical ("if stung by another man's bee, one must calculate the extend of the injury, but also, if one swatted the bee in the process, subtract the replacement value of the bee") that one has to assume they were simply jokes.

Something tells me that Anja's five percent of three percent of three percent of two degrees over one hundred years is not a joke. But maybe, then again, it is.

I'm beginning to think we've come full circle back to the Irish Medieval jurists: the New York Times is turning articles on global warming into a form of entertainment.

Flaring.