746
me_irl
(thelemmy.club)
All posts need to have the same title: me_irl it is allowed to use an emoji instead of the underscore _
Lmao. So. fucking. Confident.
Also check out The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis by Bill McGuire. More recent and stark.
None of those sentences back up your claims.
This value was specifically chosen to exclude the dinosaur impact. Otherwise they would say a longer time period.
No mention of the dinosaur impact. Not sure why you copied this.
This makes no claim comparing the present rate of change to the dinosaur impact. Not sure why you copied this.
This is your strongest claim, but it's very vague. It cites no numbers and uses vague language like "similar."
But really, this is a struggle on your part to grasp basic orders of magnitude. There is simply no physical way for our current CO2 emission rate to come remotely close to burning a substantial portion of a planet's entire biomass over the course of a few hours. We burn a lot of stuff, but no where near that much.
But fine, if it's what it takes, I'll hold your hand and run some rough numbers for you. I'll cite all my sources and go through the math. Feel free to make your own case in a similar way.
Global CO2 emissions right now are roughly 40 billion metric tons per year or 110 million tons per day.
On the Earth's surface, the total plant biomass today is approximately 450 billion tons of carbon. Carbon dioxide is about 27% carbon, so 450 billion tons of carbon burned would produce 1,667 billion tons of CO2.
I don't know if we have reliable figures of the plant biomass at the time of the impact. But it was almost certainly higher due to the higher pre-impact CO2 concentration then and the fact that humans weren't around paving things over. But for simplicity, let's say that it was the same number. This will help your case.
Again for simplicity, let's assume that only half of the plant matter burned. Again, this helps your side. Maybe some got buried. We'll also ignore animals, fungi, and bacteria that also doubtlessly released billion of tons of CO2. Again, I'll be generous to your side. And while the conflagration mostly happened over a few hours, I'll be absurdly generous to you and assume it took an entire month. So 833 billion tons of CO2 released over 30 days. That comes to an emissions rate of 28 billion tons per day, a whole 250 times higher than our present emissions rate.
So even using incredibly generous assumptions for your position, it's not even close. In reality the emissions rate after the impact was many thousands of times greater. Yes, our current total emissions may be greater than what the impact caused, but we're talking about rate of change.
Can you show me your numbers? I've provided my actual numbers, please provide your own. Show me some proof that in the aftermath of the impact, the CO2 rate increased less than 110 million tons per day. Can you walk me through your numbers, like I did mine?