Sometimes a comment appears that’s worthy of its own post.
Vitrivius;
I think that one of the biggest problems that is posed by innumeracy is the inability of the innumerate to reason with big numbers. For example, some time ago some people were complaining that the oil patch uses 330,000,000 liters of water a year from the Red Deer River. 330,000,000 liters! Ohh, be vewy afwaid!
But wait just a minute, how big is 330,000,000 liters in the Red Deer River context? Well, the river flow rate varies from 10 to 100 cubic meters per second. Assuming only 10 cubic meters per second, that’s still 10,000 liters per second. Which means the oil patch uses 33,000 seconds, or about 9 hours, or about 0.1% of the river’s annual flow.
Why weren’t those people complaining about the oil patch wanting to use 0.1% of the river flow? Why do they say 330,000,000 liters instead? Are they trying to hide a fraudulent agenda behind big numbers?
Ok, now let’s consider the case of atmospheric CO2 vapor. Humans produce about 50 giga-tonnes of atmospheric CO2 vapour per year. Be vewy afwaid!
But how big is 50 giga-tonnes of atmospheric CO2 vapour in the green house gas global warming context? Well, the portion of atmospheric CO2 vapor that is produced by humans is about 3% or 0.03. The portion of green-house gasses that is CO2 is about 1% or 0.01. Thus, the portion of green-house gasses that is human produced CO2 is about 0.03% or 0.0003. The heat-trapping effectiveness of CO2 compared to the average of green-house gasses is about 10% or 0.10. Thus, the portion of the green-house gas global warming caused by human CO2 is about 0.003% or 0.00003 or 30 millionths. Even if we stop producing any CO2 at all, 99.997% of green-house gas global warming will still happen (even if we ignore the Borrello Limit and the saturation effect).
Here’s one more case to consider, this one with a twist: the Canadian long-gun registry. Some people say, well, a billion dollars, you know these big projects are expensive, there’s nothing to fear. But how big is a billion dollars in the context of the long-gun registry?
Well, given that loaded staff costs of the sorts involved in such a project are about $100,000 per year, on the order of 10,000 man years have been spent on the registry. But there’s no legitimate way to spend 10,000 man-years on such a project. Therefore, some part of that money was spent illegitimately. In this case, innumeracy is used to hide a valid fear: that with a probability of 100%, our tax dollars are being wasted (or worse). (At tinyurl.com/ybnozb you can read my detailed analysis of the long-gun registry scam, which received Mark Steyn’s letter of the week award.)
Smoking, since it has been mentioned, is another such case. We are told that smoking kills. Nonsense; having a smoke won’t kill you. Smoking a lot for a long time has a tendancy to reduce one’s life expectancy by a few years. The fear-mongers tell us to be vewy afwaid. The numerate ask themselves: am I willing to spend a few end-years of my life on the overall cause of enjoying all the other decades of my life?
My point is: measured values mean nothing until they are scaled to a relevant context. People who fear-monger by deliberately hiding relevant context scaling are fraud artists.
Or my favourite – if you think that $90 is a lot to spend for the fuel required to move three tons of pickup truck down the highway for 300 miles – try mailing the sonofabitch sometime.
Thank you. Scale is everything…but don’t think too hard, you’ll scare everyone! That’s why I love this blog. Well Said!!!
Excellent post, thank you for the context.
Excellent post, thank you. I’ve always enjoyed Vitruvius’ posts here, and shall add “The Sagacious Iconoclast” to my bookmarks.
Just read the synopsis of the Gun Registry. This program is undoubtedly one the Liberals used to funnel our money to their friends. The figures just don’t “add up” any other way.
If Harper is elected to a majority, all of us non-Liberals must demand a thorough investigation into the GR.
Relating back to Vitrivius’ statements about the culture of fear propagated by media and politics, it would seem that they know “big numbers” shock and can be used as fear-motivation manupulators.
Are they really innumerate in the mSM or are they skilled at sensationalizing and shocking?
…this is a matter of perspectives.
What is a million dollars? Say for a person earning $100,000/year that would be 10 years worth. Hockey players make ~3million per year on average.
Someone making $50,000/year, that would be 60 years worth, or a lifetime.
Now it isn’t something to hear about paving a road costs $1 million per mile or to do an interchange $240 million.
Million doesn’t mean anything anymore.
But what we miss from the statistics is other variables caused by the discussion, pollution, smoking and such.
Like how much ground water is being tainted, or how much traffic, pollution, and garbage is caused by oil refineries and sometimes gross lack of control? Heck the stability of an economy based on oil? Everyone is in for the quick buck. No tomorrow.
Smoking. What about the enjoyment of others around who don’t smoke? What about dry cleaning costs, or litter by smokers, heck forest fires by butt tossers? I remember working in a military office where literally at 6′ there was a smoke bank and funnels coming up from almost every desk where cigarettes were burning in their ashtrays. Now you don’t see that.
While Kyoto was a farce, it did start people thinking about the future again. Where people missed it was the problem lays with air pollution caused by vehicle and industry exhausts. Ever been to Mexico City or Beijing?
Heck, Calgary on a thermo-inversion day…yuk.
Sometimes, the only way to get people to do something productive and to think beyond today is to use fear mongering.
While I agree with Vit, the media is great at skewing stats, but that’s how they sell papers – fear, and doom. Humans love being scared and watching the results of it.
Attest to rubberneckers going by an accident.
In answer to WL Mac: Both.
Longer answer, they have a personal and institutional agenda which is very robust in it’s resistance to inconvenient facts. Plus, they are English (or French) majors.
I’m with you, tomax. Some things cause damage and some don’t. Oil runoff and road salt cause damage. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen compounds cause damage.
CO2 and private gun ownership don’t. But what is everybody raging on about? Guns and Kyoto.
That’s why Greenies and socialists in general irritate me. They’re so busy lying about things that are entirely benign that they rush right past the stuff that’s actually dangerous. You wanna see pollution, check out a Russian paper mill.
Advice to Conservatives who want to be in the majority: fix stuff that’s actually broke.
True Phantom but we also see they have a knack for making astronomical figures seem minute or reasonable…thery way they covered up the Liberal spending on the gun registry for example.
It appears that the underpinning core competency of the MSM is to manipulate public opinion and market this skill/influence to the highest bidder.
Martha Hall Findlay perpetuates the “chicks are bad at math” stereotype:
“Ten months later we arrived in Montreal on a growing wave of support. Our 40 delegates turned into 130 votes on the first ballot. No other team could claim a 300% increase in support on that ballot.”
An increase from 40 to 130 is an increase of 225%, not 300%. This math error has been prominently displayed on the front page of Hall Findlay’s website for months.
http://www.marthahallfindlay.ca/
Excellent Post. Saved it last night for reference.
Keep this post in mind when Dryden starts blathering about universal daycare . Those fools couldn’t even catalogue firearms in Canada for all the money spent , and they want us to entrust our children to their stewardship ? Same thought for Kyoto . Boggles the mind to think what would be spent on either by the Libs .
Respectfully Thomax,
“Like how much ground water is being tainted, or how much traffic, pollution, and garbage is caused by oil refineries and sometimes gross lack of control? Heck the stability of an economy based on oil? Everyone is in for the quick buck. No tomorrow.”
I am afraid you are missing the point. We all know that pollution is a problem and should be cleaned up.
The problem is the focus on CO2 is a distraction that takes the focus away from the real pollution that is taking place like the ground water by oil companies you refer to.
What is of great concern to me is that while we chase the false pollutants the real problem grows.
For example in Saskatchewan enormous swathes of the north is being contaminated by radioactive tailings from old uranium mines. Every year hundreds more acres are be contaminated as the wind drifts the tailings with hardly a mention because it’s not sexy to people like Gore or Albatross.
Chasing the non-pollutants like C02 will do far more damage to the environment (and the world’s poor) in the long run because it diverts our attention from the real problems out there.
My favorite is that 50% of all doctors were in the botton half of their class.
I wouldn’t get too bent out of shape by mine tailings. In one famous example from years past, a tailings pond broke through its banks and ran into a creek – dispersing radioactive water into the stream.
What they didn’t mention was that the natural level of radioactivity was higher in the creek than in the tailings pond, and that the spill was in effect, a dilution…
The portion of green-house gasses that is CO2 is about 1% or 0.01. Thus, the portion of green-house gasses that is human produced CO2 is about 0.03% or 0.0003. The heat-trapping effectiveness of CO2 compared to the average of green-house gasses is about 10% or 0.10. Thus, the portion of the green-house gas global warming caused by human CO2 is about 0.003% or 0.00003 or 30 millionths.
Hey Vitruvius,
That’s fascinating. Can you provide a link so I can see more?
I’m not disputing you, I’d just like to read further.
Also, to help put the costs of the gun registry into perspective, consider that for the equivalent of 1 billion Canadian dollars (850 million $US), NASA bankrolled not one, but TWO Mars Rover missions:
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_701703555/Mars_Rover.html
“Assembly, test, launch, and a year of operations of each rover cost about $425 million, or about the same amount of money as it cost to make the movies Titanic (1997) and Pearl Harbor (2001).”
I hope, Albertaman, that your post was meant to prove the point. Considering the “couple hundred acres” that you are talking about is approximately .00000155 of the total surface area of Saskatchewan, I would hardly consider that to be an ENORMOUS swath of the north. As others have said, the hyperbole takes away from the really important issues.
1 billion loonies… If you toss one every 30 seconds into the toilet and flush… I’ll come back and see how you’re doing in 5 years and their’ll still be 95% of the pile there… that’s with no rest breaks or stops, 24/7… you’d roughly flush away 1 million bucks a year… there’s perspective.
Yes scale is a lot but be careful because scale isnt everything.
Adscam. The argument used against anything being an issue in Adscam was that relative to Federal Govrnment spending the amount pilfered was small and therefore not worth doing anything about.
SO along with scale the missing element is legality, morality and scale on a personal level. It wasnt much to the federal government but it was a lot to the individuals who tapped it.
Scale is important but it isnt everything.
In regards to problems like CO2 emissions scale is definitley predominant.
Just thought I would be pedant and keep this from sliding too far in one direction.
Vit
excellent post
and a point(scale)I’v been making for a few years, but being not quite as articulate as yourself, have not been able to express it quite so, thusly I’v stolte your post for future use, and will accredit as your work,
thanks muchly
Here’s some perspective..
1 million seconds is (11)eleven days..
1 billion seconds is (33)years..
do the math!
oops….that should have been 99.5%…no ones perfect 😛
9 hours, well they need to be exposed.
tarred and feathered too.
Thanks Vit,
will save for another day for sure.
They also use the ruse “it ONLY works out to a cup of coffee a day per Canadian” or with the new Kyoto/Carbon tax “it ONLY equals a pizza per family per week.”
My favourite is 12 billion dollars. This number is hardly mentioned in the eastern media lexicon. This is Alberta’s overpayment to Ottawa. It works out to about $3600 per Alberta, ONLY. Or for my family that’s $18,000. Where’s my personalized golf balls?
Tomax: What is a million dollars? …. Someone making $50,000/year, that would be 60 years worth, or a lifetime..
Wouldn’t that be 20 years? 🙂
Vitruvius: Damn, damn, damn, I thot I had you there with the 0.00003 or 30 millionths. Not so fast Vit, I thot, why that’s 3 100,0000ths not 30 millionths. 🙂
I’ve been fascinated by numbers and percentages for a long time. Remember the financial reporting, “Dow has biggest point loss in stock market history” with no reference to the index level and related percentage decline; this has now improved. Or think of the money management business: say a $500,000 portfolio at 2% per year. Are you gonna charge $10,000 a year by client cheque or 2% or even better 0.02 inside the fund? Why the latter of course: way smaller and invisible.
me no dhimmi’s law of the imprecision of round numbers: a few years back got a call from a unilingual Chinese girl from CRA telling me my payroll was gonna be audited. Correctly sensing that intimidation would work, I told her to go away and go after non-compliant taxpayers. Then I sat at the desk for a while wondering how that just came outta the blue for the first time in 20+ years. Then it hit me like a 2×4: heh, I sent in a cheque for exactly $5,000. Round number. Looks quick and lazy, like a guestimate. Since then I make sure that all cheques are uneven, preferably not repeating any numbers: e.g., $4,987.23. Looks like you really worked hard at that determination.
Or ask the average person what percentage he would need to make to break even after losing 50%. Amazing how few people get that right away.
Or ask people how much they need to take out of a RRSP to clear $5,000 after 30% income tax withholding. Very few can figure it out.
Vitruvius: Excellent. A keeper for the quotations file — good ammo for the next climate injustice debate. I remember your Steyn Letter of the Week most vividly. Kinda like the Nobel prize, eh?
The media use the same trick when reporting ‘excessive’ bank profits or revenues. The question to ask is: “What percentage is it of total investment?” or “How much is that in dividends on shares?”
I have the same request as Jason Bo Green. Can you please provide links? I’m interested in reading further and using this info in discussions on Global Warming. Thanks.
I’m with you 110%.
“What is of great concern to me is that while we chase the false pollutants the real problem grows. For example in Saskatchewan enormous swathes of the north is being contaminated by radioactive tailings from old uranium mines. Every year hundreds more acres are be contaminated as the wind drifts the tailings with hardly a mention because it’s not sexy to people like Gore or Albatross.” (Albertaman 11:59 A.M.)
Well, yes, pollution is pollution. But the sole aim of the eco-fearmongers appears to be a redistribution of wealth, and the facts be damned! Can’t set up a uranium tailings credit purchasing scheme (or sulphur dioxide, road salt, etc… credit purchasing schemes)… not quite enough uranium tailings emitters to make a difference vis-a-vis moving money from producers of wealth to consumers of wealth. CO2 credits are a socialist utopia.
Here’s some math for ya. I’m going from memory but here goes…
A 20 year old sets aside $3000 per year in after tax income for 40 years, investing each dollar with a good, grey, solid mutual fund which charges an annual Management Expense Ratio (MER) of 2.25%.
At age 61, our investor figures his investments have earned him exactly 10.00% compounded annually (no redemptions were ever made, nor has tax paid on the as yet unrealized gain) on the $120,000 he’s invested; he has accumulated some $1,460,000 over the 40 year span.
At a 2.25% annual fee to manage this investor’s money, the fund company has collected roughly $390,000 from him… close to $33,000 in the last year alone. The kicker… if he invested the money himself in the same boring companies old companies his managers invested the money in, his annual return would have been 12.53%; compounded annually, his same $120,000 investment would have grown to around $3,000,000! Think I’ve got the math right… stand to be corrected.
I’m not suggesting everyone go out and fire their money managers; these people collect 2+ percent annually for a reason; not every person, maybe even not most people, can invest with success. My purpose was to show that a little bit of math knowledge coupled with some perspective can go a long way to opening peoples’ eyes.
Interesting post. Your point about innumeracy is well taken; everything needs to be placed in context. 0.1% of the Red Deer River sure sounds a lot less than 300000000 L (that’s about the annual water usage of 3000 people). I think the reason so many people are concerned is, unlike municipal wastewater which is treated and discharged, the water used by the oil industry is so polluted that it is taken out of the hydrological cycle and stored in tailings lagoons. Currently, technology such as reverse osmosis and distillation is not economically viable. So that’s 0.1% of the rivers annual discharge gone. I certainly don’t need to tell you that’s 1% in ten years – and I haven’t heard anyone suggest Alberta’s oil industry is shrinking.
drew:” … I certainly don’t need to tell you that’s 1% in ten years”
To funny … try the math again.
drew (3:08 P.M.)
More context. The Red Deer River comprises what percentage of all of Alberta’s fresh water?
ON a completely different note…..has anyone had the chance to see if Cherniak has made a comment about the six Canadian Soldiers killed today?
Given the post he removed, I’m sure he’s breathing a sigh of relief his visitors no longer see the comments he made in the past. Truth be told, to date, the only people I’ve heard of who actually WANT Canadian soldiers to die in Afghanistan, are the Taliban, the NDP, and some Liberal strategists who think it will play well to their anti-American and pacifist supporters. If you’re reading this Jason, be honest with yourself. What were your first thoughts upon hearing of these deaths?
1. This should help the Liberals
2. Glad I removed that post
or
3. I mourn for the families of these men.
Given your extreme partisanship, I can’t but help think you picked door number 1.
And if I’m right….then perhaps you should spend less time worrying about Dion’s fortunes, and more thought on the good fortune you have to live in a Country made possible by men like those killed today.
some more figuring and numbers for scale.
all the oil production in the world is not as much as the flow of the Bow river in July.
If you burnt all the oil reserves in world , not just the daily production, all of it , every drop discovered to date in a magic burner under the ocean instantaneously the energy released would not raise the temperature of the ocean by 0.1 degree. Direct 100% recovery energy.
If you recovered all the C02 from the magic burner from burning all the oil in the world and converted it to limestone via saltwater saturation you would not get enough limestone to make 10 of the exposed part of Mt. Rundle.
Spills are always in litres yes.
and really no one is more upset than the oil company over a oil spill other than maybe the company that lost the ship. not only is the cargo lost, the cost of the spill , the constant harping from the press. and to think 60 years ago in the second world war. these kinds of sinkings were done on purpose.
and flow levels. Red Deer river is less than 5% because Alberta has some biggen rivers, clearwater, peace , athabasker, north saskratch ur bum
Very interesting post but you lost me with the smoking analogy. Smoking doesn’t kill? But you say that it tends to reduce life expectancy by a few years. Interesting. I suppose you could say that if you don’t die from lung cancer you will die from something else. Eventually.
Fact is, and it is much more proven than the so-called global warming science, smoking kills and it kills absolutely. Terms like “shortens life expectancy” try to mask the fact that smoking kills. Do some vehicle accidents kill or do they just tend to shorten life expectancy. A fatal gunshot wound may have severely shortened a person’s life expectancy but it certainly did kill him or her. Same goes for the guy who died of lung cancer because he smoked. It killed him.
I love this post! totally true! and “a different Bob” you missed the point. yes we will die from smoking but the point is it is irrelevant based on our lifetime. Those 90 year old codgers in retirement homes don’t give a shit about the effects of smoking. Yet the government sees fit to ban it there. Am I the only one shaking my head at this nonsence?
Good points, as usual, Vitruvius. Something that always chokes me is how GHGs are quoted “per capita”. As Kate says, it is the dose that makes the poison and it is the amount of a pollutant per unit volume (or surface area) of the earth that counts.
On average, in Saskatchewan, we have a mere 1.72 people per square kilometre generating waste, while Alberta’s average is 5.1 and Canada’s is 3.2, and (for comparison) the UK’s is 246 (all figures from Wikipedia). Now with 48 times as many people per square kilometer as Alberta, Great Britain hasn’t been devastated and sterilized by pollution; from what I hear first hand (and have seen from the plane) it is one of the lushest islands on the planet.
Ignoring density/concentration places tremendous costs on us with little to no benefit. As a small, but maddening, example, the rural municipality I grew up in has now been ordered by Sask. Environment to close their small garbage dump (most farm ‘dugouts’ are larger) as a punishment for unauthorized burning of garbage. This at a time when there are less people living in that community than in at least the last hundred years and garbage had historically always been burnt with no ill effect.
Kind of like when AL GORE had 4 million gallons of water released from a dam in conneticutt so he could do a ad paddling his cannoe what a hypotcrit gore is
Speaking of the dangers of smoking, the shoemaker in my home town,in Manitoba, was an old gentleman from Russia who left to escape the Communists after WW1.
He was a tiny little man, looked like the model for Geppetto, and was a superb craftsman. He always had a hand rolled cigarette in his mouth, while he worked.
Once I had a pair of shoes re-soled, about 1961, and I only had a dollar, so when I went to pick them up, I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t have enough money.
I asked how much it was, he replied, “twenty five cents”. Relief! The new soles lasted until the boots wore out.
Nice old guy, absolutely Hated the Communists, and died at one hundred and five years of age.
Make that “Too funny”
Drew … in case you didn’t get your error. If you drink one cup of coffee per day for one year, it doesn’t mean you drink 10 cups a day for 10 years.
Kate you should e-mail the post to Dr. Heidi Cullen at the weather channel and Al Gore just for shitz and giggles, if you recieve a response post it!
E-Mail? Drive it over in the Dodge.
More numbers games: Income inequality.
The focus on the spread between the “rich” (anyone with a car less than 5 years old) and the “poor” (people without high speed internet) without focusing on income growth at the bottom.
Which would the “social justice” set prefer: bottom decile making $20K per year and the top decile making 10x or $200K per year OR, bottom decile making $15K per year and the top decile making 8x or $120K per year?
Tax breaks for the rich. With a 5 percentage point cut in income taxes, the guy making $200K saves $10K while the guy making $20K a year saves “only” $1K. NO FAIR!!! (sexist example mine).
Strangely enough, when you’re an 85 year old smoker and die of a heart attack the medical community states that smoking was the cause of death.
…while smoking does kill, it is not immediate and while we can point out 100 year olds who smoke, I guess I could point out 55 year olds dying of lung cancer.
Just as well saying “Speeding kills” is true, yet most accidents are under 50-60KM speeds and a few die at that speed, so would it have the same effect if we say driving the speed limit kills?.
Point is, we can use numbers and statistics any way we want, and I was saying sadly it usually takes shock therapy to get anything done with this generation.
Oh at $50K/year to reach NHL average $3mil is 60 years.
Me No Dihmi,
The top 10% in income pays 80% of taxes in this country. Those with family incomes over 100K in this country are already taxed higher than almost every country in the G8. What socialist will never get is the paradox of taxes.
The more you try to take eventually the less you will get. The wealthy and highly mobile leave for a better tax environment those that remain lose the incentive to excell. Saskatchewan is learning the hard way as thousands of the best and brightest have fled to Alberta.
Meanwhile people like you feed the belief that anyone that has done well is not something that should be celebrated but cause to draw scorn.
To you it is better to create a society that is weak and dependant under the guise of compassion than it is to become stong and independant.
If a socialist findS someone in a hole yelling for help they think its somehow noble to jump down the hole and have both yell for help.
A conservative recognizes that jumping down the hole is foolish and will find a rope to help the person climd out. Unfortunatley due to the decades of socialist conditioning of many in this country they would rather hurl scorn at the person handing them the rope than climb out of the hole themselves.
For example, some time ago some people were complaining that the oil patch uses 330,000,000 liters of water a year from the Red Deer River. 330,000,000 liters! Ohh, be vewy afwaid!
People forget there are oceans of water underground.
People also forget that water is a waste by-product of crude oil production.
Dehydration facilities are the first to receive produced oil once out of the ground, and those millions of millions of gallons are too salty to be released on the surface.
Long story short BigOil is not starved for water, quite to the contrary of leftist “complainers”, they have water excess problems.
p.s 33,000 m3 is a massive amount of water for any one operation.
I’m not going to dissect Vitrivius’s entire post right now as I have other things ongoing today. I will point out some obvious errors in the above statement.
The mean flow of the Red Deer river is much higher than the 50 quoted above and is actually 62 m3/s or 1,986,768,000 m3/year. Vitrivius claims the oil sands use 330,000 m3/year, using those numbers 330,000 m3/year really would be miniscule.
Considering that it takes on average 3.5 m3 of water to produce one cubic metre of oil, using Vitrivius’ numbers, one would be led to believe only 94,286,571 litres or 94286 m3 of oil were extracted from the oil sands annually. The National Energy Board tells us by 2015 we can expect there will 472,000 m3 of oil extracted from the oil sands per day. That means we can expect water to be consumed by the oil sands at a rate of 1,652,000 m3 per day or 1.652 billion litres per day, every day, irregardless of whether the rivers are running at maximum or minimum flow rates. If we use minimum flow rates above of 10 m3/second we find we would require two Red Deer Rivers to supply the total water needs of the oil sands because we would have a water deficit of 788,000 m3 per day. Thankfully much of the water for the oil sands doesn’t come from the Red Deer River but the Athabasca River and much of the water can be reused. Even so, at low water flows, the oil sands demand for surface water may exceeds the available water for all of the demands of oil production.
We also have to remember that other people downstream need to use this water. I have stated in the past in other posts that the western pariries are facing major droughts, what then?
Obvious errors-
CO2 is a gas, not a vapour.
“Humans produce about 50 giga-tonnes of atmospheric CO2 vapour per year.”
We do not emit 50 GtC per year, we emit ~7.1 GtC per year including cement production and carbon produced from deforestation. Your numbers are simply out to lunch.
Question for Vitrivius
Seeing I’m running out of time and have to move on to other things. How much of the planets ability to absorb Co2 has been compromised through things like deforestation, pine beetle infestation and acidification of the ocean due to increased CO2? Do your claims of 0.03% still hold true or is the net affect much higher than what you have estimated? I don’t have time right now to check your math, but I don’t think you’ve taken into account how the CO2 balance has been altered through man’s increased emissions and earths reduced abilities to absorb CO2. Have you calculated the amount of CO2 required to increased the earth’s average atmospheric temperature one degree and how your numbers affect future climate?
I’m amazed a post can get so much attention and can be taken seriously when it contains lunacy such as this-
“Smoking, since it has been mentioned, is another such case. We are told that smoking kills. Nonsense; having a smoke won’t kill you. Smoking a lot for a long time has a tendancy to reduce one’s life expectancy by a few years. The fear-mongers tell us to be vewy afwaid. The numerate ask themselves: am I willing to spend a few end-years of my life on the overall cause of enjoying all the other decades of my life?”
Only someone trying to push a fool’s agenda can justify the consumption of a known carcinogen.
I too would like a link (or links) for this stuff. Our town is having a free showing of “An Inconvenient Truth” in a few weeks and my wife wants us to go. There will be discussion afterward. I’d like to reference something more than “I read it on a blog” when bringing up these numbers. Thanks.
Alan
“Kate you should e-mail the post to Dr. Heidi Cullen at the weather channel and Al Gore just for shitz and giggles, if you recieve a response post it!
Posted by: Boss429 at April 8, 2007 5:49 PM”
Why, do you think Heidi Cullen and Al Gore need a good laugh?