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Pigeon English
It is thought we are still in the Ice Ages, just that at the moment we are lucky enough to be alive during an Interglacial, brief window.
Perhaps the current Ice Age got going about thirty five million years ago.
That is when the living biota of Antarctica died out, the trees and the animals ceased to exist because it got so cold.
It is easier for a land mass at the pole to freeze over, much harder to freeze over the salty seas.
The Arctic Ocean iced over about two and a half million years ago.
I think there were very few people alive during the glaciations.MN: “Obviously, there will be a lot more Carbon locked up in living livestock.”
What utter BS is this??
The carbon “locked in” to livestock will all be released within a couple of years at this most, when they are slaughtered. In the meantime, they release vast amounts of methane, and they consume huge amounts of vegetation in order to grow.
This is such childish nonsense, please – for the love of God – stop it!
80 million tonnes carbon of in every human body. When they die, that carbon is released into the atmosphere when a body is cremated (plus that from the cremation chamber fuel). Not an insignificant amount if there was a significant event that reduced population by say 90%. However, one flight from London to Los Angeles will release 1,650 kgs of carbon per passenger – even a shortfall flight London to Rome will release 364kg per passenger. There are over 100,000 commercial flights every day across the globe – plus military and private jets.
If you really want to reduce carbon release, it’s a no brainer what should stop first.
However, back to human storage. Instead of cremating bodies after death, we should consider promession instead. Freezing bodies with LN2 then fractionalising with sound waves which reduces the body to small pellets which are then freeze-dried and reduced further to powder. That is then stored in a biodegradable container with top soil and a tree sapling and planted where the residuals become nutrients for the growing tree over the next few years. No carbon release into the atmosphere – just a tree in memory of the departed which eventually will extract carbon and release O2 instead.
* all not every human body 🤭
Michael, what I mean by ignoring people is this:
– “Michael, when you’ve answered the others and when you’ve had time to review the following two links, please tell me what you make of this lot. Russia has deemed it an “undesirable organisation”. Do they look to you like a bunch of elite militarists?”
You haven’t answered the others and you haven’t answered me. And as glenn_nl correctly pointed out, this is a very consistent pattern. Rather than debating us, you’re lecturing us, as if you know far better and wouldn’t lower yourself to answering our ignorant questions. Maybe you’re a god and have seen what happens to a statistically significant sample of inhabited planets when apes suddenly start burning aeons-worth of accumulated carbon deposits in just a couple of centuries. To dispel this impression, please answer questions as if you were a mere mortal like the rest of us 🙂
Just so you know we’re not all complete sheeple, yes, the risk we’re alarmed about is that human activity is crash terminating the current 2.6 million year ice age called the Quaternary glaciation.
Clark, I do not wish to offend you.
I have not answered your military piece because I found it bizarre,
sorry for not understanding.
I did answer Shibboleth
but the answer I posted did not show and I did not make a copy of my post. I have not forgotten how I answered.
Can I say, in a week Donald Trump will take the helm in the U.S.A.?
None of us know what he will do but he has been quoted as saying “Drill Baby Drill”
He has talked about going back to “King Coal” , taking over Canada and Greenland, probably so he can extract more Carbon.
It has been very cold for ten days, where I live in Southern England, at times minus seven Celsius.
They have been saying that very little electricity has recently been produced by renewables, so as we have shut our last Coal facility, we have had to rely on Natural Gas, probably from the North Sea or America as LNG.
Very little wind lately.
Everything seems to be going wrong, absolutely no spare electricity, extremely low volume of Methane, stored.
Difficult to get Natural Gas from Europe as that has mostly been disconnected from Russia/Ukraine.
Old energy hungry industries are shutting down, like our South Wales Steel mills.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/scotlands-grangemouth-oil-refinery-close-2025-400-jobs-go-2024-09-12/#:~:text=LONDON%2C%20Sept%2012%20(Reuters),into%20a%20fuels%20import%20terminal.
Grangemouth to close this year after a hundred years of service.
We are Europe are in a right pickle.
Some of this pickle is Net Zero.
The North Volt facility in Sweden is broke – this place thought they would make European EV batteries:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrwqpdv5q7oAs the Economies of Europe crumble, there will be a popular clamour to quickly change direction.
Tens of millions of Europeans out of work – will cause a political whirlwind, irrespective of Carbon dioxide increasing.Not just Europe, also China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92FanSQRIgcollapsing
75 steel mills just stopped working in China, little call for the product even at rock bottom prices.
I guess we are entering a World Recession.
People in China are not buying stuff, they do not need, even though their government urge to buy new stuff to keep their economy alive.For glenn,
If the human population has increased from half a billion, pre-industrial, to eight billion, now, that means that a lot more Carbon is stored in those living bodies, that Carbon comes from the air, it comes from Carbon dioxide.
Yes, most of that Carbon will rejoin the air but new people will be born, these new people will get their Carbon from the air.
So in a way 80,000,000 tons of Carbon is “stored” in humans.
Same with live stock.
Yes cows will be roasted and eaten but new cows are born, so an amount of Carbon is “stored” in livestock, as their are more people, there will be more livestock, unless we all go Vegan.
Yes, I am aware these are fairly small amounts of Carbon.I do very much agree with Shibboleth, that flying should be curtailed.
Why should flying be curtailed? Why single that industry out? Doesn’t it provide livelihoods for many people including the tourism it generates at destinations?
What criteria do you use to decide which industries should be curtailed? Why should any be curtailed over another?So, Michael, what you are suggesting is that humanity cannot live without fossil fuels. What are we going to do in a few decades time when oil and gas deposits are completely exhausted?
ET wrote: “Why should flying be curtailed?”
Because it’s unnecessary and produces large quantities of pollution at altitude, which has an unquantified effect on global warming and air quality. It doesn’t matter that those working in the sector and related industries will be affected, work wise. If we continue as we are doing, there wont be any “livelihoods” by the end of the century.
Michael – This really is desperate stuff.
Cattle are not a net positive because they temporarily store carbon, very far from it. Besides producing vast amounts of methane for their entire lives, they require habitat and feeding, which results in huge amounts of deforestation.
Humans – far from being an ideal carbon storage unit – emit carbon in vast quantities throughout their lives as a result of their activities. The longer they live, the more carbon is produced.
This appears to be yet another of your “good news!” stories which are – in fact – the exact opposite. It would be nice if you could acknowledge this once in a while, instead of quietly going on to the next equally silly point.
All of which appears to serve the purpose of dismissing global warming, with some vague and rather silly notions that stand up to no scrutiny whatsoever.
If you do not, at least some of the time have animals on the land, you have to use fertilizers, to encouraged the crops to grow. This heavy application of fertilizers, decreases life in the top soil, and I would guess decreases the ability of the top soil to retain Carbon.
Much more carbon should be stored in the top soil than in all the land based life, including trees.
Keeping top soil living is extremely important.Keep taking the tablets Michael.
Glenn,
Grass fed British and Irish cows ARE very low in methane output and their presence increases the carbon uptake of the soil. Since we are so good at growing grass it would make more sense to keep them as opposed to shipping grain-fed, polluting, South American cows half way across the world to reach us.
Grain fed, factory farmed cows produce more methane. They ARE the problem.
In many ways I share Michael’s cynicism about much of what we’re told. Much of this seems to come from America. It’s almost as if nobody but them is allowed to use their own resources. We’re guilty of climate change but they aren’t apparently.
The aforementioned cows, by the way, are owned by Cargill. The gas we’re currently paying four times the price for is coming from the good ol’ US of A too. It’s almost as if they’re driving their competitors into an early grave.
Furthermore we’ve recently been forced to buy “medicine” from them at ten times the price. As we now know the virus the “medicine” was alleged to cure came from gain-of-function research paid for by the same guy that headed the roll-out.
Our country is on its way to being improved by “A.I.”. This form of A.I. seems to have the unfortunate habit of stealing intellectual copyright from anything it comes in contact with, along with its propensity to record every conversation.
It’s almost as if there’s a pattern here?
Is climate change real? Yes, I believe so. Monied interests seem not to care though, one only has to look around to see that. The slithering agents of the monied folk seem to invoke the spectre of climate change to obfuscate their betrayals, whenever it suits, causing more cynicism.
Further to the carbon-stored-in-bodies concept, I thought to look at the figures in case the original poster hadn’t bothered to think about it at all :
1 litre of Co2 weights approximately 1.964g at stp, and according to the calculations below, a 70kg male might store about 126 litres:
Each body can thus store about 247g of co2. Great stuff, that’s nearly quarter of a kilo!
But wait – I did an online test which – despite my being a vegan, never flying, doing lots of recycling etc. etc. – still suggested that my personal emissions are more than 5 tons a year, every single year.
That’s 5 tons per year, against 1/4 kg *temporarily* stored during an entire lifetime.
Michael – where the hell are you getting this rubbish from, that suggested humans storing carbon is some “good news!” story that offsets climate change? Did you make it up yourself?
glenn the human body is not full of CO2, except in the lungs, ready to be exhaled.
However the human body is at least partially made of Carbon.
“The human body is about 18.5% carbon by mass. This means that the average person of 120 lbs contains around 21.6 lbs of carbon.
Carbon is the second most common element in the human body, after oxygen. It’s a vital component of the body, forming the basis of many organic molecules, such as carbohydrates, proteins, and fats”Where in the body stores 21.6lbs of carbon. In what form and in what tissues?
So a person weighing 70 Kilos would have about 28.54 pounds of Carbon in their body
Even if it did store – temporarily – 21.6kg of carbon, an individual still puts out SEVERAL TONS of co2 into the atmosphere – permanently – every year!
Do you only understand one side of a balance sheet, or suffer from some kind of mental block, Michael? To spell it out for the particularly hard of thinking, the amount stored (temporarily!) is utterly trivial compared to emissions. I can’t believe we’re actually having this conversation. Are you really this stupid, or just having a laugh here?
Maybe you think spending a couple of thousand pounds on a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce to take you to the local Spar each day is an excellent idea, because it saves you a couple of pennies on shoe leather?
Thanks for not answering my questions again, Michael. The clue was in the question. Yes the body is made up of many compounds – carbon is one. Hydrogen and oxygen are another two. Fat cells store carbon in the form of triglycerides, which are made up of these three compounds. When fat cells are broken down carbon atoms are released as CO2. Bones also contain carbon in the form of bicarbonate and carbonate. We need it to live. Too little CO2 and you have metabolic acidosis or ketoacidosis or respiratory alkalosis.
We do produce CO2 from breathing but not in anything like the quantity that an internal combustion engine running on fossil fuels will produce – and of course, we don’t exhale carbon monoxide.
When you die, if you are buried then the carbon compounds released during decomposition will eventually leach into the graveside solid, where it will be remain. However, if you are cremated, then the process releases significant quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – from the burning body, coffin and the gas used for cremation. Much more than the 28.54 lbs of carbon compounds in the body. Put a large steak on the BBQ – leave it there and observe what happens. Note the smoke that’s produced.
If HPAI H1H1 acquires the few mutations required to enable H2H transmission and infection and the mortality rate is as high as 80% – then cremating 7 billion bodies in a short time might have an impact on atmospheric C)2 and pollutants – but probably not as much as the wildfires in LA or a year of commercial airliners flights.
Our bodies are not the problem. It’s the grey matter between the ears. How we behave – what we burn deliberately without any thought of the consequences.
Shibboleth, although my daughter is a doctor, I am just an ordinary retired person.
If you knew the answer, why ask me?The top soils of the Earth, hold or should hold much more Carbon than the surface biosphere.
Bad land practise is releasing some of that Carbon to return to the air.
By putting chemicals on the soil, “modern” agriculture is doing the World a huge disservice.
The critters/microbes who should thrive in the soil are being killed/harmed.
Removing forests, massively reduces the leaf litter, which helps to make fresh top soil.
It is also important to have a rotation, involving animals, thus putting natural fertilizer back into the top soil.
If we don’t care for our top soils, we end up with industrial farming.
Quote
“The amount of C in soil represents a substantial portion of the carbon found in terrestrial ecosystems of the planet. Total C in terrestrial ecosystems is approximately 3170 gigatons (GT; 1 GT = 1 petagram = 1 billion metric tons). Of this amount, nearly 80% (2500 GT) is found in soil (Lal 2008).I give up.
Michael seems to be harangued with questions that the inquirer could answer themselves.
One regular is that as fossil fuels are finite, what will they be replaced with. The obvious answer is that nuclear would provide for most of our expanding needs. Few seem to acknowledge, or welcome, that obvious solution.
The other way this problem will be solved, is by realising that we are very good at invention. The Malthusian predictions of mass starvation came to nought because of our creative abilities to produce more…_
Uranium is also a finite resource and there are significant risks with most aspects of nuclear. Most of the 10K + reactors are situated on the coasts at sea level. The 2011 tsunami in Japan demonstrated the catastrophic consequences at Fukushima – and we still haven’t recovered the corium that’s contaminating the groundwater and will continue to do so for the next 32,000 years.
But even if we improve the nuclear industry to reduce these threats, electricity still won’t come anywhere close to the energy used through fossil fuels. Electric airplanes? Ships? Heavy industry? Even cars…. The latter are already on a very limited timeframe given the relative scarcity of lithium. How long could we possibly mine the ore to make vehicle batteries? Three decades? Four? Then what?
We have to radically change the way we live, but I sincerely doubt that will be possible with 8 billion consumers demanding more and more. We’ve set in motion a sequence of events mostly through our stupidity and greed – and permitted the wholesale destruction of ecosystems and the environment via a couple of dozen global corporations, but also ourselves. You still driving/flying/burning coal, gas or oil?
I’m not haranguing Michael, simply asking him to justify his many weird and wonderful comments. I note you haven’t answered my question to you on another topic. But of course it isn’t compulsory.
Best.
As for Thomas Malthus, his observations have veracity, only the timescale is flawed. The advent of fossil fuels and the Industrial Revolution gave us some respite, but the consequence of their use has warmed the planet and is making the sub-tropics uninhabitable and barren. Back in the 1790s the global population was around 1 billion – but he foresaw the road we were on, with exponential growth in a finite world. You are a human supremacist, Digger? You think we have the ingenuity and imagination to overcome Mother Nature once we’ve made her angry and determined? We’re just apes without the hair who have made an enormous mistake. I’m not particularly religious but I do appreciate most of the lessons and parables scripture offer. You remember Adam and Eve and the apple? We just ate the fucking orchard. Then cut the trees down.
Back to your nuclear fantasy. The reactors are located around the coasts at sea level. Not everywhere will experience a tsunami, but we’ll all see a significant rise in sea levels once the west Antarctic icesheet melts and Greenland lives up to its name. Several metres according to some experts. You’d think politicians would know this and act accordingly – but they’re just hairless apes too.
