Sunday, March 31, 2019

Every mile you drive puts One Pound of Carbon Dioxide in the air

From a youtube comment on global warming:

 Derek Miller said:
Average miles driven by car per year is about 15,000 miles, and there are over 1.06 billion cars on the planet. THEN, there are over 383 million commercial vehicles on the planet and they are split between long distance driving and local by about 50%, so half of the trucks average over 45,000 miles a year and the other over 100,000 miles per year. (I haven't even bothered to look up aircraft, ships, and trains).

 Atwaterpub replied:
The numbers are astronomical and that is frightening. Here is how I calculated the answer. A gallon of gasoline weighs about 6.7 pounds and is almost completely long strings of Carbon atoms. When you burn a gallon of gasoline it removes 12 pounds of Oxygen from the atmosphere and replaces it with 19.2 pounds of Carbon Dioxide. (The numbers don't quite "add up", but check them yourself, I assume this is due to the molecular bonding physics and other subtle complexities). I assume the average miles per gallon is 19 - 20 miles per gallon. The best MPG numbers on the newest cars are almost 25 mile per gallon, but many cars are old and need the engine tuned. For simplicity of mathematics I assume around 19 miles per gallon, so the average results in "Every mile you drive puts One Pound of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere," Now you can see why the Carbon Dioxide content of the atmosphere has already increased measurably by about 20% (rough estimate) since one hundred years ago. We are dynamically changing the contents of the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate on the geological scale. When all the oil and coal is burned, the atmosphere will return to the Carbon content it has about 500,000 years ago in the age of dinosaurs and the climate will be a tropical hot house. Much of the planet will be too hot for humans to survive at all. And this could easily happen within the next two hundred years. Please check the research and mathematics yourself.

 copyright (c) 2019 
William Schaeffer

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