[extropy-chat] No frozen Europe...

[Adrian Tymes]

--- spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> This carbon must be all the stuff living in that
> seawater.  About 70% of the planet's surface is
> ocean, and as I recall the average depth is about
> 4000 meters, so I calculate a total ocean mass
> of about 1.4e21 kg.  So the mass of the carbon
> in the ocean is about 4e16kg.
> 
> Did I goof that calc?  If not, then there is nearly
> one hundred times as much carbon in the sea as in
> the air.  So if the amount of krill and other ocean
> bio-stuff is increased by one percent, that would
> devour all the atmospheric carbon dioxide, which
> would be bad.  But a quarter of a percent would
> compensate for increase in CO2 in my lifetime, which
> might also be bad but some would argue is good.
> 
> So if we nuke a few whales, each of which devours
> a lot of krill and makes a lot of CO2, then we
> could take down the CO2 a lot more than that goofy
> failed treaty.  Could it really be as easy as slaying
> a number of whales?  I bet we could do that.

4e16 kg * 0.25% = 1e14 kg.  This is way more than the total mass
of all the whales prsently in the Earth's oceans.  (A blue
whale, the largest known animal, is about 1e5 kg.  It is
estimated that there are less than 1e6, possibly less than 1e5,
whales of any type in existance today.  While whales, like most
predators, consume more than their body mass over the course of
their lives, at any one instant they only account for their own
body's mass: the prey they will consume near the end of their
lives may still be but component atoms at the start, and vice
versa.)  And whales are not the only krill predators out there.

Not that this would be the first objection you'd run into if you
tried to do it, of course.