[extropy-chat] Global warming news

[spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-
> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike
...
> The carbon dioxide is about 380 parts per million by mass.
> 
> (10 meters)*(380/1000000) ~ 4 millimeters.
> 
> So the entire mass of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is equivalent to a
> water layer about 4 millimeters depth, or about 4 million kg per square
> km...Or you can think of it as a layer of water a little
> over a centimeter depth, or a layer of wood a couple cm...

I worded this weirdly.  I meant to say a layer of water a little over a
centimeter depth over all the current land that is above the ocean.  Or a
layer of wood a couple cm thick over all the land.

> ... the previous
> calculations assuming 2 meter diameter trees spaced on 40 meter centers...

I meant 20 meter centers.  When I was hiking at Mount Rainier last summer, I
estimated a well-watered forest had big trees on about 20 meter centers.
The BOTECs I did at the time were in my head since I had no envelope to
calculate on the back of.

In any case, I see the advantage of storing carbon in the form of wood,
since it would leave us the option of undoing what we did, should we decide
on a different way to control the temperature of a region of the planet.  An
example would be a very large number of solar panels which are mostly
reflective on one side, black on the other.  During the sunlit part of the
day, the panels would extract some energy from the sun and reflect the rest
skyward.  After sunset the panels would be flipped over with the black side
facing up, so heat could be radiated into space.  This assumes we still want
to keep all that ice and waste all that good heat.

spike