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The Impact of Interrupting CO2 Flows on Global Warming   (Introduction)

Global Warming CO2 Flow Diagram - How To Read The Diagram
The b
asic elements are shown here but without data


This is a more complete CO2 diagram than you usually see.  It includes and shows the size of nature's role in the fight against Global Warming.


1. The red up arrow on the left shows different CO2 sources man is adding to the atmosphere each year for an annual total of 36.7 billion tons of CO2

2. The downward green arrow shows how much fossil fuel CO2 land plants and oceans were able to remove from the atmosphere during that same year.  This arrow is the key that unlocks energy independence.

3. The horizontal red line shows how much excess CO2 is left over in the atmosphere every year.  It is Global Warming's annual Growth.

4. The downward blue arrow shows what we have to do to enable nature to repair the environment.

5. The horizontal green line is the annual ZERO GLOBAL WARMING line.  If we can get the red line below the green line, we are rolling Global Warming backwards.

IN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WORDS: The horizontal red line is the “Global Warming Growth” meter.  The higher it is above the horizontal green “zero” line, the worse things are.  If the red line is on the green line, Global Warming’s growth has been halted.  If the red line is below the green line, Global Warming has been reversed and the atmosphere is being repaired to some extent by Mother Nature.

 

Reducing the length of the red up arrow is what it is all about.

 

Your body needs the right balance of many trace chemicals to be healthy.  Like your body, our living planet is a complex and delicate system, using a little CO2 to capture a little of the sun's heat.  Without this trace amount of CO2, the world's average temperature would be zero degrees F.  A little CO2 in the air goes a very long way when heating Planet Earth.

CO2 needs to be a TRACE gas in the atmosphere at around 300 ppm (parts per million) to keep the world's temperature in normal balance.  As long as modern man's annual production of fossil fuel CO2 was less than 20 billion tons per year, nature was able to keep CO2 in the 300 ppm range through plant growth and water respiration. 
            

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The Impact of Interrupting CO2 Flows on Global Warming   (Presentation)

Global Warming CO2 Flow Diagram - With Data Added To The Diagram
The basic elements are shown here and include data

Notice the lengths of the lines.  They loosely mirror each other because a particular fossil fuel's nature has fostered its use for certain applications.

1. The upper long blue down arrow shows the coal, oil, and natural gas CO2 produced by the world's 143,000 power plants.  It shows the effect repowering all those fossil fuel power plants with nuclear would have.  To coal-to-nuclear chapter.

2. The middle short blue down arrow shows the natural gas CO2 produced by (mainly) peaking electricity generation and natural gas heating.  It shows the effect converting those uses from fossil natural gas to nuclear electricity would have.  Natural gas is naturally dirty - it produces 2/3 as much CO2 as coal.  To electricity instead of natural gas chapter.

Coal and natural gas are the "low-hanging fruit" in the effort to end Global Warming.  It's our big break. 

3. The lower long blue down arrow shows the oil CO2 produced by burning fossil oil.  It shows the effect converting from pumped fossil oil to carbon-neutral oil made by using nuclear's heat and hydrogen would have.   To oil from "dirty" natural gas or carbon-neutral algae chapter. 

We will always need the low-tech, high-precision energy of oil for our long-distance transportation vehicles.  In the best of all worlds, we would be in a position to grow unlimited amounts of algae in Gulf Coast swamp ponds.

CO2 intensive industrial activities as cement and steel production also fall into the difficult to substitute category.

 

That's it.  There isn't a whole lot more that needs to be done to end Global Warming. 
To a great extent, this is all that mankind is doing wrong.

 

 

The tragedy of Global Warming is that we don't have to make CO2 to make electricity.

(Left red up arrows: IPCC - Global Energy Flows 2004 IPCC 2004 .pdf ; Blue Fossil Fuel Power Plants arrow:   CARMA's Data ; Deforestation, other arrows: NOAA - Carbon Tracker NOAA's Data;  
Diagram by Marilyn Holm.)  
(Divide CO2 by 3.7 to find Carbon.)

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How did the author come up with this diagram?  To Supporting Data Page 

 

End
 

As it was in the decade before World War II, the world is again in a period of disbelief as we watch and ponder the slowly gathering storm of climate change.