It's HOW MUCH?

In my last post I mentioned that we put over 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere.....EVERY DAY.  I found myself wondering how to picture that.  I mean, how big is a ton of carbon dioxide in its gaseous state?  Well, it would actually occupy 556.2 cu. meters. Okay, how big is that?

556.2 cubic meters equals 727.5 cubic YARDS, and that is 19,642.5 cubic FEET. Okay, how big is that?  To help myself visualize that I looked up the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.  It is 648,000 gallons, and that equals 86, 625 cu. ft.  That would mean that about 4.41 tons of gaseous carbon-dioxide would FILL AN OLYMPIC SWIMMING POOL. 

Since we are emitting 70,000,000 tons of CO2 daily......we are putting approximately the volume of 16 MILLION Olympic pools into the air.......every single day.  Since a regulation pool is 164.5' x 82' and has an area of approximately: 14,965 sq.ft. or 1662.8 sq. yds.  simple arithmetic tells me that we are covering an area of over 116 BILLION sq. yards...to the depth of over 6 feet.....with gaseous carbon dioxide.

I still just cannot get my head around it.  Okay, there are 4,840 square yards in an acre.  Therefore each ton of CO2 (at 1662.8 sq. yards) covers a little over a third of an acre, i.e. .343 of an acre.

So, 70 million tons of CO2 covers about 24 million acres to a depth of six feet. I grew-up in New Jersey, and that state has only 5,586,560 acres, or 8,728 sq. mi.  And so, we're releasing into the atmosphere a volume between four and five times the size of New Jersey (six feet deep) every day.

And, I STILL just cannot get my head around that......or the idea that there are some people out there who have the temerity and even the pure audacity to think we can make this massive and steady input of a 'greenhouse gas' into the climate of this not so huge planet we live on and that it will not have any effect. 

It would be better to simply admit that a person who thinks this way is just hiding under a cloak of simplicity and ignorance....than to think that they are actually intelligent and simply refuse to accept the stark power of the Truth that is confronting us:  WE NEED TO CHANGE WHAT WE ARE DOING TO THIS PLANET, OR BE PREPARED TO ACCEPT THAT WE ARE PLAYING A CENTRAL ROLE IN OUR OWN EXTINCTION.