How much CO2?

[griz]

I hear estimates about how much CO2 is produced by each American per year.  Usually it is many tons.  I'm more than a little skeptical of numbers trotted out to make somebodies point, so I have a question to put it in perspective.

How much CO2 does a person exhale every year?  I would like to steer away from the debate over cap & trade etc.  But if you have an explanation of why what we exhale is not as bad as what we produce from combustion (so I have heard) I'll listen to that too.

Thanks, Griz

[alex_trebek]

http://atmoz.org/blog/2007/05/01/direct-co2-emissions-by-humans/

The first three paragraphs:

On average, a human will breath 16 times per minute [1]. Each breath will contain, on average, 0.037 grams of CO2 [2]. An average year is 525948.766 minutes. An average human will live to be 67 years old [3]. This means that the average CO2 exhaled by the average human in her lifetime will be 20861230 grams, or 23 tons. That’s a lot of mass, but this value is hard to compare to anything. The average CO2 exhaled by all humans in one year is 2230000000 tons, or 2.23 gigatons.

The current mass of CO2 in the atmosphere is 3000000000000 or 3 teratons [4]. The amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere by human respiration is obviously miniscule.

Volcanic activity alone injects around 200 teratons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year (Gerlach, 1995). I’m not sure of the largest source of atmospheric CO2, but this seems pretty large. Especially when compared to the worldwide CO2 emissions quoted below. Human respiration accounts for only 0.001115% of CO2 emissions (assuming volcanic activity were the only source of atmospheric CO2 - which it’s not).

I would like to reiterate the original author's statement, that this study was done on an amateur basis using data from the intertubes.

[Ryan in Maine]

Well, amateur or not, one thing is clear to me -- we must ban volcanoes. Volcano-owning countries should at least be required to register them with the Earth to bolster accountability. We can then combine the new registration system with past scientific research to get a better idea of what countries are spurring the most pro-volcanic activity and charge them to own their volcanoes. Etc. Etc.

[alex_trebek]

I never took any classes in college that dealt with the carbon cycle.  I learned a few tidbits talking to people who did, unfortunately my googling has turned up nothing to support their claims.  I offer them here:

A mass balance of the carbon cycle was attempted with disasterous results.  Basically the people doing the balance could not account for trillions of tons of carbon (in all forms....Not just CO2).

The point of this was to say we do not understand the carbon cycle.  Period.  We have no idea for sure where ALL of the carbon comes from, or where it goes.  What many people are trying to do is look at a few small pieces of a gigantic puzzle and make claims as to what the puzzle looks like when complete.

At least this is how it was explained to me.

[brimic]

Fact: Termites put out more CO2 every year than all of human activity combined.

Kill the termites!!!

[griz]

The point of this was to say we do not understand the carbon cycle.  Period. 

That was my impression since I've heard therories that were all over the map.  Seems if we actually knew how it works we could predict within a few tenths of a degree what the temperature will be in ten years.  But I digress.  I'll try and take shallower breaths.

[Bigjake]

I'll concede that the greens aren't full of *expletive deleted*it, the day they can tell me, within a 1/10th of a degree, what the temperature will be a week from right now at 6:27 pm. 

Then, we can talk about the "impending dooooom" coming our way in the next 300(or whatever they're speculating currently)  years.

Deal?

[Standing Wolf]

The point of this was to say we do not understand the carbon cycle.  Period.

That is not a thought acceptable to socialist parasites.

[coppertales]

Geeeeezzzzz.....don't let on how much co2 we expell or some politician will find out about it and try to do something about it.  After all, we are expendible.....chris3