This artist’s rendering at left suggests a device that its proponents say will, one day, capture CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere, and mitigate the growing threat of climate change. But let’s think about this for a moment.
The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere is fairly consistent from the planet’s surface up to about 60 miles in elevation.
Given that the radius of the Earth is ~4000 miles, and that the volume of a sphere is 4/3 πr3, this means the volume of this section of our atmosphere is 4060 4/3 πr3 – 4000 4/3 πr3, = 2.9 trillion cubic miles.
How many of these devices will be required to make a significant dent in the overall CO2 concentration, given that they need to process almost 3 trillion cubic miles of our atmosphere? What’s the cost per each one? How will they be powered, given that our grid-mix is largely fossil fuels? Won’t this only make matters worse?
This is a sad joke, but even sadder, it’s not the only one out there.
There are so many tragic aspects to life in today’s United States that it’s hard to name them all.
For my money, one of the saddest elements to the American zeitgeist is its glorification of ignorance.
Up until recently, if you wanted to know what science believes about anthropology, climate change, or particle physics, you asked a scientist in the relevant discipline, who not only has a college degree, but normally a ton of education on top of that.
Now, you ask a congressional Republican, preferably, an evangelical Christian.
To the author of the meme here (if it’s an actual human being, vs. a Russian bot): to the best of my knowledge, the only actual major “scientific fraud” in world history was “Piltdown Man.” In 1912, a pseudo-anthropologist attempted to fool the scientific community into believing he had discovered the “missing link” between apes and humans.
Now, are there examples of instances when the science of the day turned out to be incorrect?
Of course, and new instances of this surface every day.
Think of how little when scientists believed 200 years ago is still intact today. Perhaps most obviously, Newtonian mechanics has fallen to relativity and quantum physics, but there are hundreds of other paradigm shifts in health and medicine, psychology, cellular biology, chemistry, and particle physics.
Contrary to what conspiracy theorists want you to believe, science is not a set of facts; it’s a methodology whereby we come to learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
Are there other methods by which we “learn?” Sure. Some uneducated guy goes on YouTube and becomes convinced that our consumption of fossil fuels is not causing the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to rise. I would argue that this conduct is inferior to the scientific method.
Renewable Energy
Trump’s Only Real Talents: Attracting Attention and Controlling Morally Weak People
Trump is not an idiot. His IQ may not be too high, but he’s smart enough to know how to conduct himself in his lifelong quest to amass more wealth and power at the expense of everyone else on Earth.
Trump’s Only Real Talents: Attracting Attention and Controlling Morally Weak People
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