Did I Say 30 Billion Tons of CO2 a Year? I Meant 40.

Every now and again a global warming denier will say that humans aren’t putting much carbon dioxide into the air, and it’s less than a lot of natural sources. I’ve pointed out that in fact, humans throw about 30 billion tons of it into the atmosphere every year, 100 times as much as volcanoes do. I got that number from a paper published a few years back.

It’s almost impossible to grasp what 40 billion tons means. A cubic kilometer of water weighs a billion tons, but it’s hard to imagine a cube 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) on a side—the equivalent amount of water weighing 40 billion tons. The largest class of aircraft carrier weighs about 100,000 tons, but picturing 400,000 of them still strains the imagination (not to mention vaporizing them into the air every year).

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/08/20/atmospheric_co2_humans_put_40_billion_tons_into_the_air_annually.html

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