83 ppm. The "Gedanken Diamond" a treasure for all.

Diamond! Maybe Diamond?

Image:Wikipedia Commons

My wife thinks these are the "good" diamonds, and this concept is fine to counter my statement that the only good diamond is a dead diamond, or one on the end of a drill bit! 

I know that is extreme, and I like brilliant cut diamonds as much as everyone else.

But global anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are immense, industrial, planetary-scale, and endange all of us, and all fo life on this world.

How can I, a simple human, a simple man, put this in perspective?

Diamond! I thought! Diamond! Maybe we can get a perspective with Diamond!

With your help, I am going to describe the scale of the Diamond we could make from air!

It will be called "The Gedanken Diamond"! The 'Gedanken' Diamond is a very large Diamond.
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The Gedanken Diamond has a crystalline structure repeating over and over and over. . . in three dimensions.

And while we are describing the Diamond, we are going to "figure out" the total weight of the Earth's atmosphere! You might be surprised that this is so easy!

Image Wikipedia: The cube is repeated from the atomic scale to an immensity like the "Gedanken Diamond."

A Diamond made from the Air

We start like this: How much CO2(carbon dioxide) is in the air?

Since the Gedanken Diamond is made from air, we have to ask how much CO2 can we pull out of the air to make our diamond without pulling so much CO2 from the air that plants are diminished or the surface of earth becomes a snowball.

Scientist have determined by measurement that for every million units of air they trap and analyze, 383 units are CO2. That is, 383 ppm, parts per million. [I wrote this a couple of years ago -- it is now 387 and climbing--but I will use the 383 ppm for this illustration.]

Is this 383 ppm a significant number? Compared to what? We must examine the past to determine the significance of that number. So we dig into the past.

One way we can compare this quantity of CO2 to the past values of CO2 is by examining ice cores. When we do this we learn several very significant things.

1. We learn how much CO2 there was in the air in the past, as well as methane, nitrous oxide chlorofluorocarbons, oxygen, nitrogen, argon, etc.
2. We learn how warm the past climate was, the temperature of the air, and we learn that the warmth is directly "coupled" to the CO2.
3. We learn there is a lag in time to the CO2- temperature coupling and we get a rough idea of how long the lag time is.

We have obtained ice cores from every place on Earth that can provide them for analysis, and thousands of people have analyzed them.

Image: EPA

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/650000-years-of-greenhouse-gas-concentrations/
Image: Real Climate.org Thomas Stocker

We can examine 650,000 years of ice core to find out what history can tell us. We find that never! in that period of time has the amount of CO2 been more than 300 ppm (parts per million). Never! For most of that long period, the value for CO2 was not higher than 280 ppm.  You can prove this to yourself; become an ice core expert, get educated, go get some deep cores!

And this year, 2007, CO2 reached 383 ppm. By Volume.

Those of you that would like to check what your are reading here ought to reduce the window to the width of this text and call up your computer's on screen calculator in scientific mode. I suggest you do this because you won't believe the answers. We could do this as a back of the envelope thing, but you have a precision calculator!

Reconstructions of (Northern Hemisphere average or global average) surface temperature variations from six research teams (in different color shades) along with the instrumental record of global average surface temperature (in black). Each curve illustrates a somewhat different history of temperature changes, with a range of uncertainties that tend to increase backward in time (as indicated by the shading). Reference: NRC, 2006. (Figure reprinted with permission from Surface Temperature Reconstructions© (2006) by the National Academy of Sciences, Courtesy of the National Academies Press)

Image and Text: EPA.

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The weight of the air . . .

Pressure of the Air; pushing down on the Earth: Does it feel heavy?

E. Torricelli (1608-1647) discovered atmospheric pressure.

When he inverted a tube filled with mercury and placed the tube mouth into a pool of mercury, he saw an empty space develop at the top end of the tube. The space is due to the weight of the column of mercury in the tube. He measured the height of the mercury column as 760 mm. He also measured it moving up and down with the weather.

If our educational system did not fail, you know most of this . . .

You know the atmosphere weighs 14.7 lbs per square inch, at sea level. A column of water one inch square and about 33.9 feet tall weighs 14.7 pounds. Since mercury is 13.6 times as heavy as an equal volume of water, 33.9x12/13.6 = 29.921 inches of mercury. or about 760 mm of mercury in the column at sea level. All of us can read the same scripture, anywhere on the planet.

It is easy to measure a square inch or a square centimeter of area. But how many square inches of surface does the "Earth" have. Now that is a challenge! We know how much each square inch weighs! (No one knows the answer exactly, but we CAN get arbitrarily close.)

Weight of the Atmosphere of the Earth

The total weight of the Earth's atmosphere is approachable with what we know of the pressure.

The radius of Earth is roughly 3,963 miles and the surface area of the Earth is 196,937,500 square miles (NASA's value.) One mile length is 63,360 inches in length. A square mile covers a lot of square inches; 4,014,489,600 square inches, actually.

(A square mile contains just over 4 billion square inches, and now we take that value times the surface area of the Earth and then times 14.7 lbs, then to kilograms, from pounds and that is 0.4536 to get to this number of kilograms for the weight of the planets air.)

196,937,500 sq miles x 4,014,489,600 x 14.7 lbs/sq in x 0.4536 kgs/lb = 5,271,681,193,777,152,000 kg.

5,271,681,193,777,152,000 kg. Roughly 5,271 trillion metric tons (1 metric ton is like the old English 'long ton' but it is 2204 lbs.)

This back of the envelope value (well, using the Calculator) is not much different than our climate scientist's give us. However, the air we weighed is wet; it has humidity, and all I can say is we are well into the ballpark.

We want dry air. We could 'fiddle' around with the humidity, and come up with the average amount -- but atmospheric scientist's have done this and I looked it up! The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) uses *5.1352 x10^18 kg for dry air. I am going to write it as 5,135.2 trillion metric tons. Our figures above are larger by 135.8 billion metric tons, Which is not quite 3% of the total. Could water vapor makeup 3% of the air? (Sure.) But, it must be mentioned that water vapor is significantly lighter than average "air" so when we actually measure the water vapor in air we are measuring a molecule that is lighter than air and floats in air.

But of course, it does not escape to space, and does contribute to the overall mass of the air. But water comes and goes in air in a complex manner as heat is transported around the Earth. In this posting I will not delve into water's significant role. Water is a greenhouse gas (GHG), in fact the most important GHG in a major way. When you watch your weather forecast -- you are watching the rain, snow, fog, ice, or clouds -- that are a result of the amount of water in the air -- or the lack of water in the air. Water as a molecule has a short lifetime in the air. At most, any molecule of water lasts perhaps 2 weeks in the air. Then it snows, rains, or ices its way to earth.

CO2, on the other hand can last decades to hundreds, and perhaps thousands of years before it is brought to Earth or sea and processed. That is why the CO2 rise is dangerous to all life on the planet -- because it is so hard to remove once it is placed in the air, and while there it traps significant energy that eventually is transported to Earth, heating the Earth to levels that endanger all life. This posting is an attempt to scale the quantity of CO2 humans have added to the air in a way you can visualize.

Since examination of the 650,000 year history yielded the fact that CO2 never exceeded 300 ppm, we will see how much that is and how much we have added, and need to remove in making a diamond out of the Carbon we humans have added to the air -- and howBIG the diamond will be.

When we measure ppm by volume, we do not directly get the weight.

So to get the weight of the CO2 we have to convert ppmv into how much CO2 in the air weighs, since CO2weighs a lot more than our average mix of air.

Air is 78% (14)N2, 21% (16)O2,and about 1% (40)Ar. So over all that CO2accounts at 0.0383 percent.

We could refine this even more -- and at the price of diamond we probably should, but Average Air weighs
28.96 and CO2 weighs 44.01 as 1 ppmv for weight we do it like this:

44.01/28.96 = 1.5197 or half again as much as the other pieces of the million parts per.

So . . .

That is 0.000383 CO2 x the weight of the atmosphere x (44.01/28.96).

Never before was it larger than 0.000300 CO2 x the weight of the atmosphere x (44.01/28.96) as below!

383 ppm x 1.5197 x 5,135.2 trillion metric tons =2988.9178 billion tons of CO2
300 ppm x 1.5197 x 5,135.2 trillion metric tons =2341.1890 billion tons of CO2
difference------------------------------------------------- 647.7288 billion tons CO2 over what was the maximum for 650,000 years.

You can see the ratio 300ppm to 383ppm means that there is nearly 28% more CO2 in the atmosphere NOW than there has been for the the entire last 650,000 years. We started really piling CO2 into the atmosphere with the "industrial revolution." About 1850. It hasn't slowed since. Okay so how much is that 383 ppm?

83 ppm excess = 647,728,800,000 tons.

Now, a lot of that 647.7288 billion tons weight is O2, so to weigh just the C (carbon,) we take 12/44.01 times the TOTAL weight of the CO2 and come up with about 176.6132 billion tons of pure (C) carbon.

Basically, this is how much excess CO2 we have added over and above the historical 650,000 year CO2 record converted to raw carbon.

So how large is a block of "rock" (of diamond) weighing 176.6132 billion tons?

What volume would it have?

How big is a Diamond that weighs 176.6132 billion tons?

A Perfect Diamond, very pure carbon, has a density of 3520* kg/m^3, so 176,613,200,000 tons in 3520 kg chunks is how many chunks? Since diamond has a density of 3.52, the volume is:

Volume of the "Gedanken" Diamond is 1/3.52 x 176,613,200,000 = 50,174,204,545 cubic meters

That volume (50.174 billion cubic meters) turns into a cubic diamond crystal:

The cube root of (50,174,204,545 cubic meters) = 3688.3050 meters on a side.

The Gedanken Diamond is a perfect cube 12,100.714 feet tall, wide, and deep.

*Some published values differ from this 3520, and 3515 is one that recently was used so my value is close enough for this exercise.

The diamond is 12,100.714 feet tall.  Too big for a lady's finger.

Image: Wikipedia

Mt Fuji is 3,776 m (12,388 ft) so it is 288 feet taller than the Gedanken Diamond. Realize the Gedanken Diamond represents what Man has added to the atmosphere over and above any value for 650,000 years!

Okay. If we had the big Gedanken Diamond cube parked where mountain climbers could face it. . . .I suppose we could offer a challenge for a person to climb it. Think about this: suction cups might be better than any other tool, but would you trust them? For protection you would want a helicopter, to fly and land a big heavy weight on the perfect top face of the perfect diamond. It would have to be heavy, and maybe some good contact cement would help hold something to the diamond, like a winch and a few miles of protective cable... the cube would be 2.3 miles of straight-up-climb! Base jumpers . . .?

That is a lot of heavy carbon.

Image: Wikipedia commons, By Benjamin Zingg, 6 September 1999,with Echinacea fields of Trout Lake Farm

Mount Adams, Washington, USA (3,742 Meters - 12,276 Feet)

Image Wikipedia

The Gedanken Diamond would be more than half the height of Mt Mckinley, Denali, Alaska at 20,320 feet. This mountain is 8200 feet taller than the Gedanken Diamond.

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Baby Breath and other considerations.

Writer Steve Lee asked about respiration. . .

Although it is miniscule in comparison with so much else in the climate it is not "insignificant." At least not to the billions of us in a diamond analysis sense.

6.7 Billion Breaths. Now many of these are baby breaths, and while we could look into population ages, and rough it out for the differences between adult, male, female, 15 year olds versus 6 year-olds versus baby breaths, and although I could take a good stab at it, I will just stick with these figures from the USDA.

According to a study by the USDA, an average person's respiration generates approximately 450 liters (roughly 900 grams) of carbon dioxide per day.

Rather than break it out in to something more controversial I will leave it the 900 grams CO2 per day, and entertain the significance of that. Thats cool. I won't have to worry about its partial pressure as a fragment of the 383 ppmv! Grams is weight already.

It is ALL about population:

http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop
(one of many sites with a population clock)

6.7 x10^9 x 900 g/day = 6.030 billion kg or 6.03 million metric tons of CO2 per day, or 2201 million metric tons a year of CO2.

What does the pure C (carbon) exhaled amount to in that one year? As a thing we can visualize?

Well, for weight of the parts of the gas, since O=16 and C=12, CO2 = 44. The C = 12/44ths of the weight 2200 million metric tons or about 600 million metric tons of carbon. So from what humans eat in a year 600 million tons of carbon are consumed and exhaled in the breath.

Since we could compare that, say to a block of graphite, with a nominal density of say 2 gm/cm^3, we have a cubic block of 669.4m on a side, or 2,196.3 feet tall, deep and wide.

That represents how much of the food consumed we exhaled, just the C in the CO2. How does this block of graphite compare with the humans that exhaled it? And how much food and C was ingested by the humans from the Earth's bounty to allow the human organism to exhale a chunk of carbon that size?

And like above if we made baby breath or a 'breath diamond'

Out of 600 million metric tons of carbon, a year's breath, converted to diamond, how "big" is this rock.

600,000,000 tons x 0.284 = 170,400,000 cubic meters.

Cube root of that = 554.4 meters on a side = 1818.89 feet.
That's a big diamond.

What is the food and carbon situation? I maybe able to address that soon. On the food . . . what happened to the meat you ate, or the broccoli, or green beens? Or any number of carbohydrates.

But how much diamond do you individually exhale into the air?

Using the amount as USDA figures, then 900 grams a day of CO2 is 328,750 grams CO2 or 328.75 kilograms a year, but carbon is only 12/44ths of the total, or 89652.3 grams of pure C.

That is an 89.6523 kg (or 197.646 lb)chunk of pure carbon diamond. So how large a diamond did you exhale? That much weight makes a cube 29.419 centimeters on a side or 11.582 inches on a side, most of a cubic foot.

Everybody breathes one into the air every year. That is about 90% of a cubic foot, so you can take 90% of the worlds population and that is how many cubic feet of diamond could be made each year from breath alone.

Image DOE, and Description: below --

Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations have been increasing for about 2 centuries, mostly as a result of human (anthropogenic) activities, and now are higher than they have been for over 400,000 years. About 6 billion tons of carbon are released into the air by human activity each year, three-quarters from the burning of fossil fuels and the rest from deforestation and other changes in land use, with a small amount from cement production. Although the effects of increased levels of CO2 on global climate are uncertain, many agree that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, predicted for the middle of this century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, could have a variety of serious environmental consequences. The United States is committed to understanding the factors that influence climate change, reducing uncertainties in assessments of climate change, and developing strategies to mitigate change. Microbes in the earth’s oceans and soils play a major role in the cycling of carbon and other elements. The Genomics:GTL research program seeks to understand this role to enable prediction of the impacts of climate change on microbes and their responses to the resulting ecosystem shifts. This knowledge also will provide the basis for developing and assessing strategies for ocean- and soil-based carbon sequestration.

The carbon pool sizes  are expressed in Gt C (Gt C = 10^15 g C). Annual increments expressed in Gt C per year are shown in parentheses. All fluxes indicated by the arrows are expressed in Gt C per year. The inferred net terrestrial uptake of 0.7 Gt C per year considers gross primary production (~101.5), plant respiration (~50), decomposition (~50), and additional removal from the atmosphere directly or indirectly, through vegetation and soil and eventual flow to the ocean through the terrestrial processes of weathering, erosion, and runoff (~0.8). Net ocean uptake (~1.6) considers air/sea exchange (~92.4 gross uptake, -90.8 gross release). As the rate of fossil fuel burning increases and CO2 released to the atmosphere it is expected that the fraction of this C remaining in the atmosphere will increase resulting in a doubling or tripling of the atmospheric amount in the coming century.

A simpler (simplified) and newer version of the Global Carbon cycle from Dept of Energy.

You will note perhaps, that this graphic ignores the Carbonate rocks, the 70,000,000 GtC that life and natural weathering has placed in solid form over millions and billions of years -- Life, that is, has been removing Carbon from the air and oceans for essentially the entire time living things have enjoyed this plant.  If we consider ourselves both the epitome and zenith of lifes expression -- we are destroying the balance nature built, that dynamic equilibrium of the just right amount of CO2 to keep the ice at bay for the most mart of the life experience on Earth.  Does life have to make a "profit?"  How does nature look at Usury?

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Of course, only by magic or superior technology could we suck the carbon out of the air and squeeze enough of it to form the perfect immense diamond that the billions of tons in the air would provide. So we do not have magic. But we do know how to inhale air and make liquid oxygen, liquid nitrogen and of course liquid and solid CO2. The trick is sequestering the CO2. It would be nice to have an easy cheap way to separate the C from CO2. We do not have that yet, and if we use coal for power we MUST insist on 100% CO2 capture and total sequestration. (And severe penalties for failure to capture CO2 from Fossil Carbon sources. Financial and criminal.) Right now, all we have on a large scale is capture via plant's growth in both ocean and on land. And these systems of sequestration have been overpowered.

So this was a thought experiment, a 'gedanken'. And we have the Gedanken Diamond which is the largest diamond ever conceptually encountered on the surface of the Earth.

However! Cooled white dwarf stars, those cooling toward forever, might actually have larger diamonds. These are diamonds that humans will likely never see, because examining one would require extracting it from something that has the mass of the Sun in the volume of an object of planetary size. To mine for real, sizable diamonds; those possessed by cooling stars, might require a few more billion years of cooling, and a command of energy we can't well imagine.

For our own immediate plight, nothing but magic "will protect" many life forms on this planet from the ravages we humans have brought upon them by our last 14 plus years of inaction for the sake of the profit of a few. I do believe an entire new social order -- and realignment of resources and responsibilities -- must be conducted. The 100 million dollar CEO bonuses need to be collected by and given to our societies, for the works which need to be done to restore the air to a state free of fossil produced carbon dioxide. This does not exclude financial or banking executives either. These financial empires and funds derived from the masses of people, need to be returned to them via taxes or out right appropriation to repair the damages done to the environment through these derivatives.

Those resources exploited and damaged must be returned to society and environments via repair and remediation of the "commons." Again this includes all financial exploitations incident to the thermal poisoning by CO2, be it deforestation, or fossil fuel exploitation or direct or indirect contaminant damage to the atmosphere or the hydrosphere.

Unless we build the machines to recapture the fossil carbon, serious consequences for mankind and all other life on the planet will ensue. Business as usual? Not at all, business leaders, environmental exploiters and the corporations that accomplish the damage must be turned to species ownership for planetary good. No more business as usual. Charters and operations across the globe must be controlled for the good of planet and people.

Think about that big chunk of carbon, and if you compute something substantially different contact me through Xomba.

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I apologize to those who may have read this in it's earlier form. I had to remove and rename and repost it.

This was an attempt at visualizing what you can't see, can't smell, can't taste. Something many people deny is even real.