High School Math And Climate Change (The Importance Of Railway Carriages)

WHY RAILWAY CARRIAGES ARE SO IMPORTANT

People think that this Global Warming Climate Change debate is all about Science, and because Science is something that no one ever pays any attention to at High School, people have little if any understanding of even the most basic Science. However, it’s really just about Math.

One of our posts at this site that consistently gets readers is the one I posted about how one ton of coal produces 2.86 tons of Carbon Dioxide (CO2), and I think that is because people just cannot believe that one ton of what might seem a really heavy thing, lumps of coal, can produce something that is perceived as a gas, you know something that is really light and just floats in the air. Those two weights are actual weights. One ton of coal produces 2.86 tons of that gas, but don’t think of it as a gas that just floats in the air, because that heavy weight of coal produces nearly three times it’s own weight in CO2.

It’s something that is hard to understand, and even harder to try and explain.

So then, let’s build up a picture.

Those large coal fired plants burn an awful lot of coal. In fact, all the coal fired plants in the U.S. burn just over one billion tons of coal each year, and those are the most recent figures, from only 4 weeks ago.

That is 1,041,065,000 tons of coal, and look closely at that figure. It doesn’t really mean much because it is hard to imagine, being so large.

So, let’s break it down a little into something that can be imagined.

One of those large coal fired power plants will burn on average 7 Million tons of coal a year. I’ll refer you to the one I use consistently as an example, Bruce Mansfield Power Plant at Shippingport Pennsylvania on the Ohio River, near Pittsburgh. The only reason I use this plant is as a reference only, because in the main, those large coal fired plants, all of them, burn around the same amount of coal to produce their electricity.

The plant has a nameplate capacity of 2460 MegaWatts, meaning that at maximum output it produces that amount of electrical power at any one time. That power is supplied to the grid, and used by all the consumers around that area. It supplies to that grid an amount of 20 Billion KiloWattHours of electricity each year, enough to supply the total needs for 19 million household residences. All of these are just meaningless numbers because that plant does not supply those houses. It supplies power to the grid, and that power is used by consumers from the Industrial, Commercial, Residential, and Transport sectors as a whole.

However, the point is that all those figures are pretty meaningless, because they can be used however those people wanting to make a point, or to run an agenda, wish to use them.

RAILWAY CARRIAGES

So then, let’s introduce those railway carriages I mentioned above.

Go back to the Bruce Mansfield plant I mentioned above. That plant, and remember it’s similar to all those large plants, burns 7 million tons of coal a year. That is an average of just under 20,000 tons a day. Read that again.

20,000 tons for each and every day, every day of the year.

The coal is brought to this plant by barges up the Ohio River, but at most other large coal fired plants, the coal is brought to the plants by rail. Most of you have never seen a coal train load being hauled. Three large locomotives haul the coal into the plant, and behind those locos are 100 cars, each of them stacked to the gunwales full of coal. The whole unit is 1.2 miles long. Each carriage holds 100 tons of coal, so that each load that comes into the plant is 10,000 tons each. So that makes two loads of these coal trains each day for each one of those large plants.

Keep the coal train in your thoughts because the amount of CO2 produced from the burning of that coal just for that one day amounts to 57,200 tons or nearly 6 train loads of 100 cars, or 572 carriages.

That’s just for one large coal fired plant.

For the whole of the U.S. I mentioned that 1.04 Billion tons of coal burned each year, and that produces just on 3 Billion tons of CO2.

That amounts to 30,000 of those coal trains or 3 million of those coal carriages.

3 million of them, and just to produce half the electrical power used in the U.S.

Now imagine this.

30,000 large coal trains parked side by side, all of them a mile and a quarter long, every carriage full, because that’s how much CO2 is emitted each year from just the coal fired power sector in the U.S.

Okay then, now scale that up for the total CO2 emitted from the surface of the Planet each year.

This amounts to 50 Billion tons, and please don’t think that’s a number I’ve pulled out of thin air. The sources for that are from those who are actually pushing this whole scare campaign, The United Nations, and two of their bodies, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as the International Energy Agency, a separate body.

That’s 50 billion tons of CO2 emitted each and every year.

That is 5 million of those coal trains, parked alongside each other, all one and a quarter miles long.

500 million carriages, all packed tight with 100 tons of CO2.

Wow! That puts it into perspective now, doesn’t it.

Now you can see exactly how huge this problem is.

But, wait a minute, is it really a problem?

The total CO2 content of the Atmosphere is 385 parts per million.

Man, that is a lot, isn’t it?

Again, just more meaningless figures that no one can really imagine.

So then let’s break that down.

The whole Atmosphere is the total, that being one million, so let’s then look at the content of the whole of that Atmosphere.

Gas Content…..Parts per million…..Percentage

Nitrogen ……………….765,500……….76.55%

Oxygen …………………205,400……….20.54%

Argon ……………………….9,100…………0.91%

Water Vapor ………….19,500………..1.95%

Carbon Dioxide ……..385……..0.0385%

Miscellaneous Gases …..115…………0.0115%

TOTALS………………1,000,000…….100%

Those bottom three are the Greenhouse gases we are told are (CATASTROPHICALLY) heating up the World. As you can easily see there, CO2 makes up an all bit insignificant part of the atmosphere, about one thirtieth of one percent. The largest of those Greenhouse gases is water vapor, yes, and that’s right, clouds. The smallest are the miscellaneous gases of which Methane is a very small part.

If the whole Atmosphere was a single 100 carriage coal train, then CO2 would take up the same space as a small box, around 18 inches square and 18 inches tall in the bottom corner of one of those one hundred carriages.

So, the most startling thing to stand out in the whole of this argument is that those running this scare campaign concentrate on the huge numbers, and not on these tiny overall numbers graphically shown here. Also, they are relying on your lack of understanding to scare you with those huge numbers, when in actual fact, the total opposite is really the case.

Now, consider this.

Go back to the big numbers above. The one where I mentioned the overall worldwide figures for emission of CO2, 50 Billion tons, that being the 5oo million coal carriages parked in a row, 5 million long coal trains all with 100 carriages behind them.

THAT IS THE 50 BILLION TONS OF CO2 EMITTED EACH AND EVERY YEAR.

Now, go back to the overall Atmosphere coal train the one with 100 carriages and the total CO2 being the small box in one corner of one carriage.

That 50 billion tons emitted from the surface of the Planet each and every year adds 2 parts per million to the overall CO2 Atmospheric content. Go to the breakdown of gases  above and equate those 2 parts to what you see there.

That 50 billion tons of CO2 we emit each year amounts to something the size of a balled fist in the bottom corner of the small box in the bottom corner of ONE of those ONE HUNDRED carriages behind the locomotives.

It may be about the Science, but it’s really about the Math, and what is being most effectively used is the population’s lack of understanding about the Math to baffle you with the Science.

This whole Global Warming Climate Change debate is the biggest practical joke ever perpetrated on humanity, the whole of humanity, and we’ve been sucked in, hook line and sinker.

To work all this out, all you need is basic high school Math, and the ability to visualise a train with one hundred carriages one and a quarter miles long.

See now how Math can be so interesting. It tells the truth. Not like some Politicians.

UPDATE

Sometimes it’s even difficult to imagine a row of 100 carriages behind those 3 locomotives, and the total CO2 we emit each year being that balled fist inside the small box in the bottom corner of one of those carriages.

If that is hard to imagine, then this post is 1551 words long. Take this whole post as the content of the Atmosphere surrounding the Earth. The amount of CO2 we add each year to that whole atmosphere is equal to the full stop at the end of this sentence.