Friday, January 16, 2009

Wow, I suck at blogging.

I have to apologize for not writing anything for a long, long time... Between school, work, a baby, new games and laziness I've just procrastinated. Well, I thought that I would blog now.

Recently I watched 'The Day After Tomorrow', a fictional movie about humanity's punishment for mistreating the earth by using fossil fuels. As disaster movies go, it's pretty entertaining and I particularly enjoy Dennis Quaid as an actor and I don't know if there is a movie that he's been in that I don't like.

Well, as I'm watching this movie, I begin to think about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere... How much is produced by humans, but how much is produced by volcanoes and other sources. By researching some mostly reliable sources, I found that humans directly or indirectly cause about 26 billion tons of CO2 per year. While finding the amount that volcanoes put into the air (a disappointing 130 million tons per year.. I thought it would be a lot more.) on a government site, I found a wikianswer that said that insects produce about 48 billion tons of CO2 per year. Really? I then started digging, but no matter how I phrased it on google, for about two hours all I came up with were articles on how CO2 affects insects, or the effects of climate change on insects.

On google books, I found an obscure reference in a book by a real Entomologist that stated that it is estimated termites produce about 2% of the global amount of CO2... considering that the global amount of CO2 is about 3,000 billion tons (According to Wikipedia) that would mean that termites make about 60 billion tons per year... and that's just termites!

So why am I having such trouble finding information on the amount of carbon dioxide that is *not* produced by humans? All of this conflicting information makes me feel that this is kind of a conspiracy, and that blaming global warming on humans is completely ridiculous. If the 26 billion tons of CO2 that humans produce is just too much for this fragile ecosystem, then I have a plan to rectify global warming once and for all: Kill all the freaking termites!

1 comment:

Emily said...

Oh Jacob,


Its about time you blog again, now I dont have to stalk you on your cute wife's blog! How the heck are ya?

Emily Fitch Jensen