Volumes in Perspective

I was talking with Paul Kalthoff today about the “biomass” of the human race. I was driving into work and looking over at Pikes Peak (since traffic was running slow on the highway), and thought to myself that we humans really are small compared to that mountain. In fact, I thought to myself, I bet we could throw the whole human race into some imaginary volume hidden behind the peak. Little did I know how much I over estimated, after spending about 10 minutes with Paul doing mental calculations we figured that the whole of the human race would take up only around a cubic kilometer. Here is what I found later that evening:

An accurate estimate of the average volume of a human being was a little hard to come by. However, a rough estimate was proposed in a number of sites found in a Google search that hypothesized the following: the human body is approximately the density of water (1.01kg/l [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(density)]), the average mass of the human body is around 70kg [http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/AlexSchlessingerman.shtml], so the average volume of a human comes in around 70.7 liters.

Next is the simple math of translating a human into a cubic meter:
1hu = 70.7l = 0.0707m^3
1m^3 can hold a little more than 14 people (assuming you hit the puree button on the blender):
1m^3 = 14.1443hu

So how many people are on this planet? That you can find all over the internet:
6.790062216E+9 (July 2009 estimate [https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/xx.html])

So, again some simple math shows that we human beings, one of the most prolific forms of dry-land life, would take up the massive volume of around:
480E+6m^3 which of course equates to 0.48km^3

That’s right! We add up to less than half a cubic kilometer.

When you read articles that state “The biomass of human bodies now exceeds by a hundred times that of any large animal species that ever existed on land.” [http://www.newstatesman.com/200402230015]
You are left with comparing that to what: how much we use in resources? How about how much biomass was morphed into coal?

Just for some perspective, comparing the human race to the volume of coal mined on a yearly basis [http://www.lewrockwell.com/reisman/reisman15.html], I found this interesting article that noted in 2004 approximately 2.1km^3 were mined. So we could pack the mass of the human race into the hole left over from three months of mining coal.

So it would take just a small portion of the top of Pikes Peak (think about a 1km x 1km x 480m box) to hide the whole of the human race.

If you are a visual person, click on the capture of Google Earth where I mapped a 1km line across the Peak.

We are so small.
And yes, I know I’m weird.

--Marty

Manmade global warming, huh?

What happens when a non-scientist (Seth Borenstein, Boston University, BS Journalism [http://www.linkedin.com/pub/8/b5a/438]) reports on science:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090402/ap_on_sc/sci_quiet_sun_2 [original link is dead, try this one:
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_wires/2009Apr02/0,4675,SCIQuietSun,00.html]

Note the second sentence in the AP report…

WASHINGTON – The sun has been unusually quiet lately, with fewer sunspots and weaker magnetic fields than in nearly a century. A quiet sun is good for Earth: GPS systems are more accurate, satellites stay in orbit longer; even the effects of manmade global warming are marginally reduced, though just by three-tenths of a degree at most. [emphasis added]

If I am not mistaken, the sentence is drawing a connection between fewer sunspots and a lower temperature. Is that not reducing the effects of sun-made global warming?

Also, I think the effects of global warming are supposed to be on the order of about 0.1ºC to 1.0 ºC per decade over 50 years [http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2120] or 1.4ºC to 5.8ºC over the next century [http://www.greenfacts.org/studies/climate_change/level_1.htm#3], or 0.74ºC over the last century and 2.4ºC to 6.4ºC in the 21st century worst-case [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report], depending which source of hysteria you reference.

Hmmm, sunspot activity accounts for 0.36ºC to 0.54ºC in one year (main statement in first paragraph does not use units, forth paragraph from bottom notes Fahrenheit) and Cicerone states that “manmade heating effects are 13 times greater than the variations from solar activity.”
That would mean that manmade heating is expected to move temperatures by 4.68ºC to 7.02ºC a year!

Does nobody actually check these numbers?
I guess the general public is just willing to swallow whatever they are fed, as long as it sounds official.