Here is a letter I sent a guy recently where I decided to calculate the ratio of pollutants per year in a way worse case scenario for vehicles to atmospheric weighted volume!
------------------------12/16/08
I've been trying to start a petition that we have a national holiday this time of year where Al Gore is tied to a tree in each of the southern states and pelted with whatever snow might be lying around.. Seriously what a rip off artist. They were pushing pre-2002 stats knowing that things had reversed overall since then. That's what climate does. It cycles. Fer cryin out loud...
Let's do a fun calculation to get an idea of what's going on. Let's just ignore the fact that nature has ways of reconstituting compounds and recreating a pure environment for a moment... Above our planet is an atmosphere having a total volume weighted of something like 40,000 feet of thickness by ...oh it's 1.6 billion cubic miles or so :-). Even if everyone DID drive a log truck.... and say a billion people drove them 10,000 miles per year and actually replaced the atmosphere at a volue corresponding to the emission output of the vehicles... average flow rate of .5l per rev or thereabouts at 2400 rpm at 60mph...within factor of 2 or 3 off the top of my engineering brain.. :-) So they drive at that speed for 10,000 minutes in a year. Or total revs of 24million. 12 million liters of polluted air. X 1 billion people. 1.2 x10^16liters total.
Alllrighty then. SOunds like a lot! But of course there are 4.17 X10^12 liters PER CUBIC MILE. hehe.
Sooo... we're talking then about 1.2/4.17 x 10^4 cubic miles here. Or 2900 cubic miles.... of noxious atmosphere diluted into the atmosphere so it's about 1.7 parts per million of atmosphere.
NOW let's remember that nature continually filters and purifies things. Let's remember the sheer volume of more noxious stuff emitted every time a volcano goes off. Let's recall that EARTH'S ANCIENT HISTORY WAS MUCH MUCH WORSE! :-) Then..let's line Al Gore up in front of a tribunal.
I think I've constructed a worse than real case scenario in terms of auto pollution. In reality there are relatively few large transport vehicles and they are amazingly efficient for what they do. If we'd stop bailing out auto companies that have neglected to advance beyond early 1900's technology intentionally and have buried other people's attempts to do so...and let free market reign... I think the pollution from vehicles would be even substantially less than that. Not to mention the insignificance of people's inhalers etc. :-) I heard to day that these idiots banned a type of inhaler that worked much better/more cost efficient than the ones they are forcing people to use now who have asthma. Some people need to be imprisoned...in a work camp..where they learn how to WORK in stead of meddling in things they are clueless about :-)
-Bob