At a larger scale
(From The World’s Fair, based on Running The Numbers, An American Portrait.)
A musical masterpiece? Probably not. But next time someone tells you “our little movements couldn’t do anything to such a big planet”, consider this…
From Dan Pfiffer, Earth’s atmosphere and oceans if they were gathered into a sphere and compared to our planet. Our tendency as small, short-lived beings is to look up into the atmosphere and think that it is high, or down into the oceans and think that they are deep.
And so they are, but not so high or so deep that we cannot pollute them, change them, and put the other living beings therein at risk (and thus ourselves as well). But take a tabletop globe and spray on a single coat of varnish. When the solvent evaporates, leaving only the thin polymer coating, that’s about the proprtionate thickness of the atmosphere.
Dump in eight thousand million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year and you’ll change its composition a little bit, and along with its composition, you change its heat transmissivity. It’s probably OK though. Let’s call up somebody on Venus and ask them what they think.