How Many Fossils to Go an Inch? (ft. Robert Krulwich)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ส.ค. 2022
- A beautiful guest video by Robert Krulwich and Nate Milton
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Also useful knowing why these trees piled up and buried underground instead of rotting and decaying like they would today. The trees, just like modern ones, were made out of lignin, which was unfamiliar to microorganisms and therefore could not be 'digested' and broken down into more useful stuff like they are today. This caused them to pile up instead of breaking down, and once microorganisms figured out how to break down lignin, this piling up stopped. In essence, all of the coal on earth comes from a single time period, between the first creation of lignin and when it finally was able to be broken down.
It's a somewhat similar situation to what we have right now with plastic.
th-cam.com/video/b34al8YmQSA/w-d-xo.html
I was totally expecting that to be mentioned in the video. This comment should be pinned.
Yup. And the period where coal formed is called, not by accident, the Carboniferous period.
I always found that amazing. Now, if we didn't burn them for fuel, in millions of years all the peat bogs around the world would become the next batch of coal.
Yea Thats the point :D No more coal or oil
I actually know the answer to this. It's lignin. The polymer that makes trees grow tall evolved long before other organisms developed a way to break it down. So bugs, bacteria, and fungi couldn't eat the wood so it just piled up. Just like plastics today.
I was expecting an explanation of the possibility of burning newly dead bodies for electricity
Same
Same
+1
Happy birthday sparsh
Yup, I thought it was gonna be something like "in ideal conditions, how much energy can we get from a fresh corpse"
I’m a marine biologist. I know this stuff like the back of my hand. But I have never seen a TH-cam video that will stick with me as much as this one. Never seen one that is so captivating and interesting. Never seen one so intriguing. I will have to go and look for more Robert Krulwich.
I just hate that a video like this gets half a million views. It's sad this message just doesn't resonate with people, even when its put together so well.
@@JAHWH People are burning minerals good stuff
Robert Krulwich used to co-host the Radiolab podcast. I urge you to check it out, the old episodes with Robert especially are very interesting. They explore science, humanity, philosophy, life, etc.
you clearly dont know this stuff off the back of your hand, cause hes off by a factor of a thousand. its 55billion tons per year, NOT TRILLION tons as he says in the video. rewatch the video 5:22 , he used the wrong numbers in his math. in reality its about 0.019 earths per year. still a lot, but his claims are utterly insane and should have sparked some doubt if you were actually knowledgeable in this subject. If you get back to me with calculations even slightly near the 100 earths per year, i will apologize.
@@JAHWH its put together terribly, i checked his math and its wrong, he messed up hardcore and used 55 trillion tons instead of 55billion tons. frustrates me to hell that no one bothered to put any effort into the math here. not the author, not his team, not minute physics and not a single fucking person apart from me out of the half million people who watched this.
half a million people watched this and thought 6875 000 kg of fossil fuel per person per year sounds about right. I have low expectations for humanity, but Christ at this rate we arent going to make it.
The message behind this video is really good. It's not judgmental, but tells you straight up front how much energy we are using and what this equates to.
It omits telling how much of this fuel there still is, a really obvious thing to address
@@randomanon2999 But a really hard thing to answer. The results can vary very much depending on what you are looking for.
Total count of barrel oil? Part of said sum that can be extracted without being so incredibly expensive that it will no longer be used as fuel? Part of said sum that could be used but should not if we don't want to return earth to the CO2 levels it had before life even began?
The amount also shifted over time in the past. So many times they said we reached _peak oil_ but we always were able to extract more and more from the earth.
IMHO it's a good thing that they did not answer the _How much is left_ question since it doesn't really fit the rest of the video.
@@randomanon2999 It does tell us that beyond any doubt, there is no way for the current fauna and flora to absorb all this old carbon we release.
@@KuruGDIThere's also the fact that we are actually past peak conventional oil, which was around 2005-8.
Yes we keep extracting more but these are uncommon reserves, things like tar sands, and they are more expensive to tap into.
And without any climate nonsense. Great video, this should be shown in schools.
I never realized until now how much I missed Robert's voice on radio lab. This is both a testament to Robert's narrations and the current crew there that are still as captivating while giving the show a new feeling.
Without Robert wasn't radiolab for me. Maybe I'll give it another try after a while.
Alexandru - Nice observation! When I heard his voice in this video, I got a nice, comfortable feeling. It’s interesting that simply hearing a voice evokes such positive feelings.
His voice is pretty much _the_ NPR voice.
Where can we go to find Robert’s work post RadioLab?
@@pasikavecpruhovany7777 It’s still excellent but I do miss him so.
I love the term "old sunshine" for fossil fuels, never though of it that way
i had to watch that part again, "ravenous for old sunshine" really is a different way to put it
Exactly. And so weird pro oil people prefer their old sunshine to current sunshine eg solar power for energy. And are anti renewables.
@@danielbass09 While I agree with you, renewables aren't the be-all-end-all in this scenario. We still have a lot of problems to work through before they're even close to being ready to take over. One of the most important is efficient grid-scale storage to smooth out the largely intermittent renewable generators. And we can't just keep throwing batteries at the problem, lithium is finite just like coal and oil.
@@frostchain2362 The answer to the baseload question is nuclear.
@@hurrdurrmurrgurr Maybe, that's what I'm leaning towards too. Unfortunately, the discovery of large natural gas deposits in the US has brought the price of new gas turbine generators even lower than nuclear plants.
That used to be a core advantage of nuclear, its return on investment. Sure, they were ludicrously expensive up-front, but they cost next to nothing to run. At least they used to, like I said, now natural gas has taken the seat.
You just dethroned Kurzgesagt in the "most existential crises per minute of video" competition
Robert is such a talented presenter. This video is phenomenal
This was beautiful. That last model about “using 100 earths every year” should be used a lot more in public campaigns.
Maybe, but that just makes me think how many millions of years of that fossil mass we can still spend :D it doesn't sound too bad on its own when I don't know enough about other factors.
Some rough calculations (using numbers from this video) shows that our sun burns through about a million earths’ worth of biomass every year. Don’t worry though, still plenty left to keep going.
This is basically nothing. Given millions of years to store all this carbon - even with 100x pace humanity will go extinct without even using 5% of all that stuff :)
@@nooneknowsme7538 we might not use all of it but not all of it is equally accessible. Looking past the sustainability issue, we must use more destructive methods like fracking that causes increasing amounts of damage to the environment to get those harder to reach fossil fuels. It’d be nice if napkin math was all it took to figure that we’ll be just fine but unfortunately things seem to be more complicated and often have compounding effects.
@@kayj312 I remember seeing a youtube or quora comment or something of that sort say something to the tone of 'we'll never truly run out; it'll just get too expensive to retrieve, forcing us to utilize what we have more sparingly, or transition to alternate fuel sources.'
I was expecting a creepy modern solution, instead I got a rather beautiful, mind blowing, explanation of fossil fuels.
I think I missed the joke because they changed the title, what was it before?
@@DracarmenWinterspring more or less 'Powering our world with dead bodies' or something to that effect. Honestly kinda metal.
@@DracarmenWinterspring Burning the Dead for Power (ft. Robert Krulwich)
@@leoncana i think thats called biofuel, by far the biggest form of 'renewable energy'. except thats living stuff, ie rainforests. well it might be dead when its burned. but i dont think the capitalists care, as long as it burns. so might not be so green or renewable. ie its a big pile of neoliberalist horseshit lies like solar, wind, net zero, carbon capture, ecars, sustainable development, the planet isnt overpopulated etc etc etc
What
More Robert Krulwich, please! This was like a little bonus Radiolab with animation, very cool. Thanks!
Excellent presentation and lovely to hear Robert Krulwich's voice again... miss the old RadioLab... way back when... Thanks!
The animation is off the charts once again, and the information provided is great too! 👍🏻
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Reminds me of Aeon Flux animation
i can't tell if this is sarcastic or not because the animation looked like MS paint
Best part was the asshole of the cat.
I've missed Robert on Radiolab. His voice is so calming and his laugh infectious.
I thought he was retired from Radiolab but he keeps appearing on it doesn't he? He was on the most recent 9-Volt Nirvana episode about transcranial electrostimilation
@@whimbox9648 reruns
This is one of the first videos I've ever watched that truly made me want to change.
Highly illuminating video thanks!
The start of this video is great, but I think the numbers toward the end are wrong, unless there's a factor I'm missing. At 5:24, the claim is that 55 *trillion* tons of fossil fuel were consumed in 2018: according to the IPCC, this figure is 10 *billion* tons. In comparison, the total amount of carbon in living things on Earth today is estimated by the IPCC at 450 *billion* tons, mostly in the form of land plants.
Thus, we are burning about 1/50th of an Earth's worth of ancient life per year in fossil fuels, not 100 Earths' worth.
It's possible that the video's calculation is intended to account for the fact that only a fraction of the living carbon on the ancient Earth got fossilized, but the video specifically says "55 trillion tons of fossil fuels" rather than "55 trillion tons of ancient life", and in any case it doesn't cite a source for the conversion factor, and I'm not aware of scientific literature that pins it down.
Anyway, the caption "2018: 55 trillion tons of fossil fuels" at 5:24 is highly misleading or wrong, but I'm not sure whether it's a calculation error on the video authors' part, an unstated assumption, or a misunderstanding by me.
See figure 5.12 here: www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter05.pdf
This is depressingly typical of the kind of environmental doom-mongering we get served up today. Charismatic speaker delivers pseudo-scientific half-truth over the top of beautiful animation, gets signal-boosted by reputable channel, doesn't really conclude with anything beyond a vague sense of sadness, bunch of people watch and it makes them sad and not motivated to do anything because the problem seems so incomprehensibly vast that an individual person cannot possibly make a difference, and the one guy who bothers to fact-check it is only visible in the comments if you sort by 'recent'.
Of course, if the video was UNDER-estimating fossil fuel consumption and/or the risks posed by climate change, it would be considered dangerous misinformation and possibly even removed from this platform. But it's okay to misinform your audience, as long as it only makes them MORE frightened of environmental doom and gloom. And people really consider this ethical.
Best number I could find for the amount of carbon in the entire atmosphere is 875 billion tons. Based on that alone, I don't see how the 55 trillion figure can be right. My guess is that it is not the burnt fossil fuel itself, but the amount of ancient carbon that it corresponds to, since that was the theme of the video. Based on the 2 tree comparison only yielding half a ton of modern day coal, it gives an extra conversion factor of something on the order 1000-10000, which is about the discrepancy you indicated.
Also it seems to be a caption error because the audio says "if we add up all the ancient life it turns out that what we burn in a year weighs 100 times more than all life on earth today"
And later around 5:59 it says " 54 trillion tons of ancient carbon", obviously referring to the weight of the original plants, not the weight of the fossil fuel.
Yes that immediately struck me as making no sense. Consider all the trees in all the forests in the world and how much a tree weighs and intuitively there's just no way we burn that weight in fuel in just one year, let alone 100+ times as much.
@@JontyLevine individual people are fairly irrelevant in climate change to begin with. Governments and corporations are the ones with the keys
This was incredible. Just beautiful, scientific storytelling. Thank you all for sharing it!
It was a gross exaggeration that was framed to make it seem wrong to use fossil fuels. This video was nothing but propaganda. But you idiots will see when the grid can't handle your electric cars and you are freezing to death in your homes.
So lovely to hear Krulwich’s voice again. It does not disappoint. Thank you, Robert!
Beautiful, expanded my mind, thank you.
1000 kWh / month!!! That's insane! The average household in the Netherlands uses 3500 kWh / year!
Damn, didn’t realise that, that’s insanely much
Switzerland here, I was thinking exactly the same. US standards I guess...
The US home might be using electricity for heating while most homes in Europe are heated with other means
@@jonnenne but also the US has many many times more AC units for example than houses in the UK (something like 80% of US homes versus
@@jonnenne I think the US has bigger refrigerators too.
From the title I thought this was going to be about some Brave New World, Soylent Green esque dystopia where human corpses are burned 🔥 😅
Man why dystopia, dead people are burned all around the world so why not use it to our benefit
I mean, human corpses are burned today too, just not for energy.
double use crematorium
We really should. Dead bodies don't have a purpose anymore. Our obsession with the afterlife and preserving bodies is creepy and weird when you think about it. It's like the Stages of Grief but we never leave the Denial phase.
Give it time
this was the first time I've ever heard of him and wow, the way he narrates is really calming. Not to mention the animations and the info, such a good vid
He narrated on the NPR podcast Radiolab before Jan 2020. If you liked this vid, you’ll love Radiolab.
This video was really good, nothing about it was particularly abnormal, but the artstyle, robert's voice, the longer video that feels more like a story than a science lesson. Just really hit all the little good spots
"The world must be restored, not only to provide for the fundamental needs of people today and in the future, but also to secure humanity's freedom in a universe where freedom is rare. For you must be self-sufficient in this universe, or you will become dependent upon others and they more than you will determine the terms of engagement and your ability to create and to determine your own future."
To learn more about humanity's destiny within a universe full of intelligent life, read Marshall Vian Summers' work which is completely free online.
Thank you for sharing this piece of wisdom.
Wooow! This voice, this nostalgic voice of Radiolab! Robert once again catalyzing the creation of a masterpiece
This is so brilliantly done, great job to the animators and everyone else included
Right down to the cat's pucker ass.
Thanks!
I learned much today!
A quick and very pleasant reminder that Rober Krulwich did not in fact DIE when he left Radiolab, he just went on to do other things.
I always get a bit sad when his voice pops up somewhere, I just love his enthusiasm for things.
Phenomenal work. I know that they require more effort but please do more of these guest videos because they are just amazing.
4:08 grandma smokin a cig😂😂😂😂 so accurate
Just WOW!! This was the nest explainer video I've seen on this topic😍 THANK YOU🙇♂
KRULWICH!!! I'm never disappointed after hearing a Robert Krulwich story, and the perspective that this story painted was artfully jarring. Fantastic animation, too.
ditto!
The narration was witty and intriguing enough to keep my attention and not be annoying! Fantastic video!
Visuals were great too, especially reusing them whenever the narrator referred to similar ideas and concepts. Really cemented understanding
If you liked the narration, listen to some old episodes of Radiolab. It's not the same now without Mr. Krulwich, but that's okay.
Do you mean jewish?
Love this voice and animation, thank you
Spectacular animation and the info shared were just beyond belief. Just wowwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!! Thanks mp for sharing :) :)
Everything about this video is beautifully done. The writing, voiceover, art, all the content is spectacular. Good work!
This is a beautiful bit of science communication; the narration and the animation are both wonderful.
Excellent work, well written, easy to understand, but no mention of how much is left.
What a brilliant short film!
I listened to radio lab for a long time and it good to hear Rboert Lrulwich's voice again
Is this 1MWh/month figure accurate?!
If so this is insane! that's more than 3x as much as an average European (4pers.) household!
It isn't necessarily insane at all if heating is electric. 10 MWh/year is the average in the US. US uses a lot of energy oer capita, more than average in Europe though.
Very normal. Insulation in the USA vs Europe is terrible. My bill in my 400 square meter house is about double that per month, 2000 kwh, mostly because of air conditioning and running the swimming pool pumps. It will go up too when I buy my Rivian electric SUV. At least the video tells us that coal is solar based and organic, so we can sleep well at night.
I was Just thinking that. I use 1500kwh per years!
I checked the comments looking for this message exactly. Thank you
That's not really an accurate comparison, because even though Europeans don't use a lot of electric energy, they do use a whole lot of energy in terms of natural gas. Where Americans heat (or cool in the hotter places) their homes with electric heat pumps (AC), Europeans usually heat their homes with natural gas. If you then only compare electric energy used, it throws off the figures. Incorporating energy from natural gas is kinda tricky (due to unknown inefficiencies), but maybe somebody can do the calculation? Europe is now changing over to heatpumps slowly, because AC is needed due to hotter summers caused by climate change and natural gas is a limited resource compared to electric energy from renewable sources. It will be interesting to see in a decade or so how the comparison is then. I know I've run my AC pretty much all night every night lately due to extreme heat in Western Europe.
I think the average American still uses way more energy than the average European, but the difference isn't as much as 3x.
Edit: just checked some figures, Germany is about 7000kwh per person per year, where the US is about 13000kwh per person per year. So not quite double.
Beautiful narration
This really put into perspective how long the earth have been around to produce all the fossil fuels we use today. Great video
I love the animation for this video, and how crazy the amount we burn each and every year
The music, the ambience, the animation... Is this... Lofi science?! LOVE IT
More seriously, great stuff as usual, didn't that's where the video would go!
lofi science communication - narration to learn/study to
Great Video, thank you!
What a wonderful video!
Thought this would be about the feasibility of bodies as a power source
This is like the third comment I’ve read saying some very weird stuff like this. Was the title changed or something? I don’t understand what could’ve made you think this would be some weird video from the title: “How many fossils to go 1 inch?”
@@nickthompson1812 I'm also confused. Good thinking on your part that this was most likely due to a title change. Just going by the pessimistic tone of the video, perhaps the original title was something along the lines of "how many bodies have to be burned to move your car just an inch?"
A lot of the sunlight that fell on the ancient earth was reflected or lost. But much of it was locked in fossil fuels. A ton of coal or barrel of oil should represent some percent of an ancient day of sunshine. How many days do we burn per day now? I think that would be an interesting measure.
yeah!
A rule of thumb one can use is that photosynthesis captures about 6% of the energy of sunlight, and sun shines at about 1 kW per square meter at best. With fossils, a lot of that 6% has been lost in the various conversion processes. Today, with solar panels that have 20% efficiency, the whole current human energy consumption could be met with just surprisingly small area in place like sahara that gets a lot of sun and has a lot of area. So sun in theory has totally enough energy to power whole human consumption.
@@iwatchwithnoads7480 Actually above atmosphere it is a lot more; 1,36 kW / m^2. The 1 kW is at sea level on the surface. Either way, as said before, it is a rule of thumb, naturally it is affected by many things . . . Also when talking about how fossils were formed, I don't know can we expect that the radiation has always been at the same level as it is now.
@@wopmf4345FxFDxdGaa20 k I might've mixed up my area with the equator then. My bad
@@iwatchwithnoads7480 😂😂 No problem, my numbers can very well contain mistakes as well. These above numbers I got yesterday from Wikipedia, so I would expect them to be now about right.
🙏🏼👍🏼👍🏼
Thanks for the video
Great work 🥳Thank you 💜
WE NEED more of these videos. His voice, the animation and the music make a perfect trio.
I love this style of animation and the narration!
Thank you so much! This is beautifully crafted!
they are wrong there is 1.1 trillion metric tons of organic life at least 30% of that will be carbon and wee only use 15 billion metric tons of fusel fuels
but that said climate change it 100% real and posses an existential threat
That was an incredible video,wow!!
Thank you for putting this together. It really helps visualize and understand the impact of actions that seem so mundane.
They are mundane. There's a reason the video didn't include how long we could keep using fossil fuels, because it's a VERY long time and that doesn't fit the narrative, even though there are plenty of other reasons to not use fossil fuels like carcinogens released when it is burnt.
these animations are honestly just incredible. what an amazing work of art ❤️
This is the most meaningful and relaxing video I ever saw on TH-cam
Fantastic collaboration
I too was assuming recycling of humans. But I was not dissatisfied at all. It was an impactful narration which has hit home for me and possibly for everyone else. Thank you. I hope this video reaches many many viewers.
Imagine being such a poor country that you need to burn coal or petroleum to produce energy, Brazil is trully one of the few countries with more than 90% of eletricity production from renewables and the only country with more than 50 millions habitants who do that, and 40% of our fuel consumption for vehicles cames from the most green fuel source available, so instead of burning dead bodies for eletricity, just be like Brazil and you are good.
@@C0lon0you are sad? Be happy. Homeless? Buy a house
Wow! Great video! Thank you Minute Physics for bringing us such informative and entertaining content. ❤️
Omg I love Robert Krulwich. Thanks for bringing him on!
This is so beautifully animated. I’m speachless.
this guy has such a calming voice
I want this guy to read me bedtime stories
made me tear up. Very effective. Thanks for this
Gullible. ✅
Loved this one
OMFG it's Robert! Just the other day I was trying to remember the podcast he used to do for NPR because I miss him. Thank you!
This was in every way brilliant! I also loved the narration, it somehow gave me Jurassic Park 1 park narrator vibes.
To me the narrator sounded almost exactly like former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.
This is the best thing I’ve watched this year! Sorry (& also thank you) Henry/minute physics, you are generally brilliant but Robert and Nate’s video is something else!
Amazing animation, text, and execution
This is a beautifully animated and narrated video.
Excellent video (and one of my fav narrators too) - now let's do this calculation for uranium or thorium (both are similar in energy content): 1 ton contains 20 BILLION kWh, over a million times the energy density of coal. The world extracted for use 170,000 TWh in 2018, (170 trillion kWh) so we divide (170,000 tril / 20 bill ) = 8,500 tons. 1 ton of water takes up 1 m3 (about 1 cubic yard), but uranium is ~20x denser so it only takes up 8500 / 20 = 425 m3 of space. That's a cube only 7.5 m (25 ft) on each side to power the WORLD annually. The solid "waste" takes up the same space. This is what the future of nuclear power could look like.
Amen!
If only total energy was the same as extractable energy.
The nuclear fission future is not the near future. And the nuclear fission present consumes about 60000 tonnes of uranium a year to provide about 4% of global energy needs. This doesn't sound too bad, but uranium is a pretty scarce resource, and there is an estimated 130 year accessable fuel reserve at the current use rate. Running even half the world on nuclear fission would drop that to about 10 years of reserve.
I'm suprised by how much coal an ancient tree could produce, I was honestly expecting the number of fossils to be a bit higher.
I am a little dissappointed however, when I went to the description to check the sources, I didn't find any. Can I see the sources for this video? I remember minute physics putting sources in the description more often.
That's the problem. Whenever you try to ask questions with this sort of thing, you are suddenly the bad guy. Sounds a lot less like science and a lot more like a scam to me. I agree we are putting carbon back into the atmosphere at unprecedented levels, but until anyone can come up with an alternative that actually works, it's all hype. The loudest people are actually the ones who have the largest carbon footprint. They justify flying around the world in jets just to get to their environmental summits. Until there is something better, I'll continue to service and operate my gas engines thank you.
Sometimes I have to laugh at my neighbor who can only cut half his lawn in one day because his mower needs charging in between. And it can't cut through the growth of a full week, so he has to cut it twice a week. That's 4 nights per week he gets covered in grass clippings. Four times more than me! All to save on some small engine exhaust fumes which are cumulatively totally insignificant against the largest offenders, cars and homes, each with a semi-permanent flame burning inside.
Great video!
Amazing video. Hope more people get to watch this.
I really liked this video. The animation, the voicing, the music, and especially the writing. The phrasing that we treasure an ancient sunlight is somewhat... nostalgic, I guess? I'm not so sure how to say it myself.
This video is the best explanation I’ve seen that puts into perspective just how much fossil fuel we as humans are burning. That’s a lot of fuel to be burning.
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not really. Even if you burn for 1,000 years at 100 “earths per year” is only 100,000 earth years. If you are familiar with geologic time scales you know that this is nothing.
@@Adam-ns2cr The key is not every living being on Earth dies at once to all become fossils, only a tiny fraction do. So it's not actually 100,000 earth years worth of fossils it's way more. It's also worth considering that these were real living things and to stop and be grateful for this life.
You are so gullible.
Oooh.
Pretty pictures are moving.
🤭
@@donothingMTIAMG the math checks out, idk what you're trying to prove. we burn at least 100 past years worth of energy for 1 present year. It's a good thing we happen to have a long period of time when these creatures broke down without being eaten by microbes.
I loved the little laugh at 4:01. Great video, thank you
This was a fantastic video
One of the best narrations I've ever experienced. The animation matches pretty well with it too.
Beautiful video, although I don't think you intended for the youtube cards at the end to block some of the credits. I've always *hated* those cards.
This animation is simply beautiful, I'm speechless
Thanks for this. I always wanted to calculate this.
I find the numbers at the end slightly confusing. We are clearly not burning 55 trillion tonnes of fossil fuels per year. It is roughly 10 billion tonnes of carbon (C - Atoms) per year. I assume that the 55 trillion tonnes relate to the total weight of the carbon in the ancient organisms, before a very small fraction of them were converted into oil/gas. Which is supported by the fact that todays biomass is roughly 550 billion tons of C.
He's not talking about the fossil fuel, but the estimate weight of living creatures that produced the amount of fuel we are consuming. Lot of Nitrogen, Calcium also added up.
Yup, this is an estimation of the ancient creature's total biomass, because that is what we can compare to the biomass here on earth now.
I'm confused by this too. Adding up the numbers for oil, coal, and natural gas, it's somewhere around 14-15 billion tons of raw fuel which agrees with the 10 billion tons of carbon. Quick looking seems to suggest most animals are 20-30% carbon and plants ~50% carbon, so it's definitely not just that. I think the total biomass is probably right.
If you add total coal reserves to the total amount consumed, I think it's roughly 1.5 trillion tons of coal that was ever deposited. If this was deposited at a constant rate over the Carboniferous, it would be 25000 tons a year. We use about 500 million tons a year, so that is 20,000 years of coal per year. Figures for how much biomass the earth makes a year seem to be 100-150 billion, so that over 20,000 years would be 2 quadrillion tons C of biomass per year for coal. Land biomass is higher than sea biomass, so oil and natural gas can be neglected. I imagine biomass production was higher than 100-150 during the carboniferous, but only some of that is even viable to become coal (only 6% of Earth's land is peat bog or rainforest right now), and coal production was also likely not constant, so too many unknowns to get down to 55 trillion from that.
Yay! Robert Krulwich!
I've loved his voice since the first moment when I heard him co-hosting RadioLab!
Not exactly what I was expecting but interesting none the less. Absolutely deserves a like & follow
wow this video really puts things into perspective
This is one of those things... it gives me this funny feeling. It's... anxiety. It's also understanding and anger. Just knowing the scale of how much we carbon we use gives the context that many if not all of us are missing.
It's truly terrifying.
the scale is miniscule though? compared to how much there is
Teachers should show this in their classrooms, this is amazing!
I was genuinely excited to hear Robert Krolwich's voice outside of radio lab. What a rare treat.
The waving hand out of the moving car made me smile!
I was explaining something more like the Matrix's weird conservation-of-energy-violating human-power plot device. This is more interesting!
The original script only mentioned humans as a sort of processor for The Matrix, and that the energy mainly came from fusion (which is still in the movie, everyone forgets).
@@LetsTakeWalk yeah I think they decided to not go that route because it was overly complicated for the audience at the time so they just went with human batteries
@@LetsTakeWalk The movie draws WAY more attention to the human-battery angle, which is the only explanation given for why humans are kept around, which is the entire reason the plot can happen. Focusing on that plot device is appropriate!
And yeah, the draft did something more sensible, but that sensibility didn't survive long enough to be filmed, so it doesn't count (any more than the stupid ideas that were cut do).
Just a quick question because it's a bit unclear in the video, is the weight of everything we're burning the weight of the actual fuel or the weight of the organisms as they would have weighed when they were alive?
The only thing that makes sense is that the weight of the organisms which make the fuel. The fuel itself is much much lighter than the original organisms, and there's no way we could ever collect and burn that much fuel if it was the weight of the fuel itself being equal to the weight of all life on earth x100
It's definitely the weight of the animals/plants as they were alive, that then gets transferred (at a really low efficiency) into the fuel we use today.
I really didn't expect such a good content
Es un video muy ilustrativo de la realidad de los combustibles fósiles. Muy buen trabajo.
Sería genial poder divulgarlo en español.
Gracias, un saludo!
5:43 i got goatsed
You should do one like this on nuclear fissile and fertile elements being produced billions of years ago in ancient kilonovae. Naturally, it would point out that the fission of one of these heavy nuclei produces 40 million times as much energy as the breaking of a carbon bond.
This is a platitude. Would the US trust Iran with nuclear power? Or would they throw a hissy fit and launch another war in the Middle East? How about South America? Has the US decided to stop encroaching on brazilian Uranium enrichment technology yet? There's one reason fossil fuels still come out on top. It's cheaper. And the only reason we need cheap energy is because we organise the economy in such a way that those who do not use cheap power sources cannot pump global marketd full of shit so some industrialists can process that shit into some other refined shit to sell to seven billion people worldwide in order to make a line in an arbitrary graph go up
@@moscanaveia Iran has nuclear power plants
That's one of the best guest videos I have ever seen
Really beautiful animation