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To: Mary Cluney who wrote (61757)	4/12/2005 11:55:12 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Mary, the 15% is total CO2 added by people. Over 100 years, we have added 0.5% to the greenhouse effect. Here is a bit more fancy maths in regard to CO2 absorption in clouds. The volume of a drop of water is 4/3 pi r3 [r is the radius of the drop]. The area of a drop of water is 4 pi r2. Females [you and CB] will already have a blank mind, but bear with me. What that means is that as a drop gets bigger by combining other drops into it, the surface area is dramatically reduced. When the drop is as big as Earth, the surface area is tiny compared with petatrillions of drops of mist turbulently jostling in the atmosphere. That means that CO2 has a lot of trouble soaking into the ocean but no trouble soaking into drops of water in clouds which fall to the surface when it rains, carrying the CO2 with them. Let's look at a single drop of water, in a cloud with say 1 mm diameter [so it's a pretty big one]. When a whole bunch of them combine, they form a raindrop maybe 5mm in diameter. The surface area of a drop of mist is 4 pi r2 and its volume is 4/3 pi r3. If we combine a bunch of the little drops to make a drop double the diameter, we get a surface area of 4 pi r2 = 4 times the surface area of one of the small drops. But the volume is 4/3 pi r3 = 8 times the volume. So it takes 8 little drops to make a drop double the diameter. So the surface area is halved. Keep on combining drops until you have a drop the size of the Earth and you can see that the surface area of the Earth is minuscule compared with the surface area of the drops of water in clouds, so a LOT more CO2 soaks into drops in clouds and falls as rain than is soaked into the ocean. Average rainfall varies a lot around the world, but overall, I guess it's something like half a metre. Google would know. Half a metre of rainfall is the equivalent of about 150 drops of rain 5 mm diameter stacked up on each other [note fancy maths in that drops of rain are round so it takes more than 100 to stack up 500 mm deep]. That gives a guide to the turnover of drops of water in the clouds. We can safely say that hundreds of times more CO2 is absorbed by clouds and dumped into the ocean by rain than by the ocean directly absorbing the CO2. Unless I got it wrong [this is an insomnia post, and I'm making it up as I go so I reserve the right to change it in the morning]. Mqurice