Timeline for How much land would be covered by the plants that turned into the fossil fuels humanity has burned?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 20, 2020 at 20:49 | history | bounty ended | LShaver♦ | ||
| Mar 18, 2020 at 14:14 | history | edited | LShaver♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Added headings, made the calc more precise.
|
| Mar 18, 2020 at 13:54 | vote | accept | LShaver♦ | ||
| Sep 27, 2019 at 15:45 | comment | added | James Jenkins | @LShaver the last last two paragraphs of the answer, imply that we have already burned about one hundred thousand earth-sized landmasses. Your thought that "Africa/Asia/some other recognizable land mass" is off be several orders of magnitude. | |
| Sep 27, 2019 at 15:39 | history | edited | Christopher Gilmour | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
response to comments
|
| Sep 27, 2019 at 15:09 | comment | added | LShaver♦ | This is helpful, thanks. However, I'm more interested in how much coal we've burned -- not how much is in the ground. Of the 3 million generations of trees covering the land, how many became coal which we've already burned? | |
| Sep 27, 2019 at 14:33 | comment | added | Chris H | It seems like if you could work out how many trees turned into coal, one further step would be to convert to the number of times you'd have to cover the earth's entire surface area with trees, then wait 20 years for them to grow | |
| Sep 27, 2019 at 13:02 | comment | added | Jean-Paul Calderone | Nice. I wonder if there are any estimates of what proportion of the trees growing during that time actually made it into coal? Presumably some fell down and rotted, releasing some portion of their carbon immediately. Are we looking at 90% of the carbon in these trees turning into coal? 2%? I don't think this substantially changes the reasoning of your answer - unless the percent turns out to be vanishingly small, 10^-10% or some such. It would just be nice to have an estimate for completeness. | |
| Sep 27, 2019 at 9:24 | history | answered | Christopher Gilmour | CC BY-SA 4.0 |