896 Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

Message no. 896[Branch from no. 895] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Monday, April 30, 2007 1:20pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

An addendum:

If you click on the attached photographs you will see that one website suggested it would take 2.2 earth's to support people like me, while the more detailed analysis suggested it would take 6.8 earths! That is a big difference, and shows you how the models differ. In the first model, the assumption was that I lived in England (they didn't give any alternative). In the second I got to pick my country and I picked Cairo. So already the models are different. Relative to an Egyptian I use an enormous amount of space and resources. For consistency, I should have picked England for both, I suppose. Try it different ways, and always RECORD WHAT YOU DID. That way we can look for explanations for the results!

You will notice that my CO2 output is huge too, even though I only checked watching TV for two hours a day and put my car use (which is taxis in Cairo) at 5 km a day, with an average of 5 km per liter (I did this based on the idea that there are approximately 4 liters in a gallon of gas, and I figured the taxis here aren't very efficient, maybe getting 15 miles to the gallon. 20 miles is about 32 kilometers. 15 miles is 24 km. So a car getting 15 miles to the gallon would equal a car getting 24 kilometers every 4 liters or so, so that would be about 6 km per liter. So I put down 5.

The carbon calculator is for Japanese. For some reason it is easy to find ecological footprint calculators for Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, but very hard to find them for the U.S.!!

Isn't that interesting!!

Have fun with all this and see what you come up with.

A good web based conversion calculator is here: http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi

Okay, since I know it will take between 2.2 and 6.8 planets to support people like me, I'm going to go look through my telescope and see if there are any out there besides Mars we can terraform. Patricia already has Mars, but maybe we can negotiate a real estate deal... :)