3 ms·
trillions of kg/yr of anything will effect the environment in some way, since "the environment" is just the emergent properties of all of the things in the eart
by vanniv 4y ago
trillions of kg/yr of anything will effect the environment in some way, since "the environment" is just the emergent properties of all of the things in the earth system and trillions of kg/yr of stuff is a lot of stuff. If you added (or removed) 10^12 kg of water (or literally anything else) to the planet, it would change the environment in detectable ways.
- meindnoch 4y ago>10^12 kg of water That's exactly 1 km^3 of water. The Earth has 1,386,000,000 km^3 of surface water. I don't think increasing the amount of water by ~0.00000007% would be noticeable.
- burnished 4y agoIt would probably mess up any km^2 of inhabited landmass.
- meindnoch 4y agoSure. And a glass of water can kill you if it goes in your lungs. But stick to the charitable interpretation, where the water is distributed evenly in the environment, shall we?
- burnished 4y agoIf we want to be charitable, then perhaps you’d see that my point was specifically about how the scale was important, and that averaging impact out over the entire globe was perhaps not the correct scale