Hey look, your friend just discovered paleoclimatology, which has a Wikipedia entry and everything.
But yeah, let's spend our time arguing "hypotheticals" which can be easily answered online with a single Google search.
Climate Change - How about filtering CO2 out of the air?
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A recent MIT study has found a way to capture CO2: "The system uses about one gigajoule of energy per ton of carbon dioxide captured."
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Now, if we do the calculation:
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There are about 38 Gigatons of CO2 emitted into the air every year globally. That's 38,000,000,000 tons annually.
It takes about 1 gigajoule or 278kwh or 0.278Mwh to remove 1 ton of CO2.
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Strongest Wind turbine that I could find googling is about 8MW. So if the wind only goes 1/4 of the time that's 2MW or 2MWH*24*365 = 17520MWH per year.
So one of those turbines can pull out 0.278/17,520=63,021 tons of CO2 per year.
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That would mean that pulling all the CO2 that's produced per year out of the air would require 38,000,000,000/63,021= ca 603 thousand wind turbines.
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Germany in 2015 had about 27 thousand wind turbines. That's about 4.5% of required wind turbines to remove all new CO2.
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Of course this doesn't answer where we get the electricity for regular usage, also it is just a thought experiment, but it shows that I think we will very likely end up pulling CO2 out of the air!
https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Never-Environmental-Alarmism-Hurts/dp/0063001691
I wouldn't say it is unbiased but it does offer the counter point of Climate Change enthusiasts!
Believe what you want. Homo Sapiens evolved on an omnivorous diet. He is healthiest with a balanced diverse diet. Look at a Human's teeth. If we were meant to be herbivores, our teeth would be a whole lot different. And your world population is also wrong. Try 7.6 Billion.
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Lastly, our closest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees, are omnivores. The leading theory as to how humans evolved is that we became long-distance runners and hunted food by running it down until it tired, and that our access to meat and protein enabled our brains to evolve further than otherwise. So meat-eating is in our history as well as our DNA and physiology.
Vegetarians need not despair: now that we've evolved beyond having to hunt, we don't need to eat meat to survive or thrive at all. A vegan diet is possible and healthy for humans (with care to get enough vitamin B12 and a diverse set of amino acids). A meat-only diet is also possible and even healthy (with care to get a diverse set of vitamins and minerals by eating organs, not just muscle and fat). Omnivores can pick and choose their foods, as opposed to, say, carnivorous cats, that would die on a vegan diet. Still, if someone tries to push a vegan diet on you by saying that we were originally herbivores, that's simply not true.
Enjoy the read.
> Don't get me started on "aluminium".
Interesting! Wikipedia indicates "aluminum" is the original spelling, but "aluminium" became more popular. I suppose Americans should respect the "International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry" and call it 'aluminium', if they want world peace (i.e. international cooperation) ...
> Are you saying it should be 1.0C°?
Yes. Perhaps Daniel Schroeder was trying to be a trendsetter with this instruction. I think the distinction is valuable as it adds clarity and beauty to language. However, perhaps it's pedantic, as I can't think of another example: We don't make a distinction when reporting differences in length, time, pressure, mass, volume, current, or radioactivity ...
> how we know that the earth is warming and how we came about knowing this
For that, your best bet might actually be this site: https://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
It's also available in print form, but the web version is more detailed.