Conrad Theodore Seitz

The New York Times published an editorial on December 30 2014 with some information that was news to me.  To sum it up in one quote, here it is:

“India has the highest number of suicides in the world. According to the World Health Organization, of 804,000 suicides recorded worldwide in 2012, 258,000 were in India. Indian youths between 15 and 29 years old kill themselves at a rate of 35.5 deaths per 100,000 — the highest in the world — and suicide has surpassed maternal mortality as the leading cause of death of young Indian women. ”

The government has announced an ambitious mental health program that looks to be impossible to fulfill.  The first obstacle is the budget, and the national health budget has been reduced by 20 percent, from  $5 billion to $4 billion.  There is only one psychiatrist for every 343,000 people.

It appears that the government will be unable to deliver on its promise of mental health care for all the people.  Young people in particular are under a great deal of stress.  For example, young women have to choose between traditional, arranged marriages and modern style dating or a career, of which many are available now.  Young men have to deal with the stress of competition for the best grades, then the best job, or any job at all for that matter.

The conditions at India’s mental hospitals are dismal, and electroshock therapy is widely used, probably for its sedating effects.  Patients are exposed to physical and sexual abuse at times, far more often than in Western hospitals.  There simply is not enough mental health care, which causes excessive anxiety, frustration, and depression.  The suicide rate is a clear signal that stress and lack of care are overwhelming, especially for the younger population.

This problem is one that requires a force majeure to solve.  Some event like the French Revolution, something really big.  Something so big that many parts of it are simply accepted without question.  For example, the metric system of kilograms and kilometers originates with the French Revolution.

We’ll think of something that really works at the same time we discover the solution to so many of our societal ills, because all the ills stem from a common cause and can be cured by the application of a common remedy.  For example, many of our problems stem from the fact that we allow free rein to people who wish to obtain a fortune at the expense of a majority of gullible or powerless people.  We could solve so many troubles if we used reason to provide for everyone, especially those who don’t understand reason, and prevent them from being exploited, even with their consent.

Here’s another comment from the NYT that estimates how many trees each person should have to make up for burning oil:

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Why aren’t we deploying troops, like the emperor Tiberius, to protect remaining forests? The example below should serve to illustrate the magnitude of the sequestration problem. The carbon being sequestered is JUST from oil, not including larger sources such as agriculture and coal.

DO THE MATH. FACTS:

EIA 2012: Our oil consumption is nearly 19 M b/day

A barrel of crude oil is nearly all carbon, when burned produces around 317 Kg of C02

A young tree can sequester about 2.5 Kg of C02 a year, a mature tree about 20 Kg, a fast growing hardwood tree even more. That’s only 0.00685 to 0.055 Kg per day.

U.S. Population 2012: 313M

Just to maintain our current oil consumption of 19 M b/day, I need lots of trees per every man, woman and child now living in the U.S. In fact I need many acres of them.

Assuming the oil is burned, and none is sequestered into plastics and building materials, I need to sequester 19 M x 317 Kg = 6.023 B Kg of C02 every day. The allocation per man, woman, and child is
6.023 B Kg / 350 M = 17.2 Kg C02 daily. My allocation consists of 17.2 / 0 .055 = 314 trees.

A dense forest might have as many as 1000 trees per acre, ours are at 100-200 trees, overstocked per the forest service. I figure that I need 5 acres of trees per capita, but where are they? The Forest Services is managing only 322 M acres. Look no further for man-made causes to climate change.

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Here’s a comment about how many trees we need to reverse the greenhouse effect that is warming the planet:

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I did some calculations along these lines a year or so ago:

Turning CO2 into trees – according to Wikipedia, the current mass of CO2 in the atmosphere is 3.16×10^15kg. Of that, about 12/48 = 1/4 is carbon, because the atomic weight of carbon is 12, and of oxygen is 16.

3.16*10^15 kg Mass of CO2 in atmosphere

3.16*10^15 / 4 Mass of carbon in atmosphere

Current CO2 concentration is 400ppm. Before the industrial revolution it was 280ppm. Let’s aim for 200ppm to be on the safe side, i.e. halve the amount of atmospheric carbon:

3.16*10^15 / (4 * 2) kg Target for mass of carbon captured

A large tree is roughly 50% carbon and weighs, say 10 tonnes = 10^4 kg, giving a carbon mass per tree of 0.5 * 10^4 = 5 * 10^3 kg.

3.16*10^15 / (4 * 2 * 5 * 10^3) Target number of large trees

Each such tree might need 10m x 10m of land area, so 1 square kilometer can have 1000*1000 / (10*10) = 10^4 such trees

3.16*10^15 / (4 * 2 * 5 * 10^3 * 10^4) Target number of km^2.

That is 8 million km^2. The area of the continental US is 10 million km^2.

In other words, if we could plant the entire US with trees and make them grow (which will require irrigation in some places), then we could reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations to pre-industrial levels.

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