By Larry Oscar
As a new year begins its always interesting to see what sort of spin the politicians are going to put on things for the year. This year the “spin theme” seems to be global warming. I can’t help but notice the ever fattening face of old Al Gore showing up more often these days. He and others are trying to create a political football out of the global warming issue. I for one, think the problem with so called global warming may just be related to obesity. It sure is a coincidence how the earth started to warm up just when so many people started getting so fat.
A normal sized human gives off 70 BTU per hour or 613,200 BTU per year. A gallon of gasoline has roughly 124,000 BTUs of energy in it. That means a normal sized human gives off enough heat equal to about 5 gallons of gasoline per year. When you consider we have about 6.5 billion people on the planet you can easily see why the Earth is getting warmer. That’s equivalent to releasing all the energy in 32.5 billion gallons of gasoline every year into our atmosphere. And guess what? We haven’t taken into account fat people yet.
Obesity is a global epidemic according to many researchers. Some say over 50% of the world’s population is obese. That means that over 50% of the world’s population is at least 30% overweight. Do the math here. With 50% of us overweight by a minimum of 30%, we can expect another 5 billion gallons of gasoline energy to be released on top of the 32.5 billion we already established. This brings a new total of 37.5 billion gallons of gasoline energy to the table. No pun intended.
Now consider how many fad diets people go on losing weight only to gain it back again. This means that, while they are dieting, they are giving off even more heat than normal, only to gain it back again. It has been estimated that 15% of our population is dieting at any given time. That means we are burning an additional 1 billion gallons of gasoline energy just in the dieting process. This brings our new total to 38.5 billion gallons of gasoline energy given off every year just by people standing around.
The World Health Organization and UN predict that by 2050 we will exceed 9 billion people on the planet. That is an increase of 38% and brings our grand total to 53 billion gallons of gasoline energy released into the atmosphere every year by people alone. Note there are no SUVs included in these numbers, just people.
Now we have roughly 50 billion gallons of water in Skiatook Lake, Oklahoma at normal levels. So you can easily see why the Earth is warming up. We are releasing more energy into the Earth’s atmosphere than the entire volume of Skiatook Lake filled with gasoline every year. No wonder we have a warming problem. Now we have just begun to scratch the surface here folks. We did not take into account the energy released in growing, raising, preparing, and transporting of all of the food we consume. Given industrial inefficiencies, I would not be surprised to see our numbers at least doubled or possibly tripled. Cows must give off a lot of heat too. I often see steam rising from them on cool mornings.
Instead of watching Bob Dole doing Viagra commercials, I would suggest that Al Gore start doing some birth control and weight loss commercials. Some shots of Al before and after would be nice. Maybe he could get some pointers from Kristie Alley. I would also suggest he drag that rather robust Rosie O’Donnell into the picture. She is getting so large she has her own gravitational field now….. oink oink.
Science is a marvelous thing, so Al help us with global warming and loose some weigh man!