July 22, 2009

Back in town - strange concert, a good climate visualization

Just got back into town after driving back up from Seattle. The Cowboy Junkies were amazing -- I was very familiar with their music but had never seen them live before. Seeing them on a cloudless warm summer day at a nice outdoor venue was great. What was strange is that the show was a double billing with them and Son Volt. I had heard about them -- an outgrowth of Uncle Tupelo but had never heard their music. I was expecting to check out an interesting opening act and then enjoy a full set of Cowboy Junkies. The Junkies opened! They did a very short set of about six or seven songs and walked offstage -- immediately after, the roadies came and started taking the drum set down and pulling guitars off so there was no encore. Since we had driven down, we decided to stay to see what they were about. We left after the third or fourth song. The lead singer had really bad pitch problems -- whenever he went to emphasize something, he went flat. The band had no fire, no passion. I do not know if this was just an off night for both bands but it was a bit of a bummer... The show was sold out. I asked the person at the gate how many tickets that meant. I was told 3,500. 3,500 is an good number for visualizing one aspect of the Anthropogenic Global Warming debate. Take a look at tonight's crowd -- this is 3,500 people:
3500_people.jpg
We can discount the kids as children under 12 got in for free. If you take each person and have them represent one atom of our atmosphere, you will find that 2,730 of these people pictured above are Nitrogen. About 700 of them are Oxygen, 32 of them are Argon and one, just one person represents Carbon Dioxide. The amount of this gas in our atmosphere is minuscule. Again, in that crowd of 3,500 people above, if every adult is an atom of our atmosphere, just one person is an atom of CO2. Posted by DaveH at July 22, 2009 10:17 PM
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