The Vampire Muffin Man

I answered a question (by Pat) recently and wasn't able to edit my answer to respond to additional details, but I also had a few questions of my own to be asked while looking for information.

Part of my response was:

"However, over 100 years we've gotten to a point where we have added over 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels"

[disclaimer: I wasn't able to find more exact numbers, so pardon the following crude rounding techniques]

My research of course made me realize that figure is low by quite a bit.

Atmospheric CO2 concentration by mass is about 591ppm

The mass of the atmosphere is 5.3x10^18 kg

So, right now the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere is 3.13 trillion tonnes.

[wikipedia says 3.16 trillion tonnes]

Now, assuming the same relation between ppmm and ppmv

280ppmv then and 390ppmv now means that we started with about 2.25 trillion tonnes of CO2.

What I understand is that approximately 1/2 of our emissions are absorbed by plants, the oceans and other mechanisms, meaning that our emissions would total around 1.76 trillion tonnes.

So my question is: Is that correct, or does anyone have, or can anyone find more accurate numbers?

Secondly, regarding the reason I wanted to edit my answer:

>>How much can you accurately say has been absorbed by plants and animals?<<

Am I wrong to think that if the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up by 880 billion tonnes and we've added 1.76 trillion tonnes that plants and animals and oceans have absorbed 880 billion tonnes of additional CO2?

As an aside, does the amount of human CO2 emissions change dependent on how much is being added?

I recently downloaded a short video in .mkv format and it shows up with cover art instead of the default icon. I take this to mean that there is a way to embed cover art into an .mkv file... However, I can not find anything specific on how to do this after a couple of hours of searching and downloading a few pieces of software (including MKVmerge - which embedded my image, sure, but it didn't display it in place of the default icon).

I did see something that said iTunes can do this using it's tools, but I do not really want to install iAnything on my computer... However, if that's what I have to do, I guess I'll survive.

The reason I want to do this is simply that I rip backups of my DVDs to .mkv and I'd like to have them display the cover art rather than the default icon.

Also, I do know there is a way to display a thumbnail sample of the video, but that's not what I want...

Thanks

The Taurus XL rocket carrying NASA's Glory satellite lifted off around 2:10 a.m. PST from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

But NASA said in a brief statement that a protective shell or fairing atop the rocket did not separate from the satellite as it should have about three minutes after the launch.

That left the Glory spacecraft without the velocity to reach orbit, NASA launch commentator George Diller said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110304/ap_on_sc/us_sc...

http://glory.gsfc.nasa.gov/

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