Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dr. Willie Soon – A British Columbia climate enthusiast had to abort his attempt to live off oxygen produced by plants in a sealed plastic container, when cloudy weather prevented sufficient photosynthesis to replenish his air.
Why this B.C. man sealed himself in an airtight plastic cube for 14 hours
YouTuber Kurtis Baute says he wanted to teach people the ‘base science concepts surrounding climate change’
CBC Radio · October 26
Spending 14 hours inside an airtight plastic cube with rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels left Kurtis Baute feeling a little loopy.
“It feels physically like the air is a little bit thicker, and that’s partly because it is more massive and also because it’s building up inside your body,” the B.C. scientist and YouTuber told As It Happens guest host Megan Williams.
“And it also slows your mind down. So I felt a little bit out of it and it was kind of harder to focus and harder to do higher-order decision making. It was kind of wild to feel that happen.”
He live-tweeted the experience under the hashtag #KurtisInAJar.
If you're seeing this, it means I now have wifi in my homemade biodome. 🤔🌎 #KurtisInAJar pic.twitter.com/OGNHODIKFP
— Kurtis Baute (@kurtisbaute) October 20, 2018
“I think that people really don’t understand climate change because they don’t even understand what the air is made of. And you know what? It’s not their fault,” Baute said.
…
He originally planned to stay in the cube for three days, banking on his plants to absorb most of the CO2 and keep him safe.
But cloudy weather meant the plants couldn’t do their job, and he had to emerge early.
…
If only Baute had set up some reliable, fossil fuel powered grow lights to his sealed plastic cube, his plants might have received the nourishing light they needed to regenerate his air, allowing him to successfully complete his three day experiment.
Why didn’t Kurtis Baute think of taking a CO2-crubber into his tent, like true submariners do when they enter their confinement under water. The scrubbers are stuffed with lithium powder that absorbs the dangerous CO2-gas. However, it does not help much, if there is no oxygen there. He seems to have found out the hard way, that air is dominated by the intert and useless gas Nitrogen.
I think next time he tries this stunt, he should have pressured air with him, like scuba divers do. This is the brave new world of the historically inept generation. The so-called snowflakes…(or, was it zombies…?).
Oxygen must be diluted with an inert gas to be breathed safely. That is the use of the 70% nitrogen in the atmosphere.
just found the size of the biodome he used, 3m x 3m (I guess they meant by 3m tall as well)
3x3x3 = 27 cu m (27,000L) approx.
5L normal breath allows for 27000/5 = 5400 breaths of air in the given space, breathing very 10 seconds means he will have breathed all the air once in 54000×10/3600 = 15 hours
so CO2 levels should have increased to nom 25000ppm after 14 hours (excluding any plant effect)
02 levels will have dropped approx 1%
not rocket science
Kurtis Baute (indoctrinated at the School of Environmental Sciences – University of Guelph) wrote:
“…harder to do higher-order decision making”
You demonstrated your lack of ability to ‘do higher-order decision making’ before you ever stepped foot in your plastic cube, you ignoramus.
Firstly, had your 200 plants received sufficient sunlight, they still wouldn’t have given off enough oxygen to support your respiration… you’d need 400 to 500 plants, minimum, to do that. Don’t you know how to calculate plant respiration rates?
Secondly, had your plants received sufficient sunlight, your plastic cube would have heated up to intolerable levels, forcing you to leave due to heat exhaustion. Haven’t you ever heard of the greenhouse effect? No, not your libtarded “Anthurpomoorfik Gorebull Wurmang! DURRRHHH!” definition, the scientific definition. You know… where the short wavelengths of visible light from the sun pass through a transparent medium and are absorbed by objects behind that transparent medium, thereby heating the objects which re-radiate longer wavelength infrared, but the longer wavelengths of the infrared re-radiation from the heated objects are unable to pass through that transparent medium, and the transparent medium prevents that heat from being convected away, therefore… greenhouse effect.
Thirdly, you wouldn’t even have made it overnight, even with sufficient sunlight during the day. Or weren’t you aware that plants emit CO2 at night? You’d have suffocated in your sleep… it’s too bad you bailed prematurely, thereby burdening the planet with your unfathomable stupidity for an unknowable but altogether too-long amount of time before you Darwin Award yourself properly next time.
You’re no scientist, you’re an activist, nothing more. And a not-very-intelligent one, at that. If I were you, I’d go back to the School of Environmental Sciences – University of Guelph and demand my money back… it was clearly money wasted on making you more stupid than when you entered university.
That’s why they’re called ‘libtards’, folks! Liberals worldwide are mentally deficient, and they demonstrate that fact daily.
Honestly, you can’t make this sort of stuff up!
Its just as well that the sun was obscured. If it was shining he would have claimed that he proved how higher CO2 increases temperature, and some would believe him.
If he was in a polyethene biodome the LWIR would mostly have passed through the “transparent medium”, but it would still have gotten pretty warm inside, because the greenhouse effect in a greenhouse depends on inhibiting convection, not radiation.
That is why you can cool a greenhouse by opening a few roof windows. They have very little effect on LWIR radiation (too small angular area), but a lot on convection.
I think the climate obsessed should move past their little biodome experiments and go on to the dome where issues are truly settled.
Of course I mean the Thunderdome!!
https://youtu.be/9yDL0AKUCKo
One word … Retard .
Any other words in your vocabulary ?
‘It feels physically like the air is a little bit thicker, and that’s partly because it is more massive and also because it’s building up inside your body’ – this man is supposedly a scientist?
Perhaps he should study the English language.
He would have been much happier growing pot plants.
Who says he wasn’t? The plant species weren’t mentioned.
He Is A Hero.
I’ve said before, we *need* people with a bit of self-confidence to actually do some science and honestly report their findings. From actual experience as a livestock farmer, I’d suggest you learn a lot more about life, the Universe and everything by stepping into a pile of BS than by carefully avoiding it all the time.
And how many folks here think they’re being clever by taking the pi55 out of him. Again, he could easily be a child of any one of us – it was OUR duty to educate the boy.
He is not at fault – he is running an experiment in accordance with what he was taught at (primary) school.
How many times around here do we still hear the idiot notion (from NASA, supposedly the biggest & best scientists, hence= educators) that burning coal & oil makes The Planet= green?
*That* was a parallel experiment this guy was attempting so come on, why didn’t the CO2 he was breathing out turn the plant into a super-fast growing luxuriant monster-plant?
That is what the proponents of CO2 induced greenery are saying, – they are implying positive feedback. Hurrah, Utopia here we come.
And hello there Tree-ring Experts, any comment? Apart from telling me I’m a white right-wing who is an ignorant & stupid paranoid obsessive? Boring boring boring, try telling me something I didn’t already know.
What he describes does not fit with an experiment I saw involving an ex-Monty Python and a C130 transport plane. He was given a free ride into the sky, without an oxygen mask and with the back-door of the aeroplane left open.
Basically, you do not know you are oxygen starved. You carry on talking and breathing just like normal as far as you yourself can see. Observers inside oxygen masks see and imagine you to be alcoholically intoxicated – you seem to be having a ripping good time. Euphoric in fact. W
Which perfectly explains the use of nitrogen oxide (Laughing Gas) as a cheap and nearly legal intoxicant.
Also glue sniffing.
What he describes, to me, sounds like something coming off the plant – a VOC of one sort or another and a chemical signal plants use to ‘communicate. Also to shoot down any ozone that may be around.
Like ethylene for ripening fruit and something cannabis growers do to increase the potency of their crop. Do they use single sex (female) plants that emit something to encourage any local males to make pollen. If there are no males around, the girls simply up-the-ante.
Is that what he’s describing?
But anyway, hopefully a lot of folks will have seen what he’s tried and be questioning some of the over-simplified junk they were taught at school and not taught by lazy buck-passing parents.
Good on him.
9.7 out of 10 (Not a 10, he should have chosen his plant more wisely)
Dear Peta
Hypoxia and nitrous oxide narcosis are two entirely different, and in a way opposite, states. Hypoxia is due to oxygen undersaturation. Nitrous oxide narcosis is a special case of inert gas narcosis. Any breathable inert gas (except helium) will induce narcosis if breathed at high enough pressure. What is special with nitrous oxide (and also xenon by the way) is that it will induce narcosis at ambient pressure and is therefore simple to use.
This by the way is why compressed air can’t be used for diving except quite shallowly. The divers get nitrogen narcosis.
just to add
CO2 is toxic over approx 200,000ppm, just as oxygen is if greater than 500,000 ppm at STP
No Peta, this guy is an attention seeking tool and possibly a danger to himself and others.
Simple question – What was he trying to prove?
He claims to be a scientist. He apparently has a Masters in Science. What was the actual Science! he was trying to prove here?
He shut himself in a plastic covered area with a bunch of plants. What was he trying to prove? That the CO2/O2 plant cycle actually exists? Sorry, but that is well established and there are very large amounts of supporting data that would have (or perhaps SHOULD have) been able to predict the end result in advance. Again, what has he proved? That 200 iddy biddy plants cannot successfully drive the O2/CO2 cycle fast enough to keep an adult male alive?
None of this is science. None of this drives forward the overall sum of human knowledge. The man claims to be a scientist. If he had instead claimed to have been an engineer then maybe he would have done some basic safety calculations before hand because if you work in engineering and try and pull off that complete lack of a basic safety study then you are likely to be facing a new career on minimum wage.
Seriously, the only Science! this guy has supported is the theory that Education and Intelligence are completely independent from each other. You claim that stepping in BS gives you great insights into Life, the Universe and Everything but here is a much more practical counter concept – if you don’t look where you are walking you ruin perfectly good shoes.
Man is an idiot. 9.7 ppm
So he proved that 4-5 plants can’t produce enough Oxygen, from the CO2 that HE produced, to let him survive?
Obviously he had a square CO2 scrubber that wouldn’t fit in the round hole opening.
I certainly hope he tries it again in the future, only next time, he should do it aboard one of those “ships of fools” that’s crossing the Arctic Ocean or the Southern Ocean in order to simultaneously prove how little sea ice there is. That would really show us D-Nye-rs, proving beyond any reasonable doubt, for all time, just how pernicious antropogenic carbon dioxide emissions have become.
Mods, sorry, the above from me, Mickey Reno. I must have brushed the return key as I was typing my name.
Maybe next time he could do a little research.
All is not lost.
He did conclude that the air became more “massive” as the CO2 concentration went up.
I make a point of never watching CBC on any subject.
Well, except when they are covering the Royal Family.
When they need to trot out this type of insanity, they’re really getting desperate.
This must be due to the depletion of ignorance by independent media rapidly educating the masses.
i.e; they’re running out of sheeple.
H/T… https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/26/friday-funny-yet-another-celeb-chimes-in-on-climate-change/#comment-2501830
“And it also slows your mind down. So I felt a little bit out of it and it was kind of harder to focus and harder to do higher-order decision making.”
So do climatistas sit in sealed rooms to work with their models and sniff the glue?
Talk about science fail, heck, talk about basic calculations fail.
And we had one newbie go bonkers from claustrophobia who was strapped down in the torpedo bay and sedated.
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He apparently escaped to BC
Who saw that movie Shallow Grave? Remember the bit where the baddies burst in through the door and put plastic bags over people’s heads?
I guess it’s also not this guy’s fault that he’s an ijit.
“I think that people really don’t understand climate change because they don’t even understand what the air is made of. And you know what? It’s not their fault,” Baute said.
Really? So if they could just manage to do a quick google search they’d know what air is made up of, and voila, they’d understand “climate change”, but since they can’t or don’t know how to use google (or some search engine) they remain in the dark on climate?
What a moron! But it’s not his fault that he’s a moron. I don’t know whose fault it is, but it isn’t his.
Left this comment at JoNovas yesterday under her post about Mr. ignorant.
I doubt he could afford a serious CO₂ meter.
It’s rather obvious he is an urban dweller and utterly ignorant of plants, plant growth, photosynthesis, plant respiration or what air movement does for maintaining Earth’s comfortable temperatures.
If that small plastic wrap play tent was in the real sun, say in Australia, he’d learn what strong sun does to closed system temperatures in a hurry.
Of course, he would blame CO₂, but he was going to do that anyway.
Next time he can invite Gore and Dressler to play in his closed system tent too.
In the 1980’s there was a multi-person month-long experiement in living in a “Biosphere, which was repeated with improvements in the 1990s. See Wikipedia at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi3mozopKjeAhW0On0KHbbUBBgQFjAAegQIHBAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBiosphere_2&usg=AOvVaw2OzNrlo8C5z8TGwRcq3s5-
The biosphere2 is still operating. Just without people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yAcD3wuY2Q
Fairly interesting. Part of the scientific interest at the time included how to design long range spacecraft to be self-sustaining. Or settlements on other planets.
If the calculations are as stated in the video, the gas volume of the Arizona biosphere is over 212000 cubic meters. There were to be 8 human occupants, so if the enclosed ecosystems were balanced, that means at least 26000 cubic meters per person.
The Vancouver guy, Baute, built his cube to be large enough to keep him alive for three days. He states the dimensions as a cube of 10 feet. Along with some potted plants and his own volume, that translates to about 25 cubic meters of air.
25 cubic meters of air will have a mass of about 25 times 1.25 kg per cubic meter or 31.25 cubic meters.
Using weight percents of the components, that means about 23 kilograms of Nitrogen, with Oxygen at 7.2 kilograms, Argon 0.4 kilograms. Ignoring boundry layer effects, CO2 in his cube would be 0.02 kilograms, or 20 grams, but almost certainly more.
One adult male will have a basal metabolism releasing about 1 kilogram of CO2 per day. Which needs about 0.75 kilograms of O2 consumed.
So at the end of 24 hours, ignoring the plants which were likely insignificant due to clouds, the amount of O2 would have dropped by about 10 percent by mass to about 19 percent of total volume.
CO2 increasing to 1.02 kilograms. 1.02/31.25 is .0326 or 32600 parts per million.
The water vapor is also ignored, the amount would be saturated within hours, but the displacement of N2 and O2 is not important here.
He assumed that the growing plants would have offset his metabolism, but it looks like the limit to his health would have been reached at 24 hours, not due to O2 loss, but CO2 increase.
Finally, his habitat would need to be about 1000 times larger in volume to approach comparability to the biosphere in Arizona.
Seems like he didn’t learn from the failed “Biosphere 2” experiment — http://discovermagazine.com/2010/oct/20-life-under-the-bubble.
See also https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/05/science/too-rich-a-soil-scientists-find-the-flaw-that-undid-the-biosphere.html.