the rachel whitereads in the sky

My piece about how you can prove global warming in your own kitchen (and why we need more simple illustrations like this of science) has just appeared online at More Intelligent Life:

We put 26 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. Twenty-six times a thousand million tonnes is an impossible number to imagine, but it’s not impossible to picture a single tonne of CO2. It’s somewhere between the size of the sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s 'Ghost', in which she cast a Victorian parlour in plaster, and Whiteread’s Turner-prizewinning 'House' (above), in which she filled a Victorian house with concrete. Each year we’re putting something like 26 thousand thousand thousand Rachel Whitereads into the sky. It’s just that you can’t see them.