I live in New York and I am investing in a carbon offset program in Korea to decommission a coal electricity generation plant.
Will I ever breathe the cleaner air as a result of that project? And how long with that air to get here (and back around)?
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2 Answers
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It takes about 2 weeks for a mass of air to circle the globe along its latitude from West to east. I used to work for a French climate research lab in the 70s, and was based on Crozet island (South Indian Ocean) . At the time I was carrying atmospheric radioactivity measurements, and the French army was carrying nuclear test above ground in the pacific, I could see the radioactive cloud passing above me about 10 days later and then again about every second week after that and about completely disappeared after 6 months. In the case you raise, you will benefit from cleaner air about one week after the decommissioning
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Quick answer is its too vague to give a firm estimate. The geostrophic wind - what the wind would be in theory with no complicating variables, is a function of height, temperature and latitude. There is a calculator for this on http://www.shodor.org/os411/courses/_master/tools/calculators/geostrophic/
The wind speed for New York could be anything from 1 to about 16 m/sec. If we assume it is 10 m/sec, then the time to circuit the planet would be about 35 days. But then there are massive complicating factors.
