Water vapor be more harmful than CO2?

Water vapour, a product of heat I would like to answer, other pollutant I don't think I am able to tackle. I think that heat from the sun, an income source, and the radiation of heat, an outgoing source, is balanced by natural conditions. After all the earth was once a molten mass, and that cooled down by radiating heat, so there must be some point of balance that dictates the final temperature? As far as I can see the earth inclination on it's axis and the composition of the atmosphere seem to be the controlling factors, there may be others. So I see only the Milankovitch effect, the tilt of the earth on it's axis, as being the main causes of extreme change. Global warming due to an increase of temperature, I would speculate would result in increased energy being reflected in higher rain falls and stronger winds in specific areas. An increase of kinetic energy in the weather system.

Regards JD.

It could be a fine balance that could turn nasty.

more vapour = more clouds = less sunlight =

less photosyntheses = more CO2 = More heat = more evaporation = more vapour = more ....

Hopefully something will develop feeding on the CO2 and dead trees and excrete oily stuff. killing most off life.

Until situation is stable and CO2 reduces. Then in a new cycle the permanent cloud cover collapses and we see rainbows again.

That will be the start of a new pollution / CO2 producing cycle.

I think that like most natural systems the atmosphere is a balanced systems, any excessive inputs can drive the system too far to one side and eventually cause problems. But much like global warming, water vapor would likely be a problem for a sector of the population long before it destroy life on earth. If you change the rainfall or climate a little some people perceive that as the end of the world. The idea of portions of Florida being under water or New York have people up in arms regarding global warming, even though these areas were underwater in the past, and would be underwater in the future just due to natural climate cycles. Now imagine the response if you change the rainfall in southern california. I know they would like to claim they want more rainfall, but when it rains above average in southern california (about every 7 to 10 years) they have landslides in places like Malibu, and everyone thinks it is a huge disaster the likes of which they are unfamiliar with (I think people down there have the only a limited memory to about 3 years). Consider each drought we have, even though they are not as bad as some previous droughts, to everyone now they seem to be bad. The worst hydrologic droughts are not usually the ones people necessarily recall, they recall the drought that effected them the most and most recently.

I would expect a strong reactionary response if you do anything to change the climate, since it changes real estate markets and where people want to live. Some places might get nicer, others cloudier and wetter. However, the wealthy movie stars and environmental activists probably would perceive a change in the weather as apocalyptic.

Ultimately, The only 'clean' way to produce electricity is solar panels. That should be our goal. Direct conversion of sunlight to electricity.

God help us.

Orpheuse

I believe geothermal would also be acceptable., and likely more cost effective.

After enough heat extraction, the earth would shrink by thermal contraction, causing catastrophic tectonic activity.

Limiited use we wouldn't notice.

RichH

The same thing would happen to your excess water vapor ( below about 100,000 ft) that happens to your breath on a cold day. Condense, rain/snow out, evaporate, condense, rain. It's called the water cycle. The biggest problem is that for every ton of hydrogen you burn, you deplete the available oxygen in the atmosphere by 8 tons.

How many tons of Hydrogen can we burn before we get down to about 10% Oxygen v/v, the near minimum to sustain people?

Above 100,000 ft ( 30,000 m), the ice clouds do not precipitate at nearly the same rate, and the resulting reflective effect will start chilling the earth. As airplane contrails have been blamed for.

RichH

NoSciFi, If the hydrogen and oxygen used in the reaction are produced from water then there is no depletion of the atmospheric oxygen, and since the ratio of hydrogen to oxygen in water is already perfect, there is no wasted hydrogen. And no extra ice clouds and a lot less petrochemical pollution.

Dragon

However, the justifiable concerns regarding airplane contrails and their effects to reduce insolation (levels of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface) are at elevations far below the 100,000 feet you mention. Considering how much fossil fuel we burn and the concurrent consumption of oxygen to do this, your worry about oxygen depletion by hydrogen burning seems a little remote.

--JMM

I think the circle is much larger.

How can you produce hydrogen? Mainly by the electrolysis of water. That process will extract water (potential vapor) from the environment and as a side effect, produce oxygen. By producing 1 ton of hydrogen you will produce 8 tons of oxygen.

Using hydrogen as fuel will result the same amount of water/vapor that extracted by producing hydrogen and will use the same amount of oxygen developed at electrolysis.

Reduction of hydrogen from either petrochemicals or coal would not release any oxygen to recombust. Yes, currently electrolysis or catalytic/solar reduction would release it's own oxygen.

I am probably wrong, but somewhere well over 60,000 feet, the ice particles from contrails still sublime away with a half-life of hours. Farther up, the half-life increases to months or years, in particles that are small enough to be barely visible as a haze in the highest concentrations.

Odd that a fairly polite and tongue-in-cheek response to someone's misplaced concerns would draw such ferocious response, when the point hidden so deeply therein was the nonpollution of water vapor, and if we haven't burned up our oxygen yet with carbonaceous fuels, we're unlikely to with reduces hydrocarbons even if we sequestered the carbon from it.

A bigger concern would be the 1000 BTU/lb released elsewhere in the atmosphere given up with condensation. That's enough heat to warm up 3,600,000 cu ft of air by 1° F for every pound of water vapor we produce unless we learn to efficiently recover condensate heat at the place of combustion.

And considering that we have 440 lbs or 200 kg (roughly) of oxygen per square foot of earth surface, we needn't worry about Oxygen depletion until we make and burn about 25 lbs of Hydrogen per square foot. It should take us a couple of decades to start to near that total.

RichH

I am not sure oxygen depletion would be the first environmental effect to be concerned with. However, the added heat and water vapor at lower altitudes could cause problems. What would all those cities in the desert and semi desert be like if the humidity increased, how would that effect those areas and the life there. How would the it effect the re-radiation of solar energy from the surface. In addition, how would the additional water vapor effect rainfall and the high altitude clouds. Keep in mind, they currently believe that the formation of high altitude clouds from particulates generated in Europe and India facilitated the generation of more water droplets (clouds) in the atmosphere that have cause cooling of the ocean surface effecting the rainfall in some areas of north africa and islands in the indian ocean, leading to major droughts in the past. Plus could more heated water vapor in the atmosphere act to help drive stronger storms that depend on warm water vapor rising through the air, e.g. hurricanes.

Now geothermal on a massive scale, that is very risky, since it would involve injection of fluids to recover heat to the surface. Plus there is the long term effect of rapidly cooling the outer layers of the core. The thermal driven fluid motions in the earths core are where we get the force behind plate tectonics and the earth's magnetic field. And deep injection has long been implicated as a potential accelerant for plate slippage (earth quakes). A passive geothermal system for insignificantly small energy systems is not bad, since they utilize natural waters heated and, under natural systems, wasted. We just collect the waste energy before it is lost. This is not really possible as a primary source of energy world wide.

Solar is advancing fast, and the efficiencies are increasing rapidly, now that there is an infusion of R&D monies again. In a few years we may see light-weight plastics used in vehicles or as construction materials that are also solar collectors. They have already developed plastic solar collector materials. Though eventually our demand for energy could exceed our capacity to collect solar energy with insignificant adverse impacts on the environment also. The need for land, the loss of reradiated low frequency energy from the planet surface, the loss of solar energy to the life forms at the surface and in the soils, etc. could all be adversely impacted if the scale ws large enough.

If one is interested in the effects of increased humidity on a desert environment, one should study what has happened in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. I first visited Phoenix in the early 1970's. Temperatures were high, but the climate was bearable since the air was dry and permitted natural body heat exchange through perspiration. Over the following twenty years or so, I saw the relative humidity of Phoenix increase significantly during frequent visits, to the point where the climate was no longer bearable for me (in those days, I also lived in another desert area of the Southwest that did not experience such an increase in relative humidity). These observations are based on personal experience, not scientific study.

Regarding solar energy, a factor that most pundits seem to chose to ignore is that solar insolation powers other systems as well. If one extracts too much energy, one is bound to have a negative impact on the biosphere, because there is less light for vegetation (i.e., have a look at what grows under the expansive reflector farms in Southern California). Putting a collector on an existing roof is not a bad idea, but dedicating significant real estate, in the quantities required to meet current electrical demand will have a negative impact on the vegatation cover, potentially increasing the CO2 problem...

Reforestation is the only real short-term solution to the CO2 issue. Plus, it makes the environment a lot more attractive than solar collectors or wind farms...

However, reforestation does not provide energy unless we harvest and burn the forest in some manner. So I do not think reforestation would be a solution instead of solar energy. I think the use of existing and new structures, not specifically meant for solar collection, profiles to provide solar energy is one possible system to augment our needs and offset other sources. This could potential reduce some of the heat effects associated with urbanization also, since the some of the energy is captured for electromotive force not just translated into heat.

Humidity also poses the potential to change the eco-system as some species are dependant upond relatively high humidities in their environment. These species could proliferate, while native species might be adversely effected by higher humidities and be driven to extinction.

There are no solutions that will please everyone. The problem with solar electricity is that when you need it at night so you can see inside your house, there isn't any. The amount of power that can be gotten from an area on a sunny day is relatively small and fixed. It is feasible to use some of the excess power to make hydrogen which can be burned at night to generate power. However the solar facility is in a desert and making the H requires a lot of water that has to come from somewhere else and leaves behind a lot of briny/brackish water.

The total balance of H and O does not change, so the oxygen would not be used up by burning H. The problem is that you would be converting so much liquid water into gaseous water that it would affect the climate. With just the heat of the sun you get a certain amount of water vapor which rather quickly finds its natural balancing point between vapor and liquid. By creating huge amounts of water vapor from using H as an energy source IN ADDITION TO the amount made by nature we could wind up with a steamy world with a lot of rain. Water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, so more warming.

Since the environuts see ANY change as a disaster, totally ignoring the planetary history of change, they must oppose solar and Hydrogen power. Even using the solar power will affect the environment and change it. In fact when you look at any method of producing massive amounts of energy, they oppose them. The environuts will be happy when we live in thatched huts, eating and using no animals, having no fire [eat food raw], grubbing out our organic gardens with stone tools and having no impact on the environment. Of course there won't be as many of us then, because we'll have starved to death, and that will be seen as good because people are such a blight on the planet.

The warmer the atmosphere the more moisture it can carry, lower the temperature of humid air and the moisture will precipitate. Hydrocarbons are natures way of storing energy from the sun a long time ago, so also is the icecaps at the poles, and glaziers on mountain tops. Consider, how important is cool air, is it necessary for the moisture in the air to precipitate as rain. Imagine what may happen when all the stored ice is melted and the atmospheric humidity continues to rise and no cool air to precipitate the moisture? vapour may well then be a pollutant? CO2 I believe is warming the upper atmophere, and that further adds to the problem, if you think there is one?

Regards JD.

Garth,

To directly reply to your topic, i.e., is water vapor more harmful than C02? The response is. "harm is a function of magnitude."

First, let's review that both Water Vapor and CO2 are greenhouse gases along with a number of other combinations of stand alone molecular compounds. (go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gases widget for a full dissertation.).

The simple answer (according to Akim's Razor) is that a narrow band of tolerance for WV/CO2 imbalance exists in nature. Too much of either upsets the balance in nature. Right now in current time the emission of CO2 (and a concurrent adverse out of proportional excitation and release of hydrate stored Methane due to the CO2 upwardly curving temperature scale) will probably be damped down (balanced somewhat) by a rise in the counter-balancing greenhouse gas, "Water Vapor."

However - if we swing toward use of Hydrogen Fuel Cells (as an example) for Electricity production for cars and emergency generation, which Noble Gas also produces water vapor and heat bye-products we could again go too far - if you recall the movie (and book) Blade Runner of two decades ago - it foretold downpours in city states which would be an unfortunate resultant of too much water vapor because of a switch to hydrogen energy by masses of users. Ever escalating downwind and global flooding and drought extremes could very likely be that outcome (also forwarded per IPCC climate model A2 scenarios).

Like I said, my response is harm is a function of magnitude.

While my conclusion is off topic - here it is: Until we humans get away from using any form of carbon energy for our energy needs - we are always going to see adverse and massive disturbances to natural climate cycles that track back to being caused or induced by human kind.

I agree with your conclusion. We need to make the best possible use of all resources without neglecting the heat & byproducts produced!

I wanted to start a discussion about climate change, without the usual pissing contest erupting.

the solution is:

Currently there is research indicating that the conditions over the indian ocean have been cooler than climate models would predict given the amount of CO₂ India is pouring into the atmosphere (almost 50% cooler than predicted). This is due to the fine particulate ejected high into the atmosphere from the pour quality of waste streams in indian manufacturing (much like the parts of eastern US, or more like England during industrial revolution). The particulate allows the formation of fine sized water droplets high in the atmosphere, reflecting sunlight and effectively reducing the heat to the mass below (less sunlight, less energy to heat). More water would not necessarily create more high clouds, which is what you want for reflecting light. You need more particulate also. So we need to make our factories much less clean in their emissions. Also, burn some hydrogen to increase the water content in the atmosphere, then we could generate more CO2 for energy as long as we offset it with sufficient water vapor and particulate. Maybe we could seed the upper atmosphere with fine hydrogen sulfate particles, those seem to be quite effective from what i have read.

However, I suspect the land and seas would not be very pleasant, and it might be overcast much more often.