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While technically dual fuel I run my current car on almost entirely on LPG and I'm a big fan. It is massively cleaner than diesel and better than petrol. Performance with modern ECU engines is good. However it is still an interim solution because it is still a fossil fuel and is therefore carbon negative.

Hydrogen fuel produced from sea water by off shore wind turbines using surplus off peak power will replace it in the long term future because it is CO2 neutral.

http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2/o...

Methane has a GWP of 33 in the latest reports, not 20, over 100 years. It has a GWP of 72 over 20 years.

One cubic meter of methane hydrates at the sea floor expands to over 164 cubic meters of natural gas at the surface.

The methane being released from the world's oceans is estimated at 14 teragrams (about 15.4 tons) a year, half of which is from just the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. Researchers are pretty sure the reason it's matching the rest of the oceans is because the type of methane hydrates that we've been talking about are releasing gas and becoming increasingly unstable.

It seems some researchers blame releases from methane hydrates below the seas and below melting permafrost for past rapid warming trends. This is said to be the sort of warming feedback loop that carbon dioxide by itself probably couldn't trigger.

Do note the dates of some of these articles. This is recent reporting.

The short-term effects of methane are very important.

For one, you and I probably won't be worried about it personally in a century. For another, when you have methane estimated in the billions of tons in little sections of the ocean and it seems that a little warming gets that all released, things start to compound rapidly.

So we'll probably burn coal to make Hydrogen that we can than use to power our cars.

Actually reforming natural gas makes a better source of hydrogen than coal. The best way to produce hydrogen though may be using algae to produce it.

Well, I don't know about big 1" icecubes in the tropics; I think 3g cubes are plenty. But that doesn't matter; they transfer heat the same amount, though smaller ones transfer faster due to higher surface:volume ratio.

But PV doesn't cost anywhere near $4K:m^2. I've found numbers like $1-5:peakW, which is maybe $500, probably closer to $100, getting at least 10% efficiency. Even at $500, 10 powering a $1000/300W Peltier cooler, that's $6K, to produce 10 of your 1" cubes every 131 seconds, which is 6.7K cubes per day. Enough for a village to keep medicine, food and even drinks cold.

For $10K, including shipping, batteries, insulated box, a few other mechanics for processing the ice, they have a refrigerator that transforms them into a familiar late 20th Century operation. And the runoff is pure water, which once was seawater in my tropical island example. I'll drink to that.

I'm really curious what was tested here. this article basicially states "We're killing ourselves" without much into how they got to that conclusion.

There's a ton of theorys on what is causing this. The only ones they flat out denied in the article was the solar and volcanic ones. They didn't go into detail on what theory's were tested, such as the Methane Hydrate Theory.

This is the theory that global warming is increasing because Methane Hydrate is being released in the form of Methane gas from the ocean disturbed by warmer currents. As the tempeature increases in the currents, more Methane is released, ETC until the gobal tempeature increases drasticially.

Unfortunatly, I can't find a lot of reliable data on this. It seems that the majority of nutcases have run with this theory. The Most reliable source I can find on this in a short period of time is at http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2_now/journal/articles/ 3_Methane.htm.

It seems to me that all of these greenhouse scientists love to point the finger at humans alone, but don't look into a combination of natural occurances and human interaction. I'm not saying that we humans aren't doing our part to screw the earth up, but it seems that this could do much more damage then CO2 emmisions could ever do, and in a very short period of time, and there's a lot of historical data stating that it has happened in the past.

this article is based solely on europe - its projections are vague at best: mainly, one would deduce, due to the fact that it only seems to cite data from 2003. perhaps it's intended to be alarmist by citing the human death factor, for the average joe who doesnt keep at all abreast of such issues - but other recent data, namely, the mauna loa anomaly and the international arctic science committee's report, appear to harbor much more catastrophic potentiality.

mauna loa is the big one to watch - with 2 years (some would argue even 1), we should know whether or not the major 2 year co2 increase is a fluke - or if it's a sign of runaway global warming (which many say we're technically in now, but accelerated to varying degrees depending on the source). this could trigger methane hydrate deposits to break free from river and seabeds by warming said bodies of water - and then, we're in anything from some really hot water (har) to aworld of shit. (note: latter link is distant future, but theoretically possible)

(All billions in this post are 10^9.)

Using neclear plants as a backup for "green" energy is a good idea and all but as far as I know neclear plants don't work like that.

Neclear plants, I believe, are best used at a stable rate (ie 100% power output). Other traditional power plants are better suited to variable output such as gas or coal.

Here is a link that somewhat backs up my claim, though google will give you more: Hydrogen power

I saw a report on the global warming flash points within earth. Basically the idea traced the carbon output of rainforests. Geologically global warming was gradual but intensived at certain time periods. These time periods were centered around forest fires in the rain forest areas. The general map is this. Rain forests can only act as a carbon sink for so much carbon before the dead material created by the forest begins to add to carbon output instead of the plants breath cycle decreasing it. In natural historic global warming (without man made intervention) the increase of life on earth slowly moved carbon distribtion until the atmosphere warmed this slow warm hyper excelerated in the last phases. This caused quick changes in temperature followed by a dramatic cold period. The key was the current rain forest model. It appears rain forests hold more carbon than predicted. In tracing this carbon it was found that dead organic material was carried by the rivers and decayed producing methane. But instead of the gas being released in the atmosphere this material was pushed into the sea depths and froze. Methan ice packs have been hit by oil drilling before and than come up a boil. The theory is that this extra carbon sink accounts for the rapid period of global warming in the geological evidence. Slow global warming slowly raises the rates of forest fires releasing more carbon from the forests when temperatures hit a point of affectin sea temperatures the methane in the ocean becomes gas. These large storages are dumped almost instantly creating a dramatic and quick rise in temperature which melts the ice caps and glaciers. This changes the saline levels of the ocean changing the heat distribution of the currents and flipping into a cold period. So it is best to not bring up these carbon sinks but to leave them untouched. Again the drive should be to move away from carbon based fuel. Related links
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/12 18_earthbelch.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/early-earth-01k.htm l
http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2_now/journal/articles/ 3_Methane.htm
http://superstringtheory.com/forum/warmboard/messa ges2/116.html

If you look about the "About us" page for hydrogen.co.uk you'll see it's based in London. Since I'm heavily into the area and have never heard of such a trust the chances are it is a private venture run from his own home. The fact he is an h2net attendee shows him to be serious about hydrogen as an energy source. I suspect this one is a red herring.

Phillip.