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Hydrogen Fuel Station in Iceland
klang points to this blurb about Iceland opening a hydrogen refueling facility. While it isn't, as the blurb states, the world's first hydrogen station, it is notable because it produces the hydrogen onsite with electricity from geothermal energy and electrolysis, making it an almost perfectly clean energy source.
Here's what I don't understand: Why are we even talking about hydrogen powered anything? Has no one been paying attention?
The Bush Administration needs to buy themselves a cluebat and beat themselves silly. Haven't they ever heard of the Hindenburg? In a post 9/11 era, how can we even talk about letting ordinary Americans (which include of course thousands of sleeper cells) drive around huge hydrogen bombs strapped to cars? Because that's exactly what a hydrogen fuel tank is.
All this talk about water-producing Freedom Cars is great, but wait until someone drives one into a skyscraper!
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
They are protecting the gene pool my friend.
Actually, it is you who is nitpicking. Might want to look up on the appropriate use of formal scientific terms.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
both you and the original poster share the same problem. He is talking about carbon-monoxide (CO1), while you are talking about carbon-dioxide (CO2). They are not the same thing. His fear is unfounded because controlling carbon-monoxide is not a problem. We have that technology now, and besides, there is not a significant quantity of carbon-monoxide generated in most combustion.
Carbon-monoxide is not poisonous, but it can kill you because if there is more of it in the air than oxygen, the process of osmosis in your lungs will admit that, thus starving you of oxygen. (O2 is molecularly similar to CO.)
The parent poster probly knows this, but the media are deliberately attempting to confuse carbon-monoxide with carbon-dioxide, which is perfectly harmless, and the normal result of combustion. (That means it's unavoidable.) We will never be able to stop producing CO2 unless we stop all combustion. Note, this also includes breathing. Your body is an internal combustion engine, taking in oxygen(02) and fuel (containing carbon); the byproduct of which is carbon-dioxide.
Your problem is that you are not only ignorant, but blindly parroting what you thought you've been told. You believe that carbon-dioxide is poisonous, and you don't know the difference between carbon-monoxide and carbon-dioxide. (The difference is as obvious to someone with basic knowledge of the physical world as the difference between having two red balls and one blue one, vs. only one red and one blue ball)
There is (wild) speculation that too much carbon-dioxide in the upper atmosphere (way above where the highest flying plane can go) might cause a "lens" effect, also called the "greenhouse effect" by some. There is no real theory why this would happen.
There was a hypothesis that carbon dioxide, being denser than the gases normally at such altitudes, would block the escape of heat by lighter particles trapped below them, similar to a "low pressure" weather condition in the lower atmosphere, which does not directly cause, but is the result of warmer air trapped below colder air. Since this normally results in warmer weather, under a low; the inference is that the same will happen, globally, if a similar thing occurred at high altitude. This is an incorrect inference.
First, the upper atmosphere doesn't behave the way the lower atmosphere does. There is not the same degree of ground interference, convection (heating) is much more even, and there is less air pressure over all. Second, there is no explanation of how a denser layer of carbon dioxide could accumulate in the upper atmosphere. The only suppositiion is that if there is more carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere, there must be more in the higher. Even if that is the case (plants turn lower atmosphere carbon dioxide back to component oxygen and carbon.) But even if that were the case, the lower atmosphere would accumulate density moreso. (Because heavier things sink.) Remember, the convection is fairly even long before you reach the hypothetical greenhouse altitudes, and there is no ground effect to create bubbles. If a lighter gas was blocked by a heavier in the upper atmosphere, it would just go around it. It wouldn't be "trapped" in.
Other people, who maybe do not know the meteoroligical theory, but know the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, reason that carbon dioxide is transparent, and that a magnifying glass is also, and they've seen cartoons where a magnifying glass burns something, and reason that carbon dioxide will act as a lens, concentrating the sun's heat until the earth bursts into flame. Which is just silly.
Wait until I thermally crack hydrogen from water using my solar-pumped frickin laser. 5000 degrees? No problem. And while I'm at it, I just zap some space debris.
--A Mad Scientist who forgot his logon and password. Doh!