Hydrogen bombs use a very different form of a complex hydrogen isotope totally unlike fuel gas.

What does gasoline do, just kind of smolder? I am sure we can come up with a safe system for it, as we have done for gasoline. In the end the old saying "it beats walking" will come into play.

Hydrogen sucks as a fuel for transportation. It's not dense enough. You can liquify the stuff, and the energy density is still 1/10th of gasoline. Can you imagine the extra expense and weight involved with trying to contain liquid hydrogen? Not to mention it leaks like crazy. If you take the time to do the math, the process are way too inefficient to use hydrogen as an energy storage medium - better off using batteries.

Our ultimate (transportation) solution is renewable hydrocarbon fuels, like biodiesel. Growing it pulls CO2 from the atmosphere, and burning it returns it to the air for a net balance of zero.

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http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b1...oD/bioclip.jpg

Yea, like spherical Plutonium which is compressed by explosives so the Hydrogen isotopes fuse to become Helium giving off energy. This is how the Sun works, by converting Hydrogen to Helium under intense pressure.

Hydrogen would be an excelent fuel source. If an explosion does occur, the explosion goes up as opposed to gasoline which spreads out on the ground causing incineration.

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Warren

Currently 1965 220Sb, 2002 FORD Crown Vic Police Interceptor

Had 1965 220SEb, 1967 230S, 280SE 4.5, 300SE (W126), 420SEL

ENTER > = (HP RPN)

Not part of the in-crowd since 1952.

My mind reading is off a bit, but I think MikeMover may have been refering to the explosive oxidation of hydrogen, not thermonuclear fusion.

Its easy to generate enough hydrogen to make a loud pop with a dry cell and a couple of glass tubes inverted and submerged in water. Hook the wires to the dry cell and run one up each tube. Both wires will have little bubbles for around them. The wire with twice the bubbles will be the '-', I think. Sometimes a similar phenomenon happens when charging a dead batter.

U.S. Report Turns Focus to Greenhouse Gases


By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: August 26, 2004



In a striking shift in the way the Bush administration has portrayed the science of climate change, a new report to Congress focuses on federal research indicating that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades.

In delivering the report to Congress yesterday, an administration official, Dr. James R Mahoney, said it reflected "the best possible scientific information" on climate change. Previously, President Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of warming as a reason for rejecting binding restrictions on heat-trapping gases.

The report is among those submitted regularly to Congress as a summary of recent and planned federal research on shifting global conditions of all sorts. It also says the accumulating emissions pose newly identified risks to farmers, citing studies showing that carbon dioxide promotes the growth of invasive weeds far more than it stimulates crops and that it reduces the nutritional value of some rangeland grasses.

American and international panels of experts concluded as early as 2001 that smokestack and tailpipe discharges of heat-trapping gases were the most likely cause of recent global warming. But the White House had disputed those conclusions.

The last time the administration issued a document suggesting that global warming had a human cause and posed big risks was in June 2002, in a submission to the United Nations under a climate treaty. President Bush distanced himself from it, saying it was something "put out by the bureaucracy."

That may be harder to do this time. The new report, online at www.climatescience.gov, is accompanied by a letter signed by Mr. Bush's secretaries of energy and commerce and his science adviser.

The White House declined yesterday to explain the change in emphasis, referring reporters to Dr. Mahoney, assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and the director of government climate research.

In an interview, he said the report was mainly an update on the overall climate research program and was not intended to be a conclusive "state of the science'' summary of the administration's thinking. A series of 21 reports are promised on particular issues in coming years, he said, and the studies on climate models, agriculture and other subjects mentioned in the new report are "significant but not definitive.''

Then there's this cheery little note from the BBC.

Bot

Earth warned on 'tipping points'

The world has barely begun to recognise the danger of setting off rapid and irreversible changes in some crucial natural systems, a scientist says.

Professor John Schellnhuber says the most important environmental issues for humans are among the least understood.

He told a briefing in Sweden that the Asian monsoon was one of the "tipping points" that could change very quickly.

He said a better understanding of the risks was as important as the programme to prevent collisions with asteroids.

Professor Schellnhuber is research director of the UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

High stakes

He was speaking at the EuroScience Forum in Stockholm, at a briefing by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme entitled Beyond Global Warming: Where On Earth Are We Going?

Sulfuric acid in your stomach??

Here's my take on all this.

Earth's atmonsphere is 79% Nitrogen, 20% Oxygen, 1% trace elements.
Kyoto Treaty wants USA to reduce CO2 emissions, China and India excluded.
Many countries in the world are envious of the USA's economy, Kyoto Treaty would be a good thing for those countries.
Volcanic activity affects Earth's climate more that man. Mt. Pinatubo (sp?) blows, small but detectable temp. drop due to the dust in the atmosphere.
Venus is an extreme example of the greenhouse effect. Hot as hell, also closer to the Sun that Earth.
Dire predictions of large temperature increases have not been proven and models have been modified to reflect this. Chicken little the sky is falling as yet unproven. Also, computer models have a problem called 'Sensitivity to Initial Conditions'.
Forest fires in the Western USA release large amounts of CO2. Some set by the FEDS.

I'm not convinced that it's such a huge problem. I think we can make some changes but not to the point of undoing the US economy.

Look at Ozone depletion. Dire predictions have not materialized. Some changes have been made, propellants, A/C in cars. Remember, if it were such a big problem, we would be making the stuff and putting it up there.

I'm not convinced. I think politics are playing a large part in this. I could be wrong though.

__________________
Regards

Warren

Currently 1965 220Sb, 2002 FORD Crown Vic Police Interceptor

Had 1965 220SEb, 1967 230S, 280SE 4.5, 300SE (W126), 420SEL

ENTER > = (HP RPN)

Not part of the in-crowd since 1952.

Ok, hydrochloric. My mistake.

I think your Kyoto comments are exactly right. It was a stupid, horribly lopsided, economically suicidal treaty. Worse, with India and (especially) China rapidly expanding their industrialization, Kyoto gives them free reign to become truly world class polluters.

I think your concerns about the modeling efforts have been addressed to a great degree over the past 7-10 years. Even with the finest models, none will ever be perfect examples of the Earth complexity--that's why they're called models. However the models are getting better. Especially the physical models. Each new source of carbon and each new sink of carbon are incorproated into the models.

And the same degree of improvements has been occuring with the probabilistic models. Both types of models are checked for their reliability by hindcasting. Modelers take initial conditiosn from some time in history and run forward checking the model against actual records. A single run is not especially informative--many earthly processes are event-driven--like Mt Pinotubo or Krakatoa, etc. These types of events can be incorporated randomly and then watching the downstream effects enables the modeler to see the consequences.

So perhaps thousands of runs are made and each trajectory ploted. There are many modelers and models worldwide and all these egghead guys are running their models like crazy. Hell, they probably are crazy.

But the trajectories have been increasingly convergent. It is not good and there is (with still some degree of doubt) a detectible anthropogenic component.

Hotter, Faster, Worser
by John Atcheson

Over the past several months, the normally restrained voice of science has taken on a distinct note of panic when it comes to global warming.
How did we go from debating the "uncertainty" behind climate science to near hysterical warnings from normally sober scientists about irrevocable and catastrophic consequences? Two reasons.
First, there hasn’t been any real uncertainty in the scientific community for more than a decade. An unholy alliance of key fossil fuel corporations and conservative politicians have waged a sophisticated and well-funded misinformation campaign to create doubt and controversy in the face of nearly universal scientific consensus. In this, they were aided and abetted by a press which loved controversy more than truth, and by the Bush administration, which has systematically tried to distort the science and silence and intimidate government scientists who sought to speak out on global warming.
But the second reason is that the scientific community failed to adequately anticipate and model several positive feedback loops that profoundly amplify the rate and extent of human-induced climate change. And in the case of global warming, positive feedback loops can have some very negative consequences. The plain fact is, we are fast approaching – and perhaps well past – several tipping points which would make global warming irreversible.
In an editorial in the Baltimore Sun on December 15th, 2004 this author outlined one such tipping point: a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which higher temperatures caused methane – a powerful heat-trapping greenhouse gas (GHG) – to escape from ice-like structures called clathrates, which raised the temperature which caused more methane to be released and so on. Even though there was strong evidence that this mechanism had contributed to at least two extreme warming events in the geologic past, the scientific community hadn’t yet focused on methane ices in 2004. Even among the few pessimists who had, we believed – or hoped – that we had a decade or so before anything like it began happening again.
We were wrong.
In August of 2005 a team of scientists from Oxford and Tomsk University in Russia announced that a massive Siberian peat bog the size of Germany and France combined was melting, releasing billions of tons of methane as it did.
The last time it got warm enough to set off this feedback loop was 55 million years ago in a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, when increased volcanic activity released enough GHGs to trigger a series of self-reinforcing methane burps. The resulting warming caused massive die-offs and it took more than a 100,000 years for the earth to recover.
It’s looks like we’re on the verge of triggering a far worse event. At a recent meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences in St. Louis, James Zachos, foremost expert on the PETM reported that greenhouse gasses are accumulating in the atmosphere at thirty times the speed with which they did during the PETM.
We may have just witnessed the first salvo in what could prove to be an irreversible trip to hell on earth.
There are other positive feedback loops we’ve failed to anticipate. For example, the heat wave in Europe that killed 35,000 people in 2003 also damaged European woodlands, causing them to release more carbon dioxide, the main GHG, than they sequester – exactly the opposite of the assumptions built into our models, which treat forests as sponges that sop up excess carbon.
The same thing is happening to a number of other ecosystems that our models and scientists have treated as carbon sinks. The Amazon rainforest, the boreal forests (one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks in the planet), and soils in temperate areas are all releasing more carbon than they are absorbing, due to global warming-induced droughts, diseases, pest activity, and metabolic changes. In short, many of the things we treat as carbon sponges in our models aren’t sopping up excess carbon; they’re being wrung out and releasing extra carbon.
The polar ice cap is also melting far faster than models predict, setting off another feedback loop. Less ice means more open water, which absorbs more heat which means less ice, and so on.
Even worse, we’ve substantially underestimated the rate at which continental glaciers are melting.
Climate change models predicted that it would take more than 1,000 years for Greenland’s ice sheet to melt. But at the AAAS meeting in St. Louis, NASA’s Eric Rignot outlined the results of a study that shows Greenland’s ice cover is breaking apart and flowing into the sea at rates far in excess of anything scientists predicted, and it’s accelerating each year. If (or when) Greenland’s ice cover melts, it will raise sea levels by 21 feet – enough to inundate nearly every sea port in America.
In the Antarctic seas, another potentially devastating feedback loop is taking place. Populations of krill have plummeted by 80% in the last few years due to loss of sea ice. Krill are the single most important species in the marine foodchain, and they also extract massive amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. No one predicted their demise, but the ramifications for both global warming and the health of marine ecosystems are disastrous. This, too, will likely feed on itself, as less krill means more carbon stays in the atmosphere, which means warmer seas, which means less ice, which means less krill and so on in a massive negative spiral.
One of our preeminent planetary scientists, James Lovelock, believes that in the not too distant future humans will be restricted to a relatively few breeding pairs in Antarctica. It would be comfortable to dismiss Professor Lovelock as a doom and gloom crazy, but that would be a mistake. A little over a year ago at the conclusion of a global conference in Exeter England on Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, scientists warned that if we allowed atmospheric concentrations of GHG to exceed 400 ppm, we could trigger serious and irreversible consequences. We passed that milestone in 2005 with little notice and no fanfare.
The scientific uncertainty in global warming isn’t about whether it’s occurring or whether it’s caused by human activity, or even if it will "cost" us too much to deal with it now. That’s all been settled. Scientists are now debating whether it’s too late to prevent planetary devastation, or whether we have yet a small window to forestall the worst effects of global warming.
Our children may forgive us the debts we’re passing on to them, they may forgive us if terrorism persists, they may forgive us for waging war instead of pursuing peace, they may even forgive us for squandering the opportunity to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. But they will spit on our bones and curse our names if we pass on a world that is barely habitable when it was in our power to prevent it.
And they will be right to do so.

John Atcheson's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several wonk journals. Email to: [email protected]
###

lol...Bot I admire your climatic crusade!

I've bought the theory for a while now, and agree with most of the article. What remains to be seen, IMO, is to what extent predicted changes will actually occur.

On a related topic, I just received a brochure regarding provincial energy sources in Ontario. It basically outlines the challenges Ontario faces with increasing energy needs and how these needs will be met - in line with reducing emissions by 2025. Coal burning is going out the window (from 19% to 0%), nuclear is staying about the same, but the biggest planned changes are for renewable energy resources to go from an existing 23% to 43%. We'll have to see what this actually brings, but it is an interesting shift in the way our provincial government is looking at getting energy.

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Chris
2007 E550 4Matic - 61,000 Km - Iridium Silver, black leather, Sport package, Premium 2 package
2007 GL450 4Matic - 62,000 Km - Obsidian Black Metallic, black leather, all options
1998 E430 - sold
1989 300E - 333,000 Km - sold
1977 280E - sold
1971 250 - retired

"And a frign hat. They gave me a hat at the annual benefits meeting. I said. how does this benefit me. I dont have anything from the company.. So they gave me a hat." - TheDon

Wow – Read, or saw somewhere, where ice ages developed parabolically, as more ice created more reflection and grew quite fast. In a practical way I wonder if it isn't time to think about how to deal with what's coming down, as it seems futile to think actions will be taken quickly enough to actually do much about this. Does increased sunspot activity indicate that the sun is warming, or that this is a contributing factor? I guess you go long Canada/ short Mexico.

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85 Jeep CJ7
86 Chevy 6.2l diesel PU

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius

It can be useful to redraw a map with the sizes of countries made bigger or smaller in order to represent something of interest. Such maps are called cartograms and can be an effective and natural way of portraying geographic or social data.

Here's one for greenhouse emissions.

Bot

Attached Thumbnails

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071115164458.htm

More info