Global Warming

[JimmyT]

Thanks Brian. Your measured response probably prevented me from blurting out some unkind, and ill considered words.

[JimmyT]

While I am generally opposed to the whole man made global warming thing. I do believe that the cap and trade policies if enacted will have the effect of making focus fusion even more attractive as an energy of choice. I don’t understand exactly how one gets emission rights for CO2 under the cap and trade policies.

Would coal burning power plants who replaced their generating facilities with focus fusion receive carbon credits they could sell? How sweet would that be?

This seems like a Rematog question. Particularly since it is independent of the whole centralized power issue.

[Breakable]

I believe they should not receive carbon credit, but should not have to pay carbon tax anymore.

[shawn]

It is interesting how the debates between the different camps have reached at times religious fervor.
I am of the opinion that natural cycles of the Earth and the solar system and beyond have a far greater influence on our environmental conditions than we do.
Volcanoes spew out an incredible amount of heat and gases and ash, etc. and there has been a rise in volcanism since about the 1960s.
But the Al Gore crowd downplays that as an irrelevant detail.
A comment above about the ozone holes brought to mind a few things.
Ozone is a flammable gas and rockets are basically a blow torch.
We have been pushing these flaming torches through this gas cloud and then are surprised when holes appear.
Then we blame various pollutants.
I have never heard anyone make the connection about rockets being either the major cause, or a contributor even.
IMO we can and should do something about pollution, but having to go about it with this carbon-tax issue is a weird way to do it.
Maybe it is a precedent setter for future legislation to tax other gases, like say, O2.
Who knows.

[Breakable]

Interesting read:
http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html
Especially the Part I, “Numbers, not adjectives”

[Brian H]

shawn wrote:
….
Ozone is a flammable gas and rockets are basically a blow torch.
We have been pushing these flaming torches through this gas cloud and then are surprised when holes appear.
Then we blame various pollutants.
I have never heard anyone make the connection about rockets being either the major cause, or a contributor even.
…

Actually, not. I support your skepticism, but your science needs adjusting. Ozone is oxygen ( O3 instead of the usual O2 ) and does not burn any more than ordinary oxygen does; it supports combustion. It is more reactive than O2, which is why it makes smog and is toxic at lower elevations.

[Jessica]

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[jamini]

Global warming is when the temperature around the world gets warmer. There’s a natural cycle the earth has been going through for thousands of years. We have global warming for many years, and then it flips and in very quick order, we shift to global cooling which happens much faster than globalwarming, and it puts us into an ice age.

[shawn]

Brian H
Ozone is oxygen ( O3 instead of the usual O2 ) and does not burn any more than ordinary oxygen does; it supports combustion.

It still burns and so passing a flaming torch through it is likely to burn what is close to it.
I am not blaming all of the loses of it on rockets, just saying that it never gets mentioned and is a contributing factor.

This idea that we are responsible for the global warming is total tripe.
It is a natural phenomena and we can do nothing to stop it.
Even if we all just died or disappeared it would still occur.
The powers that be are most likely well aware of this and so put out the propaganda to mitigate widespread panic.

[Aeronaut]

In theory, carbon taxes are going to wean the alleged bad guys off CO2 emissions over decades. We’ll see more when the bill emerges from Congress. ‘Bama wants a California-grade bill that he can use to lead the hold-outs by example. Maybe we’ll have an indication by the end of 2010….

Liquid fueled rockets use liquid fuels like hydrogen or kerosene (by any other name) mixed with cryogenic oxygen. Pure oxygen, as Brian mentioned, is not flammable. For that matter, neither is pure hydrogen, although you could suffocate in a room full of it. A mixture of 96% hydrogen + 4% oxygen is explosive.

The oxygen is used in both cases to make it possible to burn the fuel. Burning cryogenic hydrogen + oxygen = water vapor and a bunch of heat energy. Kerosene has some relatively small advantages, but it pollutes as a rocket or jet fuel.

Do a site-wide search, though, because FF has some potential applications as a single stage to orbit energy and/or propulsion source. Guaranteed to make you swear off of chemical rocketry, lol.

[Rezwan]

Happy Monday!

This thread is now officially capped, per our new GW Policy.

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