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It may sound too good to be true, but TU Delft PhD student Ming Ma has found a way to produce alcohol out of thin air. Or to be more precise, he has found how to effectively and precisely control the process of electroreduction of CO2 to produce a wide range of useful products, including alcohol. Being able to use CO2 as such a resource may be pivotal in tackling climate change. His PhD defence will take place on September 14th.
[...] For mitigating atmospheric CO2 concentration, carbon capture and utilization (CCU) could be a feasible alternative strategy to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). The electrochemical reduction of CO2 to fuels and value-added chemicals has attracted considerable attention as a promising solution. In this process, the captured CO2 is used as a resource and converted into carbon monoxide (CO), methane (CH4), ethylene (C2H4), and even liquid products such as formic acid (HCOOH), methanol (CH3OH) and ethanol (C2H5OH).
The high energy density hydrocarbons can be directly and conveniently utilized as fuels within the current energy infrastructure. In addition, the production of CO is very interesting since it can be used as feedstock in the Fischer–Tropsch process, a well-developed technology that has been widely used in industry to convert syngas (CO and hydrogen (H2)) into valuable chemicals such as methanol and synthetic fuels (such as diesel fuel). The figure attached describes these three processes and the way electroreduction of CO2 could potentially close the carbon cycle.
Beer, from air. Others use barley as an intermediary.
Publication: Aula TU Delft, PhD defence Ming Ma, Selective Electrocatalytic CO2 Conversion on Metal Surfaces.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Fluffeh on Tuesday September 12 2017, @05:40AM (1 child)
From TFA:
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:16AM
See also Fischer-Tropsch process [wikipedia.org]. It's not a new idea.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @06:21AM (9 children)
Jesus needed at least water.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:07AM (7 children)
One of the highest producer of CO2 is fermentation. Some estimates indicate around 60 g of CO2 per liter of beer. [triplepundit.com].
Ok, it's a back of the napkin calculation, let's cut it in half: say 30g CO2/liter of beer.
US had 24172 Ml of beer in 2014 [wikipedia.org] - which means CO2 emissions by fermentation in the 750 Mton of CO2.
Comparison time: in 2014, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions totaled 6,870 Mtons of carbon dioxide equivalents. [epa.gov]. Oh, wow. That's like 10% only from the beer consumption on conservative estimates!
(Ok, Ok. I'll stop here before the govts will start putting a cap on beer production/consumption).
But, there's a thing: place the "synthetic fuel" Dutch factory close to a Heineken plant and maybe Noordoostpolder [wikipedia.org] and you can export the diesel to France... err... China... oh, stop it, will you?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:34AM (4 children)
Of course the CO2 released during fermentation was previously captured by the very plants that get fermented. Therefore the process is carbon neutral (except for the carbon used in the industrial farming process, that is).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:42AM (3 children)
Of course, CO2 is CO2 irrespective of its source. As CO2 had the habit of doing, it captures more heat than the other major components of the atmosphere.
On the same line, the CO2 farted from cows still comes the carbon captured by the grass - it doesn't stop those vegans to promote their mantra as "greener than thou".
So... in any case, just stay away from my stake and beer, or else... No, really, I mean it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:46AM (1 child)
So, is a cow only carbon-neutral if you bury it once it dies? I mean I like my aged steak, but I'm not too keen on having to *dig* for it..
Besides, the problem with steak is the water use, rather than the by-products.. http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/food-water-footprint_n_5952862 [huffingtonpost.com.au]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @12:30PM
This is what I understood one of the argument of the vegans is.
They can bury their steak if so they like it, but better stay away from mine (rump-steak 42-day-properly-aged and then twitching-blue grilled over charcoal is my favourite - a good balance, to my taste, between flavour and texture).
Oh, so this is why the Murray-Darling basin dries out!
Those paid-by-tax-water thieves in outback NSW sucking dry the Barwon-Darling system have nothing to do with it. Perhaps this is why, unlike the Northern Territory under-age detention case, we haven't heard about any outcome; silly me, out-of-sight-out-of-mind has nothing to do with it.
Tell you what: I'll insist my steak be raised in Tasmania then, lately they have excess of water.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by lx on Tuesday September 12 2017, @01:10PM
Cows fart methane which is about 200x as potent as CO2.
So yeah, cows bad.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 12 2017, @03:15PM (1 child)
Beer causes global warming? 😞
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @03:26PM
While the above might be true, a thing is certain: beer produce some... mmmm... localized cooling. Mouth, throat and stomach areas mainly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:31AM
I bet they do need water, too. At least I don't see how they could get the hydrogen from CO2. The only listed product without hydrogen is carbon monoxide.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @06:47AM (9 children)
In the same time, the Aussies developed a marvel of technology, on par or even better than the Dutch: a keg monitoring device [abc.net.au] that "tracks the temperature of the keg, how long it has been at those temperatures so we can tell how the product inside is coping, how fast it's staling and the location using geolocation technology" (essentially, by the photo, an Arduino with sensors, GPS, probably a memory card and maybe an LCD)
Oh, wow! I'm truly impressed by the leaps-and-bounds the technology progresses in Australia. If we keep it this way, we may even get our own space agency... sometime!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @06:56AM (8 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:14AM (5 children)
You mean it's very much like... outback Australia?
If there are minerals to be mined there, I guarantee you'll see Aussies in a fly in, fly out [wikipedia.org] arrangement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:57AM (4 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:19AM (3 children)
3He [wikipedia.org] perhaps ('twas an Aussie [wikipedia.org] who discovered it - without "Binary Beer" the English beer must've been awful at the time).
Theoretically, the fusion of 3He and 2D produces 4He and 1 proton which is trapped by the magnetic field - unlike 2D + 3T which produces a neutron (which has the nasty habit of making the enclosure brittle by collisions).
The required revolution is only a technological one - higher fusion temperature, make the enclosure large and/or the magnetic confinement stronger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:31AM (2 children)
See what you're talking about is light helium. It's one of the lightest things that exist in the universe. Light, in this case thought not always, meaning 'having very little mass.' Now if you'll remember you're physics E=MC^2. So in a fuel, all other things being equal, we'd prefer heavy, but ok, minor quibble, moving on. It's a naturally occurring, stable isotope of helium and there's no need to go to the moon to get it. There's speculation that it could be used to fuel a fusion reactor without neutrons, and that's wonderful! I hope it works and it sounds like it might. But that doesn't change the situation I was talking about much at all, it has no direct effect. Cheaper energy can reduce the costs of virtually everything, of course, but that's the best case here - cheaper energy.
^3HE is believed to be more abundant on the Moon than on Earth, and that's sparked all kinds of naïve and illiterate "science journalism" but it doesn't really mean much. On Earth it's supposed to be ~.000137% (I hate to even write that number, it reeks of false precision) of the Helium, which is only 5.2ppm in the atmosphere, and IIRC most of the usable Helium on the planet was extracted from natural gas. On Luna there's little atmosphere and the best I know no signs of natural gas, and the 'helium reserves' that the Chinese want to claim consist of traces clinging to loose shale and rocks near the surface.
You don't burn the kind of calories it takes to escape orbit just so you can scrape rocks for helium and ship it back to Earth mate. Not even for the highest grade helium.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:06PM
You mat want to recheck your physics: mass defect and binding energy [wikipedia.org] is in no relation to do with the original weight of the nuclei undergoing fission or fusion.
If you fuse two heavier-than-iron nuclei, you'll need to spend energy and you'll obtain something that will likely shed protons as fast as they can (no natural elements with more than 94 protons can be naturally found on Earth)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:44PM
> Now if you'll remember you're physics E=MC^2. So in a fuel, all other things being equal, we'd prefer heavy, but ok, minor quibble, moving on.
I'm sure any day now you'll be announcing your matter-energy converter that makes E=mc^2 relevant for fuel :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:28AM (1 child)
https://www.space.com/38095-moon-surface-water-molecules-all-day.html [space.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:45AM
If you think I'll go and lick the rocks on the moon for "chemically bound to rocks" molecules of beer, you are crazy!
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Troll) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @06:51AM (56 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:09AM (29 children)
Oh?!? Based on what?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:42AM (28 children)
Definitions. Definitions themselves.
What is a pollutant? I'm going to ask google, even though I know that's an actively hostile and revisionist source, and I certainly don't mean to imply any endorsement of their selection or ordering of results. The whole point is that I'm not cherry picking my preferred source, I'm actively doing the opposite, and this is still obvious from definition.
"A pollutant is a substance or energy introduced into the environment that has undesired effects, or..." -Wikipedia
"pollutant. (pə-l t'nt) A substance or condition that contaminates air, water, or soil." - dictionary.com
They list Webster third. As expected Webster mangles and makes the simple complex, listing as their first meaning:
"to make ceremonially or morally impure :defile"
but they finally get to the normal modern usage of the term in 2.b
"to contaminate (an environment)..." Webster
Since two of those definitions refer to another root, "contaminate," let's take a quick look at that one too. Again, using nearly the worst possible source;
"to make impure or unsuitable by contact or mixture..." - dictionary.com
"to soil, stain, corrupt, or infect by contact or association..."
"to make inferior or impure by admixture..."
"to make unfit for use by introduction of..." - Websters tortured wordbook, err I mean Merriam Websters online.
What does each and every one of these definitions have in common? Let me boil them down just a little bit more for you.
"introduced into" - wikipedia
"contact or admixture" - dictionary.com
"contact or association"
"admixture"
"introduction of" - webster
You can't introduce air into air. You can't do any of these things if both the subject and the object are the same thing. It simply makes no sense.
So the first, fundamental quality of *pollution* that shines through all of these definitions, and would no doubt fair even better if I had a decent dictionary handy to consult, is that it's something *different from* the substance that is being polluted.
You can't pollute air by adding air. That's just nonsense.
Air is a compound gas, of course, and changing the proportions of the constituents could have drastic effects, but that no more makes it pollution than my grey old hair makes me a pop-tart.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:59AM (5 children)
"X is part of Y, and Y is good, therefore Y with more X is good" is not logical supportable, yet what you've said seems to imply you think it's the case.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:15AM (4 children)
So you disagree with the definition of the word pollution. Ok, noted. If you find yourself doing this frequently then you should definitely come up with a new word for the new language you're speaking, just to distinguish it from English.
""X is part of Y, and Y is good, therefore Y with more X is good" is not logical supportable, yet what you've said seems to imply you think it's the case."
I have done nothing of the sort. What YOU appear to have done is to smuggle in the postulate "anything that is bad is pollution."
And that's just not what the word means.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:25AM (3 children)
I have done nothing of the sort.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:04AM (2 children)
Well all right let's take a look at this then.
Here's your caricature of my position;
""X is part of Y, and Y is good, therefore Y with more X is good""
I never used the word 'good' and what I actually said, boiled down to match your statement structurally, would actually be;
X is a natural component of Y, therefore adding X to Y is not pollution.
If we equate my 'pollution' with 'bad' which is the inverse of your 'good' then these things line up but if not, then I must leave it to you to explain yourself, for I certainly see no sense in it. I took no position on whether adding more X to Y was good, or bad, I only said it was not 'pollution.'
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:13AM (1 child)
And that is where we are in the clearest disagreement. I believe pollution is non-binary, and depends upon concentration (and other contextual properties). Explicitly - concentration x1 of X in Y can be considered not pollution, and concentration x2 of X in Y can be considered pollution.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:33AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:28AM (10 children)
It's not "adding air to air" - it's adding CO2 in excess that becomes pollution.
"Making ... from air" (the thing that irked you on the straw-man trail) does not necessarily mean all the components of the air are used in the making. If you extract CO2 from air and make things, you still made the things "from air".
Of course, if you make the things from a liquefied CO2 bottle, it may be you are making things from... mmm... "thick liquid" instead; and if you just release the CO2 in the air of a room, you may die of CO2 poisoning - you may try it (not on yourself, I suggest find a non-human enemy instead) if you want a demonstration why too much CO2 in air is a pollutant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Troll) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:47AM (9 children)
It's adding air to air. Air is a composite gas, CO2 is one of the normal components, we're only dickering over the ratios. That's not pollution. And I'll add that contrary to apparently widespread but completely nonsensical assertions, not all things that are bad are pollution.
"If you extract CO2 from air and make things, you still made the things "from air"."
Exactly my point.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:00AM (8 children)
Oh, come on, Arik! Really now. You find nothing funnier to post than some bickering over definitions?
Look, I am one of the guys that say "AGW is happening due to the increased CO2 concentration in air".
You call it pollutant or non-pollutant, CO2 doesn't care about your definitions: it will continue to trap more heat for longer than the other major components of the Earth atmosphere (and, given a chance, it will poison you if its partial pressure is high enough).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:37AM (7 children)
I'm a problem solver, son and grandson of problem solvers, I've been doing it as long as I can remember and I expect I'll be doing it on my deathbed.
And I tell you completely serious, no joke, the first step to solving a problem is to define the problem.
If you don't know what the problem is, your chances of solving it are not going to be good. The better you can define the problem, the better equipped you are to find solutions for it. If you can't even give a non-contradictory executive-overview level of the problem, then the chances of you solving it are extremely remote.
Pollution is a clearly defined term, with a clearly defined meaning, which has been increasingly misused just as we've seen repeatedly in this thread, as a slur word with no particular definition other than 'something bad.' There are a couple reasons that come to mind for this - one is that very clearly the AGW people way back when they were first planning world domination decided it was good branding to call carbon 'pollution' even though they knew damn well it wasn't. People were primed and edgy about pollution, it was a genius move from that point of view, but it's certainly done nothing to encourage me to view it as anything other than marketing. And the second is simple hollywood degeneracy, hollywood inevitably condenses everything down into 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in time for the climax, and I really wish that I could believe that people take that for what it is, but clearly we don't always do that. People unironically and unashamedly talk about 'the good guys' and 'the bad guys' in situations where it's utterly childish and unrealistic, where even 30 years ago it would have been seen as such, even joe sixpack would have been embarrassed for you to hear you say something so astonishingly naïve, like all you knew of life was some bad movie. Today our most respected leaders make such utterances daily.
So this attempt to change the meaning of the word pollution to mean 'anything bad and scary' really doesn't inspire confidence in these people or their hypothesis, but it doesn't actually mean they're wrong, just dishonest, and the continuing success of this fraud may have more to do with the general degeneracy than with their efforts specifically.
Whole subject depresses me man. If for no other reason than that I love the English language. We have a large and varied variety of words for bad things because it's incredibly useful to be able to accurately define exactly what sort of bad thing you need dealt with. Now we're busy collapsing all of those words into one big cloud of synonyms that all mean the same thing and thus can convey little or no useful information as to the nature of the problem. This is just a violent assault on the language itself, and the culture, the history that it preserves and conveys across the generations.
I weep for the next generation.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:15AM
The definitions you quoted are not identical to each other. Therefore you yourself seem to have proved that the definition is not as clear as you have just claimed.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by tfried on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:35AM (4 children)
Apparently not so, for you have not been able to point us to any definition that is remotely clear in the sense you would like it to be.
The "something bad" is actually a core part of the term from early on. E.g. wiktionary says
Which is also pretty much the only part that is still left, today, of the early recorded uses of the word.
I absolutely concede that adding CO2 to air is not something I would refer to as a prototypical example when explaining pollution. I would also concede that it makes more sense to say that the atmosphere is polluted, here, not the air, since CO2 in the given levels is not a problem for breathing, etc.
Further, I will even concede that the use of the term pollution has undergone significant changes. This however is very simply a side-effect of awareness of / debate on environmental issues at large. A new topic was starting to be discussed, using existing terms, and so those terms took on new connotations. There is absolutely nothing specific to climate change, in this respect, however. Light pollution and noise pollution are equally non-prototypical uses that emerged in the late 1960s, early 1970s, long before "carbon pollution" came into use (which I believe to be a term of the late 1990s, early 2000s, although I have not found a definite source; let's see if you can point us to earlier uses).
Look, I can see your distress with labelling CO2 as a pollutant. But that's not because you are worried about the English language. That's because you simply do not think man made CO2-emissions have the negative effects on climate that "the AGW people" ascribe to them. Do us all a favour, and try to bring how that point, instead of simply sabotaging any debate with silly word games.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:07AM (3 children)
I pointed to not one but three definitions and showed how each and every one of them necessarily implied exactly the definition of the word that I used. You can't have missed the post, just up the tree.
"The "something bad" is actually a core part of the term from early on."
No disagreement there. Another thing I posted recently which you might have more easily missed was my own definition, which I initially avoided giving for the same reason that I posted the dictionary definitions - to avoid the accusation I'm pushing my own definition. I'm only describing the word as precisely as I can, because i do not have access to a decent dictionary currently, and only after showing that it's implied by the dictionary definitions still commonly given. But it is, very succinctly - connotation: alien element denotation: harmful. That's the core of the word, and that is the meaning you're generally going to find if you're reading important books on important subjects rather than millennial weblogpostings on the innertubes.
CO2 in the atmosphere is just not foreign matter. That doesn't mean that too much (or too little) of it couldn't be a problem, but we have a lot of different words for bad things for a reason and it's really not helpful to make them all into synonyms.
"I absolutely concede that adding CO2 to air is not something I would refer to as a prototypical example when explaining pollution. I would also concede that it makes more sense to say that the atmosphere is polluted, here, not the air, since CO2 in the given levels is not a problem for breathing, etc."
That may make more sense to you, but it's still not accurate.
This goes back to how important it is to accurately define the problem. Your first sentence is showing good instincts, but your second? Still twisting to find a way to make the wrong word fit. Depending, of course, on where you are, I'd imagine that neither the atmosphere, nor the air, is very polluted. Pollution was a huge problem back in the late 70s, most places I've been this century there's been little issue, a few areas around big cities certainly to the contrary, and keeping in mind I've never set foot in some of the places I expect the most serious issues are to be found, e.g. mainland China.
You're not talking about air quality though. CO2 levels could increase significantly without any real effect on air quality. As you say, 'not a problem for breathing, etc.' This is nothing like pollution.
Increasing the amounts of any constituent gas implicitly requires decreasing the amount of one or more other gases. Too much nitrogen? Well IIRC it's mostly a filler anyway, not a problem until it pushes something else too low, then THAT is the problem. Too much oxygen? HUGE problems, for us at least. Every little spark becomes a local blaze, every local blaze a regional conflagration, every regional conflagration a national catastrophe. Fires start easier, burn hotter, spread faster and further, and resist efforts to extinguish more effectively. Once burned, forests have difficulty recovering, all plants are choking on the oxygen and struggle to grow. Crank up the oxygen a bit more and say byebye to the last remnants of large multicellular life on dry land. However, under the surface of the oceans, safe from fire, life might benefit from the increased oxygen in unforseen ways.
Third in the list of things that are air, argon, a noble gas, so again we should be able to increase the amount quite a bit, as long as we don't depress something else too low in the process. You can kill with argon, you know, but it's the lack of oxygen that actually does the deed.
So what's that leave? Oh yeah, CO2. Increase that and what happens? You increase plant growth rates right off. Plants love CO2, they eat it all day long, and they shit oxygen. Keep cranking it up and that greenhouse effect might just ruin your day though.
Increasing the occurrence of any of these elements would be bad, but it would not be pollution.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tfried on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:57AM
And you can't have missed my post(s) where I detailed that these definitions definitely do not mean what you would like them to mean. You tried to counter that using the funny argument that air and CO2 are logically "the same", and thus cannot be "mixed".
I'll stop trying to talk you out of that, but please stop pretending that made anything close to a coherent argument WRT the definition of pollution.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @01:16PM (1 child)
Only if the total amount remains unchanged.
There no indication that the weight of the entire Earth atmosphere was...mmmm.... conserved.
Wrong, if your are given 95% oxygen and 5% carbon dioxide, you are likely to pass out - increased blood pressure and hyperventilation are the immediate effects. At 10% CO2, you'll be unconscious in minutes and dead in under one hour [cdc.gov], even if the rest of 90% is oxygen.
The respiratory reflexes [wikipedia.org] aren't governed by the low concentration of oxygen but by the increased concentration of CO2 [wikipedia.org] in the blood - this is why asphyxiation with inert gases is mostly used in euthanasia [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:28PM
Actually, at those levels, the oxygen itself would likely kill you:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question493.htm [howstuffworks.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:42AM
And I'm telling you that "pollution" attached to "AGW" is a false problem. You can define the "pollution" term to God and one bus-stop beyond that and it won't get you any closer to solving, mellowing or adapting to GW.
Your grandfather would tell you "Sidetracked much? That's not funny"
I'm not a native English speaker, It doesn't stop me solving problems (and creating others, otherwise where's the fun in living?)
I can empathise with you in some respects (like "hacker" and "begging the question") but only in contexts the meaning really matter.
Yes, I agree that
but this happens mainly in US, a lot of the other countries know the difference between politics, science, fiction and Marvel-trash. As an example (not a proof), see TF-current-A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tfried on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:41AM (8 children)
So to play along with your dictionary game:
a)
How do these three out of your five defining terms of "contamination" contradict everybody else's notion that a pollutant is not necessarily something all new to the mix?
b) For the two "introduce", let's look up what that actually means. E.g. merriam webster: "3. :a putting in :insertion", dictionary.com: " 5. an act or instance of inserting." wiktionary: "3. To add (something) to a system, a mixture, or a container."
Where do these definitions refer to something all new?
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:54AM (7 children)
Let's see if we can agree on a little common sense here. Once we narrow those words down as much as you've done, there's nothing to prevent the subject and object from being the same, in some sense. If we ignore everything else and look just at that, we could talk about introducing oxygen to oxygen, contact between oxygen and oxygen, admixture, even, between otherwise identical oxygen from two different sources.
But I suspect you do speak English and you realize that this is nonsense. You can't contaminate, or pollute, oxygen by adding oxygen. You could do it by adding *already polluted oxygen* to pure oxygen, but adding pure oxygen to pure oxygen cannot possibly be pollution, do we agree on that?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tfried on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:29AM (3 children)
So you are really trying to argue that "air" and "CO2" are the same? You might want to review set theory, then, or enlighten us on the new meaning of "same".
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:47AM (2 children)
Introducing more of one of the constituent gases in a compound gas is not 'pollution.' It's changing the ratio.
Pollution does not mean fnord.
It denotes introduction of a foreign element, and connotes that the result is harmful.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tfried on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:06AM
I have completely understood that this is the definition you want to apply, but you have failed to make that point without resorting to unsound reasoning such as saying that "air" and "CO2" are the same.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @01:37PM
Really? Even when the introduced constituents become poisonous?
Because CO2 at 10% will cause mass extinction to all human (and majority of mammalian) life.
Unlike O2 and N2 and argon, CO2 modifies the pH of the body's internal medium [wikipedia.org], and the human metabolism is quite sensitive to that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:18AM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:16AM (1 child)
If you have a container of Y polluted with some portion of foreign matter X, to which you add more pure Y, you would now have a larger quantity of polluted Y, with a lower concentration of pollutant X. However, it would still be polluted, and you would have lost a portion of pure, unpolluted Y, in the process. So, depending on exactly what Y and X are and what you're trying to do, that could be a serious problem. Or not.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:43AM
It is clear that it is you who disagrees with the rest of the world in your definitions.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:20AM (1 child)
This is a stupid semantic argument.
(Score: 4, Funny) by MostCynical on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:50AM
You must be new here..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:13AM (3 children)
Sola dosis facit venenum
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:46AM
However I believe if you will cast your eye down the page to my reply to c0l0, it actually deals with your far more coherent objection as well.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:58AM (1 child)
Paracelsus?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:12PM
Better than paracetamol or parafahrenheit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:24AM (3 children)
Global warming will be solved by Ethanol_fueled and the alcohol from CO2 in the air, better than some Nazi nitrogen fixing process that goes BOOM when there is a little flood, or something!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:31AM (1 child)
CO2
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:43AM
Carbon Oxygen Squared! You got a problem with that? CO16. Rather rare isotope, but not impossible.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:36AM
A pity is wasn't an US university to discover it.
You, with your "teach the controversy" ideas, see what you've done? Put breaks on the science's appeal in US! Now Ethanol_fueled will need to immigrate!!
(and to think that producing ethanol from air may appeal even for people of some religions which frown at fermented liquors! US lost a major trump here and got a minor Orange clown instead.
large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:39AM (5 children)
According to your logic, drinking sea water should be healthy: Salt is something your body needs, and sea water contains a lot of it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:54AM (4 children)
According to your logic, anything that is unhealthy is pollution?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tfried on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:14AM (2 children)
According to your logic, the term "pollution" is independent of context?
So would you rather I enhance your fuel tank with some sugar, or your cereals with some gasoline?
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:18AM
I'm absolutely certain I said the exact opposite of that.
"So would you rather I enhance your fuel tank with some sugar, or your cereals with some gasoline?"
Neither thanks.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tfried on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:21AM
Or, since you seem so hung up about adding something that was already in the mix: You don't think you can pollute a river by adding (large amounts of) salt? You don't think you can pollute flour by adding rodent hair? You don't think you can pollute vegetables by adding mold? You don't think you can pollute your silicon dies by adding to much of the doping elements? You don't think you can pollute your view of the night sky by lighting a strong bulb next to your eye?
You don't think you can pollute a debate by insisting on nonsense definitions nobody else seems to share?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:17PM
According to my logic, any politician is unhealthy thus pollutant. Care to disagree?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:49AM (6 children)
And did you never hear the case of the bloke who died after drinking 10 litres of water in a day? So is water lethal, or necessary?
The world isn't binary.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @07:59AM
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who use monospaced fonts and those who don't.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:04AM (4 children)
You might scroll down for my other answer, but I'll add, water is lethal, water can be necessary, but neither of those propositions has any direct bearing on the question of whether or not it's pollution! You can't pollute water by adding water, that's nonsense. You can make beneficial water into harmful water by increasing the dose - in any number of scenarios - but none of that has jack shit to do with it being pollution.
Hypothetically, you could go into some extraterrestrial environment where life had evolved in the absolute absence of water, and introduce water there, and probably destroy the place, well in that context then yeah, I guess water could be pollution.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:08AM
I suspect your mind was blown before you read my comment, as noone with a correctly-connected brain could have interpreted it that way. Polluting your brain with too much THC or LSD, are we?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:19AM (2 children)
You can pollute your body with too much water, then you die.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:40AM (1 child)
Yeah, no, you actually can't.
But you can certainly drown. No pollution required, the purest of water will work just fine.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday September 12 2017, @12:01PM
Let me introduce you to "water intoxication": WebMD [webmd.com], Medical Daily [medicaldaily.com], and Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:17AM (4 children)
Quick question: is Vitamin D beneficial or is it a poison? Without enough vitamin D, you could get rickets or some similar disease. However, if you get far too much Vitamin D, the way Gary Null once did after consuming one of his own supplements [scienceblogs.com], you could develop hypercalcemia and its various complications such as kidney stones and cardiac arrhythmia. The dose makes the poison. In the same way, you can't describe CO2 as only either "air" or a "pollutant". Again, the dose makes the poison. If CO2 levels in the atmosphere fell enough, that could bring about an ice age. Sort of like a vitamin deficiency. If CO2 levels are permitted to continue rising, global temperatures could rise to levels that make agriculture impossible. Sort of like a vitamin overdose. A certain level of CO2 is needed to maintain global temperatures reasonable for human life and human civilisation, just as a certain dose of a vitamin is needed to maintain good health.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:36AM (2 children)
So your reply is to change the subject?
I said nothing about 'beneficial' or 'poison.' Nor Vitamin D either, for that matter.
"In the same way, you can't describe CO2 as only either "air" or a "pollutant". "
Sure I can. Because I'm speaking English, where words have meanings. You can't pollute air with air, you can't pollute water with water.
"Pollution" is not the set of all bad things. Nor is it a super-set containing that set. It is, instead, one of many words that describe *subsets* of the set of all bad things. Shocking as this may be to you, not all words for bad things are synonyms. If they were, we wouldn't need so many of them.
"If CO2 levels in the atmosphere fell enough, that could bring about an ice age. "
Umm, ok, and again, what does that have to do with pollution?
"Sort of like a vitamin deficiency. "
Which is yet another thing you have managed to mention with absolutely no apparent connection to the subject. Which I'll remind you was 'pollution.' Not "deficiency," and not "poison." I know they're confusingly similar, both starting with a 'p' and ending with an 'n' with a soft squishy sound in the middle and vowels to separate, but they're really entirely different words with distinct meanings.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by baldrick on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:13AM (1 child)
if you had a saltwater enviroment with a fish in it and kept adding fresh water would the fish consider you to be polluting its enviroment ?
... I obey the Laws of Physics
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:19AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:21PM
How much?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @12:01PM (2 children)
but please call me back when they can produce 18yo Highland Park (or any other malt, just going through a Highland Park phase at present...) in a similar manner.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 12 2017, @02:23PM (1 child)
Well, Highland Park is harder, it will require thick air in input.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:57PM
Is that a polluted kind of air?
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