From the “cooling towers are evil fossil fuel icons” department and the mind of Greenpeace comes this hilariously funny (and stupid) tweet. It demonstrates the usual m.o. of Greenpeace these days, blind uneducated vandalism in the name of a cause. Mind you, this isn’t some rogue splinter faction of Greenpeace putting out this photo, it’s the central office.
What these bozo activists don’t seem to understand (along with many journalists that make the same mistake) is that cooling towers emit clouds of steam and water vapor, not carbon dioxide. Even the highly liberal ABC in Australia gets this:
Rightfully, the Galileo movement helpfully fixed the billboard for the Greenpeacers in a followup Tweet:
This is obviously a Photoshop job, but wouldn’t it be great if we could identify where this vandalized billboard is at, and have somebody fix it for real?
Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So maybe this is a climate crime /sarc.
Yes !! Lets ban WATER !!! LOL…
Dihydrogen monoxide is a serious threat. Many people have died because of it.
And if it ain’t that stuff, it’s the hydrogen hydroxide that’ll kill ya….
Yes Mr. Basinger, most especially when it is inhaled to excess.
CO2 and H2O are molecularly equal villains in enabling carbon based life .
Without them all the evils and tribulations of life would be non-existent .
Hydroxylic acid is particularly dangerous. It will dissolve any known substance, and is particularly dangerous to structural materials such as steel. It is especially hazardous when it comes into contact with any electrical equipment – and our modern society is increasingly dependent on such technology for its very survival. Historically, sudden, spontaneous, uncontrolled releases of this potent chemical have been known to produce death tolls well into six figures.
It is a major scandal that this practically ubiquitous substance is readily available to untrained members of the public and it is essential that it should be tightly controlled or even banned as soon as possible.
When you live in or around Portland, Oregon, you learn not to make jokes like that. Because they’ll do it. It’s utterly amazing how last year’s absurdity becomes today’s mandate.
Terrible stuff – there is no safe harbour -In large quantities it will render you incapable of respirating. In small quantities it destroys even the very best scotch.
Steam? Excuse me I believe you are referring to “Oxygen pollution”
Dihydrogen monoxide is present at almost all fatal shark attacks!
Portland Oregon — Where they banned paper supermarket bags to save the trees mandating only plastic bags could be used — and then two years banned plastic bags to save the climate mandating that only paper bags could be used. An election cycle here merely changes the specific type of nuts who run things — but the generic level of nuttiness always remains the same.
Eugene WR Gallun.
Politicians don’t want to ban CO2, they want to tax it.
And they would certainly tax liquid water, and water vapor as well if they thought they could get away with it.
Dihydrogen monoxide must now be banned
The thought of its use must forever be canned
So the delegates spoke
in Cancun, what a joke.
It wasn’t exactly what Watt once had planned.
http://lenbilen.com/2012/01/30/dihydrogen-monoxide-the-main-source-of-greenhouse-gases-a-limerick/
don’t forget the other killer… oxygen dihydride
Damn stuff can pit concrete, that’s how bad it is.
Nah. That’s the people trying to chisel their icy walks with shovels and chippers when shoveling earlier would have been easier.
Yes what you are seeing in the picture is water droplets condensed from the invisible steam.
When the climate STOPS changing , THEN we should be worried !!
Well said!
Let’s make that our mantra.
If we’re schooling Greenpeace in scientific accuracy, let’s get it right. It’s not steam, it’s water vapor. Steam is invisible.
Water vapor is transparent.
It is colorless, same as CO2, but you can see them by the change of the refractive index.
Perhaps a better repair to the defaced sign would be another sign stating “Hate Crime” with an arrow pointing at the climate crime meme. This is, after all, what this sign really is!
It’s not the steam you see, it’s the micro droplets of water condensing from the steam.
Mie scattering actually. Best described by the even and odd orders of Riccati-Bessel functions if I remember by physics.
Well, if we’re going to get it right, let’s get it right , right?
Steam IS water vapour, hence both are invisible. The white fluffy stuff is liquid water droplets.
Now since the Greenpeace poster just points an arrow at the structure behind it and does not say “whilte fluffy stuff is a climate crime” no one is going to get very far being smart about scientific accuracy ( especially if they don’t know what steam is ).
At least this is not usual visual lie of cooling tower shot at sunset and photoshopped to make the white fluffy stuff look black and “dirty”.
In order to criticise this campaign you’d need to be able to say where the climate “wierding” CO2 is being emitted from. I think you’ll find it is coming out of the same hole as your “steam”.
The stacks that release the CO2 are the tall skinny ones, usually located within a few hundred feet of the cooling towers, but they are definitely separate from the cooling towers.
That’s a nuclear plant. Isn’t it?
Dahlquist,
Hard to say from the shot if it is a nuclear power plant. Some conventional plants have the same sort of cooling tower.
But many see these and assume they are the reactor buildings.
Of course, the reactor building is typically a squat and nondescript concrete structure nearby. The reactor building itself has no stacks, except for some vents.
It’s fog.
Dry steam is 100% water vapor and is transparent. Wet steam is between 0% and 100% water vapor and has visible water droplets (well, at 0% it’s water at 100°C). Dry steam made even hotter is superheated steam. It’s the stuff steam turbines are made for.
Steam mixed with air is, I guess, steam mixed with air. And that’s what the photo shows.
http://www.tlv.com/global/TI/steam-theory/wet-steam-dry-steam.html
A slight correction — that isn’t steam coming out of the cooling tower stack, it is condensate.
Further correction — it isn’t even water vapor, the gaseous form of water, which is transparent.
You beat me to it, steam is invisible.
Bodes ill for the “hydrogen economy”, which I haven’t heard about in a while.
Obama will claim that because of this fact there is inequality and we have to have black steam to make up for it.
Just add carbon.
Obama didn’t build it, so he may as well shut up.
Their stupidity knows no bounds. CO2 is a colourless odourless gas. Water vapour is a colourless, odourless gas that condenses in the air into tiny droplets, called steam,that refract light and are therefore visible, but still odourless, steam dissipates relatively quickly due to the relatively large surface area/volume ratio allowing evaporation and return to water vapour . Smoke is not colourless, smells to high heaven and takes a long time to dissipate. This is not science, it is observation and understanding of physical processes, dispassionately. Greenpeace lost the knack of doing that years ago!
Water droplets are NOT steam. They’re water droplets. Steam is above ambient temperature by 140F, more or less. After release, as it cools, water droplets appear. What you see coming out of a cooling tower is clouds, a mixture of water vapor and water droplets.
Jeez…seriously people?? FYI – there are three (3) types of steam;
1) Saturated Steam (dry)
2) Unsaturated Steam (wet)
3) Superheated Steam
These pictures are examples of Saturated Steam. Also things like steam from a pot of non-boiling water, ‘sea smoke’, breath vapors on cold days & clouds, etc. In essence, water condensing from a gas to a liquid in a mist-like form…also known as ‘flash steam’.
Unsaturated & Superheated Steams are water vapor boiled under pressure at temperatures above 212F (sea level).
http://www.tlv.com/global/TI/steam-theory/types-of-steam.html
Fog = Cloud on the ground
Cloud = Fog in the air
Krob, these pictures don’t show steam of any sort; they show clouds consisting of visible water droplets, invisible water vapor, plus fan-driven air coming out the top of a cooling tower. I spent 20 years specifying and designing this kind of system.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4azsQnHJggU/TpVpdRLJ0oI/AAAAAAAAAEE/vcAzb7w_Cys/s1600/cooling-tower-induced-flow.gif
Jorgekafkazar is correct, I operated cooling towers when I worked in a power plant. Cooling towers become necessary when the natural source of condenser cooling water becomes too warm or is not available with sufficient volume to maintain turbine outlet vacuum. They are mainly used when rivers or lakes are unavailable or too small to handle the thermal impact of the effluent. Nuclear installations must use a closed system to contain possible radiation excursion so cooling towers are most often associated with them.
These clowns could have taken pictures of cooling tower fog on any cool morning, on the rooftops of their local buildings that use water cooled condensers for refrigerators and chillers.
The University at which I worked most of my career tried using a cooling tower to air-cool the campus chilled water loop, but humidity levels made it impractical most of the summer and it began to get colder in winter than the engineers had predicted, so it wasn’t cost effective to maintain for so few productive hours of operation.
They had gambled that winters would be above freezing enough to save us the power the absorbers and chillers used. Instead we got more sub-freezing weather and increased maintenance. So failed alarmist predictions cost the taxpayers oodles and gobs on public education infrastructure mistakes.
Actually, the reason you see so much fog from an hour-glass shaped tower is the increase of turbulence from the design. Turbulent air can hold more of anything, including fuel in a boiler burner. I have an aftermarket device in my diesel truck to do it at the primary turbo intake.
“Climate Crime”?! How is that even a thing? Oh my, the times we live in…….
Let’s ban WATER!
People will sign anything…
And my favorite super-fund worthy site: http://tinyurl.com/naopg78
Holy cow! Look at all the CO2 being emitted by those geothermal plants! I thought those were supposed to be clean.
You can’t trust anybody any more.
Not just Greenpeace. Enter “CO2 pollution” into a Google Image search…. watch and weep.
Are they that stupid? Surely not all of them are that stupid. If I am correct, then they are deliberately disseminating false information. Isn’t there some kind of law against that? Maybe not.
Shouldn’t we ban breathing, given the increased CO2 we output?
IMO the goal is to tax breathing.
Or “thingy”!
https://youtu.be/QmFYHmGkfxw
Well, “thingy” would tend to increase release of CO2.
A lot of environmentalists want to reduce the world’s population of humans down to under 1 billion, a few advocate no more than 100 million. That’s a heck of a lot of humans who are going to have to stop breathing.
I’m pretty sure they’re willing to wait and let mother nature run her course but they just don’t want us reproducing at a growing rate.
We’ll be allowed to fade away, with Obamacare.
We will not go from 7 billion to a hundred million by attrition. It will require some serious dying.
Maybe Bond shouldn’t have stopped Blofeld.
So when are all the Green Liberal Lemmings going to start jumping off of cliffs ???? It’s their idea after all !!!! There are at least 150 million in the U.S.A. …Wouldn’t that be a good start ?????
aka: Oxidane
http://quezi.com/11668 “Why is Oxidane so deadly”
It shows the IQ/educational levels that they can still control.
Steam in itself is invisible, water vapour in itself is invisible. What one see’s is condensate, water droplets mixed in with the steam or water vapour as these condense.
Technically, what one sees is the particulate condensed phase, as you indicate. The term condensate, however, is used in industry to indicate any liquid phase resulting from cooling of a vapor. The most common “condensate” is the liquid water phase formed within steam-heating systems. Cooling towers do not emit steam–the temperatures are close to ambient.
Not really.
Air at normal temperatures CAN and does contain water vapour, just not very much of it. What is rising from the cooling tower is a mixture of water droplets entrained in rising air and water vapour. In fact the loss of heat due to the evaporation process is a major factor in the efficiency of the cooling tower.
We don’t normally regard atmospheric water vapour as steam because its relatively cool but even steam contains water in the liquid phase. The reality is unless it is superheated, steam from a boiler is mix of the gaseous and liquid phases of water.
While the water coming out of a steam condenser is indeed condensate the phrase is more commonly used for liquids separated in distillation.
Careful, the “Cold Steam ” cranks might decide to jump in here.
The same fog comes off the surface of the water at the circulating water outlets of a riverside steam cycle power plant on a cool still morning or evening. I wish I had a picture to post of the huge cloud on the river and seemingly small cloud of steam from the scrubber outlet of our nearby coal plant on a still winter morning.
(Some sarc here) It’s worse than the other commenters mentioned. Dihydrogen monoxide is the reaction product of mixing hydroxylic ACID with a base hydrogen hydroxide. Also, exhaled breath contains potent greenhouse gas water vapor in addition to “carbon”.
Sent from my iPhone
>
Good lord, Mr. Jordan!!! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!!!!!
;o)
Be sure to wear eye protection when you mix acids and bases…. IIRC, it’s better to add the acid to the base, but I recommend diluting both with water.
No carbon, as such, in exhaled breathe.
Any more than the stuff I sprinkle on my food is chlorine and sodium.
Green Warriors don’t know water from pollution, just like they don’t know ancient lines carved into a desert from publicity stunt:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/20/greenpeace-lima-nazca-lines-protest-suspects
Greensleaze are the true climate criminals, commiting vandalism and other acts in the name of the climate.
Go easy on them, Greenpeace are the ones who wanted a worldwide ban on methane. Them confusing steam with CO2 is small beer, also not a good thing to ban, I hasten to add.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/sleeping-with-the-enemy/
Pointman
Was that message written on parchment peeled from a birch tree? Uh, no, it looks like something that was manufactured using energy. Did the energy come from a wind turbine? Only 5% probability of that happening. How about the ink or paint used? Was it squeezed from some fruit or other source of colourant? Not likely. My guess is that we’re looking at something like a water-based latex. But hey! The end justifies the means, doesn’t it?
It’s actually not hard to find that location. The Tweet has a short URL which goes to a newspaper article. The caption on the image says “Climate change activists’ graffiti on a billboard near the Didcot coal-fired power station in Oxfordshire, UK.”
Yeah, it took me 2 seconds to find out what/where this was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didcot_power_stations
It is indeed a fossil fuel power station. The picture is taken out of context since it looks like its pointing towards a cooling tower.
Problem is the coal fired station at Didcot was closed sometime ago and the cooling tower in the picture was demolished. The only working unit is highly efficient modern combined cycle gas turbine station that uses smaller fan assisted units.
Dumb twice over it seems.
I was working at Chilton , looking down on Didcot when power stations A and B were still working and they were laying the foundations for the Diamond Synchrotron.
A red kite drifted over from the Ridgeway, circled around above the circular track of Diamond , then , having given its approval , moved over to the plume from one of the cooling towers , soared in and out of the plume , getting higher and higher until it disappeared from view . No choking or spluttering as far as i could see, just a kite (lazy bird, likes others to do its work for it , loves roadkill) enjoying the last days of the fossil fuel era.
That “colorless odorless” condensate is really dihydrogen monoxide!!! How can you be so callous? Think of the children!
In France, just between the 1st of June and the 26th of July, 199 persons died from acute dihydrogen monoxide exposure. This is worse than expected!
These powerplants are killers!
Source : http://www.francetvinfo.fr/faits-divers/noyades/la-hausse-des-noyades-en-france-en-trois-graphiques_1020391.html
Well someone near Oxfordshire needs to ride a bicycle over there, gently take samples so we can analyse the paint for toxins, get tire and shoe molds from iprints in the dirt near the sign so we can determine the carbon “footprints” made by the transportation they used and whether their footwear was made with fossil fuels, and check for any vegetation damage done that could have occured while painting was done. Then, carefully correct the sign using organic paint without disturbing the already fragile ecosystem there, and report.
I’ll find a couple of grad students, an art professor and some psychologists who can write a scathing manuscript about the findings to submit for peer review.
Taking a stab at comedy…
This is not pollution, Greenpeace, This is the industry’s effort to increase the albedo of the planet in order to counteract the rising CO2. Man made clouds, just like some informed scientist on your side demanded we do. Just give it time…
This is not humorous, it is propaganda! The Activists who made that sign know full well that its a lie, but they are going to keep repeating it until it becomes ‘truth’. Just like using the ‘carbon’ instead of ‘CO2’, etc. They are not stupid, they are very clever at using propaganda and disinformation. Skeptics are stupid if they think this is funny – it’s deadly serious.
For the hard core Greens any power generation not is no renewable is a ‘climate crime ‘ for they know that a renewable only approach is the way to return to their mythical ‘ideal ‘ past, full of simply country folk and 101 mad , bad and rubbish ideas that in no way reflect the hard, grim and often short lives which was the reality of the ‘rural ideal’ they wish to return to.
we could send then to a sugar plantation on an island in the Caribbean, they can eat second grade salted cod for protein, oh wait, that’s been tried before.