Guest essay by Tom Peer
Poor old carbon dioxide. One minute it was a harmless gas providing as vital a link in the cycle of life as water or oxygen and then the next thing it knows it’s a pollutant.
To add insult to injury it’s not even carbon dioxide any more, just plain old carbon. Stripped of two out of three of its constituent atoms. No longer oxidised, instead demonised as humanity’s greatest threat, it’s a bad time to be CO2. It’s enough just to say “carbon pollution” and instead of meaning soot or smoke or anything that involves real carbon pollution you’re actually referring to imaginary damage wreaked by a harmless gas.
What was it that poor old CO2 did wrong. How come it’s public enemy number one and Nitrous Oxide gets to go to all the cool parties?
The carbon shaming reached a nadir this morning with the Telegraph’s latest foray into the climate debate
A headline that would make sense if we were talking about actual carbon, but we aren’t, we’re talking about CO2, and the headline demonstrates the bizarre and pervasive lack of understanding about the difference between the two.
Let’s not forget the European diesel fleet is the end result of a policy designed to save the planet by reducing CO2 and nothing of course to do with providing a competitive advantage for German manufacturers over foreign competitors who might have had slightly more compunction about faking the results of emissions tests.
Since the VW scandal the very same priesthood class that’s been sermonizing about the evils of CO2 for the last two decades has taken a remarkably haughty position over the choking diesel fumes that have seen air quality in our cities drop to a level not seen since the days of coal fires and pea soup fogs.
The London Times’ resident atmospheric physics expert Prof. Hugo Rifkind told us with his usual supercilious panache that:
Even a sceptic has to believe in air pollution
I don’t usually let any of this denier name calling get to me, but that one stuck in the craw. Something I suppose about the murderous idiocy of the diesel fraud choking me personally unlike denying the developing world the benefits of fossil fuels which keeps the unnecessary deaths safely remote.
Exactly how do they reconcile their moralizing zeal for CO2 reduction with a mocking condemnation of those who opposed a policy aimed at reducing CO2. Of course, I forgot, all fossil fuels are just so old hat. We’re all going electric now.
The solution to the pollution problem created by the warmists and the rent-seeking motor manufacturers isn’t, as you’d think, listening to the people that said diesel was nonsense and using cheap and efficient petrol cars. Oh no, that would be far too simple. And would be sort of tacitly admitting our planet saving zealotry has already killed more people than global warming ever will.
No, the solution apparently lies in going back to the same people that caused the problem in the first place and seeing what regulations and subsidy they now need to fix a problem caused by regulation and subsidy.
Instead of gentle nudges in the direction of diesel engines for people buying 60 grand German autos, we need wholesale government subsidy for electric cars like they give to Tesla in America. Who could argue with that? Don’t you realise Electric cars don’t produce any carbon at all?
To add insult to injury it’s not even carbon dioxide any more, just plain old carbon.
Yes. Your graphite pencil is gonna erase you. Or you’re gonna get hit w/a ton of barbecue briquettes.
Make that a diamond for me, but not too big: I want to be able to carry it home.
We need the third world to sue America, Australia, and others in the world court to continue the production of carbon dioxide. The greening of the planet has helped feed many impoverished people, and increased crop yields all over the world. Reducing the concentration in air would be a green catastrophe, starving millions, especially those in areas of subsistence agriculture. Reducing carbon dioxide is equivalent to mass murder. Save the world by greening it!
You call it tomayto I call it tomarto, you call it carbon I’ll call it oxygen.
Goebbels would be proud of what the Warmunist movement has accomplished using all available tools of the trade, especially language subversion.
By assigning such a ‘special’ evil to the Nazi’s – all other examples more easily hide. To even say this is to be likely to be be tarred nazi sympathizer. That’s how it works.
“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
~ Alan Bullock, in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives
“……To add insult to injury it’s not even carbon dioxide any more, just plain old carbon. Stripped of two out of three of its constituent atoms. No longer oxidised, instead demonised as humanity’s greatest threat, it’s a bad time to be CO2. It’s enough just to say “carbon pollution” and instead of meaning soot or smoke or anything that involves real carbon pollution you’re actually referring to imaginary damage wreaked by a harmless gas…..”.
Of course, it isn’t only CO2 that is being mislabeled and misrepresented here. Saying we want to “fight” or “stop” climate change is a subtle (or maybe not so subtle) means of negating or denying the existence of natural drivers of climate. As if we humans had the means to control the activity level of the Sun, the movement of the ocean currents, the clouds (although we could try to control the clouds with geoengineering, but the stupidity of attempting such a thing is something I won’t go into), etc….
The scientific illiteracy that manifests itself with these misleading labels and words is truly frustrating for those of us who know better.
At risk of adding some AdHoms her but am all for a laugh & a ½.
Elon is a great believer in the Simulation argument, that we’re living in one → maybe ever since the LHC was switched on, flipping us all into a parallel simulation LOL!
Anyway, CO2 is the Cinderella of gases, essential for our life and the 2 evil sisters could be Alison & Michelle (real names hidden to protect the innocent) dressed-up in drag .. just having some good old British fun, no real harm intended
Climate alarmists are living in a simulation created by climate models.
Yes – and now the big question, are our own models less of a simulation? And if we take the model in place of the terrain are we just in a different kind of bubble-reality?
I don’t say this to undermine your awareness of falsely framed experience’ but to expand it.
@Leopold Danze Smith
Thanks for your answer.
To quote:
Diesel is less refined and the additives are directed primarily to lubricate the engine. Jet Fuel is more refined and the additives are to keep it from freezing a very low temps,
end quote.
So we can presumably agree, that automotive diesel is impossibele to use in a jet engine ?
BTW : You didn’t reply to my comment re ‘fast breeder reactors’ ?
You most certainly can run a jet engine on automotive diesel fuel. It will just run poorly and eventually harm the engine due to deposit build-up.
JP (jet propulsion fuels) of which there are several varieties, have additives to reduce any entrapped water content and subsequently allow the aircraft to fly at high (and very cold) altitudes without the potential of a fuel line clogged with ice crystals. If you don’t plan on venturing into these extremes the engine will run. Automotive kerosene fuel has lubricants added to coat the cylinders of the ICE. Jet aircraft are turbines and as such don’t have components that need to slide past each other like piston rings on the cylinder wall so the need for lubrication is handled differently.
Just as there a many formulations of automotive fuel to obtain necessary characteristics so is there variations on kerosene (paraffin oil based hydrocarbon).
BTW Many 1st stage liquid rocket boosters use RP/LOX as propellants. RP (rocket propellant) is yet another formulation of kerosene from paraffin oils.
I don’t know what Germany was doing to promote Diesel-powered cars, but in France (where I lived from 1985 through 1995), the French government promoted the use of Diesel-powered cars by placing a much higher tax on gasoline than on Diesel fuel, which made Diesel fuel cheaper at the pump. Wholesale Diesel fuel from a refinery (before taxes) usually costs more than gasoline.
Diesel-powered cars got slightly higher mileage (kilometrage?) per gallon or liter than gasoline-powered cars of the same size and weight, although Diesel-powered cars do emit more real carbon (as soot and particulate matter) than gasoline-powered cars, mostly in the form of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). These emissions become visible as “black smoke” when a large 18-wheeler truck (most of which use Diesel engines) tries to accelerate from a stop or uphill.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, of which the most toxic is benzo(a)pyrene, are real pollutants that have toxic effects when inhaled. They are generally black solids at room temperature, although they can vaporize at the temperatures in Diesel engines, and have a higher ratio of carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms (sometimes greater than 1:1) than paraffinic hydrocarbons (C:H ratio about 0.5).
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are the real “carbon” pollutants whose emissions should be limited, not the harmless carbon dioxide, which is a necessary raw material for green plants, and by extension, for all life on earth.
Hi Tom Peel
Well-written piece.
TKS
Bob Hoye
Just read a paper called ‘Hyperventilation and the body”, C. Gilbert, Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, July 1998. The short version: your body works hard to maintain its internal pH at 7.4. Even a variation of +/-0.1 pH units causes significant physiological effects. CO2 concentration is a vital mediator in this context. Holding your breath lowers the pH as CO2 builds up, and even mild hyperventilation raises the pH as CO2 levels drop, leading to a whole host of nasty symptoms. What caught my eye is that the normal partial pressure of CO2 in the blood and exhaled air is around 5%. In the exhaled air, this is 50,000ppm compared with the current atmospheric concentration of 400ppm. If CO2 was the dangerous pollutant it is cracked up to be, CPR would be lethal, not a life saver.
The ongoing discourse on carbon dioxide rarely, if ever, makes any reference to either chlorophyll or photosynthesis.
The cars tires do produce carbon pollution as they slowly disintegrate so the vehicle is not entirely off the hook. .
Yes its running in denial of life and not within the flowering of life.
I have wondered about that too, and for a long time I presumed that I understood the essential facts of photosynthesis. Then I spent a day on Milford Sound in New Zealand, with its near-vertical walls shooting out of the water for nearly a kilometre. But the huge rainfall produced major tree-growth even there. Then I noticed that there were large vertical strips of bare rock where entire sections had come down in a tree avalanche. Those trees could not have taken anything out of that bare granite. Their ” stuff ‘” had come out of the air, with leaves, like fishing nets, gathering rare carbon dioxide out of thin air, making all the carbon compounds that sustain the living world. Chlorophyl was the catalyst, sunlight the fuel and oxygen the byproduct. My eureka moment. I had a working model for a non-scientist mind.
This is shocking!
Why don’t they use the most appropriate name:
Carbony McCarbonFace
As carbon-based life forms, we are born “polluted”. We breathe “pollution”. “Pollution” flows through our veins. We heat our habitats with “pollution”, causing MORE “pollution”. There’s just no escaping it — we are born sinners. We need to be saved, and that’s why Al Gore, for one, has taken on this task.
I feel dirty.
He should lead by example and end his wicked ways.
The act of define (naming), and control (shaming), is mind in image or model as a sense of segregative personal identity (that also extends to its group or collective identity). A ‘self’ identified over and against ‘other’ – and yet beneath this mind is a ‘nature’ that operates/communicates unseparated from all that it is. So the human world is an augmented or virtual experience of a ‘nature’ that is obscured and distorted by our learned human conditioning.
The rule of blame is power struggle aka ‘survival’ – again as an overlay upon the natural being.
The mind-capture of such ‘power’ is the drive to keep blame alive but always pointing away – excepting token sacrifice. So the outsorcery of toxic debt operates the currency of our thought.
False currencies of thought or finance preclude true outcomes.
In a sense we have all been hacked, by our own correspondences in self-specialness and fear of loss and exposure. Freeing our mind is first recognizing what is truly ours to share and what is imbibed, inducted or imposed by a past that is not who and where we are now because we desire the true, rather than react unmindfully to a believed and perceived untruth.