California lunatic and his kind are a threat...

Smoke is our friend, global-warming-wise. It stops solar energy from
reaching the surface, and therefore helps to reduce global warming.
U.S. atmospheric temperatures actually fell during the 30-year period
from about 1945 to 1975, even though manmade CO2 was making CO2
concentrations increase steadily throughout this same period. One
possible explanation is the dirty coal we burned then, that it
introduced sufficient solar-blocking sulfur into the atmosphere to
overcome the additional CO2's increase of the greenhouse effect. Maybe
it sounds crazy today, but if planetary survival depends on bringing
temperatures down, maybe someday we'll be pumping sulfur into the air
on purpose.

Anyway, it's the greenhouse gases that are the villains in global
warming. Not smoke or sulfur or acid rain, not the destruction of the
ozone layer, not the unburned hydrocarbons (HC) or oxides of nitrogen
(NOx) or carbon monoxide (CO) that automotive emissions regulations
were originally enacted to bring under control.

The greenhouse effect arises from the interaction of earth's atmosphere
with solar energy. Solar energy arrives at earth's atmosphere in
relatively short wavelengths. The greenhouse gases do not block this
incoming solar energy. So it penetrates the atmosphere and warms
whatever it hits -- e.g., a land mass, or an ocean. This heat energy
then tries to radiate back out toward outer space, in the form of
longwave ("LW") infrared radiation. This is the energy that the
greenhouse gases absorb, which causes them to warm, which causes the
greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is our friend. If the energy that the greenhouse
gases block were not blocked and were instead allowed to escape into
outer space, earth's mean atmospheric temperature would be colder by 33
degrees *centigrade*. So we like the greenhouse effect, up to a point.
It's global warming -- a greenhouse system that is taking in more solar
energy than it can radiate back out in the form of LW radiation --
which is the problem.

So what are the main causes of the greenhouse effect, i.e., the
absorbtion of LW radiation? In first place is water vapor -- H2O in a
gaseous state. Second are clouds -- liquid H2O suspended in the air.
CO2 is a very distant third. The main reason for the primacy of water
vapor is that it can make up as much as 4% of the atmosphere, by
volume. By comparison, CO2 occupies only about 0.035%.

According to this *pro*-regulation website --
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=142 -- if you took away all the
LW absorbers except water vapor and clouds, these two components would
still absorb 85% of the usual amount of LW. If you only took away the
water vapor and the clouds, the other LW absorbers could only stop 34
percent of the usual amount. Therefore, even the pro-regulators
estimate that water vapor and clouds cause somewhere between 66% (100
minus 34) and 85% of the greenhouse effect.

The same analysis of CO2 finds that a system with only the CO2 missing
would still absorb 91 percent of the usual amount of LW, and that a
system with only CO2 left would stop only 26% of the usual. Therefore,
CO2 accounts for only 9% (100 minus 91) to 26% of the greenhouse
effect.

Well fine, you might say, get rid of 9% to 26% of the greenhouse
effect, and the equilibrium will settle into a nice, comfortable,
cooler norm. The problem is, that we can't "get rid" of the CO2. It
takes, on average, 100 years for a molecule of CO2 to get captured by
some plant or another and turned into sugar and oxygen. Not only can we
not get rid of the CO2 that's already up there; we can't even stop the
rate of increase, unless we pretty much stop burning hydrocarbons
altogether.

How much is that rate of increase? According to a Patrick Bedard
editorial in the September 2006 Car and Driver, after 200 years of
industrial revolution, the manmade proportion of CO2 is only 3.23% of
the total volume of CO2 out there. How much is added each year, I don't
know.

So there it is. 100% of the CO2 causes between 9% and 26% of the
greenhouse effect. But only 3.23% of the CO2 is manmade. In a way,
then, only 0.29% to 0.84% (0.0323 x 9, 0.0323 x 26) of the greenhouse
effect is manmade. Plus, what's done is done; we can't do anything
about that 3.23% that's already up there. All we can do is stop adding
more. The magnitude of what we can realistically stop adding -- a 25%
cut in 14 years, as proposed by the soon-to-be-signed California law?
-- sounds so minimal as to sound not worth doing; not worth doing,
anyway, if the costs are disproportionate to the benefits.

That, basically, is my question with respect to the regulation of
manmade greenhouse gases. What are the benefits of this kind of
regulation? What are the costs? DOES ANYBODY KNOW?

Another fun fact to know and tell about global warming: Take two cars,
one with the full set of modern emissions controls, and another from
1965 or earlier, with no emissions controls at all. Assume that both
cars return 21 mpg (which, BTW, is the current fleet average for 2007
cars; not trucks, SUVs, *and* cars, just cars). Which of these two
cars is producing more CO2?

That's right, the 1965 HC, CO, NOx emissions gorilla is the greenhouse
gas minimizer. That's because the fuel efficiency of the modern EFI
engine, combined with a catalytic converter, transforms nearly every
atom of carbon that goes into the fuel tank as gasoline (C5H12, C6H14,
C7H16, C8H18, C9H20, C10H22, C11H24, C12H26) into a molecule of CO2 .
The *unburned* hydrocarbons ("HC") that emissions regulations were
originally enacted to eliminate go out the tailpipe of the uncontrolled
emissions gorilla with their carbon atoms still bonded to other carbon
atoms and to protons (H+ ions).

I doubt if billions of tons of unburned HC being discharged into the
atmosphere would have a favorable effect on global warming -- HC is not
included in any list of greenhouse gases that I have seen, but in
combination with NOx and sunlight it creates O3 (ozone) which *is* a
greenhouse gas -- but it's kind of ironic that the main raison d'etre
of the catalytic converter is to turn HC into CO2, the Bin Laden of
greenhouse gases. I wonder if Bill Lockyer will sue the automakers for
putting catalytic converters on their cars, since they would produce
far less CO2 without them.

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