51
What is white hydrogen? Scientists say the clean-energy gas could save the world.
(www.businessinsider.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
51 points (84.0% liked)
News
23320 readers
3288 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
... I mean it wouldn't imbalance C02 but you would be adding water. At scale that could be just as bad.
Carbon neutral, yes, but water positive.
How would it be just as bad? Water doesn't cause climate change.
If we converted all of the CO2 humans have ever released into water, you'd get around 2.5 times lake superior. I don't see how that would cause much issues.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
Yes, but the amount of it in the air globally is not increased by burning hydrogen. The processes that remove extra water vapor from the atmosphere operate on a much faster time scale than the ones that remove CO2.
It wouldn't be on it's own though.
Without other greenhouse gases kickstarting the warming process, just adding water vapor to the atmosphere just saturates it faster, slowing natural evaporation of the water cycle, which would eventually just move all the additional water to the ocean.
The amount of water we're talking about is insignificant given the already large reservar of water we have on earth. Also in the absence of other greenhouse gases, the water cycle is self regulating, it doesn't act as a greenhouse gas in the absence of another sauce of warming (which then increases the moisture carrying capacity of the air, starting a feedback loop).
CO2 is much more rare so adding that same amount in CO2 is very significant.
It's a bit like making a sauce. Adding a bit more of your main ingredient (for example cream in a cream based sauce) won't make much difference to how it tastes. But add the same amount of a potent spice and your sauce is ruined.
"at scale" it could be just as bad. C02 isn't poisonous the big problem we're dealing with is we're putting C02 from the ground in oil and coal and putting it into the air. We've been adding C02 that was NOT in the environment into the environment.
Yeah some water isn't a bad thing, but if all of a sudden we're adding from sources outside of the water cycle a LOT more water into the atmosphere you've got increased clouds, increased weather patterns, All of a sudden the inland portions of continents can start dumping as much water into the air as a warm ocean, that can DEFINITELY be a problem.
Yeah, but we're really talking a LOT more water here. Like Noah's ark numbers.
I was talking about an amount equal to what we so far added in CO2, which is would be an insignifcant amount when turned into water.
Burning Hydrogen produces pure, fresh water, a very scarce resource relatively speaking.
Also, even at scale it's not even a drop in a bucket compared to the oceans.
Water is good for you
We don't have enough fresh water so that is of limited concern.
The big problem with hydrogen is leaks, which we can't measure well enough yet. But 5% leakage cancels out all the benefits from replacing fossil fuels. And I'd guess hydrogen leaks from natural sources would be even harder to control.
Massive potential from hydrogen but lots of problems to solve.
Well fuck... it doesn't seem to matter much what we do, we have simply overshot the carrying capacity of the earth, by a lot, and no matter what tech we try to use to solve the problem, the carrying capacity is the one thing we can't solve for, or at least, we can't seem to.
We have more than enough resources to go around, they're just badly distributed. And mostly in the hands of people who have a lot of money tied up in Big Carbon.
We can easily produce enough renewable electricity to replace all fossil fuels. Hydrogen has a role in storing renewables, along with batteries and hydro. We just need to get strict about leaks. And improve transport and housing so that we need less fuel to start with.