Hydrogen the energy of the future
Until now it has been expensive, polluting and wasteful of non-renewable resources, to produce large quantities of . Now a team of scientists at have come up with a means of doing so by using sunlight to split water into its composite hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The hard work is done and only a few small problems remain to be solved (increasing efficiency). Once done this will be the basis for freeing us from the use of for energy creation and thus solve a major contributor, the production of through the burning of hydrocarbon based fuels. Add to this the recent developments in energy production along with lesser sources of energy such as solar, wind and tidal, and there will be little need for massive imports of oil. That means the middle east will cease to be as geopolitically strategic and that’s a good thing.
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Comments
Comment from Ian Gordon
Time: 8/20/2007, 2:56 am
This is interesting. I was exchanging e-mails with a university in Australia a couple of years ago on almost exactly the same thing. Titanium Alloys to split water into hydrogen.
Comment from Kay Dennison
Time: 8/21/2007, 7:14 am
I like this and think it’s long overdue — we have known about these energy sources for a long time and little has been done to implement them. Our local YWCA went to geothermal a few years ago and their director told me the savings have been huge even after the cost of converting it. Big Oil has had us in its thrall far too long.
Comment from Ian Gordon
Time: 8/27/2007, 10:49 am
I am all for debate. Tim Matheson may even be right when he talks about high CO2 levels running concurrently with ice ages.
However, saying that, we shouldn’t forget that what the issue is sudden and catastrophic climate change, with global warming being but one scenario.
The name of the world’s foremost committee on this issue does not include the term global warming in it whatsoever. It’s called the IPCC The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It is inevitable that the science will not be up to the task of saying what will happen where. It’s rather like asking scientists to tell you which way the butterfly flew in Siberia to cause a weather system to suddenly veer. That level of understanding is not going to happen in our lifetimes.
What should be abundantly obvious to everyone however is that humanity is adversely affecting environments on a global scale. These environments are all connected into massive immensely complex systems and we mess with those systems at the peril of our own existence.
Basically what we have here is a bunch of cavemen playing in the control room of a nuclear power station turning knobs and pushing. They have no idea what the eventual outcome will be but we should all agree that anything which undermines or affects the natural systems that we depend on is a move in the wrong direction.
I won’t call it nitpicking for all that because he’s basically saying we don’t know what will happen, but when you think about it, isn’t that even scarier?
Comment from credito
Time: 8/20/2007, 2:12 am
Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth’s temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years.” Patterson asked the committee, “On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century’s modest warming?”
Carlos Menéndez
http://www.creditomagazine.es