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Originally Posted by Happy Monkey
Greenhouse gasses. Most of the discussion is about CO2, because it's the largest contributor that we can fix the easiest (though still not easily). That page also discusses water vapor.
The water created by burning hydrogen isn't an issue; the environmental impact of hydrogen cars would depend far more on how the hydrogen was collected.
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From my article cross referenced with your Wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_vapor (Also check out that "strange" increase in water vapor as measure in Boulder, CO)
Greenhouse gasses are:
water vapor: 1%-4%
carbon dioxide: .039%
methane: .000179%
nitrous oxide: .00003%
ozone: .0 to 7×10−6% (Essentially zero)
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And, since the other components of the atmosphere (oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor) aren't materially affected by human activity, the "greenhouse effect" is essentially a totally natural phenomenon, unaffected by human activity. We could repeat the spectral analysis and calculations for Oxygen, or O2 ( The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere remains exactly the same at all heights up to about 85 km, and is about 20.9% by volume ) and Nitrogen (N2) which is the whopper at 78.1% - but we won't. We'll leave that as your homework problem now that you know how to do it. Just look up the atomic absorption spectra for both, and do the math. You'll discover that Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't even "greenhouse gases", so that leaves the principal greenhouse gas... you guessed it.... Water Vapor. Curiously enough, the UN IPCC reports don't even mention water vapor, since it is technically not a "gas" in the atmosphere. Dr. Roy W. Spencer has one of the best comments we've read on this subject:
"Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas -- water vapor -- into the atmosphere every day, and removes about the same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming is not manmade, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by water vapor and clouds."
We can safely ballpark water vapor as being responsible for more than 95% of all the greenhouse effect, with oxygen and nitrogen playing no role and carbon dioxide being relatively insignificant... particularly the even smaller human-produced part.
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The reason the people latch on to Carbon is that is the only one that has any effect more than zero, and even that effect is in doubt.
And if you continue reading the article they do propose an explanation.
