Why CO2 is the most deadly gas in car exhaust
Internet experts will tell you there’s much nastier, toxic gases in car exhaust than carbon dioxide. But is that true? Here’s why the trolls in the comments section are both right and wrong…
The world is awash these days with self-appointed climate change experts and chemical science professors who claim to know more than the established institutions.
They generally get their qualifications from Google searches and conversations with equaly delusional high school dropouts.
In this report, we’re going to take a few key comments from recent reports and factcheck them for the sake of correcting the public misunderstanding of exactly how carbon dioxide, car exhaust and the human body actually work.
This will be a highly condensed version of the full video which you can watch in its entirety above to get the detailed picture.
Here is a typical example of just how deeply embedded this disinformation tick has become, under the skin, so to speak:
Putting Wanda’s awesome contribution to literature aside, let’s get this straight on the CO2 climate change emergency - because I hate it when the education system leaves anyone behind.
They also like to claim things like:
deaths plummeting from famine at the same time as the skyrocketing population [is] all thanks to CO2 over the past 150 years being…the font of all life
What actually needs to be understood here is that it’s actually thanks to mankind’s access to abundant energy reserves that has increased our life expectancy which, as you can see here, is almost exactly the same graph: (click to enlarge)
The conclusion is that hydrocarbon exploitation is the best thing that's ever happened to human health - that's just a fact. If we're having a debate and you're on the ‘No’ side, then get ready to lose because there's no other conclusion.
Hydrocarbons: best thing that's ever happened to human health, and I'm not saying we shouldn't embrace other potential alternatives as well. Quite the opposite.
Exploitation of hydrocarbon energy meant humans no longer had to suffer through 16-hour days of back-breaking work just to feed themselves. We freed up the best minds in the business to innovate, to learn, to experiment and that's what catalyzed this staggering tsunami of technological advancement.
It led to all kinds of things like hydrocarbon fertilizer and medicinal antibiotics, and now everybody, statistically, is living into their 70s or 80s, or perhaps even further.
I don't think organizations such as the U.S National Library of Medicine typically takes all that much poetic license with use of words including ‘poisoning’ and ‘toxic’. You could also Google the term ‘hypercapnia’ for more on CO2 toxicity.
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WHY CARBON DIOXIDE IS A PROBLEM
Another fake name know-nothing-nobody chimed in with this metric tonne of uninformed bullshit:
That begs an obvious question. Why did science bother giving CO2 toxicity an actual name if it's all so fricken healthy?
Follow-up question: Why did they bother with all the drama on Apollo 13, with the hasty adaptation of the CO2 scrubbing lithium-hydroxide canisters from the command module to the ‘LM’, just to keep things ticking over? Maybe they were just giving Jim and the boys something to do.
You can drown in CO2 - you asphyxiate, basically. You can drown in any gas that displaces the nitrogen-oxygen mixture that we're breathing now, because obviously in the absence of oxygen, you end up dead.
This is a particular risk in industry because if, for example, you need to go into a petrochemical refinery’s big steel tank to weld up some defect in the tank which has been a home for hydrocarbons for the past several years, then this is an inherently risky undertaking. So you've got to eliminate the risk of combustion, otherwise you make the news.
What you do, typically, is you flood the tank with nitrogen to displace all of the air, so there's no more oxygen. Then you can go in with your welder and breathing apparatus to weld up whatever defect. Not taking this kind of precaution is unthinkable; everything feels great (because it’s nitrogen gas) and then you’re dead. And someone from OHS has to fill out a form and make confronting telephone calls.
The salient difference between nitrogen and CO2 is that CO2 is also toxic, but it will kill you even if there is plenty of oxygen remaining in the air that you're breathing right now.
I'm gonna fundamentally disagree with all of that, because according to the U.S National Institute of Health, car exhaust is roughly 13 per cent carbon dioxide and it's also 13 per cent water. They're the two fundamental combustion byproducts.
So what's coming out of a car exhaust is 13 per cent CO2, 13 per cent water (26 per cent sub-total) and 73 per cent nitrogen gas. The air that you're breathing right now is 78 per cent nitrogen gas, 21 per cent oxygen, and one percent everything else.
Basically, in an internal combustion engine, nitrogen just gets warmed up on the way through. A small amount of it can react with oxygen in a lean-burn condition, but it's only a tiny amount. The majority of nitrogen gas overwhelmingly just gets heated up on the way through.
So for every 1000 litres of car exhaust that comes out of your car, it's a 130 litres of CO2.
No, I didn’t misspeak.
According to the Iowa State University in their Department Of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, modern car exhaust is about 1000 parts per million of carbon monoxide - that's one tenth of one per cent.
Now, carbon monoxide is a properly dangerous gas. But there's a very small amount of it coming out of a modern car - key word here is ‘modern’. Meaning with the latest emissions regulations and a catalytic converter, because there's a lot of carbon monoxide being produced by the engine, but most of it is being taken out of the exhaust gas by the catalytic converter. Only one tenth of one percent, by volume, is carbon monoxide: that’s 0.1%.
The same could be said for all of the other combustion byproducts. You can't mitigate out CO2 from exhaust, you can't mitigate out the water, but the water doesn't really matter. Everything else that is a product of inefficient combustion, like oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, volatile organics, particles, sulfur dioxide - all of that crap is the combustion byproducts that are the result of imperfect combustion and they can be mitigated.
In fact, regulators and carmakers have done a spectacular job cleaning up car exhausts since about the mid-1970s, but in modern car exhaust, about one liter for every 1000 litres is carbon monoxide, versus 130 litres for carbon dioxide.
Here’s where it gets interesting from a human toxicity perspective…
CONVERSION THERAPY
Let’s just quickly run though how modern car exhaust works.
There's 130 times more carbon dioxide coming out of a modern car compared with the amount of carbon monoxide coming out.
There's a couple of caveats on this, however. The car the car needs to be warm and at its normal operating temperature and conditions, because catalytic converters don't work when everything is cold. There needs to be no pre-cat leaks or defects in the system before the catalytic converter, because you don't want to let out untreated exhaust.
In other words, there needs to be sufficient oxygen remaining in the air so that the catalytic converter can do its thing, which is the process of trapping carbon monoxide, getting a bit of atmospheric oxygen and converting the carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide, which is less harmful.
The exhaust gas goes through three stages of catalytic chemical reactions, exposing it to platinum, rhodium and/or palladium in various honeycomb structures to do the voodoo required to reduce the harmfulness of what eventually comes out the tailpipe. (This is why people are stealing catalytic converters in the US, to nick the precious metals inside.)
If you've got an older car with no catalytic converter, then it's virtually unregulated exhaust - which is the problem Australia has with old trucks running around in our cities. It can be 30 times or even more carbon monoxide.
Carbon monoxide is spectacularly dangerous in older vehicles without catalytic converters, but in modern cars the amount of carbon monoxide that is actually produced out of the tailpipe - if everything's functioning properly - is really quite low.
The EPA emission standards have reduced the amount of carbon monoxide produced by over 95 per cent.
Iowa State University there, reinforcing that key point that the brainiacs have done a sensational job mitigating the properly heinous stuff coming out the tailpipe of modern cars over four to five decades.
Exhaust emissions from 1970 versus those from 2020 are not even close. Regulators need to take a bow on this because they painted the car industry into a corner where they had to get the propeller heads to act with proper countermeasures that basically improved human health.
So if we want to get to the bottom of what is now the most toxic thing coming out of a modern car exhaust, we need to run a thought experiment, but with some boundaries in play. For example, when I say ‘toxic’, I'm not talking about trace element toxins that you breathe in and then 30 years later the doctor says you've got lung cancer. We’re talking about immediate toxic threats that can kill you quickly.
We’re talking about what's going to kill you first if you're locked in a room with no windows, with a running modern car and you can't escape.
What's going to kill you first, carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide? Answer: that emissions-cheating Volkswagen, probably.
What’s “immediately dangerous to life and health” is for the CO2 concentration to reach 40,000 parts per million, and for carbon monoxide it's 1500ppm. If you divide 40,000 by 1500 you get about 27 - so that means you need 27 times more CO2 in that environment for it to be immediately dangerous to life and health, compared with carbon monoxide.
Our Schroedinge’s cat experiementee is in there and we want to know what's going to get him first. So remember earlier when we learned in a modern car exhaust for every 1000 litres of actual exhaust there's 130 litres of carbon dioxide and one litre of carbon monoxide. This means that the amount of CO2 being produced is 130 times greater than carbon monoxide, over time - and it only needs to be 27 times greater to achieve that immediately dangerous to life and health limit of 40,000 parts per million.
So what's going to happen trapped in that hellish scenario is that the CO2 level is going to rise to the point of being deadly almost five times quicker than the carbon monoxide level to achieve the same fatal limit
If our experimenter happens to be one of these CO2 deniers, we would also prove once and for all that fate is not without a sense of irony. And here’s exactly what happens to you (or our CO2 denier) in this nasty hypothetical situation:
Translation: When CO2 kills you it's not because it displaces the oxygen in the air - there can be plenty of oxygen in the air, but what happens is you take a breath, and even though there's not much CO2 in the breath, generally, it means hemoglobin in your blood cannot get rid of the excess CO2 that your body produces.
Normally, the hemoglobin gets rid of the CO2 by metabolizing glycogen and just throwing it into the air mass that you've just breathed in, then you breathe out and the CO2 goes away.
But if you're breathing in an environment where the CO2 level is too concentrated, it gets harder for hemoglobin to do its chemical reaction and throw the CO2 away. When the partial pressure of CO2 gets to roughly 40,000 parts per million, you feel like you are in hell; you are hyperventilating and you can't breathe enough - it's physically impossible for you to breathe enough.
The system is broken, you can breathe plenty, physically, but it's just not doing its job. But understand here, this is not suffocation, this is being poisoned by CO2. It's a chemical block on the biochemistry of respiration.
This is not a pleasant way to go by all accounts. Read the biography of at least half of the sailors who died on the Soviet nuclear submarine the Kursk, in the Barren Sea in 2000. It's un-put-downable, but grim.
Make no mistake: CO2 is toxic.
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