Car Tech: Hybrids are they really good for the enviroment?

Of course.

I guess I get a little tired *sometimes* at having to lead everyone by the hand to get information. I feel like I should be paid to do this much research.

Anyway. You are right about the CO2, and I should have not said it in that fashion. After a cars catalytic converter has sufficiently heated up, the car *should* produce nothing but CO2. As I said before, I was in automotive technology for 2 years, and worked at a dealership for 2 years. We had a smog tester there, and in testing, once a car reached normal operating temp, HC was near zero, NOx was barely even showing up at all, and CO was gone.

Now, this is a combination of first hand experience and what I was taught in college. I still have my old text book "Automotive Technology, A systems approach" by Jack Erjavec. Of course that's meaningless to you.

I looked at the data on the EPA site. It seems really skewed. I can't say why, but just the numbers seem off to me. However, I honestly have no interest in investigating this further. So, if you want to say I'm full of it, or made it all up, feel free, I just don't care enough.

Nonetheless, this increases my belief that we should move to Diesel.

Moving on: this issue of CO2 is important to me. Yes the ppm of CO2 has increased from 280 to 379 in 2005. However, if you check the data from the arctic ice core samples, you'll find that CO2 levels have varied greatly in the past, assuming we can trust that data. If we can't then we have no basis to assume the rise or fall is un-natural. If we can trust the data, then this variance is normal because in the past CO2 have been naturally higher and lower, than they are now.

One big issue here is sections of the carbon cycle, that scientist simply label "carbon sinks". The reason is, we have little understand of where the carbon goes, or what happens to it. So how do we know an unknown carbon sink doesn't vary in it's absorption of CO2? We don't.

One thing we do know for certain, is that 90% to 95% of the "greenhouse" effect is cause by water in it's various forms (frozen,liquid,vapor). Further we know that only 3.4% of yearly CO2 output is human made. Thus, we are responsible for about 0.3% of the greenhouse effect. Even if you assume the we are totally responsible for the 100 extra ppm of CO2, that still means we caused a 20% increase, which works out to about 1.8% of the greenhouse effect.

Now the research indicates the total greenhouse effect raises the global temp by 33 °C. Then this means our 1.8% has caused at most 0.59 °C increase. In other words, less than the margin of error, and it assumes we are complete responsible for a 100 ppm increase when we only contribute 3.4% of the yearly produced CO2.

Some scientists now say evidences suggests CO2 only causes 4% of global greenhouse effect, which means our 3.4% of CO2 only causes 0.136% of the greenhouse effect, causing at most 0.00044 °C increase.

If you really are interested in this subject, I'd suggest just for starters, a 5 part video:

http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=158

This is an intro really. If you really want to know, you'll need to look into it yourself. But I think it's a good intro because some of the people on it are the actual scientists who reviewed the Kyoto protocol for the U.N. and supporting information.

Be well.