A Sea of Our Own Making

Who am I?

Nobody. I am a middle-aged American from the Midwest with a high school diploma and some college.

Something I once discussed with my high school chemistry teacher has been churning around in my mind for over forty years; he showed me the chemical equation for gasoline combustion. Two molecules of the combustible compound in gasoline combine with 25 molecules of oxygen from the air and ignites creating 16 CO₂ molecules and 18 H₂O molecules. People concerned about the environmental impact of CO₂ have been hysterical in their efforts to reduce the amount of CO₂ produced during combustion of fossil fuels for decades.

Just for clarity, CO₂, Carbon-Dioxide, is the stuff in the bubbles in your soda, beer and Champagne; it's also what makes your bread rise.

But, what about the water (H₂O) produced?

What is Weather?

Essentially, weather is about the movement of water from the surfaces of the oceans, seas, lakes and rivers in the world into the air to form clouds, which move into cooler zones, where the water condenses and precipitates as rain and snow. Then, the water flows back, eventually, into the oceans.

But, for vast periods of time, the water in this system was a fairly constant amount. Water is not, really, consumed in any meaningful way, at all. Water is the medium in which most reactions that enable life in living organisms take place. You drink water, it enters your blood stream, is incorporated as water into your body's processes, then, is excreted from your body as water through urination, sweat, respiration and defecation. In other words, water is neither created, nor destroyed.

On the other hand, CO₂ is consumed by plants, which exhale Oxygen, required by most animals to breathe. Ever notice, driving down the highway, how green and lush the trees, bushes and weeds along the side of the highway are? The highway is rich in plant nutrients exhausted from our tailpipes.

What does Gasoline have to do with Weather?

Gasoline and all fossil fuels produce water when they combust, in varying amounts. For instance, a gallon of gasoline combusts into 1.1 gallons of water as vapor from the tailpipe of your car. How can you get more volume out than you put in? That's the whole point of the "expanding gases" which drive all of the fossil-fuel powered vehicles in the world, today. The expansion of gases during combustion in a cylinder in the engine of a car is what forces the piston in the cylinder down, generating torque, which drives the transmission, which, in turn, drives the wheels, moving the car.

But, here's the thing, the water produced by the combustion of fossil fuels is new to the Earth's weather cycle. That water was locked up in complex molecules deep in the Earth's crust for millions of years and was not involved in the weather cycle... until we pulled it from the crust and combusted it.

How much water are we talking about? It is estimated that worldwide consumption of gasoline is approximately 1.2 to 1.4 trillion gallons of gasoline per year. Splitting the difference between those numbers, 1.3 trillion gallons of gasoline would produce 1.43 trillion gallons of extra water in the atmosphere every year.

How much is 1.43 trillion gallons of water? It is approximately the amount of water in the Great Salt Lake added into the atmosphere each year and is likely to continue increasing. Also, I have primarily been talking about gasoline, humans are also burning diesel, jet fuel, coal, propane, natural gas, butane and numerous other fossil fuels, which also add new water to the atmosphere.

Where does all that water go?

What impact can this extra water have on our weather?

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