CO detector quit after five years, why?

Sorry, contrary to the Slowmans of the world, the sky is not falling.

The difference between the Y2K bug and global warming is that the Y2K bug w as going to happened all of a sudden on a very specific date.

Global warming is going on at the moment, and it only takes a grasp of simp le extrapolation to appreciate that it's going to get worse.

Admittedly, the more exciting and expensive consequences - like the Greenla nd ice cap slipping off into the Atlantic, and raising global sea levels by six metres - are at least a few decades off and very difficult to model, s o responsible scientists don't like talking about them.

Raising atmospheric CO2 levels from about 270ppm (where it was from the end of the last ice age to the start of the industrial revolution) to the curr ent 400pmm has made the planet measurably - 0.8C - but not spectacularly w armer.

Since the long term noise level on global temperature seems to be about +/-

The Argo buoys do seem to be telling us some stuff about the ocean currents , but it's a slow process.

Significantly different from the Y2K bug.

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Krw has got part of that right. The sky isn't falling. It is - however - ge tting warmer, and krw - as a card carrying conspiracy theorist and right-wi ng-nitwit - has decided that the scientific evidence about anthropogenic gl obal warming has all been cooked up by climate scientists in pursuit of lar ger research grants.

Quite why anybody clever and unscrupulous enough to put together such a hug e conspiracy and keep it running for decades would have wasted their effort s on research grants, when there's the US Defense Budget out there to milk, does require some explanation, but we won't get it from krw who has total faith in the misinformation he's managed to absorb (in this case from peopl e who make lots of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel).

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have.

current

The sensor is not a fuel cell. Read up on how the various sensors work.

?-)

edges

ready

There are several technologies, wet electrochemical cell, dry biomimetic membrane, thermal electrochemical cell and more. The shelf life versus operational life for each technology varies with specific implementation.

?-)

But probably not as bad as a built in expiry date that remembers how long ago it was manufactured.

And fully sealed packaging is probably better for perishable sensor technologies than loose in a cardboard box.

Quote "This is a type of fuel cell that instead of being designed to produce power, is designed to produce a current that is precisely related to the amount of the target gas ..."

... and then, quote "This technology is now the dominant technology in USA and Europe".

I was a contractor for a computer servicing firm at the time - the only thing that happened all of a sudden, was their phone not ringing as no one's PC freaked out and ran off down the road.

Matt Groening is a rotten fibber!

We've just had such a mild winter that the squirrels forgot to hibernate (but suddenly all vanished in spring) although that was after a couple of pretty bad winters - so we're probably in the periodic ripple between peaks, they haven't yet decided whether the next peak is going to be GW or the next Ice-age.

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Global warming refers to the temperature of the globe as a whole, averaged over every point.

The Arctic is warming up about three times faster than the average, which d oes suggest that other places are warming up at below average rates.

You do get some paradoxical effects. Cold winters in Europe - heavy snow ov er the south of the UK, France and southern Germany - turn out to always ha ve been associated with ice-free conditions in the Barents and Kara Seas - north of Finland. This has become more frequent, as the Arctic sea-ice gets thinner and sparser.

There's very little prospect of a new ice age any time soon. Even without t he anthropogenic extra CO2, this would have been an unusually long intergla cial - one of the side-effects of the work on climate modelling driven by t he concern about anthropogenic global warming is that we now have a much be tter idea of how the transitions between ice ages to interglacials work.

Well if we guess that about 100 million US households have them (probably way high) and a standard 5 year replacement cycle that gives 20 million per year. Multiple by an average price of $40 (guesstimated) and that gives $800 million per year. Divide that by 2000 deaths yields a per death price tag of $400,000 per death spent by others. Me thinks that the insurance companies are in on this gag as well.

?-)

It'd be nice if they could turn off the North wind - the arctic could keep its cold and we'd save a fortune on heating bills.

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As I went on to mention - and you snipped - there is a way of turning off t he worst of the cold winds. It probably isn't cost-effective, but if you us ed ice-breakers and tugs to round up enough of the sea-ice still floating a round the Arctic and used to make sure that the Barents and Kara Seas (nort h of Finland) were iced-up every autumn, the jet stream wouldn't loop as fa r south during winter, and the UK winters would be milder.

anyhow

too

work.

And we both know that Wikipedia in NOT a reliable source. I must have spent far more than enough time to totally debunk that article studying gas sensors for long tunnel applications in the somewhat recent past. Ever heard of Devils Slide tunnel or Caldecott 4th bore? BTW the actual direct text differentiates what the sensor actually does from normal fuel cells. Electrochemical cell is correct, but not fuel cell. That must have come from marketing.

?-)

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biomimetic

versus

implementation.

long

This reminds me of zinc-air batteries, indefinite shelf life, but one you fire them up you have not more than a couple of hours to a couple of weeks. The same can be done for electrochemical CO sensors, but with an operational life of maybe two or three years instead of the usual five or so.

?-)

A jet stream loop gave America our winter - and us, loads of rain.