Lufthansa replicates sharkskin to boost fuel efficiency of cargo jets

You could have stopped at " I'm 83 years old....", that's when I stopped reading.

Grand kids, great grand kids, great great grand kids?

Harry, I understand your comments and yes, CO2 is not all bad. Actually, by itself is not a pollutant in the strictly technical term. You aren't wrong about that! Everything else you wrote shows that you don't get it - even if you are 83 and you worked for a NASA contractor. Does not matter. You are focused on completely the wrong points. If you appear to authority, I will too. I am a mechanical engineer and focus on research in heating and cooling. Perhaps hear me out? I am not here to make fun of you for not understanding but it just grinds my gears that people often fail to understand simple physics (which is the study of the natural laws around us - the very same ones that allow us to improve the airplanes we know and love!)

One the one hand, it is perhaps not really useful to dedicate this time to write these few sentences to you but it is a personal appeal from me to you to stop writing about something that is demonstrably wrong.

To debunk the issue of CO2 we should start with plants - yes, they do need CO2. There is no denying it. In fact, they tend to grow even better under higher PPM levels than those have in our atmosphere. This makes sense if you look at the photosynthesis process. CO2 is needed. The higher the gas concentration, the higher the plant growing process.

The big caveat is that the CO2, just like the regular air mixture, is an insulation gas. Have you worked in this area before? Perhaps you know that when we insulate our buildings better, we use less energy. Never mind the impact on the environment. Better insulation means less heat exchange between the building and the ambient environment. Right? Well, perhaps you also know that the way this insulation works is (most often) by simply trapping air. Seems harmless, right? And yet it works! This is because, when air is trapped within the material used the insulate the building (styrofoam or fiberglass wool), the heat transfer occurs via conduction (ie by touching) and via radiation (less important when temperature differences are smaller. The heat now needs to travel across that air bubble. How high is this rate? Good question, at standard conditions (room temperature (300K) and ambient pressure (1bar)), the air (which is a well-mixed mixture of gases) conducts heat at the rate of 0.026 W/mK. So, the lower that number, the better insulation (ie spending less money on heating fuel or on electricity for cooling).

Now, for the crazy part? Well, if we look at another gas - CO2 - at those same conditions, we see that it has a thermal conductivity of 0.0017 W/mK. This means that CO2 actually reduces the rate of heat transfer. Essentially, to make a more effective insulation material, we should inject CO2 gas into it (as long as it is sealed and does not circulate).

So.... now to look at the big picture... when we increase the CO2 concentration in the earth's atmosphere, we have an insulation layer that makes it a bit harder for heat to enter and escape. This means that the earth's atmosphere reduces the SPEED of heat release to space that was collected during the day. Does that make sense?

To the regular person, this tiny difference in gas composition in the atmosphere should hardly make a big difference. In truth, it really only is a tiny amount. But compound all of that heat that is stored due to the higher insulation properties of the atmosphere and you start to get some big numbers. So big that it starts to make a difference as I showed previously with the CO2 versus air conductivity.

Again, CO2 is not directly the worst pollutant ever when compared to other lethal gases. The problem with CO2 is that it DOES make up the majority of climate-heating gases that are released by us humans into our atmosphere. These atmosphere-insulation-improving gases are therefore called 'greenhouse gasses' as they make it warmer. In this context, CO2 was labeled a 'pollutant' as it is a GHG. By itself, nothing has actual meaning other than the physical properties - in the context of climate change, CO2 is labeled a pollutant as it affects the atmosphere in a way that is negative to us humans. Now, if you want to read up more on how CO2 has been studied in many different ways to confirm the basic premise I explored above, then I quote the 'advanced' explanation from https://skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm here:

> The amount of warming caused by the anthropogenic increase in atmospheric CO2 may be one of the most misunderstood subjects in climate science. Many people think the anthropogenic warming can't be quantified, many others think it must be an insignificant amount. However, climate scientists have indeed quantified the anthropogenic contribution to global warming using empirical observations and fundamental physical equations.

Feel free to go through the site if you want, but it is tedious. It is science, after all! Anyone can actually do it but it is really frustrating and difficult - which is why not everyone decides to be a scientist (and there is no harm is that!)

At the end, I bet I haven't convinced you, right? I didn't think so. It is the reason why many smart people have given up on trying to discuss the science with naysayers. After all, they don't understand the science, cannot understand the science or are simply too deep in their own way of thinking that they cannot look beyond their own bias. HOWEVER, I have taken the time here today, to write to you a bit and explain it from a very basic perspective. I imagine it may have been a waste of time writing this here but if you finished reading this, I appreciate your effort to at least give it a go.

Here's to science that allows our species to develop sharkskin-like coatings for aircraft. Very slick!