Pollution

I realized earlier today that pollution is not only harmful because of the smoke itself and the consequent greenhouse effect.

One residue of burning fossil fuels is water, which's also dumped into the atmosphere through every smoke pipe.

Has anyone wondered where does that water go into?! In fact, in average as much water as carbon oxides are attained when burning fuels...

Imagining the complete burning of an average Diesel fuel (since Diesel is a mixture of several hydrocarbon molecules, let's consider the average number of atoms as C15H32...), it needs 23 molecules of oxygen per molecule of fuel, resulting in 15 molecules of carbon dioxide and 16 molecules of water.

This is obviously an empiric result, since the complete burn is never achieved and many other species are present in air (mainly nitrogen) resulting in other residues like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and ash.

Either way, it doesn't get that far from reality. Curiously, never heard anyone raising this issue... Maybe this discover can finally get me my Nobel prize.

Anyway, is good to know that we won't die choked: we'll drown!