Your original stance was that those who ran Catless their emissions were hurting the environment. Either way we do release a harmful chemical, catless or not. That was my only stance. I have yet to see all environmentalist live in the woods with NO dependence on fossil fuels. Do you have electricity? Point made. Just think energies to help the environment have not and will not be explored to the fullest when money is in play. Just say your in school was not a derogatory comment, unless your ashamed in higher education or improving yourself.

 

Is CO2 potentially harmful? Yes, in high concentrations it is toxic and it contributes to global warming. Can it be removed from the system by natural processes? Yes as well. If CO2 is harmful, the logical decision isn't to move to a system that releases other harmful gases.

 

wow this got wayyy off topic :P but its still interesting none the less, makes me realize how dumb i am haha, i only have no cat because my other one got plugged and i couldnt afford a new cat. why dont people just get a qtp cut out? you can weld it in before you cat and on track days open up the cut out, rip around, close it and drive home?

 

Logical decision is to ride bikes via peddle-power. But we as a species do not do well with logic. The end result is one gas is no more of a danger to the environment than the other. Nature can and will only cleanse so much of our filthy mess. Like I mentioned previously, as the food chain is broke, becuase nature cannot do what is needed, what gas caused it will be an afterthought. As a human gets overwhelmed by CO2, thus will the planet.

 

That would make sense if we planned ahead but we didn't. Unfortunately our infrastructure is too spread out for that to work, it would take me hours to get to work by bike. If the city was setup such that I could live close to where I worked, it would be great but it's not.
Which is better, releasing nitrogen, oxygen, water and CO2 or releasing nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and CO? I would say the first because only one of those gases is potentially harmful. I agree that we've over-saturated the planet but switching to more harmful gases doesn't make sense.

 

CO2 is the lesser of all the pollution evils..the catalyst is good if you can make power with one.

the key is burning less fuel, then less emissions of all gases. Emissions optimized tunes get less mpg than fuel optimized tunes. I rented identical cars once and the Canadian version got 2 mpg better. Everything is a compromise or certain laws are emotionally driven.

 

No, it naturally oxidizes in the atmosphere to CO2. Catalytic converters are mostly there to convert toxic compounds in the exhaust into something that's safer to breathe.

Personally, I run a high flow cat just because I don't want to deal with 1) ridiculous fines for not running one and 2) swapping it out when I need to get my car inspected. If I ever get serious about running my car in BSP, it'll get a test pipe that will get swapped for the weekends.

As far as the CO/CO2 effects, even if everyone who wanted to (not many) ran their cars without a cat for the extra 5hp, it won't really have an effect. We can do some math here:

Total atmospheric mass: 5.148x10^18 kg
Total atmospheric CO2 mass: 3.0x10^15 kg

It looks like a safe bounding average is 300g of CO2 per mile. In 2003, Americans traveled 3 trillion miles (3x10^12). This means our total output of CO2 from driving was around 9x10^11 kg of CO2. This is 0.03% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere. So even if everyone in the US bought 9 mpg SUV's, we'd double our output and add a total of 0.03% extra CO2 to the atmosphere. Insignificant, especially since the main greenhouse gas is water vapor, which comprises about 10x more volume than CO2.

I know what most of the theories say; I've read the research. I just don't think most of it is good science. Most climate research is either dry statistical analysis, or starts with a theory, then goes out and finds data that supports that theory. Very little of it is based on repeatable experiments, which are the cornerstone of good science.

The fact is, if our atmosphere was as fragile as most of the alarmists claim it is, the earth would have fallen off the knife edge a long time ago. In any system as big and old as our planet, equilibrium has pretty much been reached at this point, and for very good reasons. Negative feedbacks outweigh positive feedbacks by a significant margin.

Despite all this, I still run a catalytic converter.

 

how long does it take to put the test pipe on and off for a track day?

 

Two main sources of pollution are production (including construction and heavy industry) and emission from vehicles. However, I am willing to bet that majority of the emission comes from commercial vehicles, followed by automobiles used for commuting purposes. The pollution caused by automobiles used for recreational purpose is minimal. Also don't forget, that already quite a lot of pollution is produced during the process of turning raw material into a vehicle.

Only way to reduce pollution is to reduce the world population, and that is very unlikely to happen as China's probably the only country that has ever considered reducing population and to put some sort of policy to enforce it. In general, larger the population your country has, the more power for the country, especially with all these 'human rights' and sensitive moral concerns people have these days. Financial power has shown its limitations in the event of world wars, and technology has shown its limitations in the events like the Korean war and current war in Middle East. Population and power go together like how displacement and power go together for cars.

Heh, sorry for taking this way~ off topic.


To OP: It is difficult to completely prevent flame unless you are running dangerously lean, most tuners would make it a bit richer than ideal for engine safety. But leaning out through tuning definately help reducing frequency and the size of flames. You may still hear a lot of pops and bangs during shifts and fuel cuts since the car is turbo'd and is running under boost.

To above poster: Tt only takes as much time it takes you to jack up the car and remove and put on few bolts.

 

One more thing,

Pollution has no effect or its effect is insignificant to earth itself. It only harms the biological layer, and only reason it is 'harmed' is because the organisms are unable to adapt to the new chemicals and/or newer amount of these chemicals and they did not have enough time to evolve to adapt to it. You'd be surprised if you read about some of extreme environments certain micro organisms live under.

 

This is almost as bad as a forum not having kill stories.

 

lol

Al Gore's army vs 19th century industrialists

 

< 1hr the last time i took mine off. Thats only if you previously done it before. If not maybe 2 hrs the most?

 

And FWIW, even non-turbo catless cars spit flame during shifts and under engine braking. If the car ever goes rich, the unburned fuel spits out the exhaust and ignites when it hits oxygen, whether its turbo or not. A cat traps the unburnt fuel and keeps it from getting out the back of the tailpipe.

 

Don't forget those microorganisms outdate humans by a few billion years. Most are archaea which are an ancient form of life. Anyways, I think the size of the fine should be enough of a reason to remain catted.