Climate change is a normal part of earth's atmosphere.
Three questions as I honestly don't know.
1. Is the water vapor also emitted during combustion factored into the climate change model?
2. Is sun spot activity factored in?
3. Is the atmospheric "breathing" factored in?
All 3 can and do affect the earth's temp and the last 2 come from our main heat source - the sun.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and as the average temperature of the planet's atmosphere rises so does the mass of water vapor in a positive feedback loop. But anthropogenic water vapor is difficult to measure.
Man made climate change is extremely settled science and it's unfortunate that it's still a conversation that needs to be repeated but here goes:
We don't have to care about "normal" or "Sun spots" or "volcanoes" or whatever because we actually can identify exactly how much of climate change is directly from burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are made of plants and plants preferentially construct themselves from carbon-12 so by measuring the change in carbon-12 isotope against carbon-13 in atmospheric samples (ice cores) we can identify how much of the atmospheric carbon used to be a plant vs. geologic sources (volcanic activity). If the carbon present in a particularly rich historic sample has the base level ratio of C12/C13 we can expect it came from volcanic or tectonic release. If it shifts the ratio toward C12 we can expect it had an organic source - forest fires or industrial revolutions. Humans also have a tendency to tax commodities and keep records so we know exactly how much fossil fuel has been extracted and burned in human history. These numbers can be correlated and they all match. We can identify exactly how many Watts per square meter of solar energy are retained in the atmosphere
specifically as a result of human fossil fuel burning and separate from all other sources of climate fluctuation.
Few things on Earth have been studied this closely so if you trust aeronautics engineers to build a safe airplane when you fly then you can trust the tens of thousands of climate scientists worldwide who agree on this result. There isn't enough money in solar panels and Big Tofu to buy them all off. It's not a conspiracy to chop the ball bearings off your Hemi it's a conspiracy to not starve because we killed all the bees and fish.
Currently the amount of oxygenation in the fuel is all over the place - even E85 isn't always 85%
They need to tighten up the fuel standards to a much closer standard and build engines to take advantage of the added benefit.
Higher compression engines (or boosted ones) take much better advantage of oxygenated fuels, you're absolutely correct. Engines engineered for gasoline still make more power on alcohol just much less efficiently than they could with higher compression. The cost per mile can work out if the alcohol is cheaper than gasoline by the same % as the reduction in miles per gallon but there's no way around the reduction in range. I think the more difficult part of this is that right now the production of alcohol alongside chicken feed from the same harvest makes people react emotionally and the production of fuel from seaweed is not yet economically profitable. EV's weren't economically profitable in 2010 either but they got help from all of us in the form of legislative measures (taxpayer funded rebates + credits paid for by "polluters" .. i.e. part of your Ram's purchase price went to that guy who
allegedly beats up women and peddles electric cars) so the same rationale which went into those legislative pushes could be put to work saving the combustion engine by changing its diet.
In other words the same government which paid people $7500 to buy an EV could pay you $7500 to supercharge your Hemi and burn carbon neutral fuel in it
for the same reason and if your truck doesn't put carbon into the atmosphere it's inoculated against criticism from
The Green Crowd, isn't that a good thing?
