Talk:Airbending/@comment-76.24.189.176-20120121100340/@comment-4521003-20120212060605

You seem to have ignored several of my points.

Breathing on fire does not suddenly make it filled with carbon dioxide. The amount of carbon dioxide we exhale with every breath is very minimal, and not nearly enough to create a dangerous cloud of gas. You would need many breaths to produce that much CO2. Even if you could make enough CO2, you would have to be able to contain it. The gas does not stay where you put it unless you trap it in some way, and fire would not trap the CO2. So with not enough CO2 to be significant and with no way to keep that CO2 within the flames, how is a Firebender supposed to control it? You cannot make poison flames from the CO2 you exhale.

Just because Firebending occasionally produces smoke (which I never remember it doing without actually burning something) doesn't mean that Firebenders can control smoke. Smoke is not similar to fire at all, because smoke is actual particles suspended in the air while fire has no particles. You say "smoke only comes from fire and/or something that is burning" as if that is proof that Firebenders could bend smoke. Yes, smoke is associated with fire. But smoke is not born from the fire itself. Both fire and smoke are products of the chemical transformation of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen into carbon monoxide and water vapor. Fire is separate from the smoke, because fire comes from the energy released while smoke comes from the burned up substances left over after the reaction. If a Firebender could control smoke because burning causes smoke, then a Firebender could also control water because burning produces water vapor. But Firebenders definitely cannot control water, so why could they control smoke? The same logic applies to carbon monoxide and anything else fire makes.

In addition, something has to actually burn to make carbon monoxide, water vapor, smoke, ash, and other fire-related things, yet Firebenders don't rely on fuel sources for fire so those things wouldn't be present in a Firebender's fire in the first place. Different fuel sources produce different products from the cheical reaction. For example, wood fires make much more smoke than gas burners because many more unneeded things are present in wood than in the gas a burner uses. If smoke and fire were as inseperable as you claim, then the amount of smoke would only change with the amount of fire and not with the fuel source. This is not the case, because smoke comes from the fuel that is burning, not from the fire itself.

The amount you wrote isn't the problem; I read it just fine. The problem is the absence of facts to support your ideas. While some of your points appear to be reasonable at first glance, upon closer examination your arguments fall apart.

(This is only part of what I have to say. I will return later to finish.)