[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Fire_of_Ankh-Morpork

Colder air will mean denser air and with that is more oxygen, so yes that is plausible.

[1]http://www.auburn.edu/academic/forestry_wildlife/fire/relati...

However, heat is very much a part of the fire triangle.

This is especially impactful when looking at how easily sparks propagate fires across gaps.

That is, in many ways, precisely what makes it a wildfire, rather than a smouldering ember.

In the limit - when a fire is dying out - then I guess, for sure, changing the fuel temperature can sap a larger part of the energy budget.

Apologies for pedantically deconstructing what your uncle meant as a smart-assed joke.

One of the old traditional racetracks here in Australia is Mt Panorama at Bathurst. It's got about a 180m elevation change between the start/finish/pit straight and the top of the mountain. Back when they were allowed to race motorcycles there, old 2 stroke racebikes were notorious for seizing at the top of the hill if they'd been jetted down at the bottom and hadn't been set "rich enough" to allow for the altitude change. Many many riders crashed and said "It was running really strong, til it locked up on me and spat me down the road..."

(No apologies at all for my off topic response to pedantry...)

In my defence it's been a long time singe they've been allowed to race motorcycles there. At least 20 years. And now you mention it I do recall bikes seizing at the end of pit straight, right down the bottom of the hill.

In your defense, anyone old enough to remember carbs how work, even if only slightly, is forgiven the occasional lapse of memory. ;-)

(And get off my lawn!)

If you find someone who _really_ knows how they work, pay them what they ask, and keep going back to them...

These carbs use an aneroid to move a needle valve at the base of the jet as the atmospheric pressure changes, effectively dynamically re-jetting the carb on the fly.

Got any keywords that'd lead me to something like that on Google quicker than me randomly searching? (Or even a link to such a carb?)

Edit: Found it. "High Altitude Compensator". Thanks anyway.

A bit of pedantry: modern automotive electronic fuel injection with exhaust oxygen sensors adjust much better to altitude, but the first aircraft and automotive fuel injection systems used the Venturi effect acting on a spring-loaded diaphragm to estimate mass flow rate, and simple mechanical computer to adjust fuel flow needle valves. Early aircraft mechanical fuel injection systems contained an altitude-compensating aneroid, but I doubt early automotive models did.

Many small recreational aircraft still use altitude-compensating carburetors that contain aneroids that act on needle valves to compensate for altitude.

Even today, the oxygen sensor is a relatively expensive part, and it's possible that early electronic automotive fuel injectors didn't measure and compensate for oxygen concentration in the exhaust.

So, an old automobile retrofitted with an aircraft altitude-compensating carburetor may very well compensate for altitude better than an early fuel injected automobile. Though, I assume only a handful of cars have ever been retrofitted with altitude-compensating carburetors.

Side note: it doesn't work that well on burning plutonium.

If this were to happen in absolute 0, would it be possible to sustain a fire? From learning more (just now) about absolute 0 seems it wouldn't but for other reason.

Can someone answer this, I find it a really fascinating question. How does cold effect fire if at all?

All other things being equal, the colder it is, the less the candidate molecules are moving, and thus the less likely they are to encounter each other and react. IIUC almost all chemical reactions are less vigorous at lower temperatures, disallowing convection of course.

This is not a meaningful phrase when cold is the absence of heat. You need to describe the motion of the cold air against the warmer system to get a meaningful phrase.

Being able to set a river on fire is not terribly unusual for a polluted river. I remember about ten years ago I posted up at the schuylkill, waited for an oily patch, and was able to set it on fire for about 5 seconds. These oily patches are uncommon. I have no clue where the oil came from but with the schuylkill it's anyone's guess. The patch itself is necessary for lighting the river on fire; you can't just set fire to an arbitrary section of river.