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Do these morons realize we are between ice ages?

That global warming is a good thing?

* Floods from rising sea levels could displace up to 100 million people

* Melting glaciers could cause water shortages for 1 in 6 of the world's population

* Wildlife will be harmed; at worst up to 40% of species could become extinct

* Droughts may create tens or even hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees'

* costing between 5% and 20% of global GDP and render large parts of the planet uninhabitable

Do they realize that the human contribution to global warming is f'ing negligible?

Are they even aware that oscillations of the Earth's orbit due to the other planets explain every Major Ice Age going back 1 million years with a period of about 100K years between ice ages?

Are they even aware that the Minor Ice Ages can be explained as forced by precession and nutation of the Earth's axis due to perturbation by the Sun and Moon?

I think you'll find that the sulfur reduction is aimed at reducing diesel particulate emissions. Catalyic converters are ineffective against particulate carbon (soot), which would otherwise require particulate filters (a high maintenance item). The primary effect of reducing the sulfur content is reduction of particulate formation during combustion. The other effect is reduction of lubricity, thus requiring additives to compensate.

In Australia, one of the oil majors obtained dispensation against the interim 500ppm sulfur diesel fuel standard, by using an alternative additive.

I live in Australia and I fully agree with you, however the people in the UK and Europe are paying much more. That is why diesel and bio-diesel are becoming popular (approx 50% of new cars sold in Europe are diesel).

In Australia diesel cars are just starting to take off since they are becoming trendy and the same is happening in the US although the uptake is slower. I have just got a VW 2.0 diesel (TDI) Passat (the Direct Sift Gearbox is impressive) which was actually AU$2000 cheaper than the petrol version (FSI) so I start saving on fuel immediately. This however may not be true if you decide to buy a smaller car (ie. Golf TDI, Peugeot 307 TD and quite a few others) where the diesel model is normally AU@2k to AU$6k more. You may have to do alot of km's to make up the difference.

With regard to performance don't expect to beat a car like a Subaru WRX (my last car) at the lights but start from zero to the top of a steep hill and you will wonder what most people are doing because one thing a diesel has is torque and accelerating up a hill at low revs (think 1700 rpm) is no problem.

If you are thinking of buying a diesel vehicle it is best to do your homework prior to making a decision. It is no good getting a diesel car, truck or SUV if the overall costs are greater than the equivalent petrol engine for the amount of km (or miles) you do.

At the moment in Australia VW and other diesel makers are "fence sitting" with regard to bio-diesel, so I have to be careful since I could void my warranty. Bio-diesel is approx 5c to 10c cheaper than fossil diesel, although that depends on the percentage, with B100 being the cheapest. There actually is an Australian standard although car makers can't seem to find or acknowledge it (see link below) even though it's ok in Europe where some countries are mandating a minimum of 5% (B5). This may soon change in Australia when Shell and BP start putting bio-diesel (B2 or B5) in their diesel. Conspiracy theory anyone?

http://www.deh.gov.au/atmosphere/fuelquality/stand ards/biodiesel/index.html

With regard to bio-diesel, like every technology there are advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are, virtually zero sulfur, lower CO2 , greater lubricity, less toxic than common salt and is a renewable resource (there are others but most web sites cover this). The major downside of bio-diesel is there is a requirement for growing vast amounts of oil producing plants (eg. canola, sunflower, coconut, kelp? ... etc) or even animal products (ie. fat) and in many countries this is a real dilemma because you have to balance land that is normally used to grow food and land that will be used to grow bio-diesel. The same applies to sugar for alcohol as well although IMHO bio-diesel is more environmentally friendly (plenty of web sites cover the pro's and con's on this and even the differences as well).

Well, the article doesn't say much about what the army is supposed to do except kill them. I highly doubt that's the strategy and, after being raised on farms in my youth, it's easier to use a trap or target the nests than to get down on your hands and knees and kill each and every one of them. In fact, even if you killed all the visible ones, how do you kill/remove all the tadpoles and eggs from the ponds and water in Australia? It would be obviously stupid to try to introduce another foreign species that might rampage about the land. Especially one that would be immune to the toad's toxin.

It's odd that they deploy the military considering that current government research has been directed towards isolating a sex pheremone to disrupt the breeding cycle. The government fact sheet suggests removing the jelly strings of eggs from water & humane execution of adult cane toads. There are guides on Cane Toad control that talk about using traps but what do you do with the toads after you trap them. Will the Australian military be trudging through wetlands and collecting toad eggs while smashing the adults with specialized mallets? No one is alluding to the method of the military.

Perhaps this is some left over funding that was appropriated to the military and now they feel like they have to spend it? Either way, I don't live in North Eastern Australia so I don't know what level of effect these toads are truly having.

Here's a humorous Google Video on the cane toad. It's more just a dabble in CGI by film makers but I thought it worth mentioning given the topic.

And both of those you can use, safely with no retrofitting, at least up to 10% (Believe it or not, if you always buy from the lowest-priced station in your area, you almost certainly already buy "Gasohol", or E10).

This article seems to suggest that E20 causes more engine wear than ULP. And you mostly made my point for me: cheap gas stations use more ethanol than premium stations. People aren't completely irrational, ethanol has been shown to reduce engine lifespan in some studies. This was the first thing I pulled off google, but I'm sure there are others. Many people, especially with more expensive cars, would pay an extra $0.10/gallon to avoid an expensive engine replacement later.

The US uses approximately half as much diesel as gasoline

You certainly can't fix all that with some industry waste oil. And it still needs to be cheaper for it to be economically effective. If it really is a drop-in replacement, they should sell biodiesel to the gas stations to mix in. But the only reason they don't is because biodiesel is more expensive to produce on a large scale, so nobody wants to produce it.

Additionally, biodiesel has almost reached the breakeven point with dinodiesel, and ethanol costs considerably less already (though I agree that we can't state that comfortably without considering corn subsidies).

You can't state it comfortably because it's not true. Remember that gasoline and diesel are both heavily taxed, also. If you want to compare real economic numbers, you have to remove all taxes and subsidies, meaning that biodiesel is still behind, and ethanol is WAY behind.

Gasoline could get more expensive, but right now it's cheap. While gasoline is cheap, it's not realistic (or desirable) to ask people to spend more.

The primary concern is that you're asking the government to cause even more favoritism for ethanol/biodiesel than they already do. Prices are at a certain level for a reason. If you force everyone to use more ethanol, it will cost everyone more money in the long run.

The most valid criticisms of gasoline are environmental (because it's so hard to pinpoint environmental costs, so it's pretty much impossible to argue against), and perhaps international policy. You can't say that ethanol is cheap if it's expensive. And we've already been producing ethanol for thousands of years, so you can't argue that all of a sudden we will find a way to make it cheap. With biodiesel, it's not cheaper than regular diesel, so it's inefficient to use it.

Don't know about that one, but Australia's Department of Environment and Heritage has data, going back to around 1900 showing 12 to 16 cm increases in sea-levels in the 20th century.

The plan is to build a fence across the Cobourg Peninsula, so that a 6km fence will isolate 2207 square kilometres from the cane toads. It's a pity about the other millions of square kilometres of relatively unspoiled bush up there.

No it's not. "There are no restrictions on taking photographs in the Park for non-commercial purposes, for example holiday photos, other than where park signs indicate sacred sites. Less than 1% of the park is restricted in this way."

Just grabbed a random link from Google

A Testing Based Assessment to Determine Impacts of a 20% Ethanol Gasoline Fuel Blend on the Australian Passenger Vehicle Fleet - 2000hrs Material Compatibility Testing
http://www.deh.gov.au/atmosphere/fuelquality/publi cations/2000hours-vehicle-fleet/materials-2.html

The Conclusions gives you a list of all the parts affected by a 20% ethanol/80% gasoline blend

Just grabbed a random link from Google

A Testing Based Assessment to Determine Impacts of a 20% Ethanol Gasoline Fuel Blend on the Australian Passenger Vehicle Fleet - 2000hrs Material Compatibility Testing
http://www.deh.gov.au/atmosphere/fuelquality/publi cations/2000hours-vehicle-fleet/materials-2.html

The Conclusions gives you a list of all the parts affected by a 20% ethanol/80% gasoline blend

This got marked interesting? The bacteria lives in a sodding volcano... where do you think that the CO comes from?

"Feral cat" simply means a domestic cat gone wild. There have been feral cats in Europe and Asia for thousands of years, and in Australia for a couple of hundred years. Unless it has eaten radioactive waste and stars in a cheap horror movie, it gets about the size of a large domestic cat at most. It's not the size of Australian cats that is unusual, but of Australian imagination. That's why there is not a single specimen of Giant Australian Feral Cat in captivity, on a single picture, or stuffed somewhere. The idea that the body shown in the picture is of a domestic cat that has evolved over a few hundred years is hilarious. As I said, I do like the stories.

Here is some info on Australian feral cats from the Australian government:
http://www.deh.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive/public ations/cat/

It's a good point, for alternative energy sources such as solar to be effective, there needs to be a lot of them.

And 4500 acres of solar plant has some serious environmental impact.

The same goes for hyrdo, just look at the effects of the Snowy River.

better link: http://www.deh.gov.au/coasts/publications/nswmanua l/appendixb12.html

After a bit if looking I found this: Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations... Past 160,000 years
It appears that before ~20K years ago the trend was downhill for CO2.

the article lists the size of 120 watt panel as 14 feet by 10 feet

Actually, TFA says: "Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V."

Better take that article with a grain of salt size of Uluru. 120 W per square inch is about 186 kW per square meter. This is pretty high, considering the solar constant is 1367 watts per square meter. Maybe the guys at Nanosolar illuminated their panel with one of these instead of plain old sunlight.

Even if N.N. Sachitanand confused square inches with square feet, that would still be almost 1.3 kW/m^2.

Does biodiversity mean a thing to any of you? Having one strain of GM corn dominate all of an an area's crops might be awesome when it comes to raising productivity levels and immunity to pesticides, but when an unforseen disease starts to affect the plants (which can happen a lot) they would be completely wiped out, because they are all the same. Nature does it better, lets not fuck around with it.

Introducing GM plants to an area can be compared to introducing alien species to a place where they do not belong. There is no possible way to forsee all the negative impacts that could arise. Check out all the problems Australia has with feral animals, for instance. here

Mmm, both the injector systems I've worked control law design on use MAF and O2, not lambda. And since I work for a tier 1 supplier, we do firmware; we don't exactly want most of our customers reprogramming their PCMs. :)

Also, stoich does change between pure gas and E85, as does the fuel oxygen content (yes, ethanol contains oxygen as does gasoline, and in different proportions, and that oxygen contributes to the reaction, which is more an issue of programming for proper A/F to get the right stoich out). Lambda is relative A/F; it does change between E85 and gas. I would check on those engineers; if they're really telling you that none of these change when you change your fuel blend, they don't know what they're talking about. They may be right in terms of how much the EC needs to change, but their chemistry is totally off. Aussie DEQ has a pretty good page on all this (though more targeted at lower ethanol blends, the info applies to E85) at www.deh.gov.au. You might be able to get around all of the issues with proper reprogramming of your engine computer; only one I'm not sure on is your injectors, and that has to do with my background being controls and not combustion.

I'm not really interested in replacing my engine computer; I get to design them for a living, why would I want to work on them for a hobby? :)

This is off topic I know, but I'm Australian and going through school we were always taught that "Ayers Rock" was the bad, insensitive, politically incorrect name for Uluru. That's its real name under the current owners since the government handed over the land in the Kata Tjuta national park to the local Aboriginals of the area in 1984.

The Department of Environment and Heritage doesn't even have the term "Ayers" anywhere on the Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park website.

If you're worried that Uluru is too confusing, probably use "Uluru/Ayers Rock" instead of "Ayers Rock Uluru" which I've been seeing some people use.

This is off topic I know, but I'm Australian and going through school we were always taught that "Ayers Rock" was the bad, insensitive, politically incorrect name for Uluru. That's its real name under the current owners since the government handed over the land in the Kata Tjuta national park to the local Aboriginals of the area in 1984.

The Department of Environment and Heritage doesn't even have the term "Ayers" anywhere on the Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park website.

If you're worried that Uluru is too confusing, probably use "Uluru/Ayers Rock" instead of "Ayers Rock Uluru" which I've been seeing some people use.

Another rabbit virus called callicivirus was introduced about 10 years ago, which has also helped to bring the population down to a less damaging level.

There are dozens of other introduced pests that hugely damage the Australian natural environment and agricultural productivity, from cats, to weeds like Paterson's Curse. Due to this, and past successes, Australian governments throw a lot of money at research into biological control.