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With these assumptions, figuring out how much solar energy hits the entire planet is relatively simple. 12.2 trillion watt-hours converts to 12,211 gigawatt-hours, and based on 8,760 hours per year, and 197 million square miles of earth’s surface (including the oceans), the earth receives about 274 million gigawatt-years of solar energy, which translates to an astonishing 8.2 million “quads” of Btu energy per year.

Source: http://www.ecoworld.com/energy-fuels/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth.html

My best friend is a Liberal Democrat and exceedingly pro-environment. He is also the only guy I know that I would call an actual genius without reservation. He is finishing his doctorate in atmosphere science. So when he rips the terrible science the movie, I trust him. And he isn't the only one.

Take two seconds and Google up "Inconvenient Truth rebuttal" or "Inconvenient Truth lies" and note how many scientists and universities are ripping that movie.

Here is a good rebuttal.

http://www.ecoworld.com/animals/birds/rebuttal-to-al-gores-inconvenient-truth-one-sided-misleading-exaggerated-speculative-wrong.html

Depends on the car. The numbers here seem pretty accurate: http://www.ecoworld.com/energy-fuels/electric-car-cost-per-mile.html - they claim 2.9 miles per kWh, or 350 Wh/mile.

Considering a 100hp engine peaks at 75kW, and a (generous) peak speed of 220 mph, we'll assume a 10kW constant load at 30 mph, which gets us 330 Wh/mile (awfully close to the above!), or 33 kWh per 100 miles. You're off by an order of magnitude, unless you're referring to an electric moped.

So, divide my numbers by three. 1500 Amps, and you'll only need 7 of your closest neighbors to donate their power, assuming you drive a truly wimpy car.

A nice electric car, with some get up and go, should line up with my numbers fairly closely (a 200 hp/ 150 kW car).

Um, Yucca Mountain is being shut down.

Just like your comment.

You assume that gas will remain at it's current price. This is wish thinking.

The battery is laminated lithion-ion, not from golf carts, slated to be at 80% after 7 years or 50k miles. Given that the car is going to cost 25-30k, I doubt it will cost more than 5k to recycle the batteries, and by then, you may get extended range as a nice bonus with new battery tech.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/05/aesc-lithium-io.html

http://www.ecoworld.com/fuels/electric-car-cost-per-mile.html

Congratulations! You got it! It took you 48 hrs, but you finally got it. You are now a beginner skeptic. You are a very poor skeptic, but a skeptic nonetheless!

Unfortunately, since it took you so long to figure out, I don't have time to go with my original argument. Tell you what. Read the second article I provided and google "Northwest Passage". You have another 48 hrs.

Good luck and NO HELP THIS TIME!

As for data to debunk it, unless you have a memory problem you are already aware that I have posted it. Have another look at the NASA links from the GRACE sattelite and the 50 peer-reviewed papers from Nature and Science I posted.

Debunked it? Debunked what and with what? All I see is a wiki page on on a Senator and an interview about an AlGore movie.

However, going further back in your posts, long before I joined in...(who's the one with the memory problem?) You did link to a couple of google searches. Kinda ironic that you limited them to a single source each. This from a guy who's been hammering the trustworthiness of sources limits his search to a two sources.
  Now, let's go back to your original question:

Under your stated assumptions, what's the probability that Antarctica and/or Greenland is NOT losing ice?

Because you have OR in there, and Antarctica is NOT losing ice, then I have to say, with multiple sources, that YES Antarctica OR Greenland is NOT losing ice!
Site

There is evidence the ocean in this region is somewhat warmer in recent years - true enough - but this fact is dwarfed by the mounting evidence the overall ice mass of Antarctica is increasing.

Site:

However, in a study to appear in this week's online edition of Science, a researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia has found that the interior of the East Antarctic ice sheet is actually gaining mass

There's more, of course. Just take your sources out and google something without including the sources you want to use. Of course, you know that, just chose to ignore it when looking for data that backs up your own preconceived notions.

Now, to link it back to this story. Yes, a large ice sheet is about to break from Antarctica. However, it may not be because of any type of warming, it could be quite the opposite. It could easily be because the temperature in Antarctica has actually dropped a recently due to a cooling trend that has taken place since 1998. (In fairness, here is the whole thing). Maybe there's just been more snow this year. Either way, I've seen nothing to indicate this ice sheet breaking off has anything to do with temperature changes.

Also, the same could be true of glaciers disappearing. The coldest winters I've spent have been driest ones. You don't spend a whole lot of time in a cold area to realize that -15 F is too damn cold for snow. 15-32 F above zero is where you get your precipitation. Also, you'll learn that extremely cold temps, ice tends to evaporate (sublimate) more as the air is drier since all the moisture has already been frozen out. So, given this, purely from my personal experience, colder temps can and do cause ice to disappear. Fact is that ice levels may have very little to do with temperature changes and much more to do with precipitation, which is a while different argument.

it is an USA problem (and probably China), that requires their industries to make a change.

That was true before but "China overtakes U.S. in greenhouse gas emissions". At the same tyme "wind power in China is developing rapidly and receives particularly strong government support."

Falcon

Instead of filling your car with gas, you're using coal/oil power plants instead. I don't see what the true benefit really is.

If you paid any attention at all to this subject over the past 5 years you'd know that battery-powered electric vehicles are far more efficient than blowing up gasoline to move, so even if the electricity to recharge them comes from fossil fuel, there's less pollution and lower costs and higher equivalent MPG.

People have already refuted and posted links here (and the last 500 times someone who "doesn't see" brings it up), but I'll repeat two: http://www.teslamotors.com/efficiency/well_to_wheel.php and http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2006/08/04/electric-car-cost-per-mile/

It is much cheaper to get the equivalent energy at average US electric rates per mile driven then using either gasoline or diesel. It is something ludicrously cheaper like a few cents a mile. couple of quick googlized refs here http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2006/08/04/electric-car-cost-per-mile/
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/electric-car1.htm

Granted, eventually you'll have to treplace the batts, but if they last ten years and the R&D goes on for ten years, I imagine tomorrow's prices will be considerable less for better quality batteries. And like gas cars, they will depreciate as you drive them off the lot, probably unless you get a collector car, like these first run Teslas will be. I don't see anyone actually losing money on them if they can afford the upfront costs. And for that matter, anyone who can afford one of these cars could also afford a solar rig setup to keep them charged, eventually that is paid off and it is more or less free driving.

The government will most likely go to odometer readings to charge taxes though, that will screw with your cost per mile again.

No free lunch, but you can get a cheaper lunch, and going all electric with personal production means eventually at least the cost of the fuel will be free, just leaving minimal maintenance and taxes.

I am not sure, but I bet the cheapest way right now for joe sixpack to get a functional all electric car that isn't exotic or supremely cobjobbed would be to get a well used prius, rip out the gas engine and tank (save them for later, see next), add additional batteries, now you have a full electric with some legs and it weighs less most likely. I don't know if anyone has done this yet, I know they made plugins that mean you lose most cargo space for the additional batts, but carrying around two engines, the ICE and the electric, plus the gas tank, plus the batteries, is just lame, it works but it is stoopid, twice as much weight as you want or need. The hybrid idea is OK- but not in the same frame, it is ridiculous really. The ICE and fuel tank need to be in a small trailer for trips, most of the time around town and commuting you can leave it unattached and just run pure electric. I could even see people not even buying the ICE trailer part if they only needed it a few times a year and just renting it on the odd weekends they need one.

It would save you around 66%, and that is assuming $3 per gallon gas. EV is around 3.4 cents per mile, gas is around 10 cents per mile. Source here.

What, if we didn't grow corn the fields would be no-CO2-absorbing wastelands? http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2007/02/12/biofuel-is -not-carbon-neutral/

IIRC his position is that the effects certain kinds of convection are underrepresented in existing climate models.

If he's right on this, he may be right on anthropogenic global warming. However he's still in the process of proving this.

I actually had a discussion about climate models a few days ago with my wife. She's a marine scientist, not a climatologist, but she mentioned how she saw a paper which found that averaging the results of different models gave a more accurate climate prediction in any given place. My opinion was that didn't mean that averaging models was a good way to predict climate; it was just an artifact of the way that parameters in models are calibrated. You take a bunch of historical records, and you tweak the parameters in ways that seem to fit the overall data, which necessarily means having it fit not so well in various places. Averaging model results over a historical period pretty much is a way to recover the data to which they are fitted.

If Lindzen is right, it means that existing models have been designed and calibrated in a way that dramatically overestimates anthropogenic CO2 impact. When his evidence is in, we'll have to consider it. For now the jury is out. Even if he proves his case, we'll have to look at in the context of other findings in the meantime.

Lindzen also has doubts about the data showing that the globe has in fact warmed. He correctly points out that we have to take natural variability into account. However the way he analyzes the data is suspect in my opinion. Check out this graph http://www.ecoworld.com/articles/images/lindzen2_0 3_air_temp.jpg,
from this article: http://www.ecoworld.com/articles/images/lindzen2_0 3_air_temp.jpg.

The problem is that the way he poses the question is statistically loaded.

If we had set up criteria in 1980 as to whether global warming was happening over the next twenty five years, we'd have chosen the historical baseline of 1850-1979, and used mean and variation up to that point as our benchmark. Judged by that standard, every year in the 1980-1999 period was hotter than the 1850-1979 baseline we would have compared to. Rounded to the nearest half standard deviation: +1.5:1, +2:5, + 2.5:5, + 3:4, + 3.5:1, +4:1, +4.5:1. Fifteen of the twenty years anamalous with a 5% confidence level on a two-tail distribution. Five of the twenty were anamalous at the 99% confidence level. Asking if the years were "hotter" not just "anamalous" would allow us to claim a higher level of significance, but we'll let that pass.

Lindzen, on the other hand, includes in his baseline all the years up to present, including the years in question. By doing so, he's asking a subtly different quesiton: he's not asking whether the years were signficantly hotter than the previous years, he's asking whether the years were statistically differnt than the rest of the period in which they fall. Since the period from 1980 on was much hotter than the prior century, it adds both to the baseline and the error bars significantly.

One crude way to ask whether global temperature rose in the 1900s is to ask whether temperature rose more often than not. Now there is a huge variability year to year, so lets say we average five year periods. If there is no underlying temperature bias towards warming, this is like flipping a coin twenty times. We'll call it "heads" if the temperature in a five year period is higher than the temperature in the previous five year period and tails if it is the same or cooler. After flipping our coin twenty times, it came up heads sixteen. So is our coin biased? The probabilty of sixteen heads in twenty flips with a fair coin is less than 1/2%. In the four half decades from 1980 to 1999, the coin came up heads four times in a row.

IIRC his position is that the effects certain kinds of convection are underrepresented in existing climate models.

If he's right on this, he may be right on anthropogenic global warming. However he's still in the process of proving this.

I actually had a discussion about climate models a few days ago with my wife. She's a marine scientist, not a climatologist, but she mentioned how she saw a paper which found that averaging the results of different models gave a more accurate climate prediction in any given place. My opinion was that didn't mean that averaging models was a good way to predict climate; it was just an artifact of the way that parameters in models are calibrated. You take a bunch of historical records, and you tweak the parameters in ways that seem to fit the overall data, which necessarily means having it fit not so well in various places. Averaging model results over a historical period pretty much is a way to recover the data to which they are fitted.

If Lindzen is right, it means that existing models have been designed and calibrated in a way that dramatically overestimates anthropogenic CO2 impact. When his evidence is in, we'll have to consider it. For now the jury is out. Even if he proves his case, we'll have to look at in the context of other findings in the meantime.

Lindzen also has doubts about the data showing that the globe has in fact warmed. He correctly points out that we have to take natural variability into account. However the way he analyzes the data is suspect in my opinion. Check out this graph http://www.ecoworld.com/articles/images/lindzen2_0 3_air_temp.jpg,
from this article: http://www.ecoworld.com/articles/images/lindzen2_0 3_air_temp.jpg.

The problem is that the way he poses the question is statistically loaded.

If we had set up criteria in 1980 as to whether global warming was happening over the next twenty five years, we'd have chosen the historical baseline of 1850-1979, and used mean and variation up to that point as our benchmark. Judged by that standard, every year in the 1980-1999 period was hotter than the 1850-1979 baseline we would have compared to. Rounded to the nearest half standard deviation: +1.5:1, +2:5, + 2.5:5, + 3:4, + 3.5:1, +4:1, +4.5:1. Fifteen of the twenty years anamalous with a 5% confidence level on a two-tail distribution. Five of the twenty were anamalous at the 99% confidence level. Asking if the years were "hotter" not just "anamalous" would allow us to claim a higher level of significance, but we'll let that pass.

Lindzen, on the other hand, includes in his baseline all the years up to present, including the years in question. By doing so, he's asking a subtly different quesiton: he's not asking whether the years were signficantly hotter than the previous years, he's asking whether the years were statistically differnt than the rest of the period in which they fall. Since the period from 1980 on was much hotter than the prior century, it adds both to the baseline and the error bars significantly.

One crude way to ask whether global temperature rose in the 1900s is to ask whether temperature rose more often than not. Now there is a huge variability year to year, so lets say we average five year periods. If there is no underlying temperature bias towards warming, this is like flipping a coin twenty times. We'll call it "heads" if the temperature in a five year period is higher than the temperature in the previous five year period and tails if it is the same or cooler. After flipping our coin twenty times, it came up heads sixteen. So is our coin biased? The probabilty of sixteen heads in twenty flips with a fair coin is less than 1/2%. In the four half decades from 1980 to 1999, the coin came up heads four times in a row.

As of 2001, BP produced 15% of the world's output:

http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=259

I believe that it's more than that now. Shell's goal for 2005 was 10% of the world's output; I don't know if they reached that goal or not. Both are not just producers; they also offer multimillion dollar research grants, and lots of them.

Both BP and Shell are really into the whole solar thing. Both sense a backlash against oil coming due to shortages and/or global warming, and want to have the manufacturing base and intellectual property behind renewables in preparation for the shift. That's another problem with when people talk about oil companies: they treat them as monolithic. They're not. BP and Shell are incredibly different, policy-wise, from, say, Exxon-Mobil, who *still* not only denies global warming, but astroturfs against it.

What can that US$5 buy you at home? What can it buy you in Bhutan?
Please fill free to post a link to the price of common consumer items in Bhutan. Until you do, you're talking out of your ass.

You were saying?

...with the risk of being unbearably dull...

The GNP per capita 1995 for US seems to be $26 062, ranking at 12th postition. Bhutan, again, is 145th with a GNP per capita of $172. So, I suspect five bucks is a huge portion of a normal monthly salary.

It is a simple, indisputable fact that Americans (meaning residents of the US, not all North/South Americans) use MUCH, MUCH MORE ENERGY PER CAPITA (that is per human being) than ANY OTHER COUNTRY ON THE GLOBE . In fact, more than twice as much as the nearest contender, China.

Now what I want to know is, why do Americans take themselves so seriously? Is it genetic or cultural?

Let's look at another thing "powering" the US post office by way of compairison. Jeeps. You see them all over, as they won bids on an open market. The Post Office Jeeps were stripped of all insignia and were only recognizable by their form. No cardboard cut outs recomending the purchase of Jeeps ever kept the sun from shining through a USPO window. No "test drives" were ever offered. Instead, Jeep was happy to be making the sale and the use was recomendation enough. The USPO had no intentions of recomending one automobile maker over another.

Except, well, that the USPS doesn't buy them from Jeep. (Jeep, BTW, isn't a company. Jeep is a brand of DaimlerChrysler.) The USPS buys vehicles from a variety of vendors, under contract. Here, for instance, is an article (with photo) about the USPS buying electric-powered mail vehicles from Ford.

If you browse the New Business Ideas page of the USPS web site, you'll find that the Post Office is looking for new ways to generate revenue. That's why there are Federal Express drop boxes outside post offices these days--and why Federal Express is hauling Express Mail for the USPS. If they can get Microsoft to pay them money to distribute advertising in the post office, how is that different from AOL paying them to carpet-bomb America with sign-up CDs? The more ways the USPS finds to produce revenue, the lower postage costs will be. Is that a bad thing?

Very good piece of technology. Could be a bit better: being able to swap hydrogen canisters on the fly to give unlimited life; or being able to plumb in a hydrogen supply. This gives the possibility of using solar power during the day the power a computer and generate hydrogen, and to run of the hydrogen at night in a closed cycle. This would be better than lead acid batteries as these do not have a particularly high power density.

The cost of the hydrogen is outrageous - you can buy a J cylinder (big) of hydrogen for about $100.

Despite what the article says there is no way that this is the first commercial fuel cell - see this page for a manufacturer near you - but it is a great indication that they will soon be mainstream.