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UCS has been evaluating & tracking how much mpg is needed to match an EV on a grid-level basis http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...

Unless Mazda has their super-duper engine ready tomorrow, they're fighting an uphill battle with an elephant on their backs. In 2009, even on the worst grids, an EV would been about the same as a 35 mpg car. Fast forward to 2014 (there's a slider on one of the images on the page for comparison) and you're looking at only 2 grids where a 40 mpg car is better than an EV and if you look at the most populous areas, you need a 75 mpg car to achieve parity.

Thank you for the link. It's not even populous areas. According to that analysis,

Based on where EVs have been bought to-date, the average EV in the US now produces emissions equivalent to a hypothetical gasoline car achieving 73 MPG.

. So, Mazda, there's your target for the SkyActiv car: 74 mpg.

And a working link

http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...

According to this link, that was true in 2009, but false five years later.

http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...

EVs for sure, but let's try to charge them off wind/solar please? Otherwise you're shifting the efficiency problem from your engine bay to the grid. I hate smug EV drivers boasting about "clean" driving. They get all flustered when I point out that grid-charging has all sorts of issues from coal-fired electricity.

Even if you're in the midwest, with the dirtiest electric mix around, an EV is generally going to be cleaner than most vehicles. And keep in mind that the mix should only get cleaner with time. On the coasts an EV is going to be cleaner than any internal combustion engine vehicle. The Union of Concerned Scientists have some good information on this:
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v...
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v...

I like my motorcycle too, but I'm looking forward to a quiet electric motorcycle with lots of instant torque. They're still too expensive for my taste though.

EVs for sure, but let's try to charge them off wind/solar please? Otherwise you're shifting the efficiency problem from your engine bay to the grid. I hate smug EV drivers boasting about "clean" driving. They get all flustered when I point out that grid-charging has all sorts of issues from coal-fired electricity.

Even if you're in the midwest, with the dirtiest electric mix around, an EV is generally going to be cleaner than most vehicles. And keep in mind that the mix should only get cleaner with time. On the coasts an EV is going to be cleaner than any internal combustion engine vehicle. The Union of Concerned Scientists have some good information on this:
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v...
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v...

I like my motorcycle too, but I'm looking forward to a quiet electric motorcycle with lots of instant torque. They're still too expensive for my taste though.

UCS has been evaluating & tracking how much mpg is needed to match an EV on a grid-level basis
http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...

Thank you for the useful link.

but let's try to charge them off wind/solar please?

Which is already happening in several countries (e.g.: hydro is popular in the Alpine regions of Europe).
You know, not every nations produces it's electricity by burning coal.

Otherwise you're shifting the efficiency problem from your engine bay to the grid. I hate smug EV drivers boasting about "clean" driving. They get all flustered when I point out that grid-charging has all sorts of issues from coal-fired electricity.

According to research (damn, I have to keep the link under hand), except in a few countries that have a horrible mix of sources of electricity and burn too much fossils

UCS has been evaluating & tracking how much mpg is needed to match an EV on a grid-level basis
http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...

Unless Mazda has their super-duper engine ready tomorrow, they're fighting an uphill battle with an elephant on their backs.
In 2009, even on the worst grids, an EV would been about the same as a 35 mpg car.
Fast forward to 2014 (there's a slider on one of the images on the page for comparison) and you're looking at only 2 grids where a 40 mpg car is better than an EV and if you look at the most populous areas, you need a 75 mpg car to achieve parity.

Tesla is deliberately delaying the Model 3. CARB (California Air Resources Board) created a ZEV mandate. A certain percentage of each car company's sales have to be ZEV - zero emissions vehicles. Right now that's almost entirely EVs (Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the market). The percentage increases each year - the details are a bit complex but bottom line it's about 2% for 2018. If an automaker fails to reach the required percentage, they have to buy ZEV credits from an automaker which exceeded it. If they fail that too, they are banned from selling cars in California and the approx dozen states which automatically adopt CARB's guidelines. That's about 1/3 of the U.S. by population.

Since Tesla produces only EVs, they always have excess ZEV credits. Part of their finances is selling those ZEV credits. But the closer the other automakers come to meeting their ZEV requirement in a year, the lower the price for ZEV credits. So if Tesla produces too many EVs in a year in which other car companies sold enough of their own EVs, they get little to nothing for their ZEV credits, and they have to bear a larger fraction of the Tesla 3 production cost themselves.

You can tell how well EVs are selling by how good the discounts are at the end of the year. 2015, sales were really poor (relative to the ZEV mandate that year) and there were incredible discounts on EVs (in California - the only state where CARB counts sales/leases). Dec 2015 I almost picked up a 3-year lease on an e-Golf for $79/mo, no money down (there was also a $49/mo with $1500 down offer, but that's more money overall). The EV deals in late 2017 were close to nonexistent, which is a pretty good indicator that the automakers were hitting their ZEV mandate percentages. That means there wasn't much of a market for ZEV credits in 2017, which meant Tesla had to delay Model 3 production to try to push some of those credits into 2018. And that's exactly what they did.

The problem for Tesla is that they set the pre-order price of their EVs based on assumptions for how much they'll receive for selling the ZEV credits. If the other automakers consistently hit their ZEV percentage every year (or come close to it), Tesla is in a world of trouble - all those Tesla 3 pre-orders could have been "sold" for less than what it cost to manufacture because they'd assumed selling the ZEV credit would've made up the difference. So paradoxically, the better EVs sell, the worse off Tesla is financially.

Wtf? Is it global warming or climate change? It's so freaking cold here in Florida I wonder where they're taking temperature readings, maybe in their rectums? Boiling over the scam hasn't taken effect? Remember the coming ice age in the 1970's? All scare tactics no solutions just send more money!

Global Warming leads to more extreme weather conditions. This means while the mean temperature of the planet increases, some parts will get a lot hotter and other parts a lot colder.

I've added emphasis in the quotes

https://www.livescience.com/37...
[...]
Extreme weather is another effect of global warming. While experiencing some of the hottest summers on record , much of the United States has also been experiencing colder-than-normal winters .

Changes in climate can cause the polar jet stream — the boundary between the cold North Pole air and the warm equatorial air — to migrate south, bringing with it cold, Arctic air. This is why some states can have a sudden cold snap or colder-than-normal winter, even during the long-term trend of global warming, Werne explained.
[...]

https://www.ucsusa.org/global-...
[...]
Factors that come into play for regional weather (and indeed global weather) are Earth’s seasons, ocean patterns, upper winds, Arctic sea ice, and the shifting shape of the jet stream (see below). These factors can lead to extreme weather in various portions of northern mid-latitudes—such that some places get tons of snow repeatedly while others are unseasonably warm.
[...]

CARB (California Air Resources Board) introduced a ZEV mandate. Zero Emissions Vehicle - mostly EVs though Toyota has a hydrogen vehicle on the market. It requires that a certain percentage of each automaker's sales be ZEVs each year. That percentage increases every year (currently about 2%, supposed to be about 15% by 2025). If an automaker fails to hit that percentage or buy enough credits from a company which has exceeded the percentage, it is banned from selling vehicles in California. And since about a dozen other states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, that automaker would be banned from selling cars in about a third of the U.S. by population. This is why every automaker has developed an EV - none of them want to be banned from 1/3 of the U.S.

Tesla is actually subsidized by this. It always has ZEV credits, so its bottom line is buoyed by selling those to other automakers. That's also why production of the Tesla 3 has been so slow to ramp up. They won't want to produce more of them per year than they're able to sell credits for. If they can't sell the ZEV credit for a Tesla 3, they have to bear the full manufacturing costs for the vehicle themselves.

CARB actually first tried the ZEV mandate in 2000. That's why GM invested half a billion dollars developing the EV-1. Come late 1999, GM was the only automaker with a viable vehicle which could meet the ZEV mandate. They stood to make billions back selling the ZEV credits and licensing the technology to other car companies. But at the last minute the other automakers convinced CARB that technology wasn't yet ready to meet the ZEV mandate, and hybrids were the best technical solution for now. GM destroying all the EV-1s makes a lot more sense when you put it in this context. Overnight CARB turned GM's half billion dollar investment from a gold mine into money down the toilet, then had the temerity to ask GM if it could share the technology with California (so it could be given to other automakers). It's no wonder GM destroyed the EV-1s and buried the R&D so CARB couldn't get their hands on it.

Do note that this means whether or not EVs are economically viable remains to be seen (whether other automakers are feet-draggers, or if CARB is just pushing the market into unviable space). The mandate is an arbitrary bureaucrat-fixed percentage, not a market one. So if the market doesn't want to buy enough EVs to meet the mandate, automakers have to cut prices on EVs until enough of them sell (or are leased) to meet the mandate. That's why a couple years ago VW was offering a 3-year lease on an eGolf for $79/mo with no money down - they were short on ZEV credits that year. And that's why the best EV deals are in California - only EVs sold/leased in California count towards the ZEV mnadate. 2016 and 2017 didn't see as good deals, so EV sales seem closer on track with the ZEV mandate those years. But climbing from 2% to 15% in 7 years is a very steep increase in ZEV sales. If what the market wants deviates from the ZEV mandate, it will show up in the EV discounts. The greater the deviation, the steeper the EV discounts will be.

We can't accurately predict the weather for 5 days

Can't predict a coinflip either, yet we can predict very accurately the average result of 10,000 coinflips. Same with climate, which is a long-term aggregate of countless individual weather events. But sure, all those thousands of egghead climate scientists from all over the planet are obviously just making shit up, right? And apparently coordinating it all in a massive global conspiracy.

It's not a fact.

Then how do you explain the vast amount of peer-reviewed evidence supporting it that's cited in the IPCC reports? Gonna wave that all away?

There certainly is a huge monetary motivation to say it's NOT a fact.

Fixed that for you. And if you doubt me, let me know if you find any monetary motivation bigger than $33 trillion in stranded assets. Or perhaps just compare salaries.

Everything they do makes it LOOK like they are covering shit up.

According to whom? Certainly the studies cited in the IPCC reports are about as clear as it can get. Every scientific institution and meteorological department in the world endorses its conclusions - are all of them also covering this shit up, risking their reputations and sabotaging everything science stands for? Or perhaps other interests just want you to think so? There's certainly plenty of direct evidence for that.

You want data? Oh we deleted it.

Oh look, found it again.

You have an opinion we don't agree with?

Then provide evidence to back it up, or STFU. That's how science works.

The curves don't match what we said was going to happen ten years ago?

They look OK to me.

Don't get me started on having Al Gore as a spokeman

Haha, nobody elected Gore as any sort of spokesman other than himself, and certainly he has ZERO to do with the scientific case for AGW. That's like saying the entire Republican party are frauds because Trump is kind of a dick.

show me a solution that does NOT put us back into the dark ages

Well first off, the type of solution has NOTHING to do with the existence of the problem. Seriously, are you really going to deny the problem even exists just because you don't like someone's proposed solution to it? Is that rational?

Second, there are any number of proposed solutions. Pick some that you like. Nuclear is fine by me, if you can make an economic case for it (and certainly in some areas it makes a lot of sense). Solar and wind are obvious choices to be part of the energy mix, particularly in areas where there's lot of sun and/or wind. Geothermal, wave power, thorium - there are plenty of carbon-neutral energy sources to choose from.

And for intermittency, power companies already have to deal with that, since no power plant is perfect - e.g. coal plants are offline 40-60% of the time, so they have to be covered too. The answer is wide distribution and redundancy from a variety of sources ("the wind always blows somewhere") with some storage

"Literal trillions of dollars as calculated by whom? You magnify the "subsidies" of fossil fuels while handwaving over alternatives."

If you're going to persistently refuse to understand the subject whilst insisting you're right regardless I'm going to stop wasting my time. As I said - a simple Google search will find you hundreds of results, so to answer your question in terms of whom, literally every journalist and scientist that's ever objectively studied the subject. As Google is apparently way too confusing for you though, I'll make it easier:

The IMF: https://www.wsj.com/articles/i...

National Academy of Sciences: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10...

Side note on the above: "The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress." - you argue oil is better than coal, it's really not, presumably when you say you like fossil fuels what you really mean is that you're an oil man if you believe what you said.

Forbes Journalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

MIT Economics Prof: http://news.mit.edu/2016/carbo...

World Nuclear Association: http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

Union of Concerns Scientists: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-e...

Skeptical Science: https://skepticalscience.com/p...

Cambridge University: https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/bus...

How long do you want me to keep going before you decide to stop being in denial? You can't pretend this is bias or partisanism - as I've said all along, there's a reason why left and right come to the same conclusions when they study this. You cannot pretend the likes of Forbes to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the US government to the IMF, and Cambridge University to the World Nuclear Association are somehow bedfellows that all sit on the exact same end of the political spectrum - they don't, that's nonsense - they all agree because it's true, and if you disagree it's because you're being irrational.

I did as you said regarding earthquakes from dams, and yes, whilst I'm willing to admit I hadn't appreciated quite how harmful some of them had been, I think you still fundamentally fail to understand the differences in scale - we're talking less than a million deaths from them across all time, and yet fossil fuels kill tens (possibly squeezing into hundreds) of millions globally not just in one off incidents, but on an ongoing basis every year. There's still not even a remotely equivalent comparison - the externalities of fossil fuels are still many orders of magnitude higher on healthcare alone - even if you reject the global warming argument, and ignore the geopolitical strife caused by fighting over fossil fuels, you're still seeing orders of magnitude more externalities (and deaths) on fossil fuels based just on the topic of healthcare and nothing more alone. When you factor in the other realities - war, climate change and so forth, it's like comparing a spec of sand to the size of the plant and saying the two are equivalent.

I've Google'd the shit out of trying to find any kind of study showing that other fuels externalities are equivalent to fossil fuels. Guess what? Nothing, whilst it's consistently poss

The American Petroleum Institute, in particular its members Exxon and Chevron, have been funding denial and manufacturing doubt ever since their own scientists told them of the risks of continued fossil fuel use back in the 80s (here is an empirical study describing their efforts to deny and deliberately misrepresent climate science findings, including from their own scientists).

And the reason fossil fuels appeared as cheap as they did was because the huge emission and pollution costs were being borne by the public, rather than the industry. If these externalised costs were factored in, the price of coal-fired electricity would triple (study) - and the RoI for investment in alternatives like renewables or nuclear would have been much larger. Likewise, the health and other external costs of oil exceeded $56 billion annually back in 2005, adding at least 23 to 38 cents per gallon (again without including climate costs).

External costs are a market failure. Regulation is one option to correct that failure, but it's not the only possible option. Feel free to choose a solution that fits your political preferences, but ignoring or hand-waving away the problem won't make it go away. You'll still be paying for it, with excessive health premiums, illnesses and lost productivity, and tens of thousands of avoidable deaths every year.

To understand why, you have to understand the economics of EVs. The real economics - not the "EV sales are rising because more people want them" rose-tinted version its proponents like to believe.

EV sales are taking off because of CARB (California Air Resources Board). They have a ZEV mandate (zero emissions vehicles - mostly EVs though Toyota has a hydrogen vehicle on the market). Beginning in 2013 or 2014, CARB required a certain percentage of each manufacturer's vehicle sales to be ZEVs or PZEVs (partial ZEVs - basically plug-in hybrids). The percentage goes up every year. The formula is a bit complex but it's about 2% ZEVs for 2018, and supposed to reach over 15% by 2025.

If a manufacturer fails to reach this percentage, the manufacturer must buy ZEV credits from another manufacturer which exceeded its required quota. This is what keeps Tesla afloat. Since they only sell ZEVs, they always have excess credits which they sell to other manufacturers who didn't sell enough ZEVs. That's right - if you buy an ICE vehicle, you are likely subsidizing someone buying a $70,000 Tesla. This is also why Tesla is in no hurry to ramp up Tesla 3 production. They don't want to flood the ZEV credit market - that would devalue their own credits. So they're going to ramp up production just barely fast enough to keep up with how many credits other manufacturers need to buy to comply with CARB's requirement.

If the manufacturer fails to sell enough EVs or buy enough ZEV credits, they are banned from selling cars in California. Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's rules, that ban would extend to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population. No manufacturer wants to be banned from that huge chunk of the market, so they do whatever they can to sell enough EVs to comply with CARB's ZEV mandate. This means sales, discounts, incentives, whatever it takes to get however many EVs they need into buyers' hands to satisfy CARB's requirements. This is why the EV deals are better in California than in other states - CARB only counts EVs which are sold in California. So California is where automakers offer the biggest EV incentives. I almost pulled the trigger on a 3-year e-Golf lease in 2016 for $500 down, $79/mo in Los Angeles (the Bay Area had zero down, $79/mo available).

Since EVs are not actually popular with buyers (at least not at the percentage the ZEV mandate requires), this means the manufacturers have to sell the vehicles at below true market value to generate sufficient sales (sometimes even below manufacturing cost). If they're going to do this, leasing it is preferable to selling it. With a sale, they've lost the entire manufacturing cost of the vehicle. With a lease, they at least get the materials for the vehicle back at the end, which they can then reuse or recycle. And if the blue book value of the EV is less at the end of the lease than was projected, they can write off the difference and get a tax deduction for the loss. Leasing also allows anyone to take advantage of the full $7500 federal tax credit. Being a tax credit, you have to owe at least $7500 in income taxes to take full advantage of it. Based on IRS tax stats, this means the buyer needs to make more than about $70,000/yr to take advantage of the full tax credit. But if you lease it, the tax credit goes to the car manufacturer, who pays a lot more than $7500 in taxes each year. So they can take advantage of the full credit and pass it on to the buyer. That means the real price for a leased EV for anyone making less than $70,000/yr is often less than for a purchased EV.

All this is why the blue book value of a used EV is so low. The ZEV mandate only applies to new vehicle sales, not used EVs. The incentives lower the price, effectively causing more new EVs to be sold or leased than would've at the correct market p

Thank you for proving my point by linking to a long discredited story, which you cling to because it supports your political opinions.

If you weren't an anti-science political hack, you wouldn't be trying to peddle those lies here.

Citation needed.

They're all over the place: https://www.epa.gov/sites/prod...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015...
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-ve...

You can search up to power plants very easily as Australia found out. Not only that but you can build a 1GW NG plant for less then $400m

Wind and solar are at #1 because both require a base load.

That is a lie...

If you exclude nuclear, then you're left with fossil fuels.

...and you are a liar.

And the rest is similarly wrong as fantasy developed from an incorrect assumption.

Governments don't burn oil the general public does....

srsly?

The U.S. military burns roughly 100M barrels of oil a year.[1][2][3], and so on.

Pull the other one komrade.

[1] http://www.resilience.org/stor...
[2] http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_ve...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Sure in a handful of areas but for 70% of people living in the US an electric car is cleaner than nearly all hybrids. http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...

You have to look at the energy trends over the entire life of the car, those MPG equivalent ratings have gone up year after year as new cleaner power plants come on line. Maybe for the next 3-4 years a hybrid has a narrow edge but for the next 6 years your power source will get cleaner while a hybrid remains in the same spot.

One of the really nice things about an EV is that you can shift between generators without lock-in to any single fuel source. If huge natural gs reserves are unlocked you can power your vehicle on natural gas. If solar comes out cheaper you can run on solar. If you do run on coal, you're still relatively clean

In which part of the world do you live that nights are windless? Probably in the center of a desert? Hm, even there it is hard to imagine a windless night.

See http://blog.ucsusa.org/john-rogers/usgs-map-of-wind-turbine-locations-in-us-434. Excluding Texas, there are almost no wind turbines in the old Confederacy. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine the technical reason.

Environmental problems are absolutely interconnected. Technological change solving one allows the evidence of another to be collected. So it was with the particulate problem from soot and the phenomenon of global warming. The chemical basis of both is easily understood, but the environmental interaction was such that the warming effect of CO2 emissions was partly masked by the sunlight reduction from coal ash and other particulates in the atmosphere.

Environmental problems are absolutely interconnected. Technological change solving one allows the evidence of another to be collected. So it was with the particulate problem from soot and the phenomenon of global warming. The chemical basis of both is easily understood, but the environmental interaction was such that the warming effect of CO2 emissions was partly masked by the sunlight reduction from coal ash and other particulates in the atmosphere.

Wrong Fool.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...

A typical power plant is often on the order of 100s of MW http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/how-is-electricity-measured.html, but this is of course what will be just the first such, and more will follow. Since they have a large battery farm, it will also not suffer from the general problem that many solar and wind farms have of being essentially intermittent in their production and often producing more power than one needs sometimes with no way to store it. Taken together with the fact that new wind systems are so efficient that many are repowering wind farms early https://electrek.co/2017/10/16/new-wind-turbine-efficiency-so-great-utilities-repowering-farms-early/, it appears that we're finally at a point where wind is starting to be a a serious competitor. Even if natural as were not killing coal and oil, solar and wind would seem to be doing almost as effective a job.

Subsidies don't "encourage new technologies".

The ones you're talking about do, hence them being subsidies for new technologies.

If renewables "just die out" without subsidies, they are not competitive.

It isn't a competition so your point, false though it is, is irrelevant.

There shouldn't be any subsidies for any energy technologies.

Argument without reasoning, invalid.

There is little pollution from fossil fuels these days.

Except for all the actual pollution and it is costly.

You know, when you lie, you hurt yourself. But you also hurt the rest of us. You should pay for that injury.

And the danger of producing it is accounted for in its cost structure. So, not an argument.

Actually, it isn't. That's the point. Your assertion is invalid.

The picture that emerges from these figures is one where—in general—developed countries and major emerging economy nations lead in total carbon dioxide emissions. Developed nations typically have high carbon dioxide emissions per capita, while some developing countries lead in the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions.

Because emissions have never been reliably managed in first world countries, which is why we're in the situation we're in now. As for corporations, they don't see developing countries as resources to be exploited... they see ALL countries as resources to be exploited.

> reality is that powering electric vehicles with coal-generated power is worse than just letting people by gasoline-powered vehicles.
study : http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-ve...

"If we get air cooled nuclear power then I have my doubts that even wind can compete on being as cheap or "green"." - no-one who promotes nuclear seems to include the extortionate build/decommission costs or subsidies given to nuclear industry. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-...

expensive and unreliable wind and solar

The latest studies show that renewables are not actually unreliable and the latest offshore wind projects are not expensive.

This article discusses the USA, but I think it should also apply to offshore wind:
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-en...

Why, corporations are already investing in it.

The Chinese government is investing in it, we just indicated we won't be going forward. The private sector here isn't likely to seriously try to compete against the Chinese government without competitive investments from our side.

The U.S. has no energy policy and prefers free market solutions

Yes, that is the problem, you're describing again why China is going to win this one.

Thus the role of the U.S. in CO2 reduction is grossly overstated.

We're the second biggest emitter behind China and are far worse than them in terms of per capita. We have the most fat to trim. So no, meaningful carbon reductions should absolutely fall to the US. Another reason the US is going to lose allies worldwide and China will pick them up.

FYI: The country with the biggest CO2 footprint is CHINA. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...

To say that the U.S. is "historically" the biggest contributor to CO2 production is true but misleading. It is like saying "China is historically the leading cause of overpopulation" even though China has had a one-child policy for almost 40 years.

Kyoto (1992), Cancun (2010) and Paris (2015) are valid attempts to slow down and end CO2 increase using an international treaty. The problem is in this map:

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

Today's biggest and fastest growing emitters (China and soon India) are in the third world and are developing countries, which are given a pass by the treaty. Russia, Japan, New Zealand and Canada either never signed up or have dropped out because of the developing world loophole.

The issue is per capita emissions (high in first world and energy producers) and total emissions (high in third world). See http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...,

CO2 is a real problem but the NYT is filling the knowledge hole with junk and propaganda, which is too bad.

It could be that there will be worse environmental damage from them.

Nope, not even if they're powered entirely by coal.

And what will you do with the spent batteries?

Recycle them, just like we do already with the lead-acid ones.

1.) Scientists predicted in 2000 that kids would grow up without snow.
2.) It’s been 10 years since scientists predicted the “end of skiing” in Scotland.
3.) The Arctic would be “ice-free” by now
4.) Environmentalists predicted the end of spring snowfall

SOURCE ? link to scientific journal please ?

He can't do that, because the above points are copy-pasta of half-truths:

• 1) In an Independent article the author says that snow is a thing of the past, and that he quotes some scientists who say that if global warming continues snow will become a rare occurrence. No dates attached to the scientist's predictions.
• 2) In a Guardian UK article in 2004, unnamed "experts" predicted that the Scottish ski industry had about 20 years left before it died. For the math challenged, that prediction won't be testable for another 7 years. The article points to some short-term trends that showed fewer ski days and fewer ski tickets. The article that the claims were copied from claims since there was a lot of snow this year, the Scottish Ski industry is saved forever.
• 3) This is one based off of something that Al Gore said, which was "Some of the models suggest to Dr Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire North polar ice cap, during summer, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice free within the next 5-7 years." There's a lot of qualifiers in there that get skipped when skeptics read that, they tend to ignore "Some of the models" and "75% chance" and claim that Al Gore said all the Artic would be ice free in 5 years. I'm pretty sure Dr. Maslowski further hedged his bet by prefacing it with "if the current trend continues", but what was actually said is less important than claiming it's wrong.
• 4) This one is references a Union of Concerned Scientists press release, which notes that we have been getting less snow in spring over the last decade and then talks about the kinds of environmental impacts those changes have. The article the claims were copied from notes that there was a record breaking snowstorm this year as a refutation of the entire press release.

The science is pretty solid: the average temperature of the world is getting warmer, we know what it causing it, and there will be effects, some of which will be negative.

Meh. Blowing away mod points for this but statements like this is what keeps keeps the deniers in business. No. We do NOT know what is causing it.

Well, except that you're wrong. We do know what is causing the temperature rise. We know this for multiple reasons, not the least of which is by analyzing and ruling out alternate causes based on data. There are no proposed alternate explanations that fit the data. None. This is the way science is done: a hypothesis is accepted when you can rule out the competing hypotheses based on evidence. Greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere fits the data. No other hypothesis does.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/human-contribution-to-gw-faq.html

To fit just one of the many many data sets, the measured global temperature data (and you do know that heating has to fit data such as diurnal variations and measured downwelling infrared, not just global temperature, right?), let me remind you of the constraints a hypothetical alternate hypothesis would have to fit:
(1) It would have to explain why the greenhouse gasses are not heating the atmosphere,
(2) It would have to propose a different mechanism to explain the measured temperature rise that just coincidentally fits the models
(3) It would have to come up with an explanation for why the amplifier required in step (2) does not apply to the greenhouse effect.
*footnote 1: and the measured temperature rise fits the model very well. The denier community repeatedly claims it does not, but this denial is done by cherry picking of either the data or the models.
*footnote 2: item 2 will require an amplification mechanism, because we measure the input to the climate (solar energy, etc.) and know that the unamplified input can't explain the rise.

Many people have been looking for such an alternate hypothesis for several decades now. None have been found that haven't been quickly ruled out be measurements.

If we did, we could model it accurately.

No, if you mean "if we knew what caused it the error bars on the prediction would be zero," that's an assertion going one step too far. You can know the cause of something and nevertheless still have error bars on predictions. The remainder of your post is accurate:

What we do know for certain is that CO2 keeps heat trapped in the atmosphere. We are adding LOTS of CO2 to the atmosphere. The atmosphere is part of a chaotic and finely balanced system. CO2 is adding heat to that system (so we do actually know some of what is causing the heating). In summary: We know that we are altering a system and by how much. We are unsure of other factors, some are even still unknown (how does the ocean absorb heat, distribute it, and eventually release it). Regardless of the unknowns, the facts that we do know indicate that our current practices are affecting the heat status of the planet.

Is heating of the planet a problem? That is not for Science to say. Science deals with facts and theory, not judgements. My personal opinion in all of this is that we need to be concerned about our "waste" products to ensure that the planet (the only place we can currently live) remains a livable location.

There are alternative hypothesis if you wanted to search for it (solar cycles, plate tectonics/volcanoes, cosmoclimatology, etc.).

Indeed there are. And these have all been examined in great depth, and shown to not explain the data.

Read the literature. Or if you don't want to read the literature, read a popular summary. This one, maybe: www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/human-contribution-to-gw-faq.html

What a foul crock of denialist horseshit you just spewed. Shame on you.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...

Most people would agree Climate Change is real. The biggest question is what percent is due to humans and what percent is due to natural cycles. The other big question is how much of the human contribution is from CO2 and how much is from other human causes like deforestation. Current science doesn't have a good answer for these questions.

Bullshit. Here's a good answer for these questions from current science. It's not 100% human caused, but certainly over 90%:

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...

yes, they drop a little in performance but not drastically, gasoline cars also lose a little performance. http://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-re...

A lot gets said, and total carbon output has been studied a lot. For example, http://www.ucsusa.org/publicat....

Again, if you want to unconditionally accept the word of a guy in a YouTube video, while ignoring the thousands of peer-reviewed studies cited and summarised in the reports I linked to, there's nothing I can say you'll listen to.

But if you want to know who's lying to who, ask for proof. And proof isn't people saying or writing whatever they feel like on blogs or videos, it's peer-reviewed evidence. The climatologists have produced the evidence cited above, while deniers have only produced rhetoric. Evidence like rising global temperatures and hurricanes getting stronger for the last 40 years, despite what you've been told.

If you just want to follow the money instead, look at the $33 trillion dollars of fossil fuel revenue at stake. Who do you think has the biggest incentive to mislead you - scientists on an $80k salary with their reputations on the line, or oil execs earning hundreds of millions from stock options?

There isn't much difference. Note: "And despite the many innovative coal combustion technologies being developed, the only practical way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal is to get more energy out of each pound of coal -- to increase the efficiency. But the efficiency of typical coal plants has peaked at about 33 percent, limited mostly by their steam turbines. What doesn't become electricity becomes waste heat."

Climate models that are calibrated to accurately 'predict' weather conditions in the past are not proven to be as accurate in predicting conditions for which they haven't been calibrated, so knowing very well that this will attract a lot of flak from the usual AGW-zealots, and acknowledging that my karma will be reduced based on their disagreeing with me--which means that slashdot effectively already does have the 'fake news' filter that facebook is only still talking about--I will not be compelled to hold back my opinion.

Run-on sentence much? Anyway, for about the bazillionth time, climate != weather.

The AGW people are not zealots, they're scientists, and those who understand how science works. What you seem to interpret as zealotry is actually a genuine concern for the future of the human race.

All models are a compromise, because they attempt to express in mathematics and algorithms the essential parts of a complex real world. They can make wrong predictions in both directions. But the practice of science works to correct this by observing discrepancies and producing better models. And guess what? Models keep improving, and they are becoming quite accurate:

http://www.skepticalscience.co...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
http://www.ucsusa.org/publicat...
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/c...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-g...

Whether you accept what the models say or not, the essential take-away is that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gasses, and humanity is responsible for adding a significant amount of them to the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Enough to cause a problem that we must face and solve, or risk significant global hardship. Temperature is trending upwards. Polar ice is melting. Sea levels are rising. These are observed facts.

And maybe, in fact perhaps quite likely, efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will be a net benefit for economies, rather than a hardship.

Space-based weapons are illegal. Even the Chinese anti-satellite weapons are surface-based. See here , although there are some problems with enforcement.

>> There's no evidence that humans are causing global warming or that the warming is due to anything other than poorly sited instruments. Grow up.

How about you get a clue instead of just brainlessy insulting people as AC because you're too gutless to post as yourself and stand by your own words.

http://climate.nasa.gov/eviden...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...
https://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/T...
https://www.epa.gov/climate-ch...

On what planet do you live?

The same one you do, the one that passed 400 PPM CO2 and is never going back to 350 in our lifetime.

It will however, hit 600 PPM probably sometime next century, give or take a bit, and the human race will still be here.

You still forget: 75% of all CO2 pollution comes form USA, EU, and niche countries like Kuwait, Russia ofc

Really?

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...

Who is at the top of that list? Try again...

If the developed world would over night go to ZERO CO2

If unicorns flew out of my butt, that would be pretty impressive as well. Neither are going to happen...

I live in the real world, you live in fantasy land.

Of course it will be stopped.

Yep, you live in Germany where you are fed bullshit by the people currently in charge who are complete morons... In 20 years you're going to be really fucking sorry you let 1 million people from the Middle East in, by which point it will be too late...

So you're wrong, perhaps because you'd fed this nonsense and don't bother to fact check, perhaps because you don't care, and perhaps because the reality would scare you and you like your safe space.

Thanks for reminding us of the heavy financial motivations for pro-AGW climate research! I agree, it is indeed sinful.

Um, facepalm. Just facepalm.

Climate-change scientists are not living large. But the well-heeled supporters of the denialist movement certainly are.

NUCLEAR POWER: Still Not Viable without Subsidies
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/de...
Large scale solar/wind is getting cheaper even before subsidies.
Nuclear is viable in developing countries though, due to cheap labor, no environment regulation and low value of human life/risk.

The real polluter is China, at an official 1/3, and far more likely to be close to 50%.

China 28%, the United States next at 16%. Since America has less than 1/4 the population of China, though, we're still putting out 2.5 times more greenhouse gas per person. Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio... alternate source: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...

Even now, America is under 33% coal for their electricity, Sadly, theirs continues to rise, while America's continues to drop.

yep, America is about a third: http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_b... That's primarily because of the drop in cost of petroleum and natural gas. I don't have good numbers for China, but they do burn a lot of coal.

The one that should be putting their money into dramately lowering their emissions is China.

The answer is "both". Since China already uses only 40% as much fossil fuel per person than the US does, it's going to be 2.5 times easier to reduce the US emissions, of course. But, this is exactly why it is a wicked hard problem : no single actor, no single organization, no single country can solve the problem on its own. The problem is global in scale.