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Company Incentives for Going Green?
Greenie asks: "With fuel costs reaching record highs and more eco-friendly vehicles on the market than ever before, one has to ask, is it making a difference (yet)? NewEnough.com is an online retailer of new and surplus/wholesale motorcycle apparel based in West Texas. Recently, they posted a letter to the public on their website about how they've 'gone green,' and are offering incentives to their employees for switching to modern, fuel efficient vehicles (hybrid electric, diesel, bio-diesel...). While the specifics of their incentive program were not discussed, has anyone ever heard of larger companies offering a similar incentive program? According to Fortune.com, Wal-Mart is the largest employer in America. If Wal-Mart, McDonalds, UPS, GM, and Ford, the five companies that Fortune lists as having the most employees, all offered a similar incentive, more than 2,865,700 people would be eligible for incentive to go green. That could really start to make a difference for the environment. Now imagine the environmental benefit of every company in America making this same incentive offer..."
It's shaping up as an "extreme" week for global warming junk science. On Monday, the media reported about a new global warming study with headlines like UPI's "More Extreme Weather Predicted."
By Wednesday, Hurricane Wilma was labeled as the "strongest Atlantic hurricane ever reported," which no doubt will fuel claims that global warming is causing more intense hurricanes.
We can, however, weather such global warming alarmism with the pertinent facts.
Monday's news was generated by a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Purdue scientists who used a combination of mathematical models, historical weather data and local climate systems to supposedly predict that the interaction of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and local geographic features will increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as floods and heat waves.
The first red flag, here, is the Purdue researchers' reliance on a mathematical model of global climate -- essentially the Purdue scientists' crude guess as to how our exceedingly complex climate system works.
While scientists and engineers often can use mathematics to successfully explain how many natural and artificial systems function -- where success can be determined by how well the model's results match up to real-world data -- successful climate modeling has so far proved to be too difficult to achieve. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, says that the models fail to correctly describe the behavior of clouds, which may cause predictions of higher temperatures to be three times too high.
In fact, no mathematical climate model has ever been validated against the historical temperature record. So why would anyone believe that climate models can predict future climate with any reasonable certainty?
Although the Purdue study claims that increasing greenhouse gas emission levels will lead to more extreme weather events, a look at the historical record seems to refute the claim.
During the 20th century, for example, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide reportedly have increased by about 25 percent, from roughly 295 parts per million (ppm) to 370 ppm, with about two-thirds of the increase occurring after 1950. Based on the Purdue researchers' claims, we should then have expected to observe more extreme weather in the U.S. after 1950. But this hasn't been true in terms of temperatures.
During the 20th century, 26 states recorded their record low temperatures before 1950. Only 17 states recorded record high temperatures after 1950. So the post-1950 acceleration in greenhouse gas concentrations doesn't seem to have any effect on the occurrence of extreme temperatures.
There's little reason, then, to have confidence in the claims of the Purdue researchers.
Turning to Wilma -- and the inevitability that some will try to link her with the dreaded global warming -- real-life data again ought to defuse the alarmism.
Since it's generally agreed by climate researchers that manmade greenhouse gas emissions haven't caused an increase in the frequency of hurricanes, global warming advocates now claim that manmade greenhouse gas emissions will lead to stronger, or more "intense" hurricanes. Such claims have been made most recently in studies by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kerry Emanuel (Nature, Aug. 4) and the Georgia Institute of Technology's Peter Webster (Science, Sep. 16).
Emanuel claimed in his paper that hurricane strength doubled over the last few decades. But as Virginia state climatologist Pat Michaels recently pointed out, if Emanuel's claim were true, then "the change would be obvious; you wouldn't need a weatherman to know which way this wind was blowing. All of these feuding scientists would have agreed on the facts long ago."
National Hurricane center expert Chris Landsea told the Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 8) that Emanuel's results are an artifact of the mathematical procedure he used to d
You know, everyone in my company recently donated $5 to a scholarship for a disabled kid.
If everyone in China, Russia, the US, India and Brazil, the LARGEST countries in the world, donated $5 per person, we could buy this kid a new pair of legs!
C'mon, geeks are too realistic/sarcastic/pessimistic for this type of a /. submission. I hope.
hydrogen embrittlement effects steel
I'm not sure how it effects cast iron
"affects".