Wow, unusual to see thoughtful, reasoned commentary on trigger-button issues.
I think you may be overly pessimistic. At its heart, this is a technology problem, and it turns out that humanity is actually very good at solving technology problems. The alternate energy technologies are getting better and better.
I think that there won't be one solution, there will be many solutions, and they will be implemented-- slowly, but incrementally-- because the techolology will do the job.
An example case is CFC useage. When it was realized that halocarbons catalyzed destruction of the ozone layer, there was just as much skepticism as there is about greenhouse gasses, which was slowly overcome by patient gathering of data (unlike the greenhouse effect controversy, where no amount of data seems to be enough). But, here's the interesting thing: CFC production dropped well before any regulations or laws were passed to limit CFC emissions into the atmosphere (the "Montreal protocol"). They dropped because industry looked for alternate ways to do the job that the ozone-destroying halocarbons did, found them, and implemented them.
[ in reply to the question "Name one other factor in climate change that's even close to CO2."]:
Source Not sure if source is valid, but numbers are close to what I have seen before.
Equal to CO2? No
Methane 25x
N2O 298x
Yes, but that's the effect per unit mass emitted. The effect on climate change will be the warming potential multiplied by the amount emitted, and in that respect, carbon dioxide-- from fuel burned in billion ton quantities-- is the clear leader.
Amounts emitted are there a different tab on the site you linked as your source: https://climatechangeconnectio... Or, look here:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio...
But you can't tax cows,
Sure you could.
and farmers are a big lobby for Congress, so you ignore the methane. If you really cared you would be working on methane more than CO2.
methane emissions are also important, and people looking at responses to greenhouse emissions do, in fact, also look at how to reduce methane emissions.
The fact that you go after CO2 gives away your political agenda and shows that you don't really care about the science.
No it doesn't. It shows that people are looking most closely at the largest effect.
In fact I bet you didn't even know about methane. Gotta wonder when a "denier" knows more about the science than you do. According to you all I haven't ever looked at the science even half as much as you, but here I am giving facts you didn't know about.
Wrong on all counts. If you would actually read some of the literature, you'd see methane discussed in great detail. Including in the sites you list.
How many red lines have we crossed? More than Obama drew, and that's quite a few. But there always seems to be some Envirowackos standing there saying, "THIS is the final red line. Cross this and we are DOOMED!"
We're not doomed. The anthropogenic component of the greenhouse effect is warming the world slowly. This is real, and the science is getting to be well understood, but quit saying we're "doomed". We're not "doomed."
Give me a citation to one of these purported "red lines" that you are talking about, specifically what the line was, what the predicted consequences of crossing it was, and when the predicted consequences would occur.
Honestly, I've never seen such outright hatred displayed by the skeptics.
Yes, I've never before seen such outright hatred as that displayed by the "skeptics", either. It's pretty frightening. But the thing of it is, they're not skeptics: they claim that they're skeptics, but this is a peculiar one-sided "skepticism": no matter how much evidence you show them that the scientists know what they're doing, or how patiently you answer their arguments, they ignore it, but even the most absurd attacks on the science they jump on and believe absolutely, saying "look! It's all a hoax! It's a fraud! Lock them up!"
They're usually just asking for evidence and unmodified data, like good scientists strive to do.
That would be science. But when they then don't pay the slightest attention to the reply-- because they're trying to spread doubt, not actually asking for answers-- that's not skepticism: that's denial.
The total change might take a century. As in: average temperature is ow X and in 100 years Y. Or sea level is now L1 and in 100 years L2. But there are small, localized, changes as in Syria/Iraq, that happen over the course of 3 to 5 years.
Right. But there are always small localized changes that happen over the course of 3 to 5 years; droughts, floods, warm years, cold years. Some of which have indeed been devastating. But the human-greenhouse-gas-induced part is global climate change, not the "small localized changes".
Then again, if for them reason push comes to shove, as with the ice on Greenland (a Vulcano, e.g.) and the whole ice drops into the ocean over the course of a couple of years, then mankind has a problem, a serious one.
The greenhouse effect warming isn't going to melt the Greenhouse ice in "a couple of years". Look, you're accusing others of ignoring the science; don't ignore the science yourself. The greenhouse effect is a long term effect. It is not an effect where sudden changes happen.
One is for sure: the seal level rise won't be a constant X mm per year, but change rapidly due to "weather" or other reasons we don't think about now.
Of course. But weather is not climate. We tell that to the deniers every time there's a cold week in summer. Weather is not climate.
Same for agriculture areas that suddenly, over the course of a few years, get wiped out. Even if they can be "reused" for other fruits/crop. You can not switch from grapes to olive oil in a course of 10 years...
Neither grapes nor olives are among the staples supplying the world with food.
Or we have a runaway effect because of melting perma frost and releases CH4...
Now, that possibility is something that legitimately ought to frighten people. But this is not the science we're talking about when we say there's scientific consensus about the greenhouse effect. This is the "here's something important we need to study and learn more about" science.
There are thousands of things thinkable that can turn extremely bad in an surprisingly short time period.
Of course. But by "unthinkable", what you're now saying is "maybe there's something else that we don't know about." Fair enough. But I was talking about the science we do know about, which is: the world is getting warmer, we know what's causing it, and the cause is the anthropogenic greenhouse effect.
But: likely you mean with "mankind" the few people rich enough to relocate any time... those might survive, until they meet a mob thinking different.
I'm not actually sure what you're saying here. I was addressing the statement "we're doomed." Rich people are a tiny fraction of the planet. I suppose it's true that they're not doomed-- at least by environmental change-- but that's not terribly relevant.
Climate != Weather.... Weather != Climate.... Just because it's warmer today or this year, doesn't mean the climate is doing the same thing. If it keeps happening for a few years in a row, THEN one might be able to start making that argument
Correct. One warm year is weather. Two warm years is happenstance. A series of warm years, globally averaged, though, and you start thinking it's climate. A series of warm years is what has been happening.
We're not "doomed'. The climate is changing. 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.
But on a human scale, this is a long term effect: things will change slowly. If this keeps up for a century, the world of the 2100s may be very different from the world we see now. But that's a century away.
On a geological scale that is quite fast, but that's not the scales humans deal with. We're not doomed (or, at least, no more doomed now than we ever were.
I have the opposite question: is there any peer-reviewed research showing a credible alternative hypothesis to the greenhouse effect hypothesis? If so, I haven't seen it.
But, this is the line of that very short press release that bothers me:
"Twitter (TWTR, -3.18%) also said it had started taking legal requests to remove content posted by verified journalists and media outlets.
Twitter said it had received 88 such requests, but had not taken any action on the majority of these requests."
Wait, what? Removing content posted by journalists?
What are these "legal requests" to remove content posted by journalists, who is making them, why are they legal, and what content exactly is being removed?
On the other hand, small-governmenters want return of control to local governments. So a rule telling communities what laws they can't pass is bad.
That is really a mischaracterization.... This prohibition on municipalities interfering with property owners' use of their property for AirBnB is merely a logical extension of that principle, in the absence of strong evidence that something about the situation (for example, property rights being violated) requires the municipality to get involved to minimize the overall harm, keeping in mind that the municipality's interference is itself a form of harm.
But: you are agreeing with me. The thing which is preventing local municipalities from proliferating regulations is state government telling the municipalities what they can and can't do.
This is the quintessential conundrum for the small-government proponents.
On the one hand, small-governmenters want a minimum of regulations telling businesses what they are and aren't allowed to d. So, a rule saying that communities can't issue their own regulations on businesses operations is good.
On the other hand, small-governmenters want return of control to local governments. So a rule telling communities what laws they can't pass is bad.
Overall, a mishmash of local communities enacting different regulations governing every aspect of life with different degrees of control results in chaos; it would make it nearly impossible for businesses to operate if they need a lawyer in every single community they might do business in to analyze the regulations. The advantage of state and federal government is that it can standardize the regulations, so that there isn't a different law in every single community.
But, federal and local governments can certainly overuse this power.
Like almost everything, it's a trade-off.
Only it doesn't work that way: it's a well established fact that rich, usually educated people have fewer children than poor uneducated people.
To a point, then as they get richer the number of children tend to go up again
I have seen this speculation, but in the only evidence I've seen, the signal has been in the noise. There may be a very slight uptick in number of children as affluence rises, but so far the statistics to show that are poor.
"You ungrateful twerps ain't getting my shit! I'm going live long enough to spend it all!"
No, it's "you ungrateful twerps are going to inherit all this crap I've accumulated over a lifetime and filled my house with, my garage with, and a storage unit I'm renting for a hundred dollars a month, because I keep telling you that it's all valuable and you'll want it someday and also maybe there's something really collectable buried under all that broken furniture and cheap junk."
in fact, looking at the the statistics, it would take a real "special" person to come up with their conclusion. making children makes you live longer? or is it maybe that living longer gives you a higher chance of having children.
For that to be true, those 80 years olds would have to be making babies.
No. It may be true that living longer is a signal of better health, and better health also has the property that one is more likely to have children.
For example, some fraction of people with poor health may be less fertile. Or, people with poor health may be less likely to find mates.
Even if you do like kids, bringing them to the world we have today isn't exactly a gift to them...
My take also.
I don't know of any time in history in which people didn't say exactly that same thing. Only which threat is looming changes: It's wrong to bring children into a world in which Nazi armies are taking over the world. It's wrong to bring children into a world in which the Communist monolith is spreading totalitarianism across the world. It's wrong to bring children into a world in which nuclear annihilation could occur at any moment...
History lacks the ability to have an experimental case and a control case for the "what if we had done XX instead?"
If instead Obama had done this or that, maybe things would have spiraled out of control and been much much worse. Without a time machine, you can only speculate.
...That being said, global foreign policy is a stage where bold leadership has a value that seems to be beneficial even when its outcomes are suboptimal....
At the risk of Godwinizing the thread, let me point out that this was exactly Hitler's theory: bold leadership (even when its outcome is suboptimal.)
In any case Islam doesn't have a central authority like the Roman Catholic Church does.
Well, but that's useless: Christianity, as a whole, does not have a central authority since not all Christians are Roman Catholics, There are other groups of Christians who do not consider the Pope the central authority.
Individual groups of Muslims--shiites-- have a central authority, their Ayatollah (technically only acting as leaders until the return of the Mahdi.)
Whether it is good to have a central authority is another question.
Is closed captioning the only thing causing this decision? Youtube will automatically close-caption uploaded content, simultaneously eliminating any hosting costs.
The statement with respect to youtube captioning was:
"Examples of barriers to access on UC Berkeley YouTube channel content included the following:
1. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the
content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities."
However, in response to your question, no, close captioning was one barrier mentioned, but not the only barrier mentioned.
Neither. Why: 1) Most power is still generated by burning fossil fuels. You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
Half true. Points to consider:
(1) "most" is not "all"
(2) electric power is capable of transitioning to solar, and in fact car charging is a good application for solar,
(3) there is economy of scale. Large power plants are more efficient in producing energy, even from fossil fuel sources, than small engines (like car engines). This should be obvious: if car engines were more efficient than gas turbines, a power plant would consist of a million car engines. Large converters can use bottoming cycles to utilize the low-grade waste heat. Cars, on the other hand, just reject the waste heat; it's not worth the effort to do a bottoming cycle on such a small engine.
2) Cars don't contribute anywhere near as much to greenhouse gasses as we are led to believe. Cow farts are actually the #1 source.
Nope, not even close. You are right that methane is a better infrared absorber than carbon dioxide, but cows just don't produce that much methane.
Methane-- all sources-- produces about 15% of the anthropogenic contribution to greenhouse warming, and cows produce only a small portion of that.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/cours...
The rest of the post consists mostly of unsourced assertions.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, unusual to see thoughtful, reasoned commentary on trigger-button issues.
I think you may be overly pessimistic. At its heart, this is a technology problem, and it turns out that humanity is actually very good at solving technology problems. The alternate energy technologies are getting better and better.
I think that there won't be one solution, there will be many solutions, and they will be implemented-- slowly, but incrementally-- because the techolology will do the job.
An example case is CFC useage. When it was realized that halocarbons catalyzed destruction of the ozone layer, there was just as much skepticism as there is about greenhouse gasses, which was slowly overcome by patient gathering of data (unlike the greenhouse effect controversy, where no amount of data seems to be enough). But, here's the interesting thing: CFC production dropped well before any regulations or laws were passed to limit CFC emissions into the atmosphere (the "Montreal protocol"). They dropped because industry looked for alternate ways to do the job that the ozone-destroying halocarbons did, found them, and implemented them.
Sometimes we do get it right.
You do know that all of the adjustments to data are documented, and the source code is public, right? https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...
You do know that all of the previous data is still archived, and you can look at it, right? https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...
You do know that the much-vaunted changes are small, and make no difference to the ultimate conclusion, right? http://berkeleyearth.org/under...
You do know that many different groups have looked at the data independently and gotten the same result, right? https://www.skepticalscience.c...
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
Source Not sure if source is valid, but numbers are close to what I have seen before.
Equal to CO2? No
Methane 25x
N2O 298x
Yes, but that's the effect per unit mass emitted. The effect on climate change will be the warming potential multiplied by the amount emitted, and in that respect, carbon dioxide-- from fuel burned in billion ton quantities-- is the clear leader. Amounts emitted are there a different tab on the site you linked as your source: https://climatechangeconnectio...
Or, look here: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio...
But you can't tax cows,
Sure you could.
and farmers are a big lobby for Congress, so you ignore the methane. If you really cared you would be working on methane more than CO2.
methane emissions are also important, and people looking at responses to greenhouse emissions do, in fact, also look at how to reduce methane emissions.
The fact that you go after CO2 gives away your political agenda and shows that you don't really care about the science.
No it doesn't. It shows that people are looking most closely at the largest effect.
In fact I bet you didn't even know about methane. Gotta wonder when a "denier" knows more about the science than you do. According to you all I haven't ever looked at the science even half as much as you, but here I am giving facts you didn't know about.
Wrong on all counts. If you would actually read some of the literature, you'd see methane discussed in great detail. Including in the sites you list.
How many red lines have we crossed? More than Obama drew, and that's quite a few. But there always seems to be some Envirowackos standing there saying, "THIS is the final red line. Cross this and we are DOOMED!"
We're not doomed. The anthropogenic component of the greenhouse effect is warming the world slowly. This is real, and the science is getting to be well understood, but quit saying we're "doomed". We're not "doomed."
Give me a citation to one of these purported "red lines" that you are talking about, specifically what the line was, what the predicted consequences of crossing it was, and when the predicted consequences would occur.
Honestly, I've never seen such outright hatred displayed by the skeptics.
Yes, I've never before seen such outright hatred as that displayed by the "skeptics", either. It's pretty frightening. But the thing of it is, they're not skeptics: they claim that they're skeptics, but this is a peculiar one-sided "skepticism": no matter how much evidence you show them that the scientists know what they're doing, or how patiently you answer their arguments, they ignore it, but even the most absurd attacks on the science they jump on and believe absolutely, saying "look! It's all a hoax! It's a fraud! Lock them up!"
They're usually just asking for evidence and unmodified data, like good scientists strive to do.
That would be science. But when they then don't pay the slightest attention to the reply-- because they're trying to spread doubt, not actually asking for answers-- that's not skepticism: that's denial.
Sarcasm is invisible on the internet, because the background of cluelessness camouflages it. You should know that by now.
The total change might take a century. As in: average temperature is ow X and in 100 years Y. Or sea level is now L1 and in 100 years L2. But there are small, localized, changes as in Syria/Iraq, that happen over the course of 3 to 5 years.
Right. But there are always small localized changes that happen over the course of 3 to 5 years; droughts, floods, warm years, cold years. Some of which have indeed been devastating. But the human-greenhouse-gas-induced part is global climate change, not the "small localized changes".
Then again, if for them reason push comes to shove, as with the ice on Greenland (a Vulcano, e.g.) and the whole ice drops into the ocean over the course of a couple of years, then mankind has a problem, a serious one.
The greenhouse effect warming isn't going to melt the Greenhouse ice in "a couple of years". Look, you're accusing others of ignoring the science; don't ignore the science yourself. The greenhouse effect is a long term effect. It is not an effect where sudden changes happen.
One is for sure: the seal level rise won't be a constant X mm per year, but change rapidly due to "weather" or other reasons we don't think about now.
Of course. But weather is not climate. We tell that to the deniers every time there's a cold week in summer. Weather is not climate.
Same for agriculture areas that suddenly, over the course of a few years, get wiped out. Even if they can be "reused" for other fruits/crop. You can not switch from grapes to olive oil in a course of 10 years ...
Neither grapes nor olives are among the staples supplying the world with food.
Or we have a runaway effect because of melting perma frost and releases CH4 ...
Now, that possibility is something that legitimately ought to frighten people. But this is not the science we're talking about when we say there's scientific consensus about the greenhouse effect. This is the "here's something important we need to study and learn more about" science.
There are thousands of things thinkable that can turn extremely bad in an surprisingly short time period.
Of course. But by "unthinkable", what you're now saying is "maybe there's something else that we don't know about." Fair enough. But I was talking about the science we do know about, which is: the world is getting warmer, we know what's causing it, and the cause is the anthropogenic greenhouse effect.
But: likely you mean with "mankind" the few people rich enough to relocate any time ... those might survive, until they meet a mob thinking different.
I'm not actually sure what you're saying here. I was addressing the statement "we're doomed." Rich people are a tiny fraction of the planet. I suppose it's true that they're not doomed-- at least by environmental change-- but that's not terribly relevant.
Climate != Weather.... Weather != Climate.... Just because it's warmer today or this year, doesn't mean the climate is doing the same thing. If it keeps happening for a few years in a row, THEN one might be able to start making that argument
Correct. One warm year is weather. Two warm years is happenstance. A series of warm years, globally averaged, though, and you start thinking it's climate. A series of warm years is what has been happening.
https://weather.com/news/climate/news/august-2016-global-temperature-record
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jan/23/were-now-breaking-global-temperature-records-once-every-three-years
https://www.ft.com/content/9962f3c0-dda2-11e6-86ac-f253db7791c6
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...
But on a human scale, this is a long term effect: things will change slowly. If this keeps up for a century, the world of the 2100s may be very different from the world we see now. But that's a century away.
On a geological scale that is quite fast, but that's not the scales humans deal with. We're not doomed (or, at least, no more doomed now than we ever were.
Until they can show peer reviewed research showing climate change, I'm not believing it.
It's a Chinese hoax.
Here's the google scholar result, 1.4 million hits: https://scholar.google.com/sch... Is that enough?
Here's a summary of the peer-reviewed science: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
and here's another: http://science.sciencemag.org/...
I have the opposite question: is there any peer-reviewed research showing a credible alternative hypothesis to the greenhouse effect hypothesis? If so, I haven't seen it.
True... Earth has been warmer and cooler before today....
But not at the same time.
"Twitter (TWTR, -3.18%) also said it had started taking legal requests to remove content posted by verified journalists and media outlets. Twitter said it had received 88 such requests, but had not taken any action on the majority of these requests."
Wait, what? Removing content posted by journalists?
What are these "legal requests" to remove content posted by journalists, who is making them, why are they legal, and what content exactly is being removed?
On the other hand, small-governmenters want return of control to local governments. So a rule telling communities what laws they can't pass is bad.
That is really a mischaracterization.... This prohibition on municipalities interfering with property owners' use of their property for AirBnB is merely a logical extension of that principle, in the absence of strong evidence that something about the situation (for example, property rights being violated) requires the municipality to get involved to minimize the overall harm, keeping in mind that the municipality's interference is itself a form of harm.
But: you are agreeing with me. The thing which is preventing local municipalities from proliferating regulations is state government telling the municipalities what they can and can't do.
This is the quintessential conundrum for the small-government proponents.
On the one hand, small-governmenters want a minimum of regulations telling businesses what they are and aren't allowed to d. So, a rule saying that communities can't issue their own regulations on businesses operations is good.
On the other hand, small-governmenters want return of control to local governments. So a rule telling communities what laws they can't pass is bad.
Overall, a mishmash of local communities enacting different regulations governing every aspect of life with different degrees of control results in chaos; it would make it nearly impossible for businesses to operate if they need a lawyer in every single community they might do business in to analyze the regulations. The advantage of state and federal government is that it can standardize the regulations, so that there isn't a different law in every single community.
But, federal and local governments can certainly overuse this power. Like almost everything, it's a trade-off.
Only it doesn't work that way: it's a well established fact that rich, usually educated people have fewer children than poor uneducated people.
To a point, then as they get richer the number of children tend to go up again
I have seen this speculation, but in the only evidence I've seen, the signal has been in the noise. There may be a very slight uptick in number of children as affluence rises, but so far the statistics to show that are poor.
"You ungrateful twerps ain't getting my shit! I'm going live long enough to spend it all!"
No, it's "you ungrateful twerps are going to inherit all this crap I've accumulated over a lifetime and filled my house with, my garage with, and a storage unit I'm renting for a hundred dollars a month, because I keep telling you that it's all valuable and you'll want it someday and also maybe there's something really collectable buried under all that broken furniture and cheap junk."
in fact, looking at the the statistics, it would take a real "special" person to come up with their conclusion. making children makes you live longer? or is it maybe that living longer gives you a higher chance of having children.
For that to be true, those 80 years olds would have to be making babies.
No. It may be true that living longer is a signal of better health, and better health also has the property that one is more likely to have children.
For example, some fraction of people with poor health may be less fertile. Or, people with poor health may be less likely to find mates.
Even if you do like kids, bringing them to the world we have today isn't exactly a gift to them...
My take also.
I don't know of any time in history in which people didn't say exactly that same thing. Only which threat is looming changes: It's wrong to bring children into a world in which Nazi armies are taking over the world. It's wrong to bring children into a world in which the Communist monolith is spreading totalitarianism across the world. It's wrong to bring children into a world in which nuclear annihilation could occur at any moment...
Hindsight is so wonderful.
History lacks the ability to have an experimental case and a control case for the "what if we had done XX instead?"
If instead Obama had done this or that, maybe things would have spiraled out of control and been much much worse. Without a time machine, you can only speculate.
...That being said, global foreign policy is a stage where bold leadership has a value that seems to be beneficial even when its outcomes are suboptimal....
At the risk of Godwinizing the thread, let me point out that this was exactly Hitler's theory: bold leadership (even when its outcome is suboptimal.)
Irony.
Irony is invisible on the internet, because it is indistinguishable from cluelessness.
You should know that by now.
People assume that Islam is just a kind of Christianity with a different brand and a few ceremonies swapped.
No, it's a kind of religious fundamentalism with a different brand and a few ceremonies swapped.
In any case Islam doesn't have a central authority like the Roman Catholic Church does.
Well, but that's useless: Christianity, as a whole, does not have a central authority since not all Christians are Roman Catholics, There are other groups of Christians who do not consider the Pope the central authority.
Individual groups of Muslims--shiites-- have a central authority, their Ayatollah (technically only acting as leaders until the return of the Mahdi.)
Whether it is good to have a central authority is another question.
Is closed captioning the only thing causing this decision? Youtube will automatically close-caption uploaded content, simultaneously eliminating any hosting costs.
The letter from the Department of Justice goes into ten pages detail on this; take a look at it: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-c...
The statement with respect to youtube captioning was:
"Examples of barriers to access on UC Berkeley YouTube channel content included the following:
1. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities."
However, in response to your question, no, close captioning was one barrier mentioned, but not the only barrier mentioned.
Neither. Why: 1) Most power is still generated by burning fossil fuels. You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
Half true. Points to consider:
(1) "most" is not "all"
(2) electric power is capable of transitioning to solar, and in fact car charging is a good application for solar,
(3) there is economy of scale. Large power plants are more efficient in producing energy, even from fossil fuel sources, than small engines (like car engines). This should be obvious: if car engines were more efficient than gas turbines, a power plant would consist of a million car engines. Large converters can use bottoming cycles to utilize the low-grade waste heat. Cars, on the other hand, just reject the waste heat; it's not worth the effort to do a bottoming cycle on such a small engine.
2) Cars don't contribute anywhere near as much to greenhouse gasses as we are led to believe. Cow farts are actually the #1 source.
Nope, not even close. You are right that methane is a better infrared absorber than carbon dioxide, but cows just don't produce that much methane. Methane-- all sources-- produces about 15% of the anthropogenic contribution to greenhouse warming, and cows produce only a small portion of that.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/cours...
The rest of the post consists mostly of unsourced assertions.