Pogies and balaclava for the cold. Snow tires (duh) for the snow. Deep snow requires really big tires (but my bike can apparently fit them, if I want -- most cannot). Or you wing it -- if you get stuck in a snow drift, you can call a tow truck, just like with a car -- or you can just yank your bike out your own self and skip the wait.
There's a lot of safety gained by not going fast, and by not being quite such a large target. Despite the widespread belief that bicycles are deadly-unsafe, per-hour (not per-mile) they're about the same as automobiles. One might guess that there is some frequency-of-brain-fart constant at work here.
I think the way we get there is that we start deploying the anti-crash and collision sensor stuff now in ordinary cars, and once those are widespread, then cars can get smaller.
I also think that by the time these are deployed, your every move will be tracked anyway (pattern recognition, ubiquitous cameras, etc) unless legislative steps are taken to stop this from happening. My snap answer would be "ride a bicycle" but that is not a remedy to ubicams.
All this covered by characterZero's comment, but I wish to confirm that his answers are the correct ones. I rode 10 miles to work today in the clothes that I am still wearing (no lycra, no funny shoes), on a bike that has carried as many as 3 other (small) people (or a spouse), that can carry as much as 200lbs of cargo, that has also towed a bicycle and carried a passenger simultaneously. I also plan to stop by the grocery store on the way home from work; I already have a list of stuff to buy.
Regarding safety, if you only care about crashes, you are correct. If you prefer to avoid dying from all causes (e.g., including diseases of the unfit), the bicycle is the safest vehicle on the road -- 28% lower mortality rate for bicycle commuters. It is also worth noting that bicycle safety stats are grossly skewed by the high accident rate of (very) young cyclists; adult commuters are claimed to be 10-1000x safer (not sure I believe the 1000x number myself, I believe I saw it in Effective Cycling).
And it's not a light bike, and I'm neither light nor young myself. My regular bike is not cheap, not because it needed to be expensive, but because I ride it enough that I saw no reason not to buy stuff to make my ride nicer.
26 miles each way, I think you are looking at an e-assist or an aerodynamic fairing, depending on your route.
Neither is cheap, which supports your skepticism regarding low profit margins.
For a rack, it's not cheap, I think the CETMA racks are very pretty and functional, though I don't own one myself.
And I am not your go-to guy for light bikes -- yesterday's errand was to tow a 40lb bike behind a 65lb cargo bike to get the rear hub rebuilt on the 40lb bike (a legitimate antique, "ALL STEEL", circa-WW2 Raleigh).
Supposed to work; I recall discussing this with a Segway owner, and pretty much you just lean backwards. How does the Segway keep you from falling backwards? By braking. To stop harder, lean further.
This assumes both wheels have traction, of course.
It occurred to me that there is an equivalently large shitpile of energy stored in the oceans. 1.3e9 km^3, versus 3e7 for the ice caps. If the energy to melt the ice caps came from the ocean, (I think, 60 cal/gm is heat of fusion, right?) we get about 1.5 degree C of ocean cooling. So if the glaciers filled the oceans with icebergs, there would be heat available to melt them.
(data from wikipedia) earth radius = 6371km = 6.4e6m pi r^2 = 1.3e14m^2 (flat disk, presented to sun, deals with cosine off the equator) sunlight at surface = 1e3W/m^2 (perpindicular to sun, smaller than your number, which was top of atmosphere)
I get more watts -- 1.3e14 x 1e3 = 1.3e17
(data from wikipedia) ice mass numbers look right. l/km is right. heat of fusion is right
9.6e25 / 1.3e17 = 740,000,000 s = 205,000 h = 23y
So it's not necessarily constrained to be millennia-slow. Three cheers for showing work.
The issue from the Hansen papers I have read (I cite them somewhere else in the pile of comments on this thread) is that it appears that the ice sheets did enter the ocean (if not melt) rapidly in the past, because the sea level appears to have risen at a rate of several meters per century. He acknowledges that the exact mechanism of this occurring is unknown and the scale of the event is boggling (and thus, his hair is on fire on this issue). The hypothesis is that the ice need not passively melt; surface melt could supply water at the bottom and accelerate glacier movement. Ice sheets (believed to be slowing glacier flow by being in the way) could thin and become unstuck from the ocean floor, and the glaciers "run" off the land masses. Once the ice is floating in the ocean, it raises the sea level. Hansen also notes that there is a rate of iceberg formation that is self-limiting -- if you dump enough bergs in the ocean, it will become locally cooled. I had not realized quite how much energy would be needed to melt that ice; we might indeed get "change", not warming, on the scale of several decades.
That's flat backwards. You want to convert MORE to electricity, because that gives you the flexibility to get energy from hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, burning biomass, battery storage, orbiting solar collectors, traditional nukes, thorium nukes, and (if it ever works) fusion, and (if it ever works) "clean coal" (meaning, sequestered CO2). Everything else follows from how-do-we-get-there and what-are-the-economics.
Or http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf (skip to "summary discussion", 7c: "Paleoclimate records include cases in which sea level rose several meters per century, even though known natural positive forcings are much smaller than the human-made forcing. This implies that ice sheet disintegration can be a highly nonlinear process.")
Hansen proposes to fit an exponential curve with 10-year doubling, but initially you can't tell the difference between exponential and quadratic, and the possible mechanisms for rapid sea level rise and not entirely known (as in, can glaciers really move that fast?). He bases his argument on "best data from the paleoclimate says several meters per century happened in the past, and temperatures not far from where we are now".
The paper in which the fast paleoclimate sea level rise is studied: http://www.planetwork.net/climate/Hansen2007.pdf One question I don't see an answer to (yet) is whether the fastest rise occurred earlier in the glacial melt -- i.e., when ice sheets all over the northern hemisphere were melting, not just Greenland. But (apparently) Antarctica has plenty of potential.
Not sure I agree with you, since the topic drifted mucho pronto, unless you've been decorating the entire discussion with that comment. And your original comment up at the top is mostly incorrect. The "impending ice age" is theoretically hundreds of years out, and we have not so much "dodged" it as swerved across the ditch on the opposite side of the road and beyond into the next county. We had CO2 levels adequate to avoid an ice age back over 40 years ago. Everything since then has just been pissing away valuable CO2 that our descendants will need for the duration of the glaciation-friendly portion of the Milankovitch cycle; and if not that one, then the next one.
That's a problem, but it's been studied, and it looks like we did it. Climate scientists, they are not stupid. They've heard all these silly guesses at why it might not be CO2, and looked into them, and they did not pan out.
I just rechecked the crucial reference, and our "US Motor gasoline consumption" is down slightly from 385e6 gallons/day to 378e6 gallons/day. The result remains pretty much the same.
Googling a bit, recent acreage figures (they vary year to year) are: corn - 86e6 soy - 75e6 wheat - 64e6 cotton - 9e6 (I could not figure out if "wheat" included "winter wheat" and "durum wheat", similarly "cotton" vs "upland cotton").
Given this, it doesn't seem likely that we can use corn to fuel our cars unless we shrink the cars or drive them a lot less, or both. Claims for switchgrass are three times as much ethanol per acre in production, but the corn acreage is still insufficient. (Yes, I have heard that switchgrass can be grown on marginal land -- if so, does it still deliver 3x the fuel per acre? What inputs are necessary to get to 3x fuel per acre?)
Note that an awful lot of corn and soy is used to grow meat, so it is plausible that if we ate much less meat, AND if switchgrass worked about as well in practice as it does in promotional claims, we could then convert enough corn and soy acreage to switchgrass to get most of the way to replacing gasoline. This would not be a transparent change; eating 80% less meat would be a big deal for most people.
At least some people who wish ill on biofuels do so because they think it is through-and-through a terrible idea. Corn might finally be slightly ahead on EROEI, but not by much. Diverting that much farm production to fuel has a non-zero effect on food prices ("not as large as originally thought" is very, very weasel-worded, and definitely larger than zero. If someone originally someone claimed a 2x price boost, but in fact it was only 1.9x, that is "not as large as originally thought", yet not meaningfully smaller). It is also, for all the people who are unable to do the math to convert total national corn production to the fraction of our annual gasoline consumption (20%) a bit of a distraction from the fact that it is not actually doing much to solve any problems (either CO2 or peak oil). If people are betting the farm on biofuels, we're fucked, because they will not be enough.
As long as that was not your sole source -- figure out how much farmland it would take to cover our current gasoline consumption, and you'll see that we come up short. If all our corn crop was converted to ethanol, we only get to about 20% of consumption. That's the main reason E85 is boneheaded; there's simply not enough ethanol to go around to make that the default fuel.
Almost has nothing to do with the energy from a gallon -- "smart" engines that can control their compression (details of how, I am not sure) can boost compression when fed higher octane fuel, which in turn extracts more energy from the combustion. Diesel benefits both from higher energy content AND from higher compression (and in a diesel, normal ignition IS self-ignition).
I think it is instead galvanic problems with copper (and perhaps brass) wherever the two are adjacent. It's not straight oxidation (perhaps this is what you meant by super-simplified).
I would describe my feelings as more hair-on-fire. And I'm still not doing enough, we live in New England, have oil heat (ugh!), and 8 years of kids in college yet to pay out. I will say, I much prefer the "luxury" of staying warm, to the luxury of driving around in a monster armored wheelchair.
That's not really true. 18 years ago, I recall checking the elevation of the house we were buying. Given current plausible-worst-case projections (Hansen, based on comparisons with paleoclimate sea level change -- far higher than IPCC predictions) we expect no more than 5 meters in 90 years. Friend of mine at work remarked that he was happy to end up in Massachusetts, because the water supply is abundant and probably will remain adequate in the face of likely change.
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Pogies and balaclava for the cold. Snow tires (duh) for the snow. Deep snow requires really big tires (but my bike can apparently fit them, if I want -- most cannot). Or you wing it -- if you get stuck in a snow drift, you can call a tow truck, just like with a car -- or you can just yank your bike out your own self and skip the wait.
There's a lot of safety gained by not going fast, and by not being quite such a large target. Despite the widespread belief that bicycles are deadly-unsafe, per-hour (not per-mile) they're about the same as automobiles. One might guess that there is some frequency-of-brain-fart constant at work here.
I think the way we get there is that we start deploying the anti-crash and collision sensor stuff now in ordinary cars, and once those are widespread, then cars can get smaller.
I also think that by the time these are deployed, your every move will be tracked anyway (pattern recognition, ubiquitous cameras, etc) unless legislative steps are taken to stop this from happening. My snap answer would be "ride a bicycle" but that is not a remedy to ubicams.
Given what you say about the local humanity, doesn't it deserve to be offended?
All this covered by characterZero's comment, but I wish to confirm that his answers are the correct ones. I rode 10 miles to work today in the clothes that I am still wearing (no lycra, no funny shoes), on a bike that has carried as many as 3 other (small) people (or a spouse), that can carry as much as 200lbs of cargo, that has also towed a bicycle and carried a passenger simultaneously. I also plan to stop by the grocery store on the way home from work; I already have a list of stuff to buy.
Regarding safety, if you only care about crashes, you are correct. If you prefer to avoid dying from all causes (e.g., including diseases of the unfit), the bicycle is the safest vehicle on the road -- 28% lower mortality rate for bicycle commuters. It is also worth noting that bicycle safety stats are grossly skewed by the high accident rate of (very) young cyclists; adult commuters are claimed to be 10-1000x safer (not sure I believe the 1000x number myself, I believe I saw it in Effective Cycling).
And it's not a light bike, and I'm neither light nor young myself. My regular bike is not cheap, not because it needed to be expensive, but because I ride it enough that I saw no reason not to buy stuff to make my ride nicer.
26 miles each way, I think you are looking at an e-assist or an aerodynamic fairing, depending on your route.
Neither is cheap, which supports your skepticism regarding low profit margins.
For a rack, it's not cheap, I think the CETMA racks are very pretty and functional, though I don't own one myself.
And I am not your go-to guy for light bikes -- yesterday's errand was to tow a 40lb bike behind a 65lb cargo bike to get the rear hub rebuilt on the 40lb bike (a legitimate antique, "ALL STEEL", circa-WW2 Raleigh).
Can't spring the rear dropouts on an Al or Carbon frame (done that on one steel bike) or spread the front fork (done that on another steel bike).
All my bicycles have steel frames. Who wouldn't want that?
Supposed to work; I recall discussing this with a Segway owner, and pretty much you just lean backwards. How does the Segway keep you from falling backwards? By braking. To stop harder, lean further.
This assumes both wheels have traction, of course.
It occurred to me that there is an equivalently large shitpile of energy stored in the oceans. 1.3e9 km^3, versus 3e7 for the ice caps. If the energy to melt the ice caps came from the ocean, (I think, 60 cal/gm is heat of fusion, right?) we get about 1.5 degree C of ocean cooling. So if the glaciers filled the oceans with icebergs, there would be heat available to melt them.
At least, I think that's right.
Checking your work:
(data from wikipedia)
earth radius = 6371km = 6.4e6m
pi r^2 = 1.3e14m^2 (flat disk, presented to sun, deals with cosine off the equator)
sunlight at surface = 1e3W/m^2 (perpindicular to sun, smaller than your number, which was top of atmosphere)
I get more watts -- 1.3e14 x 1e3 = 1.3e17
(data from wikipedia)
ice mass numbers look right.
l/km is right.
heat of fusion is right
9.6e25 / 1.3e17 = 740,000,000 s = 205,000 h = 23y
So it's not necessarily constrained to be millennia-slow. Three cheers for showing work.
The issue from the Hansen papers I have read (I cite them somewhere else in the pile of comments on this thread) is that it appears that the ice sheets did enter the ocean (if not melt) rapidly in the past, because the sea level appears to have risen at a rate of several meters per century. He acknowledges that the exact mechanism of this occurring is unknown and the scale of the event is boggling (and thus, his hair is on fire on this issue). The hypothesis is that the ice need not passively melt; surface melt could supply water at the bottom and accelerate glacier movement. Ice sheets (believed to be slowing glacier flow by being in the way) could thin and become unstuck from the ocean floor, and the glaciers "run" off the land masses. Once the ice is floating in the ocean, it raises the sea level. Hansen also notes that there is a rate of iceberg formation that is self-limiting -- if you dump enough bergs in the ocean, it will become locally cooled. I had not realized quite how much energy would be needed to melt that ice; we might indeed get "change", not warming, on the scale of several decades.
Don't forget, "and shit will be better ANYWAY".
That's flat backwards. You want to convert MORE to electricity, because that gives you the flexibility to get energy from hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, burning biomass, battery storage, orbiting solar collectors, traditional nukes, thorium nukes, and (if it ever works) fusion, and (if it ever works) "clean coal" (meaning, sequestered CO2). Everything else follows from how-do-we-get-there and what-are-the-economics.
Might be a good deal faster than that, but it will be decades before we know.
See http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_15/
Or http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf (skip to "summary discussion", 7c: "Paleoclimate records include cases in which sea level rose several meters per century, even though known natural positive forcings are much smaller than the human-made forcing. This implies that ice sheet disintegration can be a highly nonlinear process.")
Hansen proposes to fit an exponential curve with 10-year doubling, but initially you can't tell the difference between exponential and quadratic, and the possible mechanisms for rapid sea level rise and not entirely known (as in, can glaciers really move that fast?). He bases his argument on "best data from the paleoclimate says several meters per century happened in the past, and temperatures not far from where we are now".
The paper in which the fast paleoclimate sea level rise is studied: http://www.planetwork.net/climate/Hansen2007.pdf
One question I don't see an answer to (yet) is whether the fastest rise occurred earlier in the glacial melt -- i.e., when ice sheets all over the northern hemisphere were melting, not just Greenland. But (apparently) Antarctica has plenty of potential.
mod parent up (informative, "your Google-Fu sucks balls")
Not sure I agree with you, since the topic drifted mucho pronto, unless you've been decorating the entire discussion with that comment. And your original comment up at the top is mostly incorrect. The "impending ice age" is theoretically hundreds of years out, and we have not so much "dodged" it as swerved across the ditch on the opposite side of the road and beyond into the next county. We had CO2 levels adequate to avoid an ice age back over 40 years ago. Everything since then has just been pissing away valuable CO2 that our descendants will need for the duration of the glaciation-friendly portion of the Milankovitch cycle; and if not that one, then the next one.
That's a problem, but it's been studied, and it looks like we did it. Climate scientists, they are not stupid. They've heard all these silly guesses at why it might not be CO2, and looked into them, and they did not pan out.
"now, how much farmland would be needed to cover automotive needs?"
The last time I checked, if we do it with corn, 5 times whatever we currently devote to corn.
http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/new-math/
I just rechecked the crucial reference, and our "US Motor gasoline consumption" is down slightly from 385e6 gallons/day to 378e6 gallons/day. The result remains pretty much the same.
Googling a bit, recent acreage figures (they vary year to year) are:
corn - 86e6
soy - 75e6
wheat - 64e6
cotton - 9e6
(I could not figure out if "wheat" included "winter wheat" and "durum wheat", similarly "cotton" vs "upland cotton").
Given this, it doesn't seem likely that we can use corn to fuel our cars unless we shrink the cars or drive them a lot less, or both. Claims for switchgrass are three times as much ethanol per acre in production, but the corn acreage is still insufficient. (Yes, I have heard that switchgrass can be grown on marginal land -- if so, does it still deliver 3x the fuel per acre? What inputs are necessary to get to 3x fuel per acre?)
Note that an awful lot of corn and soy is used to grow meat, so it is plausible that if we ate much less meat, AND if switchgrass worked about as well in practice as it does in promotional claims, we could then convert enough corn and soy acreage to switchgrass to get most of the way to replacing gasoline. This would not be a transparent change; eating 80% less meat would be a big deal for most people.
At least some people who wish ill on biofuels do so because they think it is through-and-through a terrible idea. Corn might finally be slightly ahead on EROEI, but not by much. Diverting that much farm production to fuel has a non-zero effect on food prices ("not as large as originally thought" is very, very weasel-worded, and definitely larger than zero. If someone originally someone claimed a 2x price boost, but in fact it was only 1.9x, that is "not as large as originally thought", yet not meaningfully smaller). It is also, for all the people who are unable to do the math to convert total national corn production to the fraction of our annual gasoline consumption (20%) a bit of a distraction from the fact that it is not actually doing much to solve any problems (either CO2 or peak oil). If people are betting the farm on biofuels, we're fucked, because they will not be enough.
Here (from a comment last week): http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2614286&cid=38657202
As long as that was not your sole source -- figure out how much farmland it would take to cover our current gasoline consumption, and you'll see that we come up short. If all our corn crop was converted to ethanol, we only get to about 20% of consumption. That's the main reason E85 is boneheaded; there's simply not enough ethanol to go around to make that the default fuel.
Almost has nothing to do with the energy from a gallon -- "smart" engines that can control their compression (details of how, I am not sure) can boost compression when fed higher octane fuel, which in turn extracts more energy from the combustion. Diesel benefits both from higher energy content AND from higher compression (and in a diesel, normal ignition IS self-ignition).
I think it is instead galvanic problems with copper (and perhaps brass) wherever the two are adjacent. It's not straight oxidation (perhaps this is what you meant by super-simplified).
P & P are supposed to be the authorities. Hey, google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=yLmGPtZTHUYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false .
Page 18 is there, at least in my view.
I would describe my feelings as more hair-on-fire. And I'm still not doing enough, we live in New England, have oil heat (ugh!), and 8 years of kids in college yet to pay out. I will say, I much prefer the "luxury" of staying warm, to the luxury of driving around in a monster armored wheelchair.
Go here http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 for slightly more accurate information. It's about 13:1 adsorbent:CO2 by weight. Not pretty, but not catastrophic.
Someone, somewhere, made a math or transcription error. This http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 says they get 78mg/g. You need about 13 g of this stuff (the treated fumed silica) to adsorb 1 g of CO2.
That's not really true. 18 years ago, I recall checking the elevation of the house we were buying. Given current plausible-worst-case projections (Hansen, based on comparisons with paleoclimate sea level change -- far higher than IPCC predictions) we expect no more than 5 meters in 90 years. Friend of mine at work remarked that he was happy to end up in Massachusetts, because the water supply is abundant and probably will remain adequate in the face of likely change.