I don't normally agree with khallow on this sort of thing, but he is basically right on these points. We produce far more "food" than we need. We convert a mess of corn into fuel, with little or no savings in GHG emissions (natural gas is used to produce nitrogen fertilizer; nitrogen fertilizer decomposes into other GHGs). We convert another mess of corn into meat, very inefficiently, and we could easily eat less. Millions of people have moved to Florida in the last 50 years; probably millions will move away if water runs short, or if hurricanes hit more often, or if barrier islands start to slip underwater. There's no difference in the cost to move and build new housing, whether to or from Florida, it's only the attitude of the person spending the money.
Transportation, there are choices other than (a) single occupancy SUVs and (b) Mad Max. We "overconsume" massively. We could drive smaller cars; we could car pool (social networks can help here); we could ride motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles, depending on the distance of the trip, heat, and fitness.
I'm sure if you beeped out "sorry" in Morse code, they would understand. So to apologize, just go: "bip-bip-bip beeep-beeep-beeep bip-beeep-bip bip-beeep-bip beeep-bip-beeep-beeep"
To put things into proportion, how long till some drunk or texting clot wipes out some unlucky pedestrian? Less than 24 hours, almost guaranteed (3000+ peds per year killed by car crashes, or 8 per day).
Which, unfortunately, actually raises your chance of an early death, because lack of exercise is a massive killer. Danish study, non-bicycle commuters, 39% higher mortality rate, corrected for risk factors. Variations on this show up again and again -- excess sitting kills, elderly walking extra adds years, etc. We're doing it all wrong, if the answer is more use of cars.
Assuming we all have the same definition of "appropriate", and whether we admit the reality of ambient human error. Given a car-ped collision, yes, speed kills. The difference between 20, 25, and 30mph is a dramatic increase in risk of death.
Problem here is that we have an intersection just like that near where I live, and most bicycles and pedestrians avoid it like the plague. No surprise, a lack of pedestrians and cyclists drives their accident count down, but not because the intersection is "safer".
A quarter mile is not a very long shopping trip; with a 100km range on your hypothetically inadequate electric car, that's 50 round trips. You could dedicate a cheap bicycle and a trailer to that task if you wanted; for a quarter mile-trip, you're not going to be nearly so bothered by issues of fit, and it would take you forever to wear out even cheap parts. For example: http://www.bikesatwork.com/bike-trailers/model-64a-bike-trailer.html That distance you can hack pretty well even in a hot climate if you just take it slow, and it's not like car AC has enough time to do any good either.
For the elderly members, maybe electric blankets, or electric heating pads? Resistive electric heating is normally gruesomely inefficient, but if you use it to put the heat right where you need it, it wins.
We've been funding fusion research for fucking forever, and we're still far from anything practical. We should be funding lots of research, in hopes that we'll generate enough wins for enough niches to really make a difference, and soon. Necessarily, we will also fund flops, and afterwards we can all point to those flops and criticize the idiots who wasted money on them.
I think you need to some references to support these things you claim exist. In your list of environmental "stupidities", the only one I know of in recent years is opposition to nuclear plants (given the explosions in Japan and the proliferation risks in Iran, are you sure nuke opponents are really all that crazy? I mean, think of all the setbacks in Iran's clean energy program caused by whoever developed Stuxnet. Way more effective than anyone chaining themselves to a plant. Do you suppose that was a Greenpeace operation?). On the other hand, I have certainly recently read of activists opposing habitat destruction, overfishing, high rates of extinction, and pollution. Are you sure you have an accurate picture of what environmental activists do? Where do you get your information?
In this discussion here, the name calling came from the a self-styled skeptic -- "simple minded radical greens". The reply did not call any names at all. This makes your entire "FTFY" exercise a little backwards, since the so-called skeptics are the ones slinging names, and the proponents (who you seem to be unable to agree with) did not.
The more subtle point is that on the one hand it is notably better than burning coal for energy, but on the other hand CH4 is such a potent greenhouse gas that if very much at all is leaked in the process of drilling/shipping/storage, then all the benefits are lost.
1) you might be able to shave a degree or two off the 70F. Lower temperatures are more tolerable with better clothing (I'm up near Boston, we get low temperatures, and we have oil heat, so $$$$); stretch polarfleece tights are effective. (I've got various bits of winter bicycle gear that are comfortable enough to wear in general, and not the ugly stuff you usually see sold "for cycling"). A small wood stove is also an option for heating a room or two, and that might let you lower the temperature elsewhere or simply cut the furnace load.
Solar water heaters are almost within reach for DIY, depending on your roof angle, latitude, that sort of thing (my father built several when I was a kid. You can do a lot with a piece of metal sheet, some copper pipe, fiberglass insulation, and some greenhouse ribbed lexan for the front. Use wire ties to hold the pipe to the metal sheet, and paint it all black.)
2) you might get some summer savings by painting your roof white, even above and beyond the shade from trees. That's pretty cheap. Be careful, apparently there can be paint-roof incompatibilities ("elastomeric" paint and asphalt shingles are anti-recommended; I used exterior latex, and intentionally did a crappy paint job so that the shingles could still breathe and were not painted together, which is apparently the issue. Note that I did this on a non-visible section of the roof; it's not something I'd call attractive.)
3) what's your commute/shopping obstacles that keep you in a car? What I'm looking for are things like distance, scary roads, hot, or cold. Scary roads are probably a show-stopper, but distance and hot you can address with some sort of a small motor (i.e., motorcycle, scooter, or assisted bicycle). There are cargo options that will pretty easily get you to six bags of groceries, and with a trailer, the limit is mostly the size of your motor (whether it's you or the assist) and your patience. But if the roads suck, probably forget it.
I think your electric car expectations are not realistic. 500km times the power required per mile to propel a car means a crapload of energy, and you probably don't have the electrical service that would let you deliver that much energy in 15 minutes. Downsizing the vehicle (scooter, or assisted bicycle) downsizes the energy required, which means that the fast-charge power requirements become somewhat more realistic, and you also acquire the option to buy spare battery packs and carry them. Unfortunately, e-assist for bicycles is not cheap, and until just now (when I googled for "cargo scooter") I did not know of any "cargo scooters".
The interesting thing is, I DID provide pointers to both a study (you can make of it what you will, you can take issue with their methodology) and evaluated a prediction that has thus far proved spectacularly wrong. That's factual. He said X, Y happened. Study Z got result F. I didn't call you stupid, I merely suggested that Fox News was a poor source of information (more likely, an active source of disinformation), and thus, makes you ignorant. Watch it less, and you'll know more. Unless you're Rupert Murdoch or Roger Ailes, I don't think I insulted anyone, and I only insulted them if it's not their intent to bamboozle the American public.
And truckloads of these "facts" really are facts. We can measure temperature, directly, or with fossil proxies. It's up. We can correct for urban heat islands (scientists, not stupid people, always checking each others' work). We can measure CO2. It's up. We can measure isotope ratios. They point to combustion of "old" carbon (i.e., fossil fuels). We can look at multiple signals -- movement in plant zones, advance of the seasonal variation in the Keeling Curve, Arctic ice volume and extent, ocean pH, historical records of ice breakup and plant blooms. The biggest problem with determining the 100%-dead-certain-fact of global warming is the difficulty of extracting the relatively small signal of a warming climate from a backdrop of noisy weather, intermittent volcano burps, solar cycles, and glitches in ocean currents. But the default answer from physics (you know, "facts") is that our addition of CO2 to the atmosphere should make it warmer, and the burden of proof that we have nothing to worry about should really rest very heavily on the other side of the argument, and they have come nowhere near what is necessary for an effective contradiction. Mere nitpicking, or noticing that there has been a very snowy winter, is not a refutation.
"Ice rings", means you get 6 months of really-really cold, and 6 months of not so cold. It leaves some sort of mark in the ice. To build up a kilometer or three of ice, the net has to be ice growth.
In the past the earth has witnessed CO2 concentrations like what we have today, and the heat followed (strictly speaking, they happened roughly simultaneously in the past because the CO2 concentrations did not rise so quickly. It takes a really long time to heat the ocean. Our CO2 is ahead of the heat, and we will not reach equilibrium for hundreds of years). Over time, that heat caused ice caps to melt and/or slide into the ocean, raising sea levels quite a bit.
In the distant past, with very high CO2 concentrations, we had very high temperature increases and mass extinction. If we continue on our present trends ("business as usual", or BAU, in many discussions) we're expected to hit 1000ppm CO2 by 2100, which is well above what it took to melt ice caps (given time), and within perhaps a factor of two of the levels leading to the mass extinction. This is still unclear, the fossil record is old, the climate models have to work with a different configuration of continents and an allegedly cooler sun, and it's not clear exactly how much CO2 was needed to start the heat, versus how much resulted from liberated CH4 degrading to CO2 and stuff dying and rotting. Do we feel lucky?
The problem for us is that if we were preceding slowly to a somewhat-higher CO2 world (i.e., early Pliocene), we would get a wetter climate, which is not that bad (fresh water is good, though sea levels will be 25 meters higher). But we're not proceeding slowly; we're turning up the heat in a relatively large way. The oceans have a huge thermal mass, and though they absorb the bulk of the heat, their temperature rises more slowly than the land temperature. The result, "temporarily" (for a few centuries) is a slightly lower relative humidity, meaning, less rain, aka, more drought. Furthermore, the likely shrinking of the ice caps will proceed through accelerated sliding into the ocean, not melting in place, which will tend to cool the ocean somewhat. (All this is extremely hand-wavy, and says nothing about changes in ocean currents, which can have a very large regional effect.) See http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2011/12/pliocene-wetter-than-today.html for a more detailed discussion.
We're doing it at a tiny tiny rate, compared to the world-wide population. It's a micro-charity. We're also exporting our habits (big cars, meaty diet), which makes things worse.
All right (your understanding matches mine regarding population growth), but that had a whopping population growth problem (a scary whopping population growth problem) and they put the brakes on it in a major and draconian way. Ours is accidental, in the same way that they love per-capita energy consumption is accidental. We've made no similar "sacrifices" -- theirs was imposed, but it surely made the Chinese population unhappy. They also did this some time ago, which yields a bigger effect.
Other moves, it's hard to say; at the same time that their car sales are shooting upwards, they've also imposed various bans on internal-combustion motorcycles in various cities, leading to a huge boom in electric scooters (which are ultimately powered by coal, but a far better choice than automobiles, and the full-cycle pollution is lower than a similar number of crappy little IC engines). http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/4973351342/#comment72157630019923447
That, I'm pretty confident they have right. Big volcanos leave world-wide signatures in the ice, these can be cross-referenced to tree rings, varves (fucking spell-check, "varve" is a word, it's layers of mud at the bottom of lakes), sometimes even historical records.
The analogy I've seen elsewhere is "loaded dice". If I roll the dice and it comes up 12, are they loaded? Can't say for sure. If I roll the dice and they don't come up 12 always, are they not loaded? How about if I roll the dice 360 times and get 100 twelves (instead of about 10)?
One likely climate-vs-weather cause I have seen proposed is a change in "Rossby Waves": http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/slowing-rossby-waves-leading-to-extreme.html This one thing would make weather "more extreme" simply by making it change more slowly; hot weather would come, and rather than moving on in a day or two, might stay for longer. Same goes for cold weather, too.
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I don't normally agree with khallow on this sort of thing, but he is basically right on these points. We produce far more "food" than we need. We convert a mess of corn into fuel, with little or no savings in GHG emissions (natural gas is used to produce nitrogen fertilizer; nitrogen fertilizer decomposes into other GHGs). We convert another mess of corn into meat, very inefficiently, and we could easily eat less. Millions of people have moved to Florida in the last 50 years; probably millions will move away if water runs short, or if hurricanes hit more often, or if barrier islands start to slip underwater. There's no difference in the cost to move and build new housing, whether to or from Florida, it's only the attitude of the person spending the money.
Transportation, there are choices other than (a) single occupancy SUVs and (b) Mad Max. We "overconsume" massively. We could drive smaller cars; we could car pool (social networks can help here); we could ride motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles, depending on the distance of the trip, heat, and fitness.
I'm sure if you beeped out "sorry" in Morse code, they would understand.
So to apologize, just go:
"bip-bip-bip beeep-beeep-beeep bip-beeep-bip bip-beeep-bip beeep-bip-beeep-beeep"
To put things into proportion, how long till some drunk or texting clot wipes out some unlucky pedestrian?
Less than 24 hours, almost guaranteed (3000+ peds per year killed by car crashes, or 8 per day).
Which, unfortunately, actually raises your chance of an early death, because lack of exercise is a massive killer. Danish study, non-bicycle commuters, 39% higher mortality rate, corrected for risk factors. Variations on this show up again and again -- excess sitting kills, elderly walking extra adds years, etc. We're doing it all wrong, if the answer is more use of cars.
Till pedestrians start pushing shopping carts full of concrete blocks into intersections before they step into them.
Assuming we all have the same definition of "appropriate", and whether we admit the reality of ambient human error. Given a car-ped collision, yes, speed kills. The difference between 20, 25, and 30mph is a dramatic increase in risk of death.
Problem here is that we have an intersection just like that near where I live, and most bicycles and pedestrians avoid it like the plague. No surprise, a lack of pedestrians and cyclists drives their accident count down, but not because the intersection is "safer".
You might try dropping that first sentence into Google and see what turns up :-).
Corporations are people, my friend. Delta's airplanes are private vehicles, too.
A quarter mile is not a very long shopping trip; with a 100km range on your hypothetically inadequate electric car, that's 50 round trips. You could dedicate a cheap bicycle and a trailer to that task if you wanted; for a quarter mile-trip, you're not going to be nearly so bothered by issues of fit, and it would take you forever to wear out even cheap parts. For example: http://www.bikesatwork.com/bike-trailers/model-64a-bike-trailer.html That distance you can hack pretty well even in a hot climate if you just take it slow, and it's not like car AC has enough time to do any good either.
For the elderly members, maybe electric blankets, or electric heating pads? Resistive electric heating is normally gruesomely inefficient, but if you use it to put the heat right where you need it, it wins.
We've been funding fusion research for fucking forever, and we're still far from anything practical. We should be funding lots of research, in hopes that we'll generate enough wins for enough niches to really make a difference, and soon. Necessarily, we will also fund flops, and afterwards we can all point to those flops and criticize the idiots who wasted money on them.
I think you need to some references to support these things you claim exist. In your list of environmental "stupidities", the only one I know of in recent years is opposition to nuclear plants (given the explosions in Japan and the proliferation risks in Iran, are you sure nuke opponents are really all that crazy? I mean, think of all the setbacks in Iran's clean energy program caused by whoever developed Stuxnet. Way more effective than anyone chaining themselves to a plant. Do you suppose that was a Greenpeace operation?). On the other hand, I have certainly recently read of activists opposing habitat destruction, overfishing, high rates of extinction, and pollution. Are you sure you have an accurate picture of what environmental activists do? Where do you get your information?
In this discussion here, the name calling came from the a self-styled skeptic -- "simple minded radical greens". The reply did not call any names at all. This makes your entire "FTFY" exercise a little backwards, since the so-called skeptics are the ones slinging names, and the proponents (who you seem to be unable to agree with) did not.
The more subtle point is that on the one hand it is notably better than burning coal for energy, but on the other hand CH4 is such a potent greenhouse gas that if very much at all is leaked in the process of drilling/shipping/storage, then all the benefits are lost.
Suggestions I can come up with:
1) you might be able to shave a degree or two off the 70F. Lower temperatures are more tolerable with better clothing (I'm up near Boston, we get low temperatures, and we have oil heat, so $$$$); stretch polarfleece tights are effective. (I've got various bits of winter bicycle gear that are comfortable enough to wear in general, and not the ugly stuff you usually see sold "for cycling"). A small wood stove is also an option for heating a room or two, and that might let you lower the temperature elsewhere or simply cut the furnace load.
Solar water heaters are almost within reach for DIY, depending on your roof angle, latitude, that sort of thing (my father built several when I was a kid. You can do a lot with a piece of metal sheet, some copper pipe, fiberglass insulation, and some greenhouse ribbed lexan for the front. Use wire ties to hold the pipe to the metal sheet, and paint it all black.)
2) you might get some summer savings by painting your roof white, even above and beyond the shade from trees. That's pretty cheap. Be careful, apparently there can be paint-roof incompatibilities ("elastomeric" paint and asphalt shingles are anti-recommended; I used exterior latex, and intentionally did a crappy paint job so that the shingles could still breathe and were not painted together, which is apparently the issue. Note that I did this on a non-visible section of the roof; it's not something I'd call attractive.)
3) what's your commute/shopping obstacles that keep you in a car? What I'm looking for are things like distance, scary roads, hot, or cold. Scary roads are probably a show-stopper, but distance and hot you can address with some sort of a small motor (i.e., motorcycle, scooter, or assisted bicycle). There are cargo options that will pretty easily get you to six bags of groceries, and with a trailer, the limit is mostly the size of your motor (whether it's you or the assist) and your patience. But if the roads suck, probably forget it.
I think your electric car expectations are not realistic. 500km times the power required per mile to propel a car means a crapload of energy, and you probably don't have the electrical service that would let you deliver that much energy in 15 minutes. Downsizing the vehicle (scooter, or assisted bicycle) downsizes the energy required, which means that the fast-charge power requirements become somewhat more realistic, and you also acquire the option to buy spare battery packs and carry them. Unfortunately, e-assist for bicycles is not cheap, and until just now (when I googled for "cargo scooter") I did not know of any "cargo scooters".
The interesting thing is, I DID provide pointers to both a study (you can make of it what you will, you can take issue with their methodology) and evaluated a prediction that has thus far proved spectacularly wrong. That's factual. He said X, Y happened. Study Z got result F. I didn't call you stupid, I merely suggested that Fox News was a poor source of information (more likely, an active source of disinformation), and thus, makes you ignorant. Watch it less, and you'll know more. Unless you're Rupert Murdoch or Roger Ailes, I don't think I insulted anyone, and I only insulted them if it's not their intent to bamboozle the American public.
And truckloads of these "facts" really are facts. We can measure temperature, directly, or with fossil proxies. It's up. We can correct for urban heat islands (scientists, not stupid people, always checking each others' work). We can measure CO2. It's up. We can measure isotope ratios. They point to combustion of "old" carbon (i.e., fossil fuels). We can look at multiple signals -- movement in plant zones, advance of the seasonal variation in the Keeling Curve, Arctic ice volume and extent, ocean pH, historical records of ice breakup and plant blooms. The biggest problem with determining the 100%-dead-certain-fact of global warming is the difficulty of extracting the relatively small signal of a warming climate from a backdrop of noisy weather, intermittent volcano burps, solar cycles, and glitches in ocean currents. But the default answer from physics (you know, "facts") is that our addition of CO2 to the atmosphere should make it warmer, and the burden of proof that we have nothing to worry about should really rest very heavily on the other side of the argument, and they have come nowhere near what is necessary for an effective contradiction. Mere nitpicking, or noticing that there has been a very snowy winter, is not a refutation.
"Ice rings", means you get 6 months of really-really cold, and 6 months of not so cold. It leaves some sort of mark in the ice. To build up a kilometer or three of ice, the net has to be ice growth.
In the past the earth has witnessed CO2 concentrations like what we have today, and the heat followed (strictly speaking, they happened roughly simultaneously in the past because the CO2 concentrations did not rise so quickly. It takes a really long time to heat the ocean. Our CO2 is ahead of the heat, and we will not reach equilibrium for hundreds of years). Over time, that heat caused ice caps to melt and/or slide into the ocean, raising sea levels quite a bit.
In the distant past, with very high CO2 concentrations, we had very high temperature increases and mass extinction. If we continue on our present trends ("business as usual", or BAU, in many discussions) we're expected to hit 1000ppm CO2 by 2100, which is well above what it took to melt ice caps (given time), and within perhaps a factor of two of the levels leading to the mass extinction. This is still unclear, the fossil record is old, the climate models have to work with a different configuration of continents and an allegedly cooler sun, and it's not clear exactly how much CO2 was needed to start the heat, versus how much resulted from liberated CH4 degrading to CO2 and stuff dying and rotting. Do we feel lucky?
The problem for us is that if we were preceding slowly to a somewhat-higher CO2 world (i.e., early Pliocene), we would get a wetter climate, which is not that bad (fresh water is good, though sea levels will be 25 meters higher). But we're not proceeding slowly; we're turning up the heat in a relatively large way. The oceans have a huge thermal mass, and though they absorb the bulk of the heat, their temperature rises more slowly than the land temperature. The result, "temporarily" (for a few centuries) is a slightly lower relative humidity, meaning, less rain, aka, more drought. Furthermore, the likely shrinking of the ice caps will proceed through accelerated sliding into the ocean, not melting in place, which will tend to cool the ocean somewhat. (All this is extremely hand-wavy, and says nothing about changes in ocean currents, which can have a very large regional effect.) See
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2011/12/pliocene-wetter-than-today.html for a more detailed discussion.
We're doing it at a tiny tiny rate, compared to the world-wide population. It's a micro-charity. We're also exporting our habits (big cars, meaty diet), which makes things worse.
damn you autocorrect. "their low per-capita energy consumption"
All right (your understanding matches mine regarding population growth), but that had a whopping population growth problem (a scary whopping population growth problem) and they put the brakes on it in a major and draconian way. Ours is accidental, in the same way that they love per-capita energy consumption is accidental. We've made no similar "sacrifices" -- theirs was imposed, but it surely made the Chinese population unhappy. They also did this some time ago, which yields a bigger effect.
Other moves, it's hard to say; at the same time that their car sales are shooting upwards, they've also imposed various bans on internal-combustion motorcycles in various cities, leading to a huge boom in electric scooters (which are ultimately powered by coal, but a far better choice than automobiles, and the full-cycle pollution is lower than a similar number of crappy little IC engines). http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/4973351342/#comment72157630019923447
That, I'm pretty confident they have right. Big volcanos leave world-wide signatures in the ice, these can be cross-referenced to tree rings, varves (fucking spell-check, "varve" is a word, it's layers of mud at the bottom of lakes), sometimes even historical records.
(There, glaciology in three or fewer sentences :-)
Just because I hurt your feelings, doesn't mean I'm wrong.
You know, perhaps I was being sarcastic. A carbon tax with some bite, is that "help help I'm being repressed", or yet another tax?
And whatever we say to China, if I were China, I would counter with "1 child per family; I think we've done quite a lot. Your move."
Just don't read the articles. That's what Playboy is for.
The analogy I've seen elsewhere is "loaded dice". If I roll the dice and it comes up 12, are they loaded? Can't say for sure. If I roll the dice and they don't come up 12 always, are they not loaded? How about if I roll the dice 360 times and get 100 twelves (instead of about 10)?
One likely climate-vs-weather cause I have seen proposed is a change in "Rossby Waves": http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/slowing-rossby-waves-leading-to-extreme.html This one thing would make weather "more extreme" simply by making it change more slowly; hot weather would come, and rather than moving on in a day or two, might stay for longer. Same goes for cold weather, too.