Things like Kyoto are just as foolish as Maos plan to have kids kill butterflies (or whatever it was).... incompetant ideas applied by people ignorant of basic science.
That's the conventional Republican wisdom in the USA, but the basic physics tells you that the basis of Kyoto is rock-solid absent solid evidence to contradict this chain of reasoning:
Carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur hexaflouride and such are transparent to most solar radiation, but absorbent across various bands of thermal wavelengths.
Due to this absorbency, increasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat which currently radiates to space.
To restore the balance between solar flux and radiative cooling, the temperature of the Earth will have to increase on the average.
If we desire to ameliorate these changes, we have to reduce the rate at which greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.
You can say that we don't know enough about the various feedback loops inherent in the system, such as the influence of clouds, to be able to quantify their effects. The thing you don't seem to grasp is that the basic physics places the burden of proof on the people claiming the absence of detrimental effects.
(And you make these implicit claims in a post with obvious errors of grammar and spelling. The irony is thick.)
Reality is the environmental quality in an area is directly proportional to the economic development in an area.
Reality is that the environmental quality in places like the Tongass National Forest is quite high, except where it has been developed (clearcut). The environmental quality in cities and the like tends to be higher where the standard of living (and thus the demand and ability to pay for pollution-control technology) is higher, but your blanket statement is trivially false.
Thus, the best way-- the only way-- to a cleaner environment is unregulated economic development.
No regulations? You mean, let dirty plants dump pesticide byproducts and heavy metals into the rivers and lakes that other people use for drinking water? I believe they tried that in the Soviet Bloc, and it didn't work very well at all; they are still trying to recover from the damage.
A basic lack of understanding of economics is behind most environmental solutions (as well as the war on poverty, etc.) and thus they actually cause the problem to be worse, not better.
Is that so? Tell me, did the regulations against the burning of coal in London after the Killer Fog cause the problem to get worse? How about the motor-vehicle pollution controls in California; did they make the Los Angeles smog worse? Or the ban on phosphates in detergents; did it make the eutrophication problem in Lake Erie worse?
I like people like you. You make it so easy to convince readers that you are wrong.
And for the record, I have nothing against corporations. Corporations are just like individuals, creatures looking for their own benefit. The way to keep them from doing harm is to prevent them from creating harm to others without having to pay for it; if everyone has to pay, the way to maxmize profit is to minimize such expenses and the problem solves itself. We get problems such as smog, algae-choked lakes and empty aquifers when people are permitted to take or dump without having to respect the limits of the resource they're using (whether the ability to create or the ability to absorb) and pay a market price for it.
The thing you have to argue against is the huge success which the Montreal Protocol has had in controlling stratospheric halogens; the polar ozone holes are already showing signs of recovery as the concentration of CFCs comes down. I agree with you that the demand of many watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) that any GHG control regime be turned into a welfare program for dysfuncti
A good chunk of Alaska is very rich land that hosts teeming plant life in the warmer seasons.
You might notice that said plant life is adapted to the short growing season and unpredictable frosts. Also to the thin layers of usable topsoil on top of permafrost...
That's the exact opposite of Econmics 101, supply and demand.
And your point is? The whole region was developed because of a government push for "reclamation" of the desert rather than any economic justification, and even now the government sells water to farmers at a price far lower than it either costs to deliver or nearby cities pay for the same water. There are on-going political battles over that water, and the cities are starting to win. Soon there will be a lot less irrigated agriculture in the Imperial valley.
Which is where adding irrigation to a region makes sense.
Follow that back one step. Where do you get the water in a desert? You can pump it out of an aquifer, at the cost of drying up other things that the aquifer feeds (rivers, streams and springs) and eventually deplete the aquifer itself. Or you can divert the water from other things that use it to feed your use, which may come at a very high price in destroyed land and extinct species.
So far we haven't done much in the way of making more fresh water on the kind of scale required. Unless and until this is done, the problem does not have a solution.
The second law does not preclude the addition of energy into a system, which is very much what farming today is about.
Modern farming has achieved most of its miracles by moving small amounts of material to where they are required: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, pest-control substances at the rate of a few pounds per acre per year. When you start talking about regenerating topsoil or importing water, you are talking about several orders of magnitude more material to move (one acre-foot of water is about 2.6 million pounds). There are also problems that you can create, such as the use of tube wells in India leading to chronic arsenic poisoning (the water is free of the pathogens that used to kill people quickly, but now it contains poisons which cause neurological problems and cancers which kill people slowly).
Southern deserts have energy in abundance from the sun, yet plant life has not found a way to make these areas highly productive despite hundreds of millions of years of time to adapt and evolve. This means that it's just not going to be simple or easy to feed lots of people from a desert, no matter how much wishful thinking you do. The only way to solve this is to find a way of capturing that energy that does not require as much of the limiting resource (usually water), and that is a problem that is not going to fall to simple economics.
With the number of farms *shrinking* in the U.S. (a sad state of affairs), why would anyone grow exports in Alaska?
Even before transport was good enough to allow importing crops from elsewhere, people did not grow food crops in Alaska. They hunted and fished (and still do to some extent).
Just because you can grow the odd monster vegetable there does not mean that Alaska is an agricultural-powerhouse-in-waiting. Ditto large parts of the rest of the world which look good on the surface but aren't, which you don't seem to comprehend.
Back to the original topic, the money would flow if there really was a crunch for food. There isn't though.
You have it backwards. The money can flow to the Imperial Valley because of the surplus productivity of the rest of the farms in the USA. If we had the kind of cash crunch that we'd have if we were butting up against the limits of agricultural production in Iowa and Texas, paying for unsustainable water projects in California, Arizona and Nevada would have gone by the wayside long since.
Ah, but you could increase that by growing crops that are normally not edible by humans.
Of course you can do that. The problem is twofold:
Due to lack of water, the productivity of the land is low and it doesn't grow crops directly edible by humans.
Because the crops require conversion by animals before being edible, there are further losses which make the human-usable productivity of the land several times lower.
There is only so much you can do without postulating something like nanotech.
So why are we having this argument?
Because growing up in the Midwest doesn't confer good understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Did you know that some of the largest produce in the world is grown in Alaska?
I notice that Alaska is not a significant producer of corn. Or wheat. Or rice. Or soya, or grass-fed beef, or wool and mutton, or anything else that America relies on to feed itself. The long summer days which can make amazing hothouse tomatoes don't translate to much in practice; the temperate rain-forest conditions north of British Columbia are great for forests but not food. I note that Alaska's major industries are fishing, oil and tourism; cold-weather crops haven't done much to change this.
Irrigation is an old problem, but there are ways of turning desert into farmland.
The Imperial Valley being a prime example, but the two essential inputs are water and money. Poorer or drier countries wouldn't have been able to pull off something that big, and you can bet that the American taxpayer isn't going to put up with subsidies to cotton and alfalfa farmers in a desert forever.
Putting that aside though, that land could be used to farm livestock such as cattle.
You are thinking of conditions like West Texas, or something more hospitable? If I recall correctly, the land in W. Texas could support about one steer per ten acres. When you consider the number of people supported by an acre of farmland across SE Asia, India and the like, that's a pretty poor showing. Raising beef on that land won't support many Chinese,
though it might reduce their beef imports a bit.
Never argue with someone who grew up in the Midwest. If there's one thing we know, it's farming.:-)
Dude... I've lived in the Midwest for 97% of my life. Take your own advice.
I should probably also point out the tremendous amount of undeveloped land in Russia and China.... China isn't much better. Everyone is crowded into the cities while hundreds of thousands of acres of land are left to be tended by townsfolk who haven't seen much technological progress in 400+ years.
This is the kind of statement I expect from people who've read one book on the subject in their lives. It ignores the myriad reasons why that land isn't already developed from the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, such as:
The land is too hot to grow food crops.
The land is too cold, ditto.
The land is too steep or too dry to support agriculture (China includes the Gobi desert and a fair number of mountains).
The land was developed once, but it became saline due to poor drainage and had to be abandoned (like the former Fertile Crescent).
The land has lost its nutrients or topsoil and now has little fertility (like most of Australia, a sparsely-populated expanse you don't mention).
The per-capita arable land in China is very small, and getting smaller as it disappears beneath cities and factories. (The failure to locate new cities and such in the non-arable land has to be counted as one of the great failures of the Communist party and its central planners.) This is one reason why China is becoming a bigger and bigger importer of food. They'll be okay as long as other people have something to export, but if climate change should dry up those surpluses.... they're screwed.
Why is OPEC already negotiating for subsidies to "guarantee the profitability of their business" in the face of environmental restrictions?
Are they really? If you should decide to come back (why not log in?), please provide a link to something which mentions where OPEC is asking for subsidies.
Fuck OPEC. Fuck the arabs. Use solar power.
Actually, using solar power would DE-fuck the Arabs. If you've looked at the economics of nations which depend on extractive industries vs. those which manufacture, create and sell services or other productive pursuits, the latter do much better than the former. (Venezuela was just about the richest country in S. America, until oil was discovered and exploited there. Now it's just about the poorest. Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, and a host of other oil-exporting nations kept going in and out of dictatorship while the private sector and the middle class it supported withered. This is not a coincidence.) Getting rid of our oil demand would only fuck the dictators; the requirement to depend on commerce and invention for sustenance would force the Arab world to throw off the shackles. (And we'd get cleaner skies, cities and seas out of the deal.)
If you look at how much energy we use vs. how much renewable energy is available, it looks like a no-brainer to switch. The problem is that renewables are typically unavailable when, where and as desired. If there's a solution, it will begin with using the sun, wind, water and whatnot when they're working and only fall back to stuff like petroleum when (nighttime, dry season, calm conditions) and where (long-haul driving, northern climates in winter) the other stuff isn't available.
My point is: doesn't attaching the engine to the wheel seem like the *most* logical choice in the first place? Why build complicated transmission mechanisms and a centralized engine in the first place?
There's a-priori (read: ignorant) logic and what comes out after you do the numbers.
Building a motor directly into a wheel limits you right off. One thing that ought to be obvious after a bit of thinking is that the force you can get out of a magnet doesn't depend on speed to any great degree, so your maximum motor torque is pretty much independent of its speed (depending on the rest of the design). Something that falls out after a bit more thinking is that power = force * speed, so the faster the two sides of the motor move relative to each other, the more power the motor can make. If you build the motor into the wheel hub the rotor and stator cannot move relative to each other any faster than some less-than-unity fraction of the road speed of the vehicle. Further, your driving force is limited to the force that the magnets can exert across the rotor-stator gap, divided by the mechanical disadvantage from the tire radius being larger than the radius of the rotor-stator gap.
If you have powerful enough magnets or low enough demands that you can do the job without need for more power or force, great. But everything else is going to need gears. Gears aren't a bad idea anyway, as a 3:1 gearset is probably going to weigh a lot less than the roughly 2/3 weight saving you'll be able to take out of the motor. Eventually it comes down to parts cost, parts count, simplicity vs. complexity of arrangement, and all the other quotidian details that drive most engineering.
The problem with adapting this sort of tech to an off-road vehicle is that the motors will be right where the vehicle takes the most abuse. With the engine on the vehicle's body it's buffered by the shock absorbers; but inside the wheel the only thing between it and the rocks it's going over is a pneumatic tire. The tire will certainly provide some protection, but it may not be enough.
Even in an on-road vehicle it can cause big problems, and it has nothing to do with any punishment the motor has to take.
If you think about the wheel as a bouncy ball (the pneumatic tire provides the bounce) that needs to be held down to the road as much of the time as possible, you begin to see the difficulty. The only thing holding the wheel down is the weight of the vehicle (buffered by the springs) so as the wheel gets heavier it takes less and less of of a bump to make the wheel lose substantial amounts of traction (or even complete contact) with the road. You can't steer or brake with a wheel that isn't touching the pavement, among other difficulties. I would think that weight on the less-compliant tire is going to do more damage to the far sides of potholes than weight passing through the more-compliant springs; it is going to hit the far edge a lot harder if it's only sprung by the tire.
For a bus where the motor is a small fraction of the vehicle weight and speeds are low, this is probably not a big deal. But for a 4x4 that ever intends to see a highway, it's probably a killer even if the motor is nigh invulnerable.
Which gives a 60% improvement? As I said it's a slightly more efficient gas-electric hybrid design. The efficiency comes from the lack of a drivetrain.
I'm not sure what you're quoting there and what you're stating, but the lack of a geared drivetrain isn't going to make such a bus more efficient than the alternative. Gears are very efficient devices, and can offset losses in electric motors by allowing them to operate at higher speed and lower current (which reduces I^2R losses in the windings, and maybe hysteresis losses in the cores). On top of that, the geared system is going to be lighter.
Diesels don't have terribly large idling losses, so I'll lay money that the efficiency gains come from the application of regenerative braking to the city-bus driving cycle of frequent stops. The placement of the motor in the wheel hub might allow different use of the space where the axle and differential would be, but would not otherwise alter the efficiency by much. The biggest benefit I can see would be lowering the floor of the bus, making it easier to get in and out. Cutting the overall height would also reduce aerodynamic drag a bit, but a city bus doesn't cruise fast enough for that to be a big problem.
Lemme see if I can find that old link.... ah, here we go.
If you take a look at that graph, you'll see that even a lead-acid battery can last many thousands of cycles as long as they are shallow. The Yellow Tops in question are, I believe, rated at 55 AH (20-hour rate, don't ask me what discharge rate was used for the test) or about 660 WH nominal. The total throughput over 4500 cycles to 25% depth of discharge is over 600 KWH.
Let's make an assumption here. Let's assume that mass-production batteries like the Yellow Tops would cost about the same per AH as a deep-cycle trolling/starting battery does now. I bought a 105 AH unit for about $65 a couple years ago, assume $70 today or $0.66/AH or $55/KWH nominal. 4500 cycles to 25% depth would cost $(55/1125) or 4.9 cents per KWH. Depending where you're buying your juice, this is somewhere between one-third to one times the cost of your off-peak electricity.
Gasoline costs quite a bit more. At 6.67 lb/gallon and 0.4 lb/HP-hr, you'd get 16.7 HP-hr/gallon or 12.7 KWH/gallon; this is about 36.5% of the 119,000 BTU/gallon of energy that gasoline really carries. At $1.50/gallon you're already talking 19 cents per KWH. Hybrid propulsion using reclaimed (regenerated) energy appears to be quite a bit cheaper than making power from scratch, and charging from the grid when opportunity allows would be cheaper than buying fuel even at today's US prices. At typical European prices, it's a no-brainer.
That said, it makes you wonder why the in-wheel-motor hybrid scheme hasn't been done for the last 50 years. I recall seeing one of Ferdinand Porsche's early attempts to power a string of trailers using in-wheel electric motors... for World War One, to move war materiel. There is very little that's truly new under the sun.
I normally don't respond to ACs, but since it's obvious that people are reading this it makes sense to try to dispell some misinformation.
Heat islands are areas which are hotter than their surroundings because they absorb and hold heat better; for instance, asphalt absorbs more heat than vegetation, and retains and re-radiates that heat for hours even after the sun goes down. Heat islands can (and do) change local thermometer readings completely independent of any regional or global climate effect.
Here is a good intro to heat islands. The home page has pointers to other data, such as causes and remedial measures. And yes, this was all on the first page of a Google search for "heat island".
the magnetic field is what keeps our atmosphere from boiling off from Gamma radiation emitted from the Sun.
Only three problems with that statement:
Gamma radiation is not impeded, reflected, refracted, or altered in any way by Earth's magnetic field. Magnetic fields only affect charged particles, which gamma rays are not. (Do you have any idea what they are?)
The Sun does not emit significant quantities of gamma rays.
A strong magnetic field is not required for a planet to hold an atmosphere (see Venus). Venus has only a small magnetic field and gets twice the solar radiation that Earth gets, but has 90 times as much mass of atmosphere.
You need to spend some serious time studying before sounding off. I also suggest turning off the radio when programs like Coast to Coast are on, and subscribing to informative periodicals. Discover isn't bad, but doesn't cover the kind of breadth you really need so I suggest Science News as well.
... that the axial tilt of Mars and the relative timing of seasons vs. perhelion and aphelion might have more to do with its ice ages than small variations in the solar constant?
Well the upper atmosphere is warming, but that can be easily explained by the weakening of the magnetic field which causes more radiation to hit the atmosphere in turn increasing the temperature in that region.
Excuse me, but exactly what kind of solar emissions are blocked by Earth's magnetic field, and how much energy do they account for?
What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.
As for the ground data, Urban heat islands are the cause.
Heat islands have been the subject of intense discussion and research in this area for as long as I've been following it, and a quick search immediately turns up refutations of that claim. From physicist Martin I. Hoffert (who is certainly more qualified to expound on the issue than Lomborg):
(1) Land surfaces are only 30 percent of the Earth's surface; and the area of the U.S. is only a few percent at most of Earth's surface. Since area weighting of all global land and sea surface temperature data is used to get global data sets, this modifi ed urban heat island effect - if it's real - would have a very small effect on the computed global warming.
When the early global warming models, which did not account for cooling caused by aerosols (which are also produced by burning coal and oil), were changed, the new models have forecast average temperatures "right on the nose," says Schneider.
Borehole temperatures can also provide an independent instrumental validation of surface measurements. Pollack et al.'s
(1998) analysis of underground temperature measurements from four
continents indicates that the average surface temperature of the
earth has increased by about 0.5 C in the twentieth century.
(I can't believe the things that get modded up. Okay, given the lack of research obvious in what gets posted, maybe I can believe the credulousness obvious in what gets modded up. But it's still dismaying.)
I recall criticisms by authors cited by Lomborg, who say that their work fails to support (or even contradicts) Lomborg's conclusions. To the extent that Lomborg claims their support, they say it is from sections taken out of context. This is hardly the work of an honest academic.
A quick Google search for "Lomborg citations" came up with a piece on Lomborg's clever use of misdirection and this review with citations of critiques. Lomborg's complete failure to acknowledge disasters like the vanishing Aral sea, falling Ogalalla aquifer and other known problems with anything like the seriousness they deserve (how are you going to continue irrigated agriculture in Texas and Oklahoma if the Ogalalla is pumped dry?) proves that his "don't worry, be happy" conclusion is bunk.
Perhaps the most colorful accusation against Lomborg is from that second link:
It is as though he is affected with a form of academic autism; able to do the math better than most mere mortals, but unable to comprehend the connections ordinary people understand as part of daily life.
I can't add much to that. Lomborg is no better than the left-wing moonbats whose attitudes and claims form a mirror-image parody of his own.
(Damn, I've been spending a lot of time on Google for this discussion!)
If a volcano puts out a decade's worth of our contribution to greenhouse gas every time it blows, we can't be tipping the scales that much.
Debunked by one of ours. If I recall correctly, the major volcanic eruptions of the past 20 years have emitted perhaps as much CO2 as Ohio's coal-fired plants yield in a month. Right now, humans are the 800-pound gorilla on the climate block.
There are no greenhouse-effect denialists who are less crazy than platygeans or Velikovskians. Without the greenhouse effect, the temperature of the Earth would average about 255 Kelvin[1], or about -1 Fahrenheit. The question is not whether or not there is a greenhouse effect, it is whether we are affecting it or not.
[1] Albedo of the Earth is about 0.3. Earth receives about 1360 W/m^2 of disc, or 340 W/m^2 of surface; roughly 30% is reflected, the rest is absorbed. The radiation from a blackbody is 5.67 * 10^(-8) W/m^2/K^4, so:
340 W/m^2 * 0.7 = 5.67e-8 W/m^2/K^4 T^4
T^4 = (340 * 0.7 / 5.67e-8) K^4
T^4 = 4.1975e+09 K^4 --> T ~= 255 K.
I am seeing cases where the environmental movement is wilfully exaggerating how bad things are, and is arguing that no matter what the choice, the environment is both the first and the only thing.
You're just now seeing them? They've been around for a couple of decades, and have spawned sects as bizarre as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
I am becoming more and more skeptical of the environmental movement. Too much of it seems to be pushing an anti-capitalist morality with which I do not agree....
Ah, yes, the "watermelons" (green on the outside, red on the inside). These are moonbat crazies whose respect for the facts is forcefully subordinated to their politics, else they'd have to acknowledge that the environment has fared vastly better under conditions of economic and political freedom (which go together) than the Soviet bloc's command system.
The other side of the issue is that powerful economic interests in the USA are capable of buying legislation which sells out the public interest to protect their profits, and they are just as capable of manipulating the press, think tank reports and other coverage to blunt public backlash against them. Just because the watermelons are for something isn't necessarily a reason to oppose it; you have to look carefully at everything, preferably with an understanding of the underlying reasons and mechanisms. If you don't have this understanding yourself, take your cues from someone who both has one and has taken the time to explain it in ways which can be checked. Dogma is the enemy, we need to fight it with reason. I've read Lomborg's book, and it is very long on endnotes and short on real supporting evidence; worse, the researchers cited by Lomborg have often disagreed violently with the conclusions he reaches based on their work. This reflects poorly on Lomborg.
(OT re command economies and authoritarian regimes: China's pall of pollution is so bad that it is affecting crop yields. The sources I can find mention pollutants such as ozone and SO2, but I recall reading that soot directly reduces plant growth by cutting off the supply of energy (sunlight) to the plants. China in particular still uses lots of coal in individual coal stoves, leading to the same emissions which caused the killer fog in London in 1952 (here's the NPR feature). These emissions would be drastically reduced if China gasified that same coal in a central plant and piped it through cities as "town gas".)
Do you even know that increased solar activity (i.e. more sonspots) actually means _less_ energy reaching the earth?
Doesn't anybody who reflexively sounds off on these issues read even the popular summaries on astrophysics? Sunspot activity increases the solar constant. See these course notes. This page gives the mechanism: "Although sunspots are regions of cooler than average Sun surface temperature, their presence is accompanied by brighter (hotter) faculae which more than compensates for the increase in darker sunspot areas".
The first page states a claim that is very difficult for the global-warming denialists: "...since 1980, the solar constant has steadily decreased by 0.02 percent per year."
I'm sure there are a number of expensive tax preferences which don't rate line items because they aren't "spending".
My nit with ag subsidies and whatnot isn't necessarily their size, it's their corrupting influence. The amount of money spent is secondary to the damage it does, which can be all out of proportion.
I doubt your DDoS would make a dent anyway. The profit margin is too high to water down that way.
The economics of spam are based on the infinitesimal cost of sending each one vs. the large profit from each response. While illegal, the use of harvested CC and contact data would have the effect of driving up the cost of each valid response. With typical 0.01% response rates, it would be trivial to DOS the spammer with hundreds of times as many bogus responses as real ones. At even a few cents per response to verify, the spammer's profit margin would be negative; end of problem.
The legal way to do this is with something like FormFucker, but it will probably not take long for spammers to get lists of legitimate CC card blocks to mechanically verify card numbers (to use one example). Re-using real information is immune to that workaround.
The spin I have heard from an X-Ray equipment technician, so I am pretty sure it is good info.
That's like asking an auto mechanic about the algorithms used by your engine-control software. The answer you got was just as ignorant. The person to ask about this is a physicist. (I am not a physicist, but I can get away with playing one on Slashdot for reasons which are obvious.)
Of course it is gamma particles. Sorry for the wrong info.
Gammas aren't "particles" as you understand them. They are high-energy photons.
Focusing I am 100% sure of. And the fact that x-ray is also depth-contrallable treatment I am even surer (if there is such a thing).
Gammas cannot be focussed by standard methods, they can only be masked. (Like a long, narrow lead tube leading away from a cobalt 60 source, radiation which is not following the line of the bore will be strongly attenuated.) Nor can you control the depth of penetration. Gamma photons have a high likelihood of going straight through a human being; they are attenuated exponentially, with heavier nuclei (calcium, lead) absorbing them more strongly than lighter nuclei (carbon, hydrogen). That's why you have the contrast between bones and flesh in X-rays (X-rays are just less-energetic photons, which have less penetrating ability than gamma rays).
Charged particles are another ballgame altogether. I'm told (remember, IANAP) that the rate of energy loss of a charged particle in dense matter is strongly speed-dependent and it goes up as the speed goes down (see other posters re: Bragg peaks). This allows a beam of charged particles to be calibrated for depth, because it will run into a "sand trap" as it loses energy going through tissue and deposit most of its energy close to the end. I've heard of pions (pi mesons) being used for radiation treatment for just this reason.
Antiprotons would be another quantum leap (pun intentional) in effectiveness. The energy the antiproton spends busting molecular bonds and making free radicals on its way in is only the beginning. When an antiproton hits a nucleus, it annihilates a proton and forms three pions (pi+, pi-, and pi0). The pi0 is its own antiparticle and decays into two gamma rays which probably don't do much, but the pi+ and pi- are also heavy charged particles. If they aren't moving very fast they would deposit most of their kinetic energy within a very short distance of the site of annihilation, busting up more molecules and making more free radicals. Then they decay to muons (which are pretty hard to stop and probably wouldn't do much from then on). On top of this, any nucleus heavier than hydrogen is going to be transmuted by the loss of the proton, changing its chemistry if not shattering the molecule it's in from the momentum change. That makes antiprotons a triple-threat.
Free radicals do things like chewing up proteins and slicing DNA strands. Enough of this and even a cancer cell can't function, and it dies.
There probably is, because Earth is definitely warmer around sunset than around sunrise. This would mean greater IR emissions in the direction opposite the orbital motion, causing thrust in the direction of the orbit.
However, the Yarkovsky effect on Earth is going to be much smaller (probably unmeasurably small) than on a sub-kilometer asteroid for these reasons:
Earth's atmosphere and oceans buffer the temperature changes, leading to less variation in IR emissions per rotation and thus less net thrust.
While the net IR emission is proportional to the intercepted sunlight and thus the area of Earth's disc (proportional to radius squared), the acceleration is inversely proportional to the mass (which is proportional to radius cubed). On top of this, Earth is denser than typical asteroidal rocks, due to its iron core and compression of lower layers to denser mineral forms.
It would be interesting to calculate the likely influence of the Yarkovsky effect on Earth, as a high-school physics exercise (like calculating the De Broglie wavelength of a moving car). I suggest this exercise to you, for fun; if nothing else, it will give you an idea of how hard it is likely to be to measure it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the conventional Republican wisdom in the USA, but the basic physics tells you that the basis of Kyoto is rock-solid absent solid evidence to contradict this chain of reasoning:
You can say that we don't know enough about the various feedback loops inherent in the system, such as the influence of clouds, to be able to quantify their effects. The thing you don't seem to grasp is that the basic physics places the burden of proof on the people claiming the absence of detrimental effects.
(And you make these implicit claims in a post with obvious errors of grammar and spelling. The irony is thick.)
Reality is that the environmental quality in places like the Tongass National Forest is quite high, except where it has been developed (clearcut). The environmental quality in cities and the like tends to be higher where the standard of living (and thus the demand and ability to pay for pollution-control technology) is higher, but your blanket statement is trivially false.
No regulations? You mean, let dirty plants dump pesticide byproducts and heavy metals into the rivers and lakes that other people use for drinking water? I believe they tried that in the Soviet Bloc, and it didn't work very well at all; they are still trying to recover from the damage.
Is that so? Tell me, did the regulations against the burning of coal in London after the Killer Fog cause the problem to get worse? How about the motor-vehicle pollution controls in California; did they make the Los Angeles smog worse? Or the ban on phosphates in detergents; did it make the eutrophication problem in Lake Erie worse?
I like people like you. You make it so easy to convince readers that you are wrong.
And for the record, I have nothing against corporations. Corporations are just like individuals, creatures looking for their own benefit. The way to keep them from doing harm is to prevent them from creating harm to others without having to pay for it; if everyone has to pay, the way to maxmize profit is to minimize such expenses and the problem solves itself. We get problems such as smog, algae-choked lakes and empty aquifers when people are permitted to take or dump without having to respect the limits of the resource they're using (whether the ability to create or the ability to absorb) and pay a market price for it.
The thing you have to argue against is the huge success which the Montreal Protocol has had in controlling stratospheric halogens; the polar ozone holes are already showing signs of recovery as the concentration of CFCs comes down. I agree with you that the demand of many watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) that any GHG control regime be turned into a welfare program for dysfuncti
The 5686's I've seen do not list voice capability among their features.
So far we haven't done much in the way of making more fresh water on the kind of scale required. Unless and until this is done, the problem does not have a solution.
Modern farming has achieved most of its miracles by moving small amounts of material to where they are required: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, pest-control substances at the rate of a few pounds per acre per year. When you start talking about regenerating topsoil or importing water, you are talking about several orders of magnitude more material to move (one acre-foot of water is about 2.6 million pounds). There are also problems that you can create, such as the use of tube wells in India leading to chronic arsenic poisoning (the water is free of the pathogens that used to kill people quickly, but now it contains poisons which cause neurological problems and cancers which kill people slowly).Southern deserts have energy in abundance from the sun, yet plant life has not found a way to make these areas highly productive despite hundreds of millions of years of time to adapt and evolve. This means that it's just not going to be simple or easy to feed lots of people from a desert, no matter how much wishful thinking you do. The only way to solve this is to find a way of capturing that energy that does not require as much of the limiting resource (usually water), and that is a problem that is not going to fall to simple economics.
Just because you can grow the odd monster vegetable there does not mean that Alaska is an agricultural-powerhouse-in-waiting. Ditto large parts of the rest of the world which look good on the surface but aren't, which you don't seem to comprehend.
You have it backwards. The money can flow to the Imperial Valley because of the surplus productivity of the rest of the farms in the USA. If we had the kind of cash crunch that we'd have if we were butting up against the limits of agricultural production in Iowa and Texas, paying for unsustainable water projects in California, Arizona and Nevada would have gone by the wayside long since. Of course you can do that. The problem is twofold:- Due to lack of water, the productivity of the land is low and it doesn't grow crops directly edible by humans.
- Because the crops require conversion by animals before being edible, there are further losses which make the human-usable productivity of the land several times lower.
There is only so much you can do without postulating something like nanotech. Because growing up in the Midwest doesn't confer good understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.- The land is too hot to grow food crops.
- The land is too cold, ditto.
- The land is too steep or too dry to support agriculture (China includes the Gobi desert and a fair number of mountains).
- The land was developed once, but it became saline due to poor drainage and had to be abandoned (like the former Fertile Crescent).
- The land has lost its nutrients or topsoil and now has little fertility (like most of Australia, a sparsely-populated expanse you don't mention).
The per-capita arable land in China is very small, and getting smaller as it disappears beneath cities and factories. (The failure to locate new cities and such in the non-arable land has to be counted as one of the great failures of the Communist party and its central planners.) This is one reason why China is becoming a bigger and bigger importer of food. They'll be okay as long as other people have something to export, but if climate change should dry up those surpluses.... they're screwed.If you look at how much energy we use vs. how much renewable energy is available, it looks like a no-brainer to switch. The problem is that renewables are typically unavailable when, where and as desired. If there's a solution, it will begin with using the sun, wind, water and whatnot when they're working and only fall back to stuff like petroleum when (nighttime, dry season, calm conditions) and where (long-haul driving, northern climates in winter) the other stuff isn't available.
If these guys ever get their act together and ship product, the Insight will look like a gas-guzzler.
Building a motor directly into a wheel limits you right off. One thing that ought to be obvious after a bit of thinking is that the force you can get out of a magnet doesn't depend on speed to any great degree, so your maximum motor torque is pretty much independent of its speed (depending on the rest of the design). Something that falls out after a bit more thinking is that power = force * speed, so the faster the two sides of the motor move relative to each other, the more power the motor can make. If you build the motor into the wheel hub the rotor and stator cannot move relative to each other any faster than some less-than-unity fraction of the road speed of the vehicle. Further, your driving force is limited to the force that the magnets can exert across the rotor-stator gap, divided by the mechanical disadvantage from the tire radius being larger than the radius of the rotor-stator gap.
If you have powerful enough magnets or low enough demands that you can do the job without need for more power or force, great. But everything else is going to need gears. Gears aren't a bad idea anyway, as a 3:1 gearset is probably going to weigh a lot less than the roughly 2/3 weight saving you'll be able to take out of the motor. Eventually it comes down to parts cost, parts count, simplicity vs. complexity of arrangement, and all the other quotidian details that drive most engineering.
If you think about the wheel as a bouncy ball (the pneumatic tire provides the bounce) that needs to be held down to the road as much of the time as possible, you begin to see the difficulty. The only thing holding the wheel down is the weight of the vehicle (buffered by the springs) so as the wheel gets heavier it takes less and less of of a bump to make the wheel lose substantial amounts of traction (or even complete contact) with the road. You can't steer or brake with a wheel that isn't touching the pavement, among other difficulties. I would think that weight on the less-compliant tire is going to do more damage to the far sides of potholes than weight passing through the more-compliant springs; it is going to hit the far edge a lot harder if it's only sprung by the tire.
For a bus where the motor is a small fraction of the vehicle weight and speeds are low, this is probably not a big deal. But for a 4x4 that ever intends to see a highway, it's probably a killer even if the motor is nigh invulnerable.
Diesels don't have terribly large idling losses, so I'll lay money that the efficiency gains come from the application of regenerative braking to the city-bus driving cycle of frequent stops. The placement of the motor in the wheel hub might allow different use of the space where the axle and differential would be, but would not otherwise alter the efficiency by much. The biggest benefit I can see would be lowering the floor of the bus, making it easier to get in and out. Cutting the overall height would also reduce aerodynamic drag a bit, but a city bus doesn't cruise fast enough for that to be a big problem.
If you take a look at that graph, you'll see that even a lead-acid battery can last many thousands of cycles as long as they are shallow. The Yellow Tops in question are, I believe, rated at 55 AH (20-hour rate, don't ask me what discharge rate was used for the test) or about 660 WH nominal. The total throughput over 4500 cycles to 25% depth of discharge is over 600 KWH.
Let's make an assumption here. Let's assume that mass-production batteries like the Yellow Tops would cost about the same per AH as a deep-cycle trolling/starting battery does now. I bought a 105 AH unit for about $65 a couple years ago, assume $70 today or $0.66/AH or $55/KWH nominal. 4500 cycles to 25% depth would cost $(55/1125) or 4.9 cents per KWH. Depending where you're buying your juice, this is somewhere between one-third to one times the cost of your off-peak electricity.
Gasoline costs quite a bit more. At 6.67 lb/gallon and 0.4 lb/HP-hr, you'd get 16.7 HP-hr/gallon or 12.7 KWH/gallon; this is about 36.5% of the 119,000 BTU/gallon of energy that gasoline really carries. At $1.50/gallon you're already talking 19 cents per KWH. Hybrid propulsion using reclaimed (regenerated) energy appears to be quite a bit cheaper than making power from scratch, and charging from the grid when opportunity allows would be cheaper than buying fuel even at today's US prices. At typical European prices, it's a no-brainer.
That said, it makes you wonder why the in-wheel-motor hybrid scheme hasn't been done for the last 50 years. I recall seeing one of Ferdinand Porsche's early attempts to power a string of trailers using in-wheel electric motors... for World War One, to move war materiel. There is very little that's truly new under the sun.
Heat islands are areas which are hotter than their surroundings because they absorb and hold heat better; for instance, asphalt absorbs more heat than vegetation, and retains and re-radiates that heat for hours even after the sun goes down. Heat islands can (and do) change local thermometer readings completely independent of any regional or global climate effect.
Here is a good intro to heat islands. The home page has pointers to other data, such as causes and remedial measures. And yes, this was all on the first page of a Google search for "heat island".
- Gamma radiation is not impeded, reflected, refracted, or altered in any way by Earth's magnetic field. Magnetic fields only affect charged particles, which gamma rays are not. (Do you have any idea what they are?)
- The Sun does not emit significant quantities of gamma rays.
- A strong magnetic field is not required for a planet to hold an atmosphere (see Venus). Venus has only a small magnetic field and gets twice the solar radiation that Earth gets, but has 90 times as much mass of atmosphere.
You need to spend some serious time studying before sounding off. I also suggest turning off the radio when programs like Coast to Coast are on, and subscribing to informative periodicals. Discover isn't bad, but doesn't cover the kind of breadth you really need so I suggest Science News as well.... that the axial tilt of Mars and the relative timing of seasons vs. perhelion and aphelion might have more to do with its ice ages than small variations in the solar constant?
What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.
Heat islands have been the subject of intense discussion and research in this area for as long as I've been following it, and a quick search immediately turns up refutations of that claim. From physicist Martin I. Hoffert (who is certainly more qualified to expound on the issue than Lomborg): Here's another take on the issue: and another independent measurement: (I can't believe the things that get modded up. Okay, given the lack of research obvious in what gets posted, maybe I can believe the credulousness obvious in what gets modded up. But it's still dismaying.)A quick Google search for "Lomborg citations" came up with a piece on Lomborg's clever use of misdirection and this review with citations of critiques. Lomborg's complete failure to acknowledge disasters like the vanishing Aral sea, falling Ogalalla aquifer and other known problems with anything like the seriousness they deserve (how are you going to continue irrigated agriculture in Texas and Oklahoma if the Ogalalla is pumped dry?) proves that his "don't worry, be happy" conclusion is bunk.
Perhaps the most colorful accusation against Lomborg is from that second link:
I can't add much to that. Lomborg is no better than the left-wing moonbats whose attitudes and claims form a mirror-image parody of his own.(Damn, I've been spending a lot of time on Google for this discussion!)
[1] Albedo of the Earth is about 0.3. Earth receives about 1360 W/m^2 of disc, or 340 W/m^2 of surface; roughly 30% is reflected, the rest is absorbed. The radiation from a blackbody is 5.67 * 10^(-8) W/m^2/K^4, so:
340 W/m^2 * 0.7 = 5.67e-8 W/m^2/K^4 T^4
T^4 = (340 * 0.7 / 5.67e-8) K^4
T^4 = 4.1975e+09 K^4 --> T ~= 255 K.
The other side of the issue is that powerful economic interests in the USA are capable of buying legislation which sells out the public interest to protect their profits, and they are just as capable of manipulating the press, think tank reports and other coverage to blunt public backlash against them. Just because the watermelons are for something isn't necessarily a reason to oppose it; you have to look carefully at everything, preferably with an understanding of the underlying reasons and mechanisms. If you don't have this understanding yourself, take your cues from someone who both has one and has taken the time to explain it in ways which can be checked. Dogma is the enemy, we need to fight it with reason. I've read Lomborg's book, and it is very long on endnotes and short on real supporting evidence; worse, the researchers cited by Lomborg have often disagreed violently with the conclusions he reaches based on their work. This reflects poorly on Lomborg.
(OT re command economies and authoritarian regimes: China's pall of pollution is so bad that it is affecting crop yields. The sources I can find mention pollutants such as ozone and SO2, but I recall reading that soot directly reduces plant growth by cutting off the supply of energy (sunlight) to the plants. China in particular still uses lots of coal in individual coal stoves, leading to the same emissions which caused the killer fog in London in 1952 (here's the NPR feature). These emissions would be drastically reduced if China gasified that same coal in a central plant and piped it through cities as "town gas".)
The first page states a claim that is very difficult for the global-warming denialists: "...since 1980, the solar constant has steadily decreased by 0.02 percent per year."
My nit with ag subsidies and whatnot isn't necessarily their size, it's their corrupting influence. The amount of money spent is secondary to the damage it does, which can be all out of proportion.
The legal way to do this is with something like FormFucker, but it will probably not take long for spammers to get lists of legitimate CC card blocks to mechanically verify card numbers (to use one example). Re-using real information is immune to that workaround.
Charged particles are another ballgame altogether. I'm told (remember, IANAP) that the rate of energy loss of a charged particle in dense matter is strongly speed-dependent and it goes up as the speed goes down (see other posters re: Bragg peaks). This allows a beam of charged particles to be calibrated for depth, because it will run into a "sand trap" as it loses energy going through tissue and deposit most of its energy close to the end. I've heard of pions (pi mesons) being used for radiation treatment for just this reason.
Antiprotons would be another quantum leap (pun intentional) in effectiveness. The energy the antiproton spends busting molecular bonds and making free radicals on its way in is only the beginning. When an antiproton hits a nucleus, it annihilates a proton and forms three pions (pi+, pi-, and pi0). The pi0 is its own antiparticle and decays into two gamma rays which probably don't do much, but the pi+ and pi- are also heavy charged particles. If they aren't moving very fast they would deposit most of their kinetic energy within a very short distance of the site of annihilation, busting up more molecules and making more free radicals. Then they decay to muons (which are pretty hard to stop and probably wouldn't do much from then on). On top of this, any nucleus heavier than hydrogen is going to be transmuted by the loss of the proton, changing its chemistry if not shattering the molecule it's in from the momentum change. That makes antiprotons a triple-threat.
Free radicals do things like chewing up proteins and slicing DNA strands. Enough of this and even a cancer cell can't function, and it dies.
However, the Yarkovsky effect on Earth is going to be much smaller (probably unmeasurably small) than on a sub-kilometer asteroid for these reasons:
- Earth's atmosphere and oceans buffer the temperature changes, leading to less variation in IR emissions per rotation and thus less net thrust.
- While the net IR emission is proportional to the intercepted sunlight and thus the area of Earth's disc (proportional to radius squared), the acceleration is inversely proportional to the mass (which is proportional to radius cubed). On top of this, Earth is denser than typical asteroidal rocks, due to its iron core and compression of lower layers to denser mineral forms.
It would be interesting to calculate the likely influence of the Yarkovsky effect on Earth, as a high-school physics exercise (like calculating the De Broglie wavelength of a moving car). I suggest this exercise to you, for fun; if nothing else, it will give you an idea of how hard it is likely to be to measure it.