Do you really think that SpaceX developed all of Falcon 9 with just $248M?
No. The number I quoted of $248 Million was the portion of the NASA contract that had already been paid by NASA before the first flight. The payments from NASA continued after that. According to the Space-X web page, "The Falcon 9 launch vehicle was developed from a blank sheet to first launch in four and half years for just over $300 million." By the end of second COTS flight in May 2012, NASA had put in $396 million, paying for the development and two demo flights
see http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/003/120602crs/ : "NASA invested $396 million into SpaceX under a public-private partnership agreement signed in 2006. The space agency released payments to the California-based company as it met design, testing and flight milestones."
or http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/649910main_cots2_presskit_051412.pdf :
"To date [i.e., May 1 2012, just before the COTS-2 launch] Space-X has received $381 million for completing 37 out of 40 milestones worth a possible $396 million in that [COTS] agreement."
That also covers Falcon-1.
No, that doesn't cover Falcon-1. That wasn't part of the Commercial Orbital Transportation contract, and NASA didn't pay for development of Falcon-1.
My point was that NASA paid for development of the Falcon-9; and it was not true that (as the post I originally responded to claimed), "government had nothing to do with it." If you want to say "yes, but it was remarkably inexpensive," or "yes, but they didn't pay for development of Falcon-1", or "yes, but private capital was invested to build up Space-X in the first place," or "yes, but private companies contracting with the government is a cost-effective way for NASA to do business," sure, all of these statements are fine; I agree.
I think NASA is also paying a slight premium as they have been moved up ahead of other customers on the launch manifest and other "special treatment".
Well, considering that NASA paid for the development of the booster, which wouldn't even exist if NASA hadn't funded it, they didn't exactly "move up ahead of other customers"-- they were the first customer, and others came in after NASA demonstrated that it worked. I'd call "we bought in to this when it was just a concept, and paid to make it real" is a good reason for "special treatment".
The development of Falcon 9 was paid by NASA. You are correct that NASA contracting does not work by cutting a large check and saying "tell us when you're done": contracts have set milestones with incremental payments as work is accomplished. However, these milestones are for things like passing critical design review. Even before the first flight of Falcon-9, they had already received $248 million dollars of NASA funding. (http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/453605main_Commercial_Space_Minutes_4_26_2010.pdf )
The engines, however, were an incremental improvement over the Falcon 1 engine; so you're right in that the original engine development was not a NASA project.
So on that subject, did these guys get paid this time? I'm curious what they charged NASA, what they actually spent on this launch (not R&D costs to get here, just costs to build, fuel and launch)...
The spacex website says a falcon9 launch is $54mil for 2012.
That may be the cost quoted on the website, but they are charging NASA $133 million per launch. Development costs and the costs of the demonstration flights were charged (also to NASA) separately.
"SpaceX and NASA signed a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract in December 2008 for 12 flights to the space station through 2015." http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/003/120602crs/
You do realise the dragon capsule is owned by private company? Nothing to do with government or military
You do realize that the development cost of the Dragon-9 launch vehicle and the cargo transport capsule was paid for by NASA? This is hardly "nothing to do with government."
(The small rocket (Falcon 1) was privately financed.)
Right, in May they demonstrated docking to the Space Station, but it wasn't a supply mission, it was a launch and docking demonstration flight. That first flight did carry some miscellaneous stuff and some student experiments, but it wasn't carrying supplies critical to station operation.
As the summary says, this was the first actual contracted supply mission.
Sorry, their conclusions are just not statistically justified.
Let me review what they found: Compared total caffeine consumption of less than 125 mg/day to greater than 500 mg/day: no significant result Compared abstain from caffeinated coffee to greater than 3 cups of caffeinated coffee daily: glaucoma relative risk in the interval 1.09 to 2.54 Compared consumption of (caffeinated soda, caffeinated tea, decaffeinated coffee or chocolate) to non-consumers of same: no significant result
That relative risk that they quote as being significant has a confidence interval with a lower end of 1.09; which is only barely above 1.0 (1.0= no effect). So, they studied one particular variety of one particular minor disease (of many health effects). Finding one effect at a trivial level is meaningless.
The point of the article was a person who was the lynchpin in starting a business out of nothing and turning it into a rising star is often not well suited for steering a growing corporation, that is, managing a team that's grown large enough that not every decision is made by consensus of all the participants. When the business moves to this state, arrogance and stubbornness--the very qualities that made the "brilliant jerk" indispensible during the incubation of the company--make them jerks to the company trying to go mainstream.
True enough.
The correct way to deal with this is to divert them away from the corporate leadership structure and into a new start-up venture, where being brilliant and pig-headed once again becomes an asset. A good "brilliant jerk" can probably spark four or five new companies before the rough edges get worn off. Look at Steve Jobs, for example.
Interestingly, I had that idea (offensive cyber security) about 5 years ago, but was told by the TLA...
And William Gibson talked about offensive cyber security quite a few years before that-- he called it Black ICE. (ICE = Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics)
Well, yes, that is true; however, the government (which is making these rules) belongs to us. Do we chose to have intrusive searches using mostly-unproven technology? What our choice in the matter of giving away our privacy in the battle between fear and freedom?
You need to abide by the rules of the road as set forth by the governing bodies, or find another way to travel. It's really that simple.
And, likewise, the TSA needs to "abide by the rules as set forth by the governing bodies, which, as far as I can see requires a period of public comment, something that the TSA has failed to do. So, if somebody is "failing to abide by the rules," it apparently is the TSA
Quit whining and just go through it. Trust me, nobody really wants to ogle your naked outline.
Whether you, anonymous coward, choses to think that somebody else's privacy concerns, or safety concerns, are valid or not is not your business
Thanks for that link. Quoting the most relevant passage from it:
"Many experts agree that, on a national level, the United States is ready for a vast expansion in electric cars. According to a 2008 Energy Department study, the effect of a vast expansion in electric vehicles could be minimal. Electric vehicles are expected to account for around one quarter of the market by 2030. If those vehicles are all charged after 10 p.m., when electricity demand is low, the nation would require no additional power generation. "
Which is pretty much just what I just said.
Later--after repeating "In most residential areas, an EV can easily be accepted into the charging infrastructure"--the article goes on to point out that if you get too many EVs in one area, you will need "'some kind of a strategy for adapting to it,' according to Allan Schurr, vice president of strategy and development for energy and utilities at IBM."
Fine. Most residential areas have no problem, but, OK, some areas may need "some kind of strategy" to deal with a high number of vehicles all in one place. So we may have to deal with it. That's not "a giant fail" (your words) on the electrical grid.
Oh, and yes, electric vehicles require energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere. Yep, that's true. Nobody that I know of ever claimed that they didn't.
As another poster pointed out, you are basically advocating people own two cars unless by chance they fit into precisely the range of an ev 99% of the time.
Not at all. Once again, here is what I said: "...(and most households in the US have two or more vehicles)..."
I'm not "advocating" that households own two cars, I am stating that most US households already do have two cars.
Again: electric vehicles are good for some but not all applications. About the only comment I have on all the replies to the effect of "but they're not good for all applications!" is that this agrees entirely with what I said: some but not all.
...And of course, the far larger unsaid is the giant fail that EVs are on the power grid were they to be widely adopted. Ignoring the question of sourcing of raw materials for the necessary power, the grid in most major metro areas is barely able to handle today's peak demands.
No, I'm sorry, but no. To the contrary: currently, the peak electrical power usage is typically early afternoon. If electric cars charge overnight, when power is in oversupply, they fit superbly into the existing power structure.
If it turns out to be a problem that people plug in their cars at 6pm but the off-peak hours don't start until 10pm, that can be easily solved with a timer. Implementing a time-of-day dependent rate structure would also help, but no change in the grid itself is needed.
Er... what good are those stats? Is your commute to work to only driving you do? Do you ownly make one trip in the car each day?
Here is what I stated: "...for a second vehicle (and most households in the US have two or more vehicles), electric is completely practical."
So: if I make a longer trip, I'd use my wife's car. I suppose that there could be days in which we both, separately, need to make long trips; but I can't think of it having happened offhand.
If 25% of the time I am going to be driving well beyond the electric range the car is worthless, even if my 'average' trip is within that range.
What I'd written was: "Whether an electric car is practical or not depends on application." If your application is one in which 25% of the time you're driving beyond the electric car range, well, for your application an electric car is not practical.
Electric is practical for some applications, not all applications. For your quoted requirement of extended range 25% of the time, a plug-in hybrid instead of an all-electric might be the right choice. Or maybe not; depends on what exactly you need. Some applications.
If you live close enough to work and a store to commute on a single charge, and have a second vehicle in the household for longer trips it makes sense. I think that this niche is a lot bigger than the current market - electric vehicles are still much more expensive than equivalent compact cars.
Exactly. Whether an electric car is practical or not depends on application.
There are millions of people for whom electric cars perfectly fit their requirements. If you're thinking "replace 100% of the cars in use"-- well, yes, that is impractical. But there are large segments of the market for which electric is practical today.
In 2009, the average length of a car trip was 10.1 miles; the average length of a commute to work was 12.6 miles. http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw615.html My commute to work is considerably shorter. Most usage of cars could be done easily with electric vehicles, with recharge overnight at home. Not all-- however, for a second vehicle (and most households in the US have two or more vehicles), electric is completely practical.
The point is to make electric cars for the uses for which they are well adapted. If you want a vehicle to take a family of four on a camping trip from New York to Yellowstone, an EV is not the right choice. If your application is a seven mile commute for one person in Atlanta, along with occasional trips to the grocery story, it may be exactly what you need. It may be a "niche" market by some definitions, but there are a 443 makes and models of cars sold in America-- there's room for many niche vehicles to sell perfectly well.
(Another interesting point is that electric vehicles are more practical in regions south of the snow belt, unless you have plug-in stations at the destination that can keep the batteries warm. A practical EV for Alaska is a harder technology than making EVs for Los Angeles!)
If you're a vegan, I hope for your own sake that you take various (artificially produced) supplements - there's no way to obtain all the necessary nutrients from a purely vegan diet if it's purely natural.
I'm no vegetarian, but nevertheless, I do have to inform you that there are large segments of the world that are vegetarian, including (for example) about 6 million Jains. You may think that you need meat to survive, but no, actually, people can survive without meat. Sorry.
That's not new. No smiles in Ohio, either-- I renewed my license over a year ago, and was quite firmly instructed that smiles were not allowed in drivers license photos because it screws up the facial recognition software.
As I said, no amount of data can change the mind of people who are determined to not pay attention to data.
Climate scientists publish all the time. They don't "hide their data and methods," nor "share only with people that agree with them"-- the whole point of peer-reviewed research is to publish and get the data out there in the community. I really, really, suggest that you should read the IPCC WG-1 report; http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html ; it won't change your mind (since you've determined you aren't interested in changing your opinions), but at least it will allow you to argue with some actual knowledge, instead of simply parroting the third-hand opinions of people who simply assert that climate scientists are frauds.
...Let's go back to that computer model.
What do you mean by "that" computer model? At the moment I'm aware of nineteen major global circulation models, being run by groups in America, Canada, France, Australia, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Korea, UK, Norway, and Sweden, but I'm sure that there are more. You talk as if there's one model, that's made one prediction. There are a series of many different global circulation models, run by many different institutions, dating back nearly fifty years. (The earliest real global climate model incorporating convective/radiative transfer with an assumption of constant relative humidity was Manabe and Wetherald, 1967; but I've referenced that so many times I'm tired of it.)
A bunch of amateur software developers
"Amateur." Well, that's a charge that's impossible to refute, since whoever does it, I'm sure you will just say "they're amateurs." One of the major models was the Los Alamos model, for example; their experience in running finite-element supercomputer models of fluid and thermal transfer comes from the fact that they model nuclear weapons explosions. But I'm sure you can say "oh, they're amateurs" if you want to. Yeah, nuclear bombs probably don't even work, it's all a hoax. The National Center for Supercomputer Applications? Amateurs. Yeah, sure.
Pretty much all of the supercomputer centers in the world have worked on climate models over the last fifty years. "Amateurs." Yeah, right. Whatever.
with no source control, no data integrity and no experience with formal software engineering procedures
And for that matter, the majority of the computer models, including the source code, are publicly available-- many of them are even on the web.
are claiming to model something that is incredibly complex using what is by definition an abstraction. Do you understand what an abstraction is? Doesn't sound like it.
Yes, a computer model involves making abstractions. All equations are abstractions, for that matter, but guess what? Physics still works.
Perhaps you'd want detailed numerical models to match with the back of the envelope calculations, and you'd want to ask nineteen different groups on four continents to make different computer models; you'd want temperature measurements taken from a variety of different methods-- say, ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite-- to all agree; you'd want satellite measurements of infrared; you'd want vertical temperature profiles...
WIthout denying that anthropogenic CO2 represents a problem (I'm an advocate on cap-and-trade, which for some reason people who know nothing about economics call a "tax") I'm skeptical of the authority of climate models. Unlike the people writing climate models, I'm a computational physicist, and I've done far too much work on far too many systems where apparently "minor" approximations and unphysical parameterizations result in wildly unphysical results.
Well, except that the highly detailed models show the same overall behavior as the globally averaged models without details. The original 1967 Manabe and Wetherald model is still within error bars of the best detailed results we have. It seems to be a no-win situation: when the climate-denier spin started up, in the late '80s, the criticism was "the models aren't detailed enough, there might be effects we can't see without fine-detail modelling." Now that the models are fine detailed, the charge is "the models are too complicated! You can't believe them!"
...So I'm concerned that the active and irrational denial community has in fact resulted in a complementary phenonmenon in opposition, where the model results are vastly over-sold, both in terms of their correctness and the magnitude of likely consequences: there can be no admission that the effects of additional CO2 might be modest in most areas and positively beneficial in some, or the denial community will have won, seems to go the thinking.
"What are the effects?" Is an entirely different question from "is the science right in saying that human-generated carbon dioxide has an effect on climate."
While this does have potentially horrendous consequnces (I consider any energy plan for the 21st century that involves the word "coal" a pretty horrendous outcome) it also creates significant risks for the credibility of science, as the real uncertainties in the models are not being discussed as forthrightly as they ought,
I just don' t know what you mean by that. The quoted uncertainty in the models, at the moment, is that the temperature rise is between 2 and 4.5 degrees C per doubling. That's a huge uncertainty. In what way is it "not being discussed forthrightly"?
Watts published an entire paper on siting problems for temperature recording stations.
Again: the point is that it isn't just one set of data that is suspect-- multiple groups on many continents, measuring temperature in many different ways, all show consistent results, and these results are all very much what is explained by the (well understood) theory. Isn't it a bit unlikely that this exact same bias would show up in satellite measurements, which don't depend on ground stations at all? In gravity maps of polar ice thickness? Not to mention in the Berkeley "BEST" project to reanalyze the temperature record, which reproduced pretty much exactly the same results (his is the project that Watts--the guy you just cited--specifically said would do a thorough and unbiased job.)
But in any event, even temperature going "all the way back" to the 1800s doesn't do much to help us with the problem of a geologic time scale.
Wow, is this the new denialist position? "We can't know anything about global warming on a time scale of decades, for which which we have many extremely good measurements by multiple independent methods,unless you can show direct, well-calibrated measurements that go back a hundred million years at least. And since you can't do that, global warming isn't real!" Talk about unfalsifiable!
So, unless you're suggesting some hithertofore unsuspected place that the CO2 from burning that coal is going, I'd say it's a pretty definitive smoking gun.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think that SpaceX developed all of Falcon 9 with just $248M?
No. The number I quoted of $248 Million was the portion of the NASA contract that had already been paid by NASA before the first flight. The payments from NASA continued after that. According to the Space-X web page, "The Falcon 9 launch vehicle was developed from a blank sheet to first launch in four and half years for just over $300 million." By the end of second COTS flight in May 2012, NASA had put in $396 million, paying for the development and two demo flights
see http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/003/120602crs/ :
"NASA invested $396 million into SpaceX under a public-private partnership agreement signed in 2006. The space agency released payments to the California-based company as it met design, testing and flight milestones."
or http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/649910main_cots2_presskit_051412.pdf :
"To date [i.e., May 1 2012, just before the COTS-2 launch] Space-X has received $381 million for completing 37 out of 40 milestones worth a possible $396 million in that [COTS] agreement."
That also covers Falcon-1.
No, that doesn't cover Falcon-1. That wasn't part of the Commercial Orbital Transportation contract, and NASA didn't pay for development of Falcon-1.
My point was that NASA paid for development of the Falcon-9; and it was not true that (as the post I originally responded to claimed), "government had nothing to do with it." If you want to say "yes, but it was remarkably inexpensive," or "yes, but they didn't pay for development of Falcon-1", or "yes, but private capital was invested to build up Space-X in the first place," or "yes, but private companies contracting with the government is a cost-effective way for NASA to do business," sure, all of these statements are fine; I agree.
I think NASA is also paying a slight premium as they have been moved up ahead of other customers on the launch manifest and other "special treatment".
Well, considering that NASA paid for the development of the booster, which wouldn't even exist if NASA hadn't funded it, they didn't exactly "move up ahead of other customers"-- they were the first customer, and others came in after NASA demonstrated that it worked. I'd call "we bought in to this when it was just a concept, and paid to make it real" is a good reason for "special treatment".
I suggest you should read up.
The development of Falcon 9 was paid by NASA. You are correct that NASA contracting does not work by cutting a large check and saying "tell us when you're done": contracts have set milestones with incremental payments as work is accomplished. However, these milestones are for things like passing critical design review. Even before the first flight of Falcon-9, they had already received $248 million dollars of NASA funding.
(http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/453605main_Commercial_Space_Minutes_4_26_2010.pdf )
The engines, however, were an incremental improvement over the Falcon 1 engine; so you're right in that the original engine development was not a NASA project.
The statement "nothing to do with government" is incorrect.
If you want to go on and say "yes, but it was very inexpensive," that's a different topic.
So on that subject, did these guys get paid this time?
I'm curious what they charged NASA, what they actually spent on this launch (not R&D costs to get here, just costs to build, fuel and launch)...
The spacex website says a falcon9 launch is $54mil for 2012.
That may be the cost quoted on the website, but they are charging NASA $133 million per launch. Development costs and the costs of the demonstration flights were charged (also to NASA) separately.
"SpaceX and NASA signed a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract in December 2008 for 12 flights to the space station through 2015."
http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/003/120602crs/
$1.6B/12 launches = $133.3M/flight
The issue is energy. Energy (required to reach orbit) is too expensive.
The actual energy cost of getting to orbit is quite low-- about 30 MJ/kg; that would cost well under a dollar a kilogram at today's electrical prices.
The problem is that exponential in the rocket equation (along with the fact that you can't pause halfway).
You do realise the dragon capsule is owned by private company? Nothing to do with government or military
You do realize that the development cost of the Dragon-9 launch vehicle and the cargo transport capsule was paid for by NASA? This is hardly "nothing to do with government."
(The small rocket (Falcon 1) was privately financed.)
Right, in May they demonstrated docking to the Space Station, but it wasn't a supply mission, it was a launch and docking demonstration flight. That first flight did carry some miscellaneous stuff and some student experiments, but it wasn't carrying supplies critical to station operation.
As the summary says, this was the first actual contracted supply mission.
Wow-- that's a feature, not a bug.
(Well, the bees themselves are bugs.)
Sorry, their conclusions are just not statistically justified.
Let me review what they found:
Compared total caffeine consumption of less than 125 mg/day to greater than 500 mg/day: no significant result
Compared abstain from caffeinated coffee to greater than 3 cups of caffeinated coffee daily: glaucoma relative risk in the interval 1.09 to 2.54
Compared consumption of (caffeinated soda, caffeinated tea, decaffeinated coffee or chocolate) to non-consumers of same: no significant result
That relative risk that they quote as being significant has a confidence interval with a lower end of 1.09; which is only barely above 1.0 (1.0= no effect). So, they studied one particular variety of one particular minor disease (of many health effects). Finding one effect at a trivial level is meaningless.
Ob xkcd: http://xkcd.com/882/
This bacteria refines gold compounds.
More accurately, it reduces gold. That is, it makes gold metal from gold ions.
The point of the article was a person who was the lynchpin in starting a business out of nothing and turning it into a rising star is often not well suited for steering a growing corporation, that is, managing a team that's grown large enough that not every decision is made by consensus of all the participants. When the business moves to this state, arrogance and stubbornness--the very qualities that made the "brilliant jerk" indispensible during the incubation of the company--make them jerks to the company trying to go mainstream.
True enough.
The correct way to deal with this is to divert them away from the corporate leadership structure and into a new start-up venture, where being brilliant and pig-headed once again becomes an asset. A good "brilliant jerk" can probably spark four or five new companies before the rough edges get worn off. Look at Steve Jobs, for example.
Interestingly, I had that idea (offensive cyber security) about 5 years ago, but was told by the TLA...
And William Gibson talked about offensive cyber security quite a few years before that-- he called it Black ICE. (ICE = Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics)
Flying is a privilege, not a right.
Well, yes, that is true; however, the government (which is making these rules) belongs to us. Do we chose to have intrusive searches using mostly-unproven technology? What our choice in the matter of giving away our privacy in the battle between fear and freedom?
You need to abide by the rules of the road as set forth by the governing bodies, or find another way to travel. It's really that simple.
And, likewise, the TSA needs to "abide by the rules as set forth by the governing bodies, which, as far as I can see requires a period of public comment, something that the TSA has failed to do. So, if somebody is "failing to abide by the rules," it apparently is the TSA
Quit whining and just go through it. Trust me, nobody really wants to ogle your naked outline.
Whether you, anonymous coward, choses to think that somebody else's privacy concerns, or safety concerns, are valid or not is not your business
No, but global warming is threating the viability of the cacao growing areas, messing up the rainfall patterns.
Bull. We're panicking enough about the bacon, let's not make shit up.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/global-warming-could-make-chocolates-expensive/articleshow/11266989.cms
http://www.ibtimes.com/global-warming-makes-chocolate-dearer-322831
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/10/local/la-me-gs-valentines-day-destroyed-by-climate-change-20120210
Thanks for that link. Quoting the most relevant passage from it:
"Many experts agree that, on a national level, the United States is ready for a vast expansion in electric cars. According to a 2008 Energy Department study, the effect of a vast expansion in electric vehicles could be minimal. Electric vehicles are expected to account for around one quarter of the market by 2030. If those vehicles are all charged after 10 p.m., when electricity demand is low, the nation would require no additional power generation. "
Which is pretty much just what I just said.
Later--after repeating "In most residential areas, an EV can easily be accepted into the charging infrastructure"--the article goes on to point out that if you get too many EVs in one area, you will need "'some kind of a strategy for adapting to it,' according to Allan Schurr, vice president of strategy and development for energy and utilities at IBM."
Fine. Most residential areas have no problem, but, OK, some areas may need "some kind of strategy" to deal with a high number of vehicles all in one place. So we may have to deal with it. That's not "a giant fail" (your words) on the electrical grid.
Oh, and yes, electric vehicles require energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere. Yep, that's true. Nobody that I know of ever claimed that they didn't.
As another poster pointed out, you are basically advocating people own two cars unless by chance they fit into precisely the range of an ev 99% of the time.
Not at all. Once again, here is what I said: " ...(and most households in the US have two or more vehicles)..."
I'm not "advocating" that households own two cars, I am stating that most US households already do have two cars.
Again: electric vehicles are good for some but not all applications. About the only comment I have on all the replies to the effect of "but they're not good for all applications!" is that this agrees entirely with what I said: some but not all.
...And of course, the far larger unsaid is the giant fail that EVs are on the power grid were they to be widely adopted. Ignoring the question of sourcing of raw materials for the necessary power, the grid in most major metro areas is barely able to handle today's peak demands.
No, I'm sorry, but no. To the contrary: currently, the peak electrical power usage is typically early afternoon. If electric cars charge overnight, when power is in oversupply, they fit superbly into the existing power structure.
If it turns out to be a problem that people plug in their cars at 6pm but the off-peak hours don't start until 10pm, that can be easily solved with a timer. Implementing a time-of-day dependent rate structure would also help, but no change in the grid itself is needed.
Er... what good are those stats? Is your commute to work to only driving you do? Do you ownly make one trip in the car each day?
Here is what I stated: "...for a second vehicle (and most households in the US have two or more vehicles), electric is completely practical."
So: if I make a longer trip, I'd use my wife's car. I suppose that there could be days in which we both, separately, need to make long trips; but I can't think of it having happened offhand.
If 25% of the time I am going to be driving well beyond the electric range the car is worthless, even if my 'average' trip is within that range.
What I'd written was: "Whether an electric car is practical or not depends on application." If your application is one in which 25% of the time you're driving beyond the electric car range, well, for your application an electric car is not practical.
Electric is practical for some applications, not all applications. For your quoted requirement of extended range 25% of the time, a plug-in hybrid instead of an all-electric might be the right choice. Or maybe not; depends on what exactly you need. Some applications.
If you live close enough to work and a store to commute on a single charge, and have a second vehicle in the household for longer trips it makes sense. I think that this niche is a lot bigger than the current market - electric vehicles are still much more expensive than equivalent compact cars.
Exactly. Whether an electric car is practical or not depends on application.
There are millions of people for whom electric cars perfectly fit their requirements. If you're thinking "replace 100% of the cars in use"-- well, yes, that is impractical. But there are large segments of the market for which electric is practical today.
In 2009, the average length of a car trip was 10.1 miles; the average length of a commute to work was 12.6 miles. http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw615.html
My commute to work is considerably shorter. Most usage of cars could be done easily with electric vehicles, with recharge overnight at home. Not all-- however, for a second vehicle (and most households in the US have two or more vehicles), electric is completely practical.
The point is to make electric cars for the uses for which they are well adapted. If you want a vehicle to take a family of four on a camping trip from New York to Yellowstone, an EV is not the right choice. If your application is a seven mile commute for one person in Atlanta, along with occasional trips to the grocery story, it may be exactly what you need. It may be a "niche" market by some definitions, but there are a 443 makes and models of cars sold in America-- there's room for many niche vehicles to sell perfectly well.
(Another interesting point is that electric vehicles are more practical in regions south of the snow belt, unless you have plug-in stations at the destination that can keep the batteries warm. A practical EV for Alaska is a harder technology than making EVs for Los Angeles!)
If you're a vegan, I hope for your own sake that you take various (artificially produced) supplements - there's no way to obtain all the necessary nutrients from a purely vegan diet if it's purely natural.
I'm no vegetarian, but nevertheless, I do have to inform you that there are large segments of the world that are vegetarian, including (for example) about 6 million Jains. You may think that you need meat to survive, but no, actually, people can survive without meat. Sorry.
That's not new. No smiles in Ohio, either-- I renewed my license over a year ago, and was quite firmly instructed that smiles were not allowed in drivers license photos because it screws up the facial recognition software.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10249834-71.html
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/05/27/states-adopting-no-smiles-policy-for-drivers-licenses/
http://www.webanswers.com/legal/why-can-t-you-smile-in-your-drivers-license-picture-84ffba
As I said, no amount of data can change the mind of people who are determined to not pay attention to data.
Climate scientists publish all the time. They don't "hide their data and methods," nor "share only with people that agree with them"-- the whole point of peer-reviewed research is to publish and get the data out there in the community. I really, really, suggest that you should read the IPCC WG-1 report; http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html ; it won't change your mind (since you've determined you aren't interested in changing your opinions), but at least it will allow you to argue with some actual knowledge, instead of simply parroting the third-hand opinions of people who simply assert that climate scientists are frauds.
...Let's go back to that computer model.
What do you mean by "that" computer model? At the moment I'm aware of nineteen major global circulation models, being run by groups in America, Canada, France, Australia, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Korea, UK, Norway, and Sweden, but I'm sure that there are more. You talk as if there's one model, that's made one prediction. There are a series of many different global circulation models, run by many different institutions, dating back nearly fifty years. (The earliest real global climate model incorporating convective/radiative transfer with an assumption of constant relative humidity was Manabe and Wetherald, 1967; but I've referenced that so many times I'm tired of it.)
A bunch of amateur software developers
"Amateur." Well, that's a charge that's impossible to refute, since whoever does it, I'm sure you will just say "they're amateurs." One of the major models was the Los Alamos model, for example; their experience in running finite-element supercomputer models of fluid and thermal transfer comes from the fact that they model nuclear weapons explosions. But I'm sure you can say "oh, they're amateurs" if you want to. Yeah, nuclear bombs probably don't even work, it's all a hoax. The National Center for Supercomputer Applications? Amateurs. Yeah, sure.
Pretty much all of the supercomputer centers in the world have worked on climate models over the last fifty years. "Amateurs." Yeah, right. Whatever.
with no source control, no data integrity and no experience with formal software engineering procedures
You know, Los Alamos National Labs pretty much invented formal software engineering procedures on supercomputers. And, yes, they do apply it to climate models. (discussed, among many many many other places, here, for example http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~bbd/IJHPCASpecialIssue05/Drake.pdf or here http://www.nd.edu/~gmadey/sim06/Classnotes/Validation/pope.pdf or here http://www.informs-sim.org/wsc98papers/016.PDF )
And for that matter, the majority of the computer models, including the source code, are publicly available-- many of them are even on the web.
are claiming to model something that is incredibly complex using what is by definition an abstraction. Do you understand what an abstraction is? Doesn't sound like it.
Yes, a computer model involves making abstractions. All equations are abstractions, for that matter, but guess what? Physics still works.
Perhaps you'd want detailed numerical models to match with the back of the envelope calculations, and you'd want to ask nineteen different groups on four continents to make different computer models; you'd want temperature measurements taken from a variety of different methods-- say, ground, ocean, balloon, and satellite-- to all agree; you'd want satellite measurements of infrared; you'd want vertical temperature profiles...
WIthout denying that anthropogenic CO2 represents a problem (I'm an advocate on cap-and-trade, which for some reason people who know nothing about economics call a "tax") I'm skeptical of the authority of climate models. Unlike the people writing climate models, I'm a computational physicist, and I've done far too much work on far too many systems where apparently "minor" approximations and unphysical parameterizations result in wildly unphysical results.
Well, except that the highly detailed models show the same overall behavior as the globally averaged models without details. The original 1967 Manabe and Wetherald model is still within error bars of the best detailed results we have. It seems to be a no-win situation: when the climate-denier spin started up, in the late '80s, the criticism was "the models aren't detailed enough, there might be effects we can't see without fine-detail modelling." Now that the models are fine detailed, the charge is "the models are too complicated! You can't believe them!"
...So I'm concerned that the active and irrational denial community has in fact resulted in a complementary phenonmenon in opposition, where the model results are vastly over-sold, both in terms of their correctness and the magnitude of likely consequences: there can be no admission that the effects of additional CO2 might be modest in most areas and positively beneficial in some, or the denial community will have won, seems to go the thinking.
"What are the effects?" Is an entirely different question from "is the science right in saying that human-generated carbon dioxide has an effect on climate."
While this does have potentially horrendous consequnces (I consider any energy plan for the 21st century that involves the word "coal" a pretty horrendous outcome) it also creates significant risks for the credibility of science, as the real uncertainties in the models are not being discussed as forthrightly as they ought,
I just don' t know what you mean by that. The quoted uncertainty in the models, at the moment, is that the temperature rise is between 2 and 4.5 degrees C per doubling. That's a huge uncertainty. In what way is it "not being discussed forthrightly"?
Watts published an entire paper on siting problems for temperature recording stations.
Again: the point is that it isn't just one set of data that is suspect-- multiple groups on many continents, measuring temperature in many different ways, all show consistent results, and these results are all very much what is explained by the (well understood) theory. Isn't it a bit unlikely that this exact same bias would show up in satellite measurements, which don't depend on ground stations at all? In gravity maps of polar ice thickness? Not to mention in the Berkeley "BEST" project to reanalyze the temperature record, which reproduced pretty much exactly the same results (his is the project that Watts--the guy you just cited--specifically said would do a thorough and unbiased job.)
But in any event, even temperature going "all the way back" to the 1800s doesn't do much to help us with the problem of a geologic time scale.
Wow, is this the new denialist position? "We can't know anything about global warming on a time scale of decades, for which which we have many extremely good measurements by multiple independent methods,unless you can show direct, well-calibrated measurements that go back a hundred million years at least. And since you can't do that, global warming isn't real!" Talk about unfalsifiable!
... the laws of physics are exactly the same for human generated carbon dioxide as for carbon dioxide measured in a laboratory...
There's the problem right there. To mangle the quote: You can't very well dust CO2 for fingerprints.
No, but you can get a pretty good idea of how much is getting into the atmosphere from the Mauna Loa data: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full
And we have a pretty good numbers for how much coal is burned worldwide:
http://gregor.us/coal/the-world-turns-to-coal/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
So, unless you're suggesting some hithertofore unsuspected place that the CO2 from burning that coal is going, I'd say it's a pretty definitive smoking gun.