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Debating climate science will get this thread shut down pdq, so how about talking about cars instead?

YouTube insisted that I watch the following, which I did purely because of the title.



I immediately thought of @Garno and his YouTube dependency issues, but it fits in here, too. A 4hp engine you can hold in one hand seems to be a bit of a breakthrough. Not electric, but may be an interim stopgap in increased efficiency.
 
how fast do you think the waters are going to rise? lol
Sadly, much faster than you think. Over 40 years ago I was taken on a tour of the Woolwich barrier just before it officially opened, by one of the engieers in charge. He explained "London was sinking and surge sea levels rising but the barrier and flood protection walls along the banks of the Thames would keep us safe for 60 years, at the then rate of sea level rise." Not many of those 60 years left ,especially as the rate of melt of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has dramatically increased in recent years.
 
Yes but you might pick it up one day.
If you weren't so young, and busy eating your avocado toast and sipping your fancy coffees, you might have picked up on the Marriot Edgar reference, especially in a woodworking forum...
"Well the rain showed no sign of abating
And the water rose hour by hour,
'Til the only dry land were at Blackpool,
And that were on top of the Tower."
 
If you weren't so young, and busy eating your avocado toast and sipping your fancy coffees, you might have picked up on the Marriot Edgar reference, especially in a woodworking forum...
"Well the rain showed no sign of abating
And the water rose hour by hour,
'Til the only dry land were at Blackpool,
And that were on top of the Tower."

Who knew as well as running all those hotels he could also write poetry.
 
I know its not woodwork or EV cars but thanks for this reference

I've just looked him up. I always thought the Stanley Holloway wrote his own stuff. It proves you don't have to be young not to know stuff!!
I think most people thought Stanley Holloway wrote it.
Anyway, that particular poem is very relevant to woodwork.
 
Debating climate science will get this thread shut down pdq, so how about talking about cars instead?

YouTube insisted that I watch the following, which I did purely because of the title.



I immediately thought of @Garno and his YouTube dependency issues, but it fits in here, too. A 4hp engine you can hold in one hand seems to be a bit of a breakthrough. Not electric, but may be an interim stopgap in increased efficiency.


Has something happened? Rotary engines were always more compact but less efficient (and the torque is very poor). We had them in RC airplanes and they advertised high horsepower specs, but couldn't swing as big of a prop for a given horsepower spec (maybe when both the wankel and recipro engines were wide open they could, but the same power wankel choked under a prop that the recipro engine could handle).

Same in chainsaws - they ran OK wide open, but chainsaws do need some torque and the novelty wore off quickly.

mileage here or the Rx mazda cars was always poor, and the harder you drove them, the worse they seemed to get relative to a piston car doing the same thing.
 
Sadly, much faster than you think. Over 40 years ago I was taken on a tour of the Woolwich barrier just before it officially opened, by one of the engieers in charge. He explained "London was sinking and surge sea levels rising but the barrier and flood protection walls along the banks of the Thames would keep us safe for 60 years, at the then rate of sea level rise." Not many of those 60 years left ,especially as the rate of melt of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has dramatically increased in recent years.

6-8 inches of rise in the last 100 years according to the google monster. Is the thames issue also partially due to lack of flooding like we have with the mighty missespissi?

The delta here sinks about 10mm a year due to lack of sediment - sea level rise is supposedly around 3mm a year. I don't know if the sink rate is gross or net, the article that I read doesn't explain.
 
not really an Ev but I had a Mk1 Mazda sport with the rotary in it....
cost to much too fix it so I put a 3liter Ford V6 in it......same kinda M.P. Gallon but if flew.....
wish I had it now......
 
Risk is often expressed or defined in terms of a 1 in 100 (or 500 or 1000) year event.

A (say) 20cm rise in sea level may not appear to be great - deep enough to drown in if you lie down, but if walking comes half way up the shin.

However the distribution of events around which the risk is expressed tend to cluster around the mean. An extreme event, be it temperature, wind speed, river level etc, comes at the ends of the distribution curve.

The impact of a small change in the mean value may have the effect of turning what was (say) a 1 in 100 year event into a 1 in 25 year event - 4 events now exceed whatever threshold level is considered acceptable. This is a massive change in risk even though the value change is fairly trivial.
 
Those are the kinds of things insurers puzzle over because catastrophic infrequent rates are difficult to insure. Also complicated by the desire here in the states to build in those areas (river valleys here - so the mentioned mississippi sediment isn't something that can be reversed - the delta shall continue to sink even if the sea level were to cease moving - which it won't do....but even worse, building of expensive homes in coastal areas using federal program coordinated insurance. ).

The hurricane that went through jersey here years ago did a lot of damage to houses held mostly by real estate speculators (think $4MM houses on 1/10th of an acre on little island areas - some considerably more expensive than that). There was some outrage that insurance for those homes is covered under a federal program (hard to cut out the folks of means without taking out the few who are not) - in reality, 80 years ago, that wasn't a good place to build a house so few people did and the houses they built were bungalows that would cost little to repair or replace.
 
Just saw this vid and it is interesting for what Rachel Maddow says about BEVs and the F150 and is why I say it is a game changer


This is very significant. When the most popular car in the US goes electric that says a lot about how quickly the market is changing. Its a a mugs game to predict the future, unless you make the future which Ford et al appear to be doing.
 
Found out the other day a Toyota hydrogen powered car did 1003 km on one charge, admittedly in special circumstances and as a publicity exercise but on the public road. It's normal range is 650 km, just over 400 miles with a recharge time similar to filling a petrol tank. Obviously without the infrastructure in place we won't all be buying Hydrogen fueled cars any time soon, the most likely starting point for this technology to be adopted on any significant scale is buses and delivery vans operating from city center depots where the impact on air quality would be huge. It shows it can be done and with a significant range.
 
I think it would take a whole lot more "Damage" to make it unlivable for people - not that we're incapable. But we could very well have our attitudes adjusted by a giant volcano eruption.

It would be a fun thing to take up a pool to see if anyone can guess what the next crisis will be after carbon.
Crisis is a matter of personal perspective, and selling newspapers. You raise an interesting question. What is a crises.
Our industrialised economy of 7 billion people is big enough to dangerously change the planets environment, so we will be subjected to unexpected changes/crises from time to time.

To me what distinguishes the CO2 driven climate crises is its sheer scale and challenge in dealing with it.

We are used to crises. Some natural such as the volcano example you site, others man made such as the smog, the poisoning of UK rivers by sewage and pollution in the 1950s,
1622893622908.png


A foaming rivers crises emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s was dues to man made detergents that could not be broken down by microbes in the water. 1965 legislation banned certain types of detergent. DDT was a wonder insecticide which in 1945 was a major life saver as thousands of refugees were deloused and in particular eliminating typhoid/typhus spread. However it had a devastating impact on wild life - the bald eagle etc and after Silent spring was published in 1962 it was steadily replaced following a ban in the US in 1972. All of these product bans were initially disruptive and cause costs to rise and affected employment, but they were managed and necessary for our planets heath and survival. We will continue to live through them as more 'unexpected effects' emerge from our technologically driven economies. In my view these things are normal adaptations to change.

I have some personal experience of the Montreal protocol, when I first joined ICI in the 1980s the ozone hole had been discovered in 1985 and really quite quickly the culprit was identified as CFCs which were regulated out in 1987/9 - interestingly lead by Thatcher and Reagan. Who realised that the ozone hole would have a devastating effect on people and crop yields. I saw the effect this had on ICIs businesses are plants making £200m per years of products had to closed over a 8 year period and new products had to be found. Ultimately it lead to several thousand redundancies as the whole technical support departments were closed down. I recall at least two people died while on re-deployment, one dropped dead on the bus home and we wondered at work if it was related to the stress of seeing their careers ended.
DDT took about 20 years from early data on bird death to a ban in 1972. with CFCs the first chemical hypothesis was published in 1974 and governments started to fund research into the issue in the late 70s. In 1985 the hole was observed and by 1987 the protocol was agreed and came into effect in 1989 - four years after the hole was observed. This is perhaps an unusually quick example, it became clear that rapid action was needed and leaders from the right of centre in the US and EU were on board.

We have natural disasters, its believed that a volcanic eruption in Indonesia (Sumatra) in 542 was con9ncident with the first global pandemic, it lead to two missed summers - a huge climate change and is thought to have caused a change in the plagues spread, the Justinian plague wiped out between 20% and 60% of the European population and effectively ended the Byzantium empires control of the west. It was a natural event. The same with the Black death in the c13th.
1622896339002.png
the last rights administered to victims of the plague of Justinian 543.

Returning to the theme of man made crises. These will continue to be created and will need to be resolved. A classic is the 1960s green revolutions. Green Revolution - Wikipedia at the time about 1 billion people were facing starvation in Asia Africa and south america and this was averted by developments of new drought resistant rice and later corn varieties. Its know as the green revolution and can be traced back to various key individuals such as Norman Borleung, who saved 100smilloin lives. However these advanced enabled the worlds population to grow exponentially from 3bn to 5 bn over that 20 year period.

1622897065821.png

We now have the challenge to stabilise the global population and to mitigate the effects of the green revolution on the environment. Its a challenge that will eventually lead to a crisis is nothing is done.

Returning to Climate change. I can think of now bigger issue.

Our entire economic prosperity is based on cheap fossil energy. It has fuelled enormous growth for the past 100 years. The change to zero carbon economy is the biggest technological change in history. We managed evolutionary changes at great pace as oil replaced coal as the dominant fuel source in the early 20th century, but this change is bigger and faster than anything before. It requires changes to nearly all basic man made materials, fuels, steel, concrete. Nearly everything we buy will need to be made differently. Food production is responsible for 25% of Co2 emissions so changes to agriculture and our diets will be needed. I cant think of anything on this scale that has happened before.
 
Neither can I (in terms of scale and longevity), but panic isn't the answer. Solving problems is the answer. Actual analysis and problem solving (which often includes "we're not sure at this point") bores most people. It's not thrilling, it doesn't satisfy a lot of peoples' desire to listen to and be swooned by charisma, and the fantasy stories distract from solving the actual problem.

Truthfully, if the population continues to explode, I don't see the problem getting solved any time soon. Even if it doesn't, I don't, but if we pat our backs about carbon emissions per capita declining 20% or 50% and population doubles....

.....when it becomes economically gainful to mitigate the problem, that's when we'll see far greater appeal to doing so. Until then, the "scary story" narrative will dominate.
 
Whilst some people have multiple houses, cars, gadgets, almost a billion people live in abject poverty. Whilst we can send men into space we cannot fund the basics like clean water for tens of millions of people.

That is where the stupidity comes in.
That's free market capitalism....i.e. Greed not stupidity.
 

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