[Macros]

well diesel aside, 30 mog is reltively conseraviteive /9(super/ sports/ racing caes asiode
) i pretty dfuckinking consercvative

[Cold Iron]

I agree, but lay off the guiness

[Macros]

Fortunately I don't often consume the black stuff, so I don't have its accompanying beer belly, however my vodka consumption is currently destroying me,
worst hangover ever

[caladanbrood]

Damn, I really wanted someone to mention Hydroelectric power here so I could lay down the smack

[paladin]

Cold Iron;294070 said:

Hey macros i don't think diesel is all that common in the US, it's mostly petrol. And paladin, like your government, you are being way too conservative, you're letting your companies tell you how to legislate, that is not free market.

the free market works by making it yourself or asking someone to make it for you, along with not buying what you dont want. as people stop buying suvs and ask for hybrids, guess what, more hybrids are on the roads and selling great.

the top vehicles bought in the us are still v8 and v6 pickup trucks. not sedans or sportscars or suvs. and gasoline, not diesel. we tried diesel and it didnt catch on and the distribution and cost of diesel at the pump dont support bringing it back at this time.

as far as japanese vs american emissions, from what i understand theres not much difference when you go vehicle class by vehicle class. emission standards and mpg standards go up every year or few years and every manufacturer meets them or they cant sell the car. california has the most stringent standard and nearly every vehicle is 50 state ready, meaning it meets the most stringent standard.

[Macros]

I'm curious why your civic is only getting 35 mpg then.

[paladin]

thats the fuel rating assigned to the vehicle after road testing by the EPA

for the 08 model year this has went down for almost all vehicles in the US. the EPA has changed how they calculate it because the estimates were best case scenarios rather than typical scenarios.

the base civic models average 29mpg for this model year under new standards.
the civic si models average 24mpg
the civic hybrid(gas/electric) averages 42mpg
the civic natural gas car averages 28mpg

real world performance will differ based on the amount of city driving, highway driving, traffic, a/c, etc, but the new standards they released for measuring these average mpgs seem to be working pretty well, and if anything they still are optimistic

[Macros]

I see said the blind man, so with the new standards 30mpg is reasonably stringent, fair enough. Considering most of my driving is city driving at the minute sticking with a diesel is really the only option for me despite its higher price, its so much more economical when tootig around town its ridiculous

[cerveza_fiesta]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e...s_by_Sector.png

Accepting of course that wiki ins't flawless and the data is from 2000, this is still a nice compilation of GHG emissions by sector.

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/...equivalents.asp

and taking into account that different GHGs have different global warming potentials. This means that methane is about 21 times as potent as CO2 and NOx is about 310 more potent as CO2 at warming up the planet. CO2 is the baseline because although it is the most abundant, it is the least potent of all GH gasses.

EDIT the line-through statement below isn't true, I misinterpreted initially. The calcs I did below basically double-weight the graph, so I guess it's more of a proof of concept now

[linet]The wiki graph is calibrated in weight units [/linet](tons, megatons, whatever), which is a convenient number to represent the true amount of gas being emitted. When you look at it, you can plainly see that about 14 percent of the GHG emissions come from transport fuels (disregarding for a second that this encompases cars and the transport industry). Power plants emit about 21 percent, Agriculture about 13 percent and industry about 16.8 percent, globally.

It's not enough to talk just in amounts though, because different GHGs warm the globe at different rates. So you have to rate the gasses according to their potency. The pie charts say CO2 is 72 percent of the whole amount contribution, CH4 about 18 percent and NOx about 9 percent. The extra 1 percent I assume is a catchall for the other GHGs not big enough to represent here (assume makes an ass of u and me...blah blah I know shut up). Weighting the amount contributions by impact gives an impact index number.

CO2 - .7 x 1 = .7 this equates to 3% of the impact contribution
CH4 - .18 x 21 = 3.78 equates to 12% of the impact contribution
NOx - .09 x 310 = 27.9 equates to 86% of the impact contribution

This index number basically means that 1 ton of CH4 has 21 times the effect of 1 ton of CO2. Likewise, 1 ton of NOx has 310 times the effect of 1 ton of CO2. Speaking in terms of total impact number GHG contribution, we need to change the distribution of the little pie charts to say basically that CO2 contributes much much less to global warming effect than is represented by the ton-amount charts.

Now go back to the by-industry contribution. Transportation is 14 percent of the whole amount contribuition, but it is mainly produced in the low-impact form of CO2 emissions and a small amount of NOx emissions. A similar situation exist for power production and industry.

Compare this with agriculture. It possesses a smaller amount contribution than transportation, but it's contribution is lodged firmly in CH4 and NOx emissions, which are incredibly much more impactful than CO2 emissions.

When you compare sectors on the basis of their contribution to global warming impact, the numbers get VERY different from what's generally represented in environmental literature and the media. When viewed in this light I don't understand everybody's crazy fixation with CO2 emissions and controlling transport, industry and power generation. It seems to me that more research should be going into producing agricultural technologies that emit less or capture more of the truly dangerous GHGs like methane and Nitrous Oxide.

It goes back to what (I think paladin??) was saying before with diminishing returns. If you are investing crazy amounts of time and money in upping the efficiency on auto engines and power plants a few fractions of a percent, couldn't you take that same money, put it into increasing farm based biomass methane-capture technology a few fractions of a percent and get a much much better result?

I'm asking here too...not purporting the above as gospel. Just think about it and tell me if my logic makes sense. If GHGs aren't all created equal, wouldn't it be better to really focus in on the contributors having the greatest impact and save the less impactful ones for later?

[Macros]

I new methane and Nox were worse than CO2 but never thought it was on that kind of scale. Methinks people focus more on CO2 because its EASIER to be seen to do something about it with regards to car emissions and the ike. There are means to bringing down agricultural methane discharges (apart from the obvious cork in the animals ass solution) but methane collector/ digestor (whatever the correct term for the giant poop bins is) are simlpy not viable for most farming units, in the UK anyway. The big land farms that could do it are mostly arable, for smaller beef/ dairy units its simply too expensive and impractical to change from the basic slurry tanks into the eco friendly units.

[cerveza_fiesta]

That's precisely why I mentioned the diminishing returns thing. If changing CO2 emissions is having a minimal effect, why not dump all that money into incentives and farmer support programs so they dont have to personally bear the cost of digestor / eco friendly whachimicallit upgrades?

Also, it's not just methane and NOx. There are a lot of other extremely high-impact GHGs that comprise the remaining 1% not mentioned in the wiki graphs. Some of them, like the ones in this link

http://www.climatechangesask.ca/html/learn...ming_potential/

can have even more horrible GHG potential impact.

It's the same reasoning they use when banning CFCs to protect the ozone layer. Rather than focusing on the most common ozone depleters, they zeroed in on the CFCs since they were having the highest impact. By phasing out the worst ones, we've actually slowed the thinning of the ozone greatly and reversed it in some areas like overtop of antarctica.

Gov't intervention is totally the key, because it ends up being the most effective incentive in the absence of economic and market factors. I just wish they'd shift this ridiculous focus off CO2. They're forcing power plants to sacrifice 20% of their efficiency in my area just to bottle CO2 from the flue gasses and pump it underground. It's insane when you think about all the money and time they're wasting on a program that will have such a minimal impact compared to what they could be doing.

[Macros]

thats a good point, but over here anyway people would NOT be happy to see more money going to farm diversification and upgrading seeing as the industry is largly surviving on subsidies as it is.

[cerveza_fiesta]

That's one of those hilarious little inconsitencies in western society anyways. In Canada the farm industry is in rough shape and no gov'ts will send enough money to the farmers to help them out and keep them in business. Then when the beef market or the wheat market crashes because our product is so poor, we have to start importing the same products at a much greater cost. Then everybody bitches and moans about the cost of food. It's not me or peopel like me doing the bitching because we have enough income that it doesn't matter. It's always the social assistance-collecting shrubs and the poor that get hit the hardest by food price hikes. Somehow the link is never made that if they didn't bitch and moan so much about not receiving enough assistance, there might be some money left over for the farms and the whole situation could be avoided in the first place.

Fuck I hate democracy. Politics are always squarely in the way of everything. I'm starting my own country.

EDIT...I take that back. I just wish folks would look at situations a little more objectively before going off and implementing half-cocked "solutions" that will have little to no effect. There's so much pressure for immediate action by everybody (including environmental lobby groups) that it just seems stuff isn't getting thought through. Gov'ts are implementing solutions that don't make good scientific sense on the basis that they look good and get votes.

[paladin]

diminishing returns would apply here definitely. other than moving every gasoline car to hybrid technology, there really isnt much more you can do significantly to cars that use internal combustion engines.

nationmaster is a great resource for statistics as it is unbiased and offers no analysis, just quantitative data.

NOx emissions per population center: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_nox_...-populated-area

NOx per capita: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_pol_...ides-per-capita


SO2(sulfure dioxide) emissions per population center: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_so2_...-populated-area

CO2 per capita: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_co2_...ions-per-capita

Pollution control spending as % of GDP: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_exp_...ion-control-gdp

[Cold Iron]

This is embarrassing but I always assumed (god only knows why, I should have known better, I'm usually a big media sceptic) that those pie charts were already impact weighted. This changes everything.

Ok, potential for impact, I think this story was posted on this board when it was released, in light of our massive bell ringing from our friend cf, this could save us all:

http://news.bbc.co.u...fic/2023371.stm

[cerveza_fiesta]

I'm gonna put a massive disclaimer on my post above that the argument is entirely incumbent on those wiki graphs not being weighted by impact but amount only. It didn't say whether the graphs were weighted that way or not.

My post was mainly aimed at showing how environmental statistics, even those on the side of "right" can be pretty convincing even though they might not be showing you the truly relevant data at all. I'll try and get more background on that graph.

EDIT ok so I found that graph again and it is weighted by global warming potential so basically, I double weighted the whole thing in my analysis. Whatever, demonstration of concept at any rate.

So those wiki graphs as-is are probably a good picture of what's going on and who are the major contributors to global warming.

It kinda shocked me after I did that analysis to find out that transportation would be such a minimal contributor. It makes more sense now.

[Cold Iron]

Thank god the world is normal again. You scared the shit out of me cf.

[Cold Iron]

Ok news time:

Narwhals Threatened by Polar Melt
Greenhouse Gas Emissions 'On Wrong Track'

Quote

The average level of CO2 in the atmosphere increased by 2.4 parts per million in 2007, bringing the total to nearly 385 parts per million. Pre-industrial levels were around 280 parts per million.
...
More surprising to climate researchers is that atmospheric methane levels increased this year by 27 million tons, after a decade of staying relatively constant.

Great news.

[Zanth13]

another damn sandstorm... I dont know if its a climate change but when i was over here in 2006 we didnt have this many...

fuck sand...

You want to know what its like?

Go out into the fog, but instead of fog its sand... now eat the sand... and get sand paper and rub it all over your body... now eat the sand paper...

then get some nice refreshing eye drops and switch it out for sand drops and drip it into your eye...

then make a glass of water but minus the water and add sand and drink it...

I fucking hate this shit and its going to get worse next week I hear...

This is not the fucking country for me... I swear I will never come any where near this country for a fucking vacation...

[Cold Iron]

and you are where?