The biggest surprise at last Friday’s Consumer Reports’ press shindig: no plug-in electric – gas hybrid Chevy Volt. Not a mock-up. Not a mention. Oh, GM was there– with two hydrogen fuel cell Chevy Equinoxes. So never mind all that talk of “reinventing the automobile.” At “The Future of the Car,” the car of the future’s just like your current ride, only cleaner and, mostly, a lot less practical.
The major message from manufacturers’ reps at the scenic East Haddam, CT auto test site: incrementalism. Brett Hinds bragged about Ford’s EcoBoost (formerly Twin Force). Ford’s Advanced Engineering Design and Development Manager called their 3.5-liter V6 twin-turbocharged direct injection engine “a near-term solution… with improved fuel economy and less CO2.”
Diesel loomed large– in more ways than one. Audi’s Christian Bokich claimed that European manufacturers had refined diesel engine efficiency for two decades. He alluded to racing TDI Audis recently at American Le Mans and Sebring. But the Audi Q7 TDI, which will launch next year, is a porky (>5000 lbs) torquey (406 lb-ft) gas-guzzling (25 mpg highway) SUV.
Not to be outdone (as if), Rob Moran of Mercedes said MB is planning an ’09 release for a gas – electric hybrid S400 (with lithium ion batteries) and a diesel hybrid. According to Rob, despite the higher cost of diesel over gasoline, oil burners offer a 15 percent lower cost of ownership. According to Consumer Reports’ literature, fuel accounts for about 26 percent of the cost of new car ownership over five years. Never mind.
BMW’s Dave Buchko (he of the TTAC press car ban) quoted an Environmental Defense Fund report that concluded that BMW’s fleet average for CO2 emissions dropped by 12.3 percent between 1999-2005– despite bigger engines, bigger, safer cars with “six airbags instead of one, ABS, ESC, etc.”
Two new offerings glossed BMW’s green sheen. Their new 2.0-liter, four-cylinder twin-turbo 123d belts out 204hp/290 lb-ft while sipping 45/50 mpg (Euro-only, Euro specs). And the new 335D, a 3.0-liter variable twin-turbo 265hp and 425lb-ft@1750 rpm inline six, rates 23/36 mpg (USA specs). Buchko reports he achieved 37 mpg on the way back to headquarters last Friday, at 75 to 80 mph (tsk-tsk). Both cars were a hoot to drive around CR’s aggressively windy, hilly test track; the engines felt very refined. Alas, no clutch stateside on the 335D.
Nonetheless, burning a gallon of diesel emits about 15 percent more carbon dioxide than gasoline, so diesel mpgs exaggerate their greenitude (BMW in particulate).
The somewhat ad hoc nature of the event was belied by the presence of a three-wheeler that looked like it’d lost its way to Boston’s Larz Anderson Auto Museum’s annual microcar show, and two backyard battery electric conversions.
Floor the 1989 Jetta EV conversion and it feels like someone’s [barely] pushing. The other: EV: a 1981 DeLorean (of course). When the absence of commercial non-hybrid battery electrics was noted in the discussion, Jennifer Watts of the Electric Drive Transportation Association said, “We’re all looking to see how the Tesla performs.” (Join the club.) She also mentioned A123, an MIT battery-building spinoff [still] hoping to supply the Volt’s cells. Unfortunately, these pose no apparent threat to ICE.
Honda’s hydrogen fuel cell FCX Clarity has the understated elegance associated of an Audi inside and out. The FCX’s crisp steering and handling, and responsive acceleration, comes with just a hint of a whine from the power plant. If you live in LA and you’re lucky enough to be Jamie Lee Curtis, you can lease one for $600/month for three years. The range is 280 miles, similar to an RX-8. The EPA fuel economy is 74 mpg equivalents on combined cycle.
The General currently boasts more than 100 fuel cell vehicles on the road. GM’s Dan O’Connell noted that 40 customers have driven GM’s fuel cell vehicles roughly 350k miles. The Equinox SUVs “average close to 50 mpg equivalents, and have a 170 mile range.” The Equinoxes feel a little bloated, and they kick you in the pants when you first hit the gas.
O’Connell said that real world fuel cell reliability is improving, costs are falling, and it’s all Big Oil’s fault. “I’ve seen little evidence of motivation to delivery hydrogen on the part of oil companies,” he asserted.
Spencer Quong of the Union of Concerned Scientists, (who did not attend the event) told TTAC that the auto manufacturers have made huge progress on fuel cells over the last ten years. But “they’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit,” and success is by no means assured. “We’re hoping in ten to twenty years you’re going to see a cost effective vehicle.”
If global warming is as urgent as experts would have us believe, the CR green car hoe-down indicates that manufacturers are fiddling while Rome burns (ice caps melt, etc.). If not, well, get a new four-banger Bimmer and party on!
I bet you needed waders at that convention. Talk about saving the wristwatch. This is what happens when marketing, corporate, legal and technical bump into each other.
The shame of it all are the Euro vehicles we cannot buy. Who could imagine Europe being easier to sell a clean diesel than the US. Maybe we need to change the elected leadership here at more than just the presidential level.
Was the food good?
CR avoids being corrupted, but they do their best to corrupt.
In Canada autos contriute just 20% of our greenhouse gas emissions, seems sort of a wasted effort to really claw back Auto’s when others are the source of pollution. Autos are highly visible though, industry, not so much.
That said, it’s a place to start I suppose. I guess my plans for a car that burns styrofoam isn’t going to work then?
…burning a gallon of diesel emits about 15 percent more carbon dioxide than gasoline…
But burning a gallon of diesel also gets you 15 percent more energy, or in this case, distance. So the carbon-dioxide emission is a wash.
@ Michael Karesh
Potential conflicts of interest: The wrap sandwiches were good, and the cookies and coffee cake were superbly decadent. I had enough calories for three normal days. Also, the young women from CR and the PR agency contractor were beautiful and extremely helpful.
@ yankinwaoz
that’s my point.
Sun spot activity is at its lowest level in 100 years. Solar wind has almost stopped. The next ten years will be much colder than normal.
Based on historical data, energy consumption will rise, agriculture will suffer a 25% shortfall and someone will realise, eventually, that climate change was 99% influenced by our good old friend, the sun.
CO2? Who cares?
austinseven :
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Sun spot activity is at its lowest level in 100 years. Solar wind has almost stopped. The next ten years will be much colder than normal.
Based on historical data, energy consumption will rise, agriculture will suffer a 25% shortfall and someone will realise, eventually, that climate change was 99% influenced by our good old friend, the sun.
CO2? Who cares?
Shhh. We mustn’t question the AGW orthodoxy.
Er, BMW is an interesting one to greenwash. According to the NHTSA, they have routinely failed to meet the CAFE targets, and blithely pass along the cost of the fines to their customers.
austinseven
Since the Sun Belt is the fastest-growing part of the US and contains nearly half the population, I’m suspecting our domestic energy consumption will naturally go down a bit (less A/C usage in summer). But I’m sure that no matter what, the green movement will take the credit for “educating the masses on conservation”
And Oprah will pat herself on the back for pushing CFLs.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Again, people are so anti-SUV and so worked up over oil consumption in cars when the pollution that comes from cars isn’t that big compared to factories and power plants and stuff, yet that stuff gets no attention.
David Holzman: “The wrap sandwiches were good, and the cookies and coffee cake were superbly decadent. .. Also, the young women from CR and the PR agency contractor were beautiful”
Hey, that sounds like a sneaky marketing ploy from CR magazine’s “selling it” page. No fair appealing to the senses! When CU headquarters learns some nice things were said about cars over at the East Haddam test track, they may have the place carpet-bombed.
@romanjetfighter
If the problem is as bad as some think, we need to deal with all sources. The thing that gets me though is the push for a new 55 mph limit. That’s peanuts in the big picture, given that cars are only part of the over all problem. If there’s a problem with co2, tax carbon, and let people decide how to conserve. That, say economists, is the most efficient way to reduce co2 emissions. For some reason, all the would-be micromanagers focus on cars. Like the Boston Globe editorial board.
They might be able to push technology along in fine increments but will anyone be able to educate the consumer out of their ignorance? I mean there are people who use up any efficiency handed to them through larger vehicles, keeping vehicles for fewer miles, or driving more/harder…
Oh wait – we are entering a recession. That’ll educate a few people…
… solar activity peaked at around 1985-87, and has been declining ever since. In contrast, temperatures have continued on an upward trend that extends far earlier than 1985. Looking at longer-term data, the authors also found that measures of cosmic ray fluxes haven’t displayed a clear trend since the 1960s.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/07/11/modern-warming-sun-down-temps-up
“BMW in particlate”
Clever line, but I was wondering if there was any reason behind it. BMW’s gas engines are particularly clean so does that then reflect badly on their diesels, or are their diesels worse than average for clean emmissions?
Regardless of what the biggest culprit in the greenhouse effect is, it’s still stupid for us as a species to sit idly by as tons of carbon dioxide are put into the air, if not for greenhouse gases than for public health and to prevent such known problems as acid rain.
Hybrids, clean diesels, natural gas and other clean technologies need to be used more often in the long term, in cars, power plants, and factories.
if not for greenhouse gases than for public health and to prevent such known problems as acid rain.
Excess sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are the primary cases of acid rain. Sulfur dioxide is mainly a byproduct of coal fired power plants. Nitrogen oxides are a byproduct of gasoline engines and is largely controlled through the use of catalytic converters. Carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the production of the more destructive forms of acid rain.
If you want to reduce the effects of acid rain, look to the power plants that burn coal, not the cars that burn gas.
Ah. OK, I didn’t know that.
Regardless, cutting down on carbon dioxide is hardly a bad thing and I still think it would generally be good.
austinseven, that argument is thoroughly discredited. Continuing to repeat it will not make it otherwise.
@Landcrusher
That was RF’s joke.
If the BMW diesels are as clean as they are refined, they’re very clean.
There was also a Smart at the CR event. Driving it reminded me a little of driving a VW Real [old] Beetle, in a good way–light, responsive. But it would be much more fun with a clutch. A car like this shouldn’t have a slushbox. And what a slushbox. When it shifts, it goes, kaaaa-CHUNK.
Sorry to argue, faster than rabbit, but I guess you’ll have to wait and see what this winter holds for us all for me to prove my point in the matter. Each of us can point to studies and research, graphs and statistics.
Reality / facts are coming down on the side that the globe IS cooling down rapidly and has been since 1998 or so, and the prominent theory seems to be it’s naturally related to the sun.
Google Maunder Minimum for a preview of what we will be seeing for the rest of our lifetime – or beyond. About 70 years.
Actually there were several minimal sunspot periods in a row from about 1270 through 1815 and the Maunder Minimum was only one of them.
Ever heard the term “mini-ice age”? That was it.
In case you all weren’t paying attention, Iran, South Africa – places not exactly known for snow – got significant cold and snow for the first time in their winter within the last year.
There are thousands of REAL scientists being told to shut up right now about it – being told to toe the line and back the CO2 nonsense. One more winter ought to do it. Two, tops.
Perhaps about this time next year or the year after, we can all hope that Al Gore will have shut his stupid face and this nonsense false-religion of CO2 will finally find it’s place in history with idiotic non-science like the world being flat and the universe revolving around the earth.
Guys! Guys! (and any women who happen to be lurking): I don’t think anyone is going to convince anyone else who has already made up their mind on global climate disruption. But I’m curious: is there anyone who either was undecided about the issue, and made it up on the basis of arguments put forth on TTAC, or who had made up their mind and actually changed it on the basis of such arguments?
For me, it’s the 32000 prominent scientists who signed this petition
http://www.baileycar.com/petition.html
…this nonsense false-religion of CO2 will finally find it’s place in history with idiotic non-science like the world being flat and the universe revolving around the earth.
Ok, look, I realize I was wrong about acid rain… but non-science? The world is flat? These ideas were never seriously accepted by science.
The greenhouse effect is real. It is demonstrated on other planets, specifically Venus. The real question is whether we should worry about it or not.
I would argue that in the long term, increased carbon dioxide emissions could have the ability to affect the Earth’s temperatures. It is not something that is an immediate threat to life on planet Earth, but it is something we need to work on in the future. We need to be careful as a species before we make blanket assertions that our actions on Earth are “beneficial” or not.
I would recommend using nuclear power to replace coal power, using more natural gas power plants and cars, use more wind and solar power, and work also on making sure our charities are able to give money directly to helping farmers in third-world nations, so they don’t have to resort to deforestation to make more farmland. Destroying dictatorships can help get more aid to the poor, allowing more trees to survive; these trees, as they absorb greenhouse gases, would be better able to negate the greenhouse effect than would cutting back on large cars and trucks.
With sun spot activity quieting down or just to say simply the cooling of the the suns energy providing less heat in the next 10 years. I am happy the Co2 and methane (maybe the primary culprit in rise in temperature) increases have occurred.
Without these man made heat blankets to help us to maintain the proper temperatures to grow our crops we may avoid another mini-iceage that would have been disasterous to all these folks needing food. That includes US because we could have a summer without a decent crop if it was not for these blankets of methane and CO2.
Phil Bailey For me, it’s the 32000 prominent scientists who signed this petition
http://www.baileycar.com/petition.html
I found the petition and randomly googled four signers. Three had no google hits except for the petition, demonstrating that IF they are scientists at all, they are not prominent. The fourth worked at a mining company.
Sunspots.
Geeze, people, do you think the IPCC and its members just ignore the big, burning ball of gas in the sky when it does it’s calculations? Hint: no, they don’t.
From sourcewatch.org:
“The most commonly cited study by skeptics — by Usokin, Schussler, Solanki and Mursula — also found that the correlation between solar activity and temperature ended around 1975. At that point, temperatures rose while solar activity stayed level. This led them to conclude that, “during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”
Ok, so no net increase in solar radiance. Well, shit, that shoots that theory, doesn’t it?
I’ll ask this question, because I never get a good answer: Who benefits from pushing the “reduce emissions” angle? A few scientists and some green companies, all together with perhaps a few million dollars in clout. Most of these people will be working in research labs regardless of whether the earth heats or cools, and haven’t a whole lot of financial incentive.
Now, who benefits from not reducing emissions? Major multinational corporations with billions of dollars in clout and more billions in profits at risk.
Similarly. these companies have done a wonderful job snowing “average Americans” into believing that there’s massive disagreement in the scientific community (there isn’t) or that there’s some kind of green conspiracy afoot, or that the green movement is somehow elitist, top-down and anti-American, while, amusingly, it’s the titans of the stock market and their multimillion-dollar marketing budget on one side, and a bunch of pencil-necked climatologists on the other.
This sounds a whole lot like the tobacco industry in the latter half of the twentieth century. The deniers and skeptics all had serious money at risk, and fought a very dirty campaign to muddy the waters of debate. Did any of the anti-tobacco forces reap anything near what the cigarette companies have lost?
Maybe it’s just my inner underdog, but I have a real hard time fostering the idea that Exxon et al have my best interests at heart when they pumps millions into AGCC groups, and who-knows-how-much more into direct lobbying.
People, please, see through the hype you’re being fed and realize that you’re being adroitly manipulated by some very rich people who have a lot to lose by reducing consumption and really don’t care at all about the climate
But I’m curious: is there anyone who either was undecided about the issue, and made it up on the basis of arguments put forth on TTAC, or who had made up their mind and actually changed it on the basis of such arguments?
No, but it helps to see what people come up with. I’ve learned a lot researching and rebutting points, and it’s helped my understanding in general.
I don’t expect to change people’s mind, but I do hope they’ll think a little more about where their opinion is coming from. I think people are too willing to take for granted all the facets of their ideological bent without critically examining where they came from. It happens on both ends of the spectrum, and it’s dangerously shallow thinking.
Look, I’m a leftist. I won’t change, but I don’t hold a compete set of traditionally leftist views: I’m more or less pro-life, don’t have a great love of unions, don’t support protectionist trade and don’t think totalitarian socialism is a good thing. I also don’t like Greenpeace’s motives and many of it’s staff, though I think their goals are noble.
I got this way through informed debate.
I’ve met many people who I don’t agree with, but I can at least respect their point of view. I’ll certainly respect anyone who says “I think that reducing emissions is too costly for our economy, and here’s why…”. I may not agree with them, but they’re at least truthful and earnest. But I don’t see that anymore, though, because the industry is too afraid to take a stance and instead prefers to greenwash itself while silently discrediting their opposition. And thusly, I see people repeating astroturfed skepticism put forth by industry who are too cowardly to say that, really, the problem is dollars.
It’s like what passes for political debate: it’s not about issues or platforms, it’s about taking your opponent down a notch. And that’s shameful and ultimately self-defeating, and both sides of any issue are discredited in the eyes of the mainstream, and apathy breeds as a result.
psar,
While I appreciate your attempt to follow the money, and examine incentives to shed more light on the subject, you aren’t getting it quite right.
Your conclusion is off because you are not taking into account the drive for personal fame, power, and money. Also, you aren’t taking into account the individual utility for money, nor the access to press.
The scientists are often people whose whole work and social lives are wrapped up in this issue. They have a lot of faith in science and contempary understanding of it. They see some evidence, buy into it, and they are done. Then you have the vast majority of researchers whose whole careers will be about reproducing work of others, or otherwise adding to it marginally. Bucking the trend on this issue is simply not likely for most of them. They aren’t going to outright lie on purpose, just go along.
So, personal fame wise, you have lots of folks successfully getting lauded for supporting man made warming, while those who shoot it down run into a LOT of very nasty opposition. Overall, I simply discount “consensus” among scientists. It’s crap.
When it comes to power, both sides are in a strugle, but the scientists aren’t really looking for power, but their allies in politics and the press are. Those folks can take an issue like this, and use it for a LOT of power. And, they have been.
The CEO is fighting with the politicians and the press for power over regulation and property. The stakes are high. The CEO can hire scientists, but the pols and press don’t have to. Then, we poo poo the industry paid scientist while the other side’s guys are supposedly pure. They can reward their scientists without writing a check from their own pockets. The money and other rewards get to the scientist just the same, but it isn’t a direct payment. It’s much more hard to resist than a pay off, it’s a career.
So, we get to personal utility for money. Let’s assume we have two people who are simply willing to bend the facts for money. Who is more likely to lie in order to gain a quarter million dollars over three years? The scientist is! The CEO wouldn’t risk even an already soiled reputation for that amount of money. That’s the sort of thing you are missing.
It’s also why you see a lot of rich and powerful people signing on to the green thing. They have figured out its not worth the fight. Or they need a cause, but the bottom line is that the regulations aren’t going to hurt them much. They can take the Al Gore route. Sure, it costs a lot of green to appear green, but they have LOTS of green.
So, you can see that all the sides have skin in the game, and that the incentives are plenty strong for all the players. Especially since you completely underplay the money involved in greenmail and green innovation. Regulatory changes can mean taking VERY large revenue streams from one group of folks and handing it to another. Often, it’s a matter of getting something banned, like freon, for which the replacement is something controlled by someone else. Especially when the replacement is SPECIFIED EXACTLY by the government, rather than fairly setting standards for solutions. Upwards of BILLIONS change hands in these deals, and LOTS of academics get large checks for patents, research, speaking, lobbying, testifying, etc.
The bottom line is that most of the big company executives have it made. They really have much less incentive than most of the folks involved on the other side to make stuff up. Most also have a built in restrained approach to these sorts of things or they would not have gotten to the top of the companies they are leaders of.
Given the incentives, I think this thing is playing out just as one would expect it would. It’s not going to change until we manage to change the incentives for academia and the press (I assume their will always be power hungry politicians).
Landcrusher, you’re certainly correct that fame is a big motivator for scientists. Nonetheless, the average scientist isn’t getting much. And the wide open niche is that of the contrarian. What fame is there in asserting the consensus?
Same thing within the press. I know because I’m a member of the press. I’ve been in situations where I watched editors seek contrarian views to write about.
Finally, one of the leading proponents of anthropogenic global climate disruption is John Holdren, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science a few years ago. He was my professor in 1974, the year the notion that we were headed for a new ice age gained currency and made the big news weeklies. Around that time, I was taking his class, and he was teaching about global warming, not the new ice age.
To show how highly Holdren is regarded, the MacArthur Foundation once asked Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in economics, to evaluate a MacArthur program for new PhDs. One aspect of hte program was that each had to spend a year away from his or her academic institution. The majority found the program highly disruptive, Schelling told me. “But three people who had gone to Holdren’s program at Berkeley said it had been the greatest year of their careers.”
It’s also notable that insurance companies are now worried about global climate disruption.
David,
Fame was too strong a word, my bad. Recognition might be better. I meant things that range from CV stuffers up to things that get you invited to speak or help sell books or getting your paper published.
I also believe there was a big change in academia that followed the bloating of it in the sixties. Things simply got much more competitive by the eighties, and it changed science for the worse.
I am not familiar with Holdren, but while I give him credit for sticking to his guns, nothing I have seen anywhere would lead me to believe that the silly little crap we hear will change the world is really doing that. Theoritically, it might make a difference in a big way, but in reality it seems to have made a differnce in very marginal ways.
Insurance companies? I rank them below politicians for integrity. Your average insurance exec will say ANYTHING to protect his company and toe the line. Sounds like they are simply angling for higher prices. They spend less to figure out actual causes than they do on comfy chairs for their fat arses.
Your conclusion is off because you are not taking into account the drive for personal fame, power, and money. Also, you aren’t taking into account the individual utility for money, nor the access to press.
A valid point, but there’s a huge amount of press and fame waiting for whomever publishes a defensible, peer-reviewed climate change study that says dumping carbon into the atmosphere has negligible effects.
Even with other hot-button issues, the autism/vaccination debate being a big one in terms of money and political impact, there are opposing studies both with equal merit. In the incredibly superheated field within particle physics there is no end to contrarian theories, and proofs or disprovals granting rockstar status to the person or group in question.
With climate change this flat out hasn’t happened. Not one “real” study has cropped up, despite the big, fat brass ring waiting to be grabbed, and the amount of money that industry is throwing at it.
The reason? Saying “large-scale carbon emissions have no real effect climate change” would be tantamount to “smoking has no real effect on lung cancer”. That is, completely incredulous unless the data was there to back it up. There’s a reason why all you see quoted are bullet points like “solar activity may also contribute to global climate change”, “cooling may be observed under certain circumstances” or “scientists disagree on effect of polar ice cap recession” that get twisted and abused.
No one, but no one, is calling whole concept idea bunk; what they are trying are Stupid Lawyer Tricks to make the argument look weaker without actually rebutting the core statement. Science is not a court of law or a media scrum. Skeptics and journalists don’t seem to understand this:
* All theories are theories.
* Scientists disagreeing on detail is normal, and does not invalidate the core theory
* All theories are evolving
* Yes, Virgina, anyone can get published in a peer-reviewed journal as long as your data is solid. Pons and Flieschmann were certainly offered the chance; Pharmaceuticals get published all the time.
They can take the Al Gore route. Sure, it costs a lot of green to appear green, but they have LOTS of green.
Al Gore is a speaker, not a scientist. He makes money because he’s well known, has media contacts and can push an agenda. Saying that every IPCC scientist is Gore in potentia is really just a way to galvanize those who don’t like Dear Al anways. Al Gore is an Inconvenient Lightning Rod, and while it’s all well and good to poke fun at him (or froth at the mouth, as some are wont to) it’s just distraction activity.
The CEO is fighting with the politicians and the press for power over regulation and property. The stakes are high. The CEO can hire scientists, but the pols and press don’t have to. Then, we poo poo the industry paid scientist while the other side’s guys are supposedly pure.
Not true. Exxon could fund a lot of useful climate science through all sorts of totally above-board means. They can publish their results any time they like. They can present the theory at IPCC summits for review.
Again, there’s that big, sucking hole where that refutation should be, but isn’t.
And what I’m sure this will get refuted with is the standard “Green Conspiracy” tack. But again, there’s a whole lot of money available to all those industries (Oil, Manufacturing, trade unions, banks that hold investments in the aforementioned) and somehow we’re to believe that the green conspiracy is the more powerful one? That’s incredibly hard to swallow, coming from companies with a track record for sweeping environmental disasters under the rug.
psar,
I have been too long winded today already. However, didn’t Exxon do exactly what you suggested? Haven’t some folks also done some really scientific debunking on much of the data used as evidence? Doesn’t anything I have written about the problems with the Academy lead you to think that “peer review” ain’t what it used to be?
The better a study debunks the whole thing, the more it’s authors are shouted down and ostricized. The only way we will likely end the fight is one of the formerly well loved theorists coming around and admitting that he may have not really known what has research was telling him.
Hey Landcrusher,
psar and Holzman have already responded quite well to this issue, and as Holzman has already pointed out there’s no way any one of us here will convince the other to change their view so it is unnecessary to state any further facts.
However, two points in your last post I have to address. I have to say that all of your rhetorical questions have negative answers, if Exxon has recently produced a serious scientific study that has debunked the CO2 – global temperature relationship then I have yet to read it. (Hopefully it’s not one of the articles in this list http://envirotruth.org/516.html)
Even more importantly, the whole anthropogenic global warming debate can be ended rather easily. There’s no need, as you suggested, for something as dramatic as a former theorist coming forth with some illuminating scandal.
Simply; if average global temperatures roughly drop to the 1920 levels in 20 years while atmospheric C02 concentrations continue to increase at roughly the same rate, then AGW will be looking seriously flawed. If such a thing happens, I’d be willing to renounce my beliefs about the affects of C02 on global temperatures. I’m sure most others would as well.
My question is, what would it take for YOU to admit you were wrong? If global temperatures continue to rise along with C02 over a 10-20 year period (and of course, global temps have actually decreased SLIGHTLY each year since 2004 despite increased C02) would that be enough evidence for you to accept AGW? If not, then what are your own falsifiability thresholds? Just curious.
Q,
There was a reason I asked, rather than stated that Exxon did that. I thought I heard something to that effect. It doesn’t matter though, because anything Exxon pays for is obviously wrong. They could put out a free, perfectly correct, 2nd grade math book in the name of reducing education costs and corporate responsibility. It would instantly be derided as a conspiracy. Of course, it would be a conspiracy, because 2nd grade math is nearly enough to debunk most of the conspiracy theories involving Exxon.
What will it take for me? Frankly, I don’t know anymore. I have likely become too skeptical of our scientists and the academy in general. I used to have lots of friends in grad school. I still have an inside line to much of the BS that goes on in our top universities. It’s sad. Maybe I have an overly rosy view of how science is supposed to be, but I am not deluded about what goes on.
How about I say this, when they get weather forecasting down a lot better, I will loosen up.
You shouldn’t be so easily convinced yourself, of proof the theories are wrong though. When the data started turning against them, the global warming crowd simply changed their tune from warming to climate change. They also set up the whole thing as a logic trap. You see, it could happen any time, but when it does finally happen, it will be too late for us to change our evil ways. C’mon, they should get specific, make their predictions, or go back to the basement and record more data.
Lastly, it wouldn’t take someone coming forward with an illuminating scandal. It’s not a conspiracy as much as it is a systemic failure. What it would likely take is someone simply saying either they made a mistake interpreting what their study actually told them, or that the community read improper conclusions into their work.
The problem with contesting global climate disruption is that it satsifies Occam’s razor quite well.
1. The mechanism is plausible. CO2 and methane both allow solar radiation to pass through, while blocking radiation of the wavelengths reradiated by earth. So if you argue against a potential global heating catastrophe, you have to come up with good reasons why the effect will be negligible.
2. climate change history correlates pretty well with the amount of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere.
3. were seeing the world’s glaciers and the greenland and arctic ice melting at unprecedented rates.
I hope the global heating people are wrong. I love internal combustion, don’t want no stinkin’ electric, and am tired of feeling cognitive dissonance every time I take advantage of the power available from my vtec at high revs.
I’ve done some hypermiling, and I really don’t like doing it at all; it’s just that I sometimes get obsessive about seeing how many mpgs I can squeeze out.
But I’m not going to be on global heating being wrong.
Hey Landcrusher, I’m on your side with the whole dilution of science thing. I hear you loud and clear. But what can I say? This time it’s for real – the climate data which has been around for decades suggests it. Unless the data is wrong, the chances of AGW is very high.
Like David Holzman says, everyone who loves cars here (and hey, I can’t exactly claim to be helping with carbon emissions given the V8’s I adore) is praying for AGW to be all wrong. But the data is simply too strong at this point for me.
Always enjoy your posts and articles David. (Btw, are you the NYU economists professor by the same name? Keep up the good work.
Qusus,
Thanks for the complements. No, I’m not the NYU economist, and I actually tried googling my name and economist, and didn’t come up with anyone. But there are lots of David Holzmans, including a noted concert pianist, a banana rancher, an Austin tX middle school science teacher, and numerous doctors and scientists. My father, Franklyn, was a Tufts U economist.
Alas, no clutch stateside on the 335D
No clutch anywhere on the planet for the 335d, 535d, 635d, or the X3 and X5 with the same engine.
Shame on BMW