Bob: IM S6 posted:Maybe not a trend, but perhaps a tipping point.
There were other warming seasons in Roman times and middle ages, somehow no one asks about the effect of people or animals in that time. So I can't see that tipping point showing up anywhere as I can't see the trend.
Stan wrote: “I've heard of an experimental process whereby power is "beamed" from towers to a receiver, without the use of wires-- supposedly, enough power to turn on an electric motor.”
Yeah, Nikola Tesla (yes, THAT Tesla) tried to demonstrate that back in 1899. It was only marginally successful (but people walking in the nearby town could feel the electricity in their feet). Think of the massive inefficiency of this system, charging the air everywhere, and maybe 5% is useful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...Experimental_Station
So-called “Super Capacitors” have a limitation, too, called Physics. They are very good at discharging a lot in a short time, not so good at moderate discharge over a longer time (they might be great, though, for vehicle acceleration, like a turbo). There is work being done on graphene (carbon) based super caps, but it’ll be a while before they get out of the lab. Wicked cheap to produce compared to Lithium-Ion (China owns a lot of the Lithium out there) .
As Stan said, I keep waiting for that “just beyond the horizon” ‘Next Big Thing’ to appear.
Still waiting, though.
BTW, when I had my Ham Radio big rig, I could light a 4’ florescent tube hung in a tree many yards from my antenna just by pointing the antenna at it and speaking into the mike. It was all RF (radio frequency) stuff, but it worked from about 600 watts and up.
"As Stan said, I keep waiting for that “just beyond the horizon” ‘Next Big Thing’ to appear."
I just hope the name does not start with an "i"
Electric cars will be almost unnecessary once they put in all those monorail commuter trains we were promised back in the sixties. Those things will whisk you wherever you need to go in just minutes.
I was feeling pretty good about impossible stuff of the future becoming real after Amana cooked up the Radarange and Steve Jobs gave us Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio.
But things have slowed down somewhat since then.
As Stan says, a lot of very smart people have been trying to make a cheap, electric car that's as practical as, say, a Corolla for a long time, but haven't yet managed to pull it off.
My money is on harnessing the energy in naturally occurring methane. The burrito-powered car is the future.
Come to think of it, Stan, Maybe Tesla was on to something, just way ahead of his time once more.
What if we took his power transmission idea and combined it with the wireless charging concept of recent cell phones and made the electric auto road bed a charging mat with a receiving mat under the car? Think about that for a few seconds...... Distance would no longer be a problem AND it would allow the charged car to work off-roadbed, too.
"My money is on harnessing the energy in naturally occurring methane. The burrito-powered car is the future."
Oh, your intent on making a new seat with built in equipment.
IaM-Ray posted:"My money is on harnessing the energy in naturally occurring methane. The burrito-powered car is the future."
Oh, your intent on making a new seat with built in equipment.
It would definitely change the definition of a seat with "rear ventilation".
Bob: IM S6 posted:Maybe not a trend, but perhaps a tipping point.
Don't you heat with wood? I've got nothing against it, but burning wood creates a pretty wide carbon footprint. Certainly wider than driving a car.
I don't have any idea if the climate change is truly something to worry about or not, because I'm not a scientist. The hyperbole surrounding the argument seems a bit breathless to me.
Jumping wholesale onto a half-baked technology which is a proven ecological nightmare to escape a hypothetical one seems like much ado about nothing.
I'd contend that any 10 year old ICE car is creating a significantly smaller ecological footprint than a brand spanking new EV, if the mining and manufacturing are factored in.
But... I'm just a pipefitter, and I know almost nothing.
Gordon Nichols posted:Come to think of it, Stan, Maybe Tesla was on to something, just way ahead of his time once more.
What if we took his power transmission idea and combined it with the wireless charging concept of recent cell phones and made the electric auto road bed a charging mat with a receiving mat under the car? Think about that for a few seconds...... Distance would no longer be a problem AND it would allow the charged car to work off-roadbed, too.
Burying windings in the road is 100% possible right now, but commercially unfeasible, as every bit of roadway would need to be wired and maintained to a high level. We can't even get light-rail in most small cities, or a nationwide network of high-speed rail to compete with a Byzantine airline system.
As I understand it, the "electrical broadcasting" is just building on Tesla's idea with a focused beam and dedicated receiver. From what I've heard, it's actually in a venture capitalist beta-test for possible applications in the 3rd world, to power remote places. If it were to be perfected, I can see hundreds of potential profitable applications-- powering cars being at the top of the list.
FWIW, Tesla was a towering intellect, almost beyond my comprehension.
Stan Galat posted:...Burying windings in the road is 100% possible right now, but commercially unfeasible, as every bit of roadway would need to be wired and maintained to a high level...
Yeah, commercially unfeasible, that's the ticket.
That's why those monorails of the sixties never got built. They were technically very possible to build, but the numbers just didn't add up.
Just as the Concorde was a step too far for commercial aviation (too far commercially, not technologically), I think the electric car's numbers just don't add up. Do-able, but not profitable.
Coils in the roadway to transfer power inductively sounds a lot easier to pull off than trying to beam significant power to a thousand moving targets, but again, there's a huge divide between what can be done and what we can afford to do.
In California, we can no longer afford to patch the cracks and potholes in our asphalt and concrete. I can't imagine Caltrans keeping thousands of miles of buried wires underneath all that up and running.
And suppose they did for a few years when everything was freshly installed. And suppose a good proportion of the traffic over the grapevine, say, started to depend on those coils being there to power the morning commute. Just imagine the chaos the first morning those coils went cold and it took crews a few days to find and fix the problem. Thousands of cars all going dead at once right there on the Five.
Workable transportation, like politics, is the art of the possible.
IaM-Ray posted:Bob: IM S6 posted:Maybe not a trend, but perhaps a tipping point.
There were other warming seasons in Roman times and middle ages, somehow no one asks about the effect of people or animals in that time. So I can't see that tipping point showing up anywhere as I can't see the trend.
That may be so, Ray (Roman times), but there were not nine billion humans on the planet at that time. I don't believe that human activity can be discounted as a direct variable on climate.
Stan Galat posted:Bob: IM S6 posted:Maybe not a trend, but perhaps a tipping point.
Don't you heat with wood? I've got nothing against it, but burning wood creates a pretty wide carbon footprint. Certainly wider than driving a car.
Actually, Stan, done properly, wood burning is close to neutral in terms of carbon production. Trees are temporary carbon sinks, and the carbon will either be released slowly as the tree dies and rots, or more quickly as the tree is burned. Wood burning neither increases nor decreases carbon release, it just speeds it up. Particulate release is a concern, especially with old, inefficient wood stoves/furnaces. But all new stoves for the last few years have to meet stringent clean air standards, such as the ones your current government is removing from legislation.
There is no real easy clean solution to keeping warm in winter for us who live in northern climes (except to head far south...)
Bob wrote:
But all new stoves for the last few years have to meet stringent clean air standards, such as the ones your current government is removing from legislation.
Bob,
If you are interested, there is going to be an opening soon. 
Wow! Great discussion! I recently read "Lukewarming" by Patrick Michaels that addresses the models being used to predict GW . Heavy on statistics , but it illustrates that whenever possible, the highest values are used to predict a planet on fire. It is warming, as it has for billions of years, but not at the rate we are told.
Also, most of the "settled science" comes from scientists who either work directly for the government (NASA) or are paid by government grants. No one works for free and there are lots of mouths to feed.
As someone already said , it's the new religion. It replaces going to church and you can feel good about yourself.
I'm not sure about the electric car future, it will happen eventually, but like many people, I'm not diving in till it makes sense to my bottom line. Just selfish I guess.
Ironically, when I go South this Winter I'm going to check out an MGB GT that was converted to electric and then returned to the dreaded internal combustion engine. I had one as a daily driver for years and sold it to a friend in the Bahamas where it eventually dissolved.
@Bob: IM S6 wrote- "There is no real easy clean solution to keeping warm in winter for us who live in northern climes (except to head far south...)"
Yeah, but if you're trying to stay carbon neutral you have to factor in the fuel to get you there...
ALB posted:@Bob: IM S6 wrote- "There is no real easy clean solution to keeping warm in winter for us who live in northern climes (except to head far south...)"
Yeah, but if you're trying to stay carbon neutral you have to factor in the fuel to get you there...
Come on, Al. It's all downhill from where we live...we just need to put in neutral and coast...
Bob: IM S6 posted:ALB posted:@Bob: IM S6 wrote- "There is no real easy clean solution to keeping warm in winter for us who live in northern climes (except to head far south...)"
Yeah, but if you're trying to stay carbon neutral you have to factor in the fuel to get you there...
Come on, Al. It's all downhill from where we live...we just need to put in neutral and coast...
I gotta stop eating while reading- now I have oatmeal on the keyboard!
Too funny, Bob!
Bob: IM S6 posted:IaM-Ray posted:Bob: IM S6 posted:Maybe not a trend, but perhaps a tipping point.
There were other warming seasons in Roman times and middle ages, somehow no one asks about the effect of people or animals in that time. So I can't see that tipping point showing up anywhere as I can't see the trend.
That may be so, Ray (Roman times), but there were not nine billion humans on the planet at that time. I don't believe that human activity can be discounted as a direct variable on climate.
Bob, while it may be suggested that humans and animals are part of the problem, no scientist has been able in all this time to gather any data to prove this supposition. So why would you spend all kinds on CO2 and carbon tax on a supposition? Also, why use the taxpayer to start a new business ie: electric cars. Since the science is still not clear it is now simply an ideology like the emperor has no clothes.
Let's look at what cards we are given with the current issues and deal with those infrastructure issues ie: flood protection etc. Some barriers while costly to build would completely eliminate the potential future flooding. Instead we are willing to spend on an intangible myth in my opinion.
Well, your myth is my reality, so back to Speedsters. I mean, there is sufficient evidence to back up the climate theorists, but then competing evidence can be presented, so no use debating it here.
We can share a beer at Carlisle and get into it hammer and tong.
Well said,: : )
P.S.
Youtube has a lot of the senate committee meetings if you should desire to listen to them... but you knew that anyway 
Stan Galat posted:FWIW, Tesla was a towering intellect, almost beyond my comprehension.
Absolutely! And Edison, when realizing Tesla's plans were better than his, stole them
Gordon Nichols posted:
So-called “Super Capacitors” have a limitation, too, called Physics. They are very good at discharging a lot in a short time, not so good at moderate discharge over a longer time
Yep! I was thinking about some device that could manage the discharge somehow.
@Jethro wrote : Yep! I was thinking about some device that could manage the discharge somehow.
IMHO a discharge could put you into a hospital bed or at the minimum leave a nasty trail where you have been ~ As Bob said and now back to speedsters.
Jethro posted:Yep! I was thinking about some device that could manage the discharge somehow.
A device to replace penicillin?
"My money is on harnessing the energy in naturally occurring methane. The burrito-powered car is the future." - Sacto Mitch
Vince Manto (SOC Cuz'n Vinny) is waaay ahead of you! Here he is at our last SLO cruise after his meal from the Taco Truck.
WOW! That guy can really build pressure!
Al Gallo posted:Wow! Great discussion! I recently read "Lukewarming" by Patrick Michaels that addresses the models being used to predict GW . Heavy on statistics , but it illustrates that whenever possible, the highest values are used to predict a planet on fire. It is warming, as it has for billions of years, but not at the rate we are told.
Also, most of the "settled science" comes from scientists who either work directly for the government (NASA) or are paid by government grants. No one works for free and there are lots of mouths to feed.
As someone already said , it's the new religion. It replaces going to church and you can feel good about yourself.
This is flat-Earth, "Lizard People Control the British Crown" stuff.
Guys: no one likes it but human-made global warming is a real thing that is really happening and it's not a made-up conspiracy of fat-cat scientists on the government's teat.
You might as well be saying "Well, smoking cigarettes may not actually whiten your teeth and make you more athletic but cause cancer?? That sounds like some hyperbole from those AMA guys who everyone knows are in cahoots with Big Air Freshener."
Please.
"Guys: no one likes it but human-made global warming is a real thing that is really happening and it's not a made-up conspiracy of fat-cat scientists on the government's teat. "
Ed your entitled to your opinion but not to your facts.
I can't drink that koolaid, I hate religion.
Al Gallo posted:Wow! Great discussion! I recently read "Lukewarming" by Patrick Michaels that addresses the models being used to predict GW . Heavy on statistics , but it illustrates that whenever possible, the highest values are used to predict a planet on fire. It is warming, as it has for billions of years, but not at the rate we are told.
Al, I'd much rather be discussing Speedsters and the comparative merits of fiberglass and steel, but I just can't let this pass.
Michaels would say things like that because, well, he's sort of being paid to.
Here's just a bit of his background from his Wikipedia page (emphasis mine)
"...The World Climate Report, a newsletter edited by Michaels was first published by the Greening Earth Society, a public relations organization. Greening Earth Society was funded and controlled by the Western Fuels Association, an association of coal-burning utility companies. Greening Earth Society shared an office and many staff members with Western Fuels Association. It has been called a "front group created by the coal industry ..."
These days, Michaels seems to be working mainly for the Cato Institute, a 'think-tank' that while claiming political neutrality, probably has a very definite political axe to grind - it was founded by three prominent libertarians, including Charles Koch (chairman and CEO of Koch Industries), whose political leanings are seldom described as 'neutral'.
So, while Michaels likes attacking scientific researchers for being guilty of political bias and for publishing results slanted to please the sources of their funding, that seems to be exactly what his own game is.
The international scientific community countered the earliest evidence of human-caused climate change with a healthy degree of skepticism, beginning many years ago. Healthy skepticism, after all, is sort of the most important principle of science.
But the evidence has been surviving those skeptical challenges of impartial scientific examination and is only growing as more research is done. It's a very large and complex problem. Making precise predictions about just what will happen and where and when is almost impossible. But that lack of precision doesn't mean there is no problem.
Parallels to the tobacco industry's denial of a link between smoking and cancer are pretty hard to ignore. A very wealthy industry found its profits threatened by a bunch of 'nutball' scientists who couldn't at first prove the link beyond a doubt. First evidence was statistical, not clinical. It took many years for the cause to produce a result, and more years for the research to prove that.
The industry fought back hard to discredit the messengers who were bringing the bad news. They hired their own 'scientists' and commissioned their own 'studies'. They had a lot to lose and weren't giving up easy.
But the writing was on the wall and you didn't need glasses to read it.
First, apologies to @Al Gallo for calling him out in particular. It might as well have been Stan or any of several others. Most of us are guilty of this kind of mistake: we look for reasons to keep believing what we already "know," and what makes us comfortable. A lot of smokers used to do this, and the industry made it easy for them.
This is way bigger than cigarettes and lung cancer. The tobacco industry took about half a trillion dollars in revenue world-wide as of 2012. The gas and oil bidness was $173 billion in the US alone that year. Last year, Sinopec did a half trillion dollars in revenue—and it's one of two main Chinese oil companies . . . and there are 17 more oil companies with revenue of at least $100 billion. The total revenue is over $3.5 trillion for those companies alone. That doesn't count coal. Or motor vehicle production, jet turbines, etc.
So the fossil fuel industry is at least 7-8 times the size of the tobacco industry. But it's also much more literally entrenched. Oil extraction is not a game for kids or poor people.
These companies (and nations) have tremendous sunk costs to recover, and so they are threatened existentially by every bit of evidence that burning fossil fuels—which are the ultimate source of previously sequestered carbon—causes climate change which threatens civilization.
They have responded as one would expect: by elevating a dwindling corps of contrarians and "skeptics" on a storm surge of cash. And the media (of which I am a part) has been, as it was in the cigarette days, compliant and complicit.
And so have we. Us. On this board.
We don't want to acknowledge the reality that we are hastening an ongoing mass extinction event because we really like cars. I get it! I am "us" too! Admitting that global warming is real means implicating ourselves in the problem. So much easier to concentrate on the "scientific uncertainty" (of which almost none remains) than just say
"whelp, all the credible scientific evidence shows that our way of life is unsustainable, but I'm not going to change a damn thing because I love the idea of the open road and personal freedom and my little plastic clown car and I don't care that I am making things ever so slightly worse every day because I am old and will die soon so you-all can figure out how to solve this problem when I'm gone after you pry my Speedster's steering wheel from my cold, dead hands."
But this is the only honest way to deal with it. The rest is sophistry.
So say it with me, gentlemen. Know thyself. Allow the joy of your road trip, and of feeling warm when you press a button, and of seeing this page when you flick on your personal computational device, be ever-so-slightly troubled by the honest realization that it can't go on this way much longer.
And that big, ugly changes are coming in hot.
Ed, I'd rather talk about cars too, so I understand, yet I find the story of this climate researchers retirement reasons quite interesting as she shares issues with climate change research Judith Curry Ph.D "I have resigned my tenured faculty position at Georgia Tech" You don't give up a very very nice position like this without good reasons. You might like it.
As it regards to the tobacco industry, the medical evidence was overwhelming, and the drug companies in my opinion, were trying to postpone the innevitable while they moved their assets off shore.
FYI, I hate end of the world frenzies, most times, rather they are unreal, the CC debate is too politicized and It is too religious for my liking,
Climate change cycles have been around for thousands of years it's nothing new, it just gets more " air play" due to mass media etc.
Ray, nice blog post from the retiring climate scientist.
Yes, the field is becoming highly politicized and will probably become more so as schools and research institutes are increasingly strapped for cash and big business has greater incentives to provide that cash.
Which makes it more important for anyone looking for answers to critically analyze where the latest 'study' or opinion piece is coming from.
And yes, apologies to @Al Gallo . My post above wasn't directed at you, personally, Al. It's just that there's a lot of 'truthy' stuff out there masquerading as fact.
The internet is like a wild west frontier town with no sheriff. The James brothers can shoot things up with no one to call them out. Hold onto your hat. It will probably get worse before it gets better.
"fake news"
Update:
I would say before and as you read whatever on the web, of course even this site just keep in mind everybody is playing an angle, in other words, web defines it as : "they seek ways to advance one's self-interest, especially by making choices in a calculating or crafty manner; to scheme. "
What else is new, nothing new in those facts but thanks for the wild west comment at least you guys down south can be packing.
LSMFT 
Winston tastes good, like a dot dot cigarette should.
How many old slogans are bouncing around in our shriveled brains?
Well, maybe the earliest attempt at flat-out denial was:
"Not a cough in a carload."
LSMFT Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco …..Parliament gives you extra margin....Come up, come all the way up to Kools . I'm showing my age but I am thankful I never smoked
"SHOW US YOUR LARK"
