Prius vs. Hummer

How much faster would the icecaps melt if we were all driving Hummers than if we were all driving Prius's?

Let's run some numbers. (My apologies to the UK people, who I understand don't have the same meaning of billion, trillion and quadrillion we do in the US.) It sounds like you assume Arctic melting is the result of rising global temperatures, which are in turn the result of rising CO2 levels, driven by burning fossil fuels. We will see those are all dubious assumptions, but we'll get out our calculators anyway.

I'm not sure what your question is asking; whether you are picturing everybody uniformly driving either a Prius or a Hummer, or if all Prius cars were traded for Hummers. It's unclear how many Hummers of various styles are in circulation, and I don't see all-time totals in MRV's postings of Prius sales in the US. Let's go on the high side of either with a million vehicles to be changed from Prius to Hummer. The Hummer is EPA rated 15 mpg in town,

19 highway. For ease and conservatism, let's use 10 mpg. Let's also assume each will be driven an average of 20K miles per year, for a total of 2000 gallons per vehicle and 2 billion gallons for the million vehicles per year. The EPA fuel economy is only about 25% of the Prius EPA rating, so we can estimate a million Hummers would consume 1.5 billion gallons per year more than a million Prius.

In the US, we consume about 7.3 trillion barrels of petroleum products per year

about 45% of that is used as gasoline At 55 gallons per barrel, that amounts to about 400 trillion gallons of petroleum and a little short of 200 trillion gallons of gasoline. By changing a million Prius driven 20K miles per year in the city to Hummers we would increase gasoline consumption in the US by about 0.00075%, and increase US oil consumption by about 0.00035%. The world petroleum consumption is about 1600 trillion gallons per year so the effect on world oil consumption would be about 0.0001%... right at one part per million. That's not all the fossil carbon in play. Coal consumption worldwide is about 6 billion tons per year or about 12 trillion pounds. Since petroleum is composed of alkanes, we can say the 6 lbs/gallon approximate weight is carbon and worldwide oil consumption is 10 quadrillion pounds. (Natural gas is similarly minor: and Those numbers don't dent the petroleum numbers but still dwarf the million Hummers by a factor of 10,000.

There are no proposed solutions that would change the shape of things to come in atmospheric CO2 levels, only the timeline. Since atmospheric CO2 is still rising 0.4% per year

reducing the worldwide fossil carbon load by .0001% would reduce the timeline by about 2 1/2 hours per year.

However, we also know the majority of the excess CO2 comes from surface sources. The "Industrial Effect" of C14 dilution by fossil carbon was discovered by Hans Suess in 1955

He found that the C14 signal was diluted a bit over 2% with respect to 1898 levels. About that time, the Mauna Loa Observatory had begun monitoring CO2 levels and found they were 315 ppm, up 13% from 278 ppm 7 ppm of the 37 ppm were fossil in origin (no C14), leaving 80% of the excess CO2 to be from surface sources. Since then atmospheric thermonuclear testing has obscured the C14 record so we don't have current data.

What is the measured effect of CO2 on climate? There is no usable supporting data - the methodology is not practical - but there are indications there may actually be no effect

The authors "prefer" that their data shows the model they were using was incorrect, but that is not science, just wishes. Is the Earth warming? Good question. In a world dominated by water and ice, that is probably unknowable. Temperatures are only loosely related to the question of heat (enthalpy) retention, for the same reason a glass of water to which ice has been added can gain heat and drop in temperature on a summer day. Don't even bother talking about land temperatures - that is entirely the realm of regional effects. Given that two thirds of the world is covered by water and that water has 5 times the heat capacity of silica (the most common rock), the oceans would have to be no more than knee deep for land temperatures to be important.

Is Arctic thawing the result of global warming? There is no reason to believe so. The regional weather phenomenon known as the Arctic Oscillation (National Geographic magazine January 2004, or

is well known to be directly responsible. There is no credible evidence to associate AO with global temperatures; the same theories work equally well if you substitute "witchcraft" for "global warming." Note that much of the Antarctic has cooled over the last 30 years So... in the event that Arctic melting is caused somehow by global warming, and that the earth is actually warming, and that rising atmospheric CO2 is the primary cause of that warming, and that fossil fuels are primarily responsible for the rising CO2... changing a million Prius to Hummers would speed the melting by 2.5 hours per year.

Mike

Mike, Your data was debunked years ago. BTW, are you one of those "The earth is 6,000 years old" people?

There are almost 500,000,000 passenger vehicles in the world today. A Hummer consumes about 3 times the weight in materials than a passenger car in production and parts. Imagine how much more destruction to the earth if all vehicles were Hummers!

Starvation added to the list...

Check the date.

Paul

Nope - current data, hundreds of hours of research over the last decade or so. You are just too easily misled. The very basis of science is skepticism. That makes Galileo, Leewenhoek, Franklin and Michelson such outstanding examples of what a scientist is. Each fought the prevailing superstitions that their peers called "science" and demonstrated the world is not what everybody thought: objects of the same weight fall at the same speed, life does not spontaneously spring from habitats, lightning isn't "God's judgement," light doesn't travel in ether. No true scientist ever believes in anything but natural laws, and he frets over those. Einstein and Planck each added footnotes to Newton's Laws of Motion, and now nobody has found a way to make the universe as we know it exist. Two objects could not occupy the same space until Bose and Einstein realized that at extremely low temperatures (energy levels) atoms merge

And the search goes on, for all who don't say "I already know all that; you can't teach me anything."

People have asked me what kind of scientist I am (obviously meaning "you aren't a scientist.") For years I replied "I am not a scientist, I am an engineer" because I have philosophical problems with science. I became a devotee of ruthless science when I was 10, and it sealed my fate as a geek. How many 12 yr olds acknowledge that their heroes are Ben Franklin and Anton Von Leewenhoek?

In my early 20s science led me into a paradox. I had been looking for a real-time test for whether I was awake or dreaming. I failed and have been searching for more than 30 years now, with no more success. This is a problem: if we can't define a difference, scientifically they are the same (back to that Bose-Einstein condensation thing!) That led to my philosophical standing as a skeptical solopsist. I suspect, but am not convinced, the world is created moment by moment in exactly the same way as a dream. Yes, I've heard the objections, but they are all based on the premises that we are awake now and that dreams are incoherent. Neither of those are necessarily true, and all the arguments that we are awake can be applied in a dream... I've done them all.

You see the problem. If reality is not solid, as the science of the situation suggests, science has no meaning. Can you use science in a dream? But time has worn me down. Now I admit I am a scientist (go with the illusion, if that it be) and a solopsist. Funny - nobody has yet challenged me on the conflict.

As for "debunked", let me guess: you still believe CFCs are responsible for stratospheric ozone holes?

Mike

Once you believe in witchcraft, witches can do anything. Ditto with "global warming." Ever wonder why a career politician is the leading proponent of what is a scientific question, and he never ever once raises any open issues? That isn't science, partner.

For discussion by scientists of the facts of global warming see

Still being wary that the overwhelming majority of the people identified as "scientists" are not necessarily so. The term has been applied to anybody news services want to lend credibility to, including engineers, technicians, bureaucrats and random activists who may or may not employ scientific principles. A recent Yahoo! news headline had "scientists" moving a Peregrine Falcon nest. Maybe they were doing it as an experiment and they were going to observe the results, but that's not what the article said.

My big complaint about the IPCC is that everybody there has a huge vested interest in finding alarming climate change. If they can stir us up their careers take off and they have job security. If they can't, they are worthless to the UN. "All that money and you didn't find anything?" Decisions, decisions....

And those denying global warming have an even bigger vested interest in there being no climate change. Their vested interest makes any interest by the IPPC look positively miniscule.

But the thing is that those scientists don't have any such interest; it's not as if that's the only thing they can do.

But the companies that deride global warming could lose billions of dollars if they had to change their business practices to help fight global warming.

I disagree about the UN's work environment. Richard Butler related in his book "The Greatest Threat" how heavily he was pressured by Kofi Annan to certify Iraq as being in compliance, even as his UNSCOM team was being denied entrance to sites at gunpoint. The UN has some very good programs, notably WHO and UNICEF, but the UN is at heart a political organization and they expect results... "correct" results. One man's opinion.

I do agree that there is a huge problem with bringing the "global warming" question to open and honest discussion. I see the political origin of the theory as being central to that. In any event, the polarization has greatly hampered genuine scientific inquiry. In all discussions the question is not whether there is another piece of the puzzle, but whether the presenter is already a fanatical convert or is a die-hard disbeliever.

So far, there have been no proposals that would affect the course of CO2 increases. As one of our mutual friends in another forum pointed out, that is an issue in itself and is well documented. The biochemical effects of rising CO2 could be a big problem. Even the most radical current proposals for controlling fossil emissions does not change the course of CO2 rise, only the rate... and that only marginally. I would support well crafted population controls on livestock, particularly since our only other piece of hard data points to surface sources as being the major contributor to CO2 increases, and the CO2 rise more closely parallels the rise of high density ranching than it does the use of petroleum for fuel. It may not be politically empowering, but it holds promise of actually accomplishing something rather than pretending to.

Mike

Can you tell me what caused the last Ice Age? Or for that matter, the warming trend that followed? Of course there is a global warming effect taking place today, but how can you so sure that mankind is the cause?

What will the human race say about the flipping of the magnetic field of the Earth? What can we say caused this in the past or what will cause it in the future?

Why do you ask irrelevant questions? To use an analogy, forest fires have been caused by natural causes (lightning, for example), but there have been forest fires caused by humans as well. Just because there have been cycles of warming and cooling not caused by humans doesn't mean that humans aren't exacerbating things.

An AC current can be based on zero volts, and range between 60 and -60 (again, to use an analogy), but it can also be based on a DC voltage and range between 120 and zero, or even between 180 and 160.

Same thing with global warming; the warm cycles get hotter and the cold cycles don't get as cold.

I see the political/economic opposition as being central to that. I do not see anything political about the observations, nor about the theory that explains those observations.

It is certainly striking that acceptance and opposition are each drawn so strongly along political lines. I'm politically conservative - don't look so surprised ;-) - but my objections are scientific. More worrisome, theories that fall along political lines are more likely to be political than scientific, and that is rarely benign. I recall the Nazis and their racial theories.

I place the most blame on news services. Too many people get their information from the same sources that brought us the O.J. Simpson trial and that try to pass off American Idol and interviews with random people as news. To those news organizations, the global warming controversy is a story and as such only one side is presented. No point in scaring subscribers with uncertainty!

I brought up CFCs and ozone depletion earlier. The best science was done by a joint NASA/NOAA team in 1997. In situ measurements with laser gas chromatagraph packages were far better than the crude sampling methods of previous measurements. The mission goal was identified in the name: Photochemistry of Ozone Loss in the Arctic Region In Summer (POLARIS). The finding: that reactive nitrogen oxides formed in extended hours of sunlight were responsible for seasonal ozone depletion, and that halogens from all sources were responsible for only 15% of the peak depletion

This mission was undertaken 10 years after we signed the Montreal Protocol, another pointless exercise in control of industry worldwide by the UN - whether that was their goal or not. I have no estimate of how much the Montreal Protocol has cost the US in forcing the abandonment of R-12 and retooling for R-134a. Did you hear of this breakthrough in the ozone controversy? I doubt it; no news service picked it up. I came across it after months of research on-line. We were hoaxed blind, and it was kept quiet. Political careers hinged on the old story, and today most people still believe CFC ozone depletion is "settled science." Mike

Opposition is drawn along political and economic lines; that makes acceptance appear to be along political lines. The political opposition is because of the economic opposition.

Yeah, theories attempting to debunk global warming, theories attempting to debunk the big bang, and theories attempting to debunk evolution certainly fall into that category. Theories attempting to explain global warming do not fall into that category.

That's all you got from a 59-page highly technical report? Where exactly in that report does it say that?

Also, do you consider that 15% to be insignificant?

am, "Michael Pardee"

You've got waaaay too much time on your hands.

You keep citing this "tinyurl" source. It looks kind of shaky to me.