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Some reading for the “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers”

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #1025 on: November 18, 2017, 09:42:12 am »

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« Reply #1026 on: November 18, 2017, 02:43:08 pm »


Indian motorists ride through a thick blanket of smog and dust on the outskirts of New Delhi. Thick smog has constricted India's capital this week, smudging landmarks from view and angering residents. The air was the worst it has been all year in New Delhi, with microscopic particles that can affect breathing and health spiking, at times, to 75 times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization. — Photograph: Photograph: Altaf Qadri/Associated Press.
Indian motorists ride through a thick blanket of smog and dust on the outskirts of New Delhi. Thick smog has constricted India's capital this week, smudging landmarks
from view and angering residents. The air was the worst it has been all year in New Delhi, with microscopic particles that can affect breathing and health spiking,
at times, to 75 times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization. — Photograph: Photograph: Altaf Qadri/Associated Press.

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« Reply #1027 on: November 18, 2017, 03:36:08 pm »

Nothing to do with CO2. Next piece of irrelevant bed-wetting?
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« Reply #1028 on: November 19, 2017, 08:30:13 am »

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« Reply #1029 on: November 19, 2017, 11:02:09 am »


I know somebody in my street who has a bach down near Cape Palliser, just north of Ngawi.

Their batch is not connected to the national grid, but has the entire north-facing slope of the roof covered with solar panels (both electrical and water-heating), as well as two wind turbines on poles to take advantage of the frequent high winds in that area. The whole lot is connected up to a bank of batteries, then via an inverter into the building's 230/240-volt ac mains wiring system. Most cooking is done with gas, although the bach has a wood-fired stove in addition to the gas stove; and hot water is a combination of solar and gas. The electrical system is so good that they leave the fridge and freezer going all the time and they never have problems with the contents thawing out. They have a small bill for gas useage and they usually drop off a load of firewood to the batch once a year, but the rest of the energy for the house is provided by mother nature. They stay in their bach for about six-weeks over the Christmas-New Year-January period, then make frequent weekend visits to their batch throughout the rest of the year.

Flat-earthers/anti-warmalists/climate-change-deniers/heads-in-the-sand-brigade hate seeing people being self-sufficient in their energy requirements like that.
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« Reply #1030 on: November 19, 2017, 07:52:27 pm »

Yes *sounds* good doesn't it. The total cost of all that to run a proper modern house is signifantly more than grid power. Its a boutique solution for the wealthy.

But, that doesn't stack up when you scale up to powering towns and cities.

Germany which is one of the most advanced industrialised societies on earth tried the utopian wind and solar fantasy and now in order to stop killing the poor through unaffordable power they are INCREASING their use of coal power.
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« Reply #1031 on: November 19, 2017, 08:10:39 pm »

Solar requires highly industrialised processes using rare resources. The panels have to be replaced and disposed of. Ditto batteries.
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« Reply #1032 on: November 19, 2017, 08:56:48 pm »


Change hands....you'll wear out the one you're using for masturbating if you don't share the load.
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« Reply #1033 on: November 20, 2017, 09:02:56 pm »

Engage a few braincells.
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« Reply #1034 on: November 22, 2017, 11:47:50 am »


Hahaha.....“flat-earthers” and “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers” are all kooks & retards, alright.



from The Washington Post....

This man is about to launch himself in his
homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat


Goodbye, cold, flat Earth.

By AVI SELK | 1:51PM EST — Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Mike Hughes and his steam-powered rocket constructed out of salvaged parts on a five-acre property that he leases in Apple Valley, California. — Photograph: Waldo Stakes/Mad Mike Hughes/Associated Press.
Mike Hughes and his steam-powered rocket constructed out of salvaged parts on a five-acre property that he leases in Apple Valley, California.
 — Photograph: Waldo Stakes/Mad Mike Hughes/Associated Press.


SEEKING TO PROVE that a conspiracy of astronauts fabricated the shape of the Earth, a California man intends to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal.

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Mike Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes's ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above the Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on.

“It'll shut the door on this ball earth,” Hughes said in a fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group for Saturday's flight. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home — though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

“This whole tech thing,” he said in the June interview. “I'm really behind the eight ball.”

That said, Hughes isn't a totally unproven engineer. He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with mixed results.

“Okay, Waldo. 3 … 2 … 1!” someone yells in a test fire video from 2012.

There's a brief hiss of boiling water, then … nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a thick cloud of steam belches out toward the camera.

He built his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Arizona.

As seen in a YouTube video, the flight ended with Hughes being dragged, moaning from the remains of the rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.

And the 2014 flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday's mile-long attempt.

And it was based on round-Earth technology.

Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.

It was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign — “From Garage to Outer Space!” — that mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts, and was themed after a NASCAR event.

“We want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,” Hughes said, standing in his Apple Valley, California, living room, which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.

“They have not put a man in space yet,” Hughes said. “There are 20 different space agencies here in America, and I'm the last person that's put a man in a rocket and launched it.”

He compared himself to Evel Knievel, as he promised to launch himself from a California racetrack — the first step on his steam-powered leap toward space.


Mike Hughes plans to launch his rocket on Saturday over the ghost town of Amboy, California, at a speed of roughly 500 miles per hour. — Photograph: Mad Mike Hughes/Associated Press.
Mike Hughes plans to launch his rocket on Saturday over the ghost town of Amboy, California, at a speed of roughly 500 miles per hour.
 — Photograph: Mad Mike Hughes/Associated Press.


The Kickstarter raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.

Hughes made other pitches, including a plan to fly over Texas in a “SkyLimo”. But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty of funding his dreams on a chauffeur's meager salary.

A year later, he called into a flat-Earth community Web show to announce that he had become a recent convert.

“We were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I'm a believer in the flat Earth,” Hughes said. “I researched it for several months.”

The host sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket, he noted, whereas astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.

“John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons,” Hughes agreed. “Once you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.”

The host talked of “Elon Musk's fake reality,” and Hughes talked of “anti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.” After half an hour of this, the host told his 300-some listeners to back Hughes's exploration of space.

While there is no one hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disc ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in.

What's beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.

“We need an individual who's not compromised by the government,” the host told Hughes. “And you could be that man.”

A flat-Earth GoFundMe subsequently raised nearly $8,000 for Hughes.

By November, the Associated Press reported, his $20,000 rocket had a fancy coat of Rust-Oleum paint and “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” inscribed on the side.

While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the Associated Press reported, Hughes will be making adjustments right up to Saturday's launch.

He won't be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph across a mile of desert air. And even if it's a success, he's promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year, into the space above the disc.

“It's scary as hell,” Hughes told the Associated Press. “But none of us are getting out of this world alive.”

This is true. Yet some will try to live to see its edges.


• Avi Selk is an American-Canadian nomad. He reported for the Dallas Morning News from 2009 until December 2016, when he joined the general assignment desk at The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Kyrie Irving's flat-Earth beliefs now the bane of middle-school teachers' existence

 • Kyrie Irving believes the Earth is flat. It is not.

 • A Trump team member just compared climate science to the flat-Earth theory

 • The explorers who really disproved flat-Earth theories

 • VIDEO: Watch SpaceX's greatest explosions, courtesy of Elon Musk


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/21/this-man-is-about-to-launch-himself-in-his-homemade-rocket-to-prove-the-earth-is-flat
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« Reply #1035 on: November 22, 2017, 04:47:42 pm »

Dumb spam. Not read.
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« Reply #1036 on: November 25, 2017, 10:03:03 pm »


from The Washington Post....

A flat-Earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade
rocket just hit a speed bump


“It's still happening,” Mike Hughes said of his plan to “prove” that Earth is flat.

By AMY B. WANG and AVI SELK | 2:28PM EST — Friday, November 24, 2017

A CALIFORNIA MAN who planned to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a homemade scrap-metal rocket — in an effort to prove that Earth is flat — said he is postponing the experiment after he couldn't get permission from a federal agency to conduct it on public land.

Instead, Mike Hughes said the launch will take place sometime next week on private property, albeit still in Amboy, California, an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert along historic Route 66.

“It's still happening. We're just moving it three miles down the road,” Hughes told The Washington Post on Friday. “This is what happens anytime you have to deal with any kind of government agency.”

Hughes claimed the Bureau of Land Management said he couldn't launch his rocket as planned on Saturday in Amboy. He claimed the federal agency had given him verbal permission more than a year ago, pending approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

A BLM spokeswoman said its local field office had no record of speaking with Hughes and that he had not applied for the necessary special recreation permit to hold an event on public land.

“Someone from our local office reached out to him after seeing some of these news articles [about the launch], because that was news to them,” BLM spokeswoman Samantha Storms said.

Representatives from the FAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Hughes said he had originally intended to arrive in Amboy on Wednesday to start setting up the rocket. The BLM's denial, along with some technical difficulties — a motor in his modified motor home quit working for a day — threw a wrench into his plans, according to Hughes.

“I don't see [the launch] happening until about Tuesday, honestly,” he said. “It takes three days to set up…. You know, it's not easy because it's not supposed to be easy.”

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof that it's a disk we all live on.

“It'll shut the door on this ball Earth,” Hughes said in a flight fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home — though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

“This whole tech thing,” he said in the June interview. “I'm really behind the eight ball.”

That said, Hughes isn't a totally unproven engineer. He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with mixed results.

“Okay, Waldo. 3 … 2 … 1!” someone yells in a test-fire video from 2012.

There's a brief hiss of boiling water, then … nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a thick cloud of steam belches out toward the camera.

He built his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Arizona.

As seen in a YouTube video, the flight ended with Hughes being dragged, moaning, from the remains of the rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.

The 2014 flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday's mile-long attempt.

And it was based on round-Earth technology.

Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.

It was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign — “From Garage to Outer Space!” — that mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts and was themed after a NASCAR event.

“We want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,” Hughes said in the pitch video, standing in his Apple Valley, California, living room, which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.

“They have not put a man in space yet,” Hughes said. “There are 20 different space agencies here in America, and I'm the last person that's put a man in a rocket and launched it.” Comparing himself to Evel Knievel, he promised to launch himself from a California racetrack that year as the first step in his steam-powered leap toward space.

The Kickstarter raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.

Hughes made other pitches, including a plan to fly over Texas in a “SkyLimo”. But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty of funding his dreams on a chauffeur's meager salary.

A year later, he called into a flat-Earth community Web show to announce that he had become a recent convert.

“We were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I'm a believer in the flat Earth,” Hughes said. “I researched it for several months.”

The host sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket, he noted, whereas astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.

“John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons,” Hughes agreed. “Once you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.”

The host talked of “Elon Musk's fake reality,” and Hughes talked of “anti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.” After half an hour of this, the host told his 300-some listeners to back Hughes’s exploration of space.

While there is no one hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disk ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in.

What’s beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.

“We need an individual who's not compromised by the government,” the host told Hughes. “And you could be that man.”

A flat-Earth GoFundMe effort subsequently raised nearly $8,000 for Hughes.

By November, the Associated Press reported, his $20,000 rocket had a coat of Rust-Oleum paint and “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” inscribed on the side.

While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the Associated Press reported, Hughes will be making adjustments right up to the launch.

But he won't be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph across a mile of desert air. And if it's a success, he's promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year, into the space above the disk. He told Ars Technica last year that the second phase of his mission might involve floating in a balloon up to 20,000 feet above the ground, then rocket-packing himself into space.

“It's scary as hell,” Hughes told the Associated Press. “But none of us are getting out of this world alive.”

This is true. And yet some hope to live to see its edges.


• Amy B Wang is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post.

• Avi Selk is an American-Canadian nomad. He reported for the Dallas Morning News from 2009 until December 2016, when he joined the general assignment desk at The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: This man hopes his homemade rocket will prove the earth is flat

 • Kyrie Irving believes Earth is flat. It is not.

 • A Trump team member just compared climate science to the flat-Earth theory

 • The explorers who really disproved flat-Earth theories


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/24/a-flat-earthers-plan-to-launch-himself-in-a-homemade-rocket-just-hit-a-speed-bump
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« Reply #1037 on: November 26, 2017, 09:07:10 pm »


from STUFF/Fairfax NZ....

EVs: The future is closer than you think

Electric dreams fast overtaking the dino-juice drinkers

By MIKE O'DONNELL | 5:00AM - Saturday, 25 November 2017

Like the Skoda Kodiak, EVs are confounding everyone's expectations.
Like the Skoda Kodiak, EVs are confounding everyone's expectations.

THE motoring journos at STUFF have just announced their pick of the 2017 Top Cars. The overall winner was the Skoda Kodiak, the first seven seater SUV from the Czech manufacturer.

Apart from being a fine car in its own right, the granting of the 2017 Top Car gong to Skoda is solid recognition that the brand migration for Skoda is fully completed.

As a teenager Skoda represented everything that was bad about Soviet manufacturing — they were ugly, unreliable and unfashionable.

Today they are great drives with a higher quality of assembly than their owner, Volkswagen. Plus, they are less expensive than their other stable mate, Audi.

Apart from the migration of the Skoda brand, the thing that caught my eye was the number of electric cars in the lineup. Four of the 16 Top Cars were EVs or hybrids.

It was only a couple of years ago that the first electrically assisted car made the STUFF list, now its 25 percent. I'd be willing to bet it will be closer to 50 per cent next year, if the rise of electric bikes is any indication.

It's clear that in the race for the future of personal cars, the EV has won. While you can argue the micro diesel is a better contender, the decision has been made so the industry had better get on with it.

While EV fans wax lyrical about the consumer centric-joy of being about to drive for a day and charge overnight, the explosive disruptor is the electric motor. Specifically, it's simplicity.

The motor in the new Tesla Model S has just 18 moving parts. By contrast, the internal combustion engine sitting under the bonnet of your late model Toyota Corolla has about 1,600. If you're driving a BMW or Subaru, that number is closer to 2,000.

That's 2,000 pieces of (mainly) metal moving, exploding, rubbing and reciprocating. All of which need lubrication, monitoring for wear, regular maintenance and periodic replacement.

Whereas the electric motor has a couple of sealed bearings that might need replacing every 250,000 kilometres or so, and that's largely it, as long as the battery hasn't got a dud cell.

The disruptive implications of this are vast. Much of the existing mechanical, auto electrical and engineering industries will have dramatic reductions in workload.

The concepts of an oil and filter, a lube or a new cambelt will likely exist only as metaphors. A little like the phrase “don't scare the horses” is now.


Stanford economist Tony Seba sees peak oil use occurring around 2022 — about 10 years earlier than previously thought. — Photograph: Tom Pullar-Strecker.
Stanford economist Tony Seba sees peak oil use occurring around 2022 — about 10 years
earlier than previously thought. — Photograph: Tom Pullar-Strecker.


Speaking of horses, futurist Tony Seba has a presentation that's doing the rounds at the moment on YouTube.

It features a photograph of a New York Street in 1900 and he asked you to find the car. If you look hard enough, you can find it but mainly the photo is full of horse riders and horse drawn carriages.

He then shows a photograph of the same street taken 11 years later and asks you to find the horse. This time the street is absolutely chocka with cars, with just one twitchy horse visible, if you look really hard.




But the downstream impact of this disruption is far greater than just putting my mechanic mates out on the street.

Currently demand for EVs is outstripping supply many-fold. While part of this is fuelled by the Government's EV friendly policy, the big thing is that consumers are voting with their feet, or rather by their credit cards.

So car manufacturers are spending billions on retooling and figuring out how much longer they can flog the dino-juice drinkers they've got 100 years of costs sunk into.

The multi-billion dollar parts industry will do it tough.


Mike O'Donnell: “It's clear that in the race for the future of personal cars, the EV has won.” — Photograph: Kevin Stent.
Mike O'Donnell: “It's clear that in the race for the future of personal cars, the EV has won.”
 — Photograph: Kevin Stent.


But the biggest pain will be felt by the oil companies, particularly once the unstoppable advance of electric cars marries the irresistible functionality of self-driving autonomy platforms.

My old mate Steve West who's behind the EV charging network ChargeNet reckons that autonomous EVs will be able to deliver private rides for less than 30 cents a mile.

Futurist Seba reckons that it will be more like 15 cents, falling to less than 10 cents over time.

That will see peak oil use happening around 2022 — about 10 years earlier than previously thought. And by 2030, petrol use for private cars will have dropped to near zero (because no one will drive petrol cars) while total crude oil use will have dropped by almost a third.

Some energy companies — like Z — are leaning forward into this challenge having rolled out eight fast-charge electric vehicle charging stations and sponsoring the likes of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.




Others like Mobil may have have missed the (electric) bus in godzone.

Just as we're currently neck deep in Software as a Service (SaaS), futurists are picking that Transport as a Service (TaaS) will be the way of the future in towns and cities.

So fast forward just a few years and instead of handing out the awards for Top Cars, the STUFF motoring journos might be issuing virtual gongs to TaaS providers based in the cloud.


Mike “MOD” O'Donnell is a professional director and amateur rally driver. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he owns more internal combustion engines than is prudent.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/99163525
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« Reply #1038 on: November 28, 2017, 06:53:50 pm »

If and when EVs are cheaper and better than conventional cars/trucks then the masses will want to buy them. Don't hold your breath.
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« Reply #1039 on: November 28, 2017, 08:05:20 pm »


from STUFF/Fairfax NZ....

Petrol cars could vanish as quickly as the horse and carriage

There will be 80 percent fewer cars on the roads by 2030, economist predicts.

By TOM PULLAR-STRECKER | 5:00AM - Sunday, 26 November 2017

Autonomous vehicles will mean 80 per cent fewer cars parked and on the road, US economist Tony Seba has forecast.
Autonomous vehicles will mean 80 per cent fewer cars parked and on the road,
US economist Tony Seba has forecast.


NO PETROL VEHICLES will be built after 2025 and the number of cars in the United States will have plummeted by 80 percent five years later, with most journeys taken “Uber-style” in fleets of self-driving cars.

That was the message given to APEC delegates in Wellington by Stanford economist Tony Seba, who believes the transport and power industries are just a few years away from a massive tipping point.

Energy Minister Megan Woods described his predictions as “both interesting and challenging”.

Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter said she would be discussing options to promote the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) with officials over the next few weeks.

“This government is committed to reducing climate pollution to net zero by 2050. That means we have a responsibility to start reducing emissions from transport,” she said.

“Increasing the uptake of electric vehicles will be a priority alongside our plans to boost investment in public transport and walking and cycling.”

Seba agreed that there was no need for governments to consider subsidising EVs if his forecasts were correct, as they would take over rapidly anyway.

Instead the most useful thing policy-makers could do was to encourage pilots of driverless vehicles, he said.


Tony Seba believes a transport revolution will unfold very suddenly, once an economic tipping point is reached in a few years. — Photograph: Mark Tantrum.
Tony Seba believes a transport revolution will unfold very suddenly, once an economic
tipping point is reached in a few years. — Photograph: Mark Tantrum.


Seba said councils should also be preparing for huge areas of major cities to be freed-up by a reduced need for parking.

On current trends it would be cheaper to build a mid-range EV costing US$33,000 than a conventional car by 2019,  and they would be cheaper than the average equivalent conventional small car by 2022, he said.

Given EVs were 10 times cheaper to fuel and much cheaper to maintain, petrol and diesel cars would soon be difficult to give away, he believed.

While the average car had more than 2,000 moving parts, EVs had just 18 and could rack up 500,000 miles, he said, quoting research from Baron Funds Research.

By 2030, 95 per cent of passenger-miles would taken in self-driving vehicles, he said. In the US “200 million cars are going to be stranded — useless”.

Motor Trade Association industry relationships manager Greig Epps said he came away “a bit gobsmacked” from a presentation by Seba, who had some “very persuasive information” about changes in battery technology.

Epps forecast in 2016 that it would be 20 years before EVs had a significant impact in New Zealand, but now believed that could happen within 10 to 15 years.

New Zealand would lag the US though, given most imports were of secondhand cars, he said.


Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter will be discussing options to increase the uptake of electric vehicles with officials over the next few weeks. — Photograph: Warwick Smith.
Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter will be discussing options to increase
the uptake of electric vehicles with officials over the next few weeks.
 — Photograph: Warwick Smith.


Seba's forecasts are predicated on the assumption that the cost of generating and storing solar electricity will continue to fall — to the point where just about all generation will be solar by 2030.

But electricity production would only have to increase by 18 per cent in the US to cope with a complete switch to EVs, he said.

At some point, the cost of producing solar power at the home would fall below the transmission cost of transporting electricity across national grids, meaning no other form of generation would be able to compete, he said.

Like conventional cars and parking buildings, investments in deep sea and shale oil would be a write-off, with the price of oil collapsing below US$25 a barrel because of a lack of demand.

Seba fired off statistic after statistic to back up his case at the APEC meeting, but not all experts believe EVs or solar power will take over quite as quickly as he suggests.

The number of EVs on New Zealand roads has already more than doubled this year to 5,431, but that still represents only a little over a tenth of one percent of all vehicles.

International Energy Agency transport leader Pierpaolo Cazzola, who also addressed the APEC electric vehicle and hydrogen energy working group meeting, believed EV uptake would still depend a lot on government policies.

Seba believed no-one would be manufacturing land vehicles — even tractors — with combustion engines after 2025.


Opposition energy spokeswoman Judith Collins describes Tony Seba's forecasts as “challenging”. — Photograph: Kevin Stent.
Opposition energy spokeswoman Judith Collins describes Tony Seba's forecasts
as “challenging”. — Photograph: Kevin Stent.


But Cazzola noted 10 members of the IEA — the US, Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, Holland, Norway, Canada and Sweden — had set a much more modest goal of ensuring 30 percent of cars, buses and trucks were EVs or hybrids by 2030.

Cazzola acknowledged the IEA's forecast had not factored in the possibility that most journeys would be undertaken using self-driving vehicles that would be owned by Uber-like companies.

Seba agreed other forecasters had access to the same data as him about technology trends and had come to less radical conclusions.

That was because they had not picked up that change was exponential and tended to be guided by each others' forecasts, he said.

“Mainstream analysts look at one another instead of looking at the data.”

That had happened before, for example when consultant McKinsey advised telecommunications giant AT&T in 1980 that there would be fewer than a million cellphones in the US by 2000, whereas the actual number was 109 million, he said.

“In 13 years, New York City went from all horses to all cars.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • How electric cars can create the biggest disruption since iPhone

 • Petrol cars will be obsolete in 8 years, says US report

 • NZ's 15,000 motor mechanics get ready for the electric vehicle era


https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/99074823
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aDjUsToR
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« Reply #1040 on: November 28, 2017, 10:48:04 pm »

Yes "could". The favourite word for unicorn chasers (and especially ones from the eco-cult of Co2) when making predictions about the future.
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« Reply #1041 on: December 05, 2017, 08:54:18 am »

Listen carefully boys and girls...

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« Reply #1042 on: December 05, 2017, 09:06:34 am »


I really should have titled this thread “Some Reading for the Terminally Stupid!”

It would have been considerably more appropriate, but the thread has being going now for so long that it would sacrilage to change it.
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« Reply #1043 on: December 05, 2017, 07:32:35 pm »

It hurts your brain to be confronted by scientific reality. That's normal for those who believe cultic rubbish.
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« Reply #1044 on: December 05, 2017, 07:34:17 pm »

Let me see you actually state that Prof William Happer is "terminally stupid".
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« Reply #1045 on: December 06, 2017, 12:20:41 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Climate scientists see alarming new threat to California

By EVAN HALPER | 3:00AM PST — Tuesday, December 05, 2017

In this May 2nd, 2014, photo, dust rises around a walnut tree as a worker mows weeds in Gridley, California. — Photograph: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press.
In this May 2nd, 2014, photo, dust rises around a walnut tree as a worker mows
weeds in Gridley, California. — Photograph: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press.


CALIFORNIA could be hit with significantly more dangerous and more frequent droughts in the near future as changes in weather patterns triggered by global warming block rainfall from reaching the state, according to new research led by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Using complex new modeling, the scientists have found that rapidly melting Arctic sea ice now threatens to diminish precipitation over California by as much as 15% within 20 to 30 years. Such a change would have profound economic impacts in a state where the most recent drought drained several billion dollars out of the economy, severely stressed infrastructure and highlighted how even the state most proactively confronting global warming is not prepared for its fallout.

The latest study adds a worrying dimension to the challenge California is already facing in adapting to climate change, and shifts focus to melting polar ice that only recently has been discovered to have such a direct, potentially dramatic impact on the West Coast. While climate scientists generally agree that the increased temperatures already resulting from climate change have seriously exacerbated drought in California, there has been debate over whether global warming would affect the amount of precipitation that comes to California.

The study, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, provides compelling evidence that it would. The model the scientists used homed in on the link between the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic and the buildup of high ridges of atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean. Those ridges push winter storms away from the state, causing drought.

The scientists found that as the sea ice goes away, there is an increase in the formation of ridges.


Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Google Earth.
Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Google Earth.

“Our design was aimed at looking at what will happen in 20 to 30 years, when the Arctic becomes ice-free in the summer,” said Ivana Cvijanovic, the lead climate scientist on the study. “It is coming soon. We want to understand what the impact would be…. The similarities between what will happen and [how weather patterns caused] the most recent drought are really striking.”

Rainfall in California would drop, on average, 10% to 15% in the coming decades under Cvijanovic's model, but the decline would present itself sporadically, exacerbating the potential for drought. Some years the decline in rainfall because of diminished Arctic ice would be much steeper than 15%. Other years would be wetter than they otherwise would be.

The study is yet another by federally funded researchers that finds the failure to more rapidly diminish greenhouse gas emissions could have a serious impact on California and other parts of the country. The findings contrast starkly with Trump administration policy on warming, which ignores the mainstream scientific consensus that human activity is driving it. The administration has been working aggressively to unravel Obama-era action on climate change, withdrawing from the Paris agreement that seeks to limit its impact, dismantling restrictions on power plant emissions, and signaling that it will relax vehicle mileage rules that are a critical component to addressing global warming.

The warnings about the impact of melting sea ice on California are being embraced by some prominent climate scientists. They say that while the study is just one of multiple models being used to project global warming impacts, it is bolstered by other studies that have signaled a connection between the ice melt in the Arctic and the buildup of atmospheric ridges affecting California. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said in an email that it paints a sobering picture for the state.

“As we learn more about the subtleties in the dynamics of climate change, we are learning that certain climate change impacts, like California drought, may be far worse than we had previously thought,” Mann wrote. “It also means that, when it comes to water resource issues in California, the impacts of climate change may exceed our adaptive capacity. That leaves only mitigation — doing something about climate change — as a viable strategy moving forward.”

Governor Jerry Brown has been taking a lead globally in confronting climate change, warning the Trump administration's approach is reckless and defies science. He traveled last month to a United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany, to meet with world leaders and send the signal that much of the nation is moving to act on climate change, even if President Trump is not. Brown is helping lead a coalition of state and local governments that is vowing to reduce emissions enough to meet the entire country’s obligation under the Paris agreement, which President Obama signed last year.

But the Trump administration’s retreat threatens to substantially slow the rate at which U.S. climate emissions decline. And even if all commitments made in the Paris agreement are kept, climate scientists say the Arctic ice situation would still be dire.

“This is happening very quickly,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. “The change is dramatic, and it is taking place faster than had been projected by climate models.”

Diffenbaugh said the study is a breakthrough for climate researchers who have been struggling to pinpoint the impacts of melting Arctic ice. “Being able to isolate the effect of melting sea ice on the atmosphere and the ocean's response — and how it impacts precipitation in California — that is a big step forward,” he said.

Because the model only projects future impacts, the study does not focus on the role melting Arctic ice may have played in the massive drought from which California recently emerged — the most severe in 1,200 years, according to one scientific study. But the atmospheric patterns leading to that drought had all the characteristics of those that can be triggered by Arctic sea ice melt, Cvijanovic said, raising the prospect that California might have dodged the latest drought — or at least not have been hit as hard — if not for the large amount of ice that has already vanished.

“There is lots of research to be done,” she said. “Hopefully we do it in time to allow people to plan for whatever may be coming.”


• Evan Halper writes for the Los Angeles Times about a broad range of policy issues out of Washington D.C., with particular emphasis on how Washington regulates, agitates and very often miscalculates in its dealings with California. Before heading east, he was the L.A. Times bureau chief in Sacramento, where he spent a decade untangling California's epic budget mess and political dysfunction.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • 150 structures destroyed, 27,000 people evacuated in raging Ventura wildfire

 • ‘It's coming across this way!’ Residents tend to older parents as fire approaches.

 • More than 260,000 customers lose power amid intense winds

 • 7,700 homes evacuated as fire rages; traffic jams as residents flee


http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-climate-california-20171205-htmlstory.html
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Im2Sexy4MyPants
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« Reply #1046 on: December 06, 2017, 02:08:21 am »


climate cult morons


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Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
http://www.infowars.com/

AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP
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« Reply #1047 on: December 06, 2017, 04:46:49 am »

Eco alarmists making up the usual "could" happen bed wetting stories. You do realise how many times already those stupid prophecies have turned out to be total bullshit right?
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« Reply #1048 on: December 06, 2017, 08:59:38 am »


ROFLMAO....you two “flat-earthers” are hilariously funny.

Your faces must be lilly-white from the amount of time you have your heads buried in the sand.
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« Reply #1049 on: December 06, 2017, 09:45:04 am »


Well....look at that....it's time for a new page in this thread.
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