This past weekend after a tough day of exercising and falling asleep on the beach I headed up to Pasadena to see Eric before he headed off to the, well I'm not sure if it's the east coast or the mid west (for those who think I'm a really bad person - yes I know what city it is, just not sure how to classify it). Well, anyway, his new home for the next year. It was good to see him and it has been a lot of fun living near him. I'll miss him but I'm glad he'll get to live near Jess and do some interesting research. I'm also always very supportive of anyone doing research on a disease I could potentially get later in life. Oh, and thanks Eric for the stack of books and truck full of miscellaneous other stuff! Well, I don't like to post too much on the internet about other people's lives so I'll cut it off there.
I'm not sure where I heard about it, but Steve Carell is in a new move: Little Miss Sunshine. It's only playing in New York and LA for the next week or two, but I realized that I live near LA. So after Eric took off I headed over to hollywood to see it. Very funny! It'd definitely see it whenever it makes it to your city. It was also an interesting experience because I saw it at the Arclight Theater which is where they were holding the barnyard premier while I was there. No, I didn't see any of the festivities, they were going on while I was in the movie, but I listened to the paparazzi talk while I had lunch before the movie.
Finally I added An Inconvenient Truth to the list of books I've read. It was interesting to see how Gore presented the information and I was somewhat surprised by how much of an impact global warming has already had. Obviously, I know it's real, I just didn't know the facts on what the impact has been. While I found it interesting, I'd say if you already care about the environment then not much need to read it, although it might be interesting to flip through the last few pages that have suggestions on what you can do to help. If you don't care about the environment - THEN GO READ IT!
So I'm going to throw out an opinion I've been developing and I know it's not that original and it might be flawed so I'm interested to hear what people think. But here's the thought. Hybrid cars are nice. And for any given person it's better that they buy a fuel efficient car than not and typically hybrids are more efficient (although anyone who drives a hybrid SUV and lives far from work might want to pause before bragging). But here's my opinion as a society as a whole hybrids are nothing special. They for the most part at best double the gas milage. Doubling might sound good but really to save the environment I think we need to be talking about radical change, not some people using half as much gas. Something like 30% of the green house gasses in the US come from cars. And lets face it at best in the near future we're going to replace maybe 1/2 the cars on the road. People will be buying cars being used now for quite a while. Now if you took 15% of the emissions and made it almost go away, that would be huge. Say you got 90% more fuel efficient then you'd have eliminated 13.5% of the emissions in the US. And you could really move on to concentrating on the next highest offenders. But cutting it in half just isn't that interesting. Sure you drop 7.5% but there's still a lot left to be done. So this is getting long, but the idea is people shouldn't be all happy with hybrids, they should be demanding true radical change, not an iterative step. So feel free to tell me the thought is crap but as an engineer when I see a 2x change I shrug my shoulders, when I see a 10x change I take notice.
Monday, July 31, 2006
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2 comments:
While, as a fellow engineer, I agree that an improvement of less than an order of magnitude will not bring about radical change, I think that, as an engineer, you appreciate that a solution to the "global warming" problem is far more complicated than just cutting car emissions. The real problem is that we just don't understand enough about it.
For example, Google "global dimming" and hit up the Wikipedia entry. In particular, look carefully at the paragraph that talks about the experiment some folks did during the few days after September 11 when all US planes were grounded - during this short period the diurnal temperature variation increased by 1 degree!
So, in fact, it may well be possible that introducing cars that drastically reduce emissions will actually cause all of us to become cold-hearted Siberian dwellers :).
Hmmm, I'll admit it is a very complex system with a lot of factors we do not understand, but you are going to have a pretty tough time convincing me that hitting the system with a sledge hammer of CO2 emissions is not a bad thing.
I looked up global dimming and from what I see people are not saying don't worry, the two are canceling, but are saying they are both doing really bad things and global dimming might be making us not realize how much damage we have done through global warming. So I'm going to go ahead and stick with the polluting is a bad thing opinion. Now, if you're saying we need to study it more to understand better how we can stop it, I agree, but in the mean time let's not do so much damage that we can never recover.
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