Jack-all,
No, I posted this thread in response to the closure and conclusions reached at the UN Summit on climate change in Montreal.
As for "what am I doing to help solve global warming"... well you're an idiot if you think that one person can solve it singlehandedly. That would be like me asking you "what are you doing about the insurgency/car bombings in Iraq"? The only thing an individual can do is to draw attention to the ecological disaster that awaits if nothing is done by government. It
won't just sort itself out by market forces. And... despite the Montreal summit which was attended by delegates from 180 countries, the main problem with regard to greenhouse gas output is the USA - 25% of the world total. What this thread has done is to expose the "not our problem" attitude of so many who live there. There are so many miconceptions of the problem, and after Montreal I believe it was a good time to bring it up.
Here are some of the misconceptions....
We had one guy who said my list of CO2 emissions by country was BS. In fact he said it twice. And the basis of his rebuttal? He had walked down a Mexican street and had smelt sulphur in the air. Erm... hello? None of the three leading greenhouse gases contains sulphur.
We have people who "see no reason" not to go on burning fossil fuels at the same prodigious rate as before, and who even believe that the depletion of the world's oil reserves in the fastest possible time would be a good thing! They trust in some new alternative to arrive as if by magic.
We have a cheeky chappy from the other side of the world who said of my CO2 emissions data:
"Given those figures are guesses by hippies based on energy use I think you're screwed in this thread." But then Nashwan came along and confirmed the figures using data provided by the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The same cheeky chappy added
"You think wrong. Depending on the situation a larger engine may prove more effecient. Simply stating a smaller engine burns half as much fuel exposes a very limited understanding of energy in general." The discussion is about greenhouse gas emissions, and I was able to quote manufacturer's data as well as DVLA vehicle test data, both of which supported my statement that CO2 emission is in direct proportion to engine size/quantity of fuel burnt.
The same data answers the "argument" put forward by the gentleman who suggested
"More fuel efficient does not mean less green house gases, Beet. Try again." Both the DVLA data I supplied and the data provided by vehicle manufacturers show that CO2 emissions rise with engine size. I've just checked the BMW 5-series website and see that the emissions tax rises in line with engine size. The same gentleman quoted a source which he firmly believes to be true:
"A 40 percent increase in fuel economy standards would reduce greenhouse emissions by only about 0.5 percent, even under the most optimistic assumptions.", but as I will show in a moment this is also false. So it's funny that the person who trusts such a flawed statement refuses to fly on an Airbus because he doesn't trust the technology.
I found the following CO2 emissions table on a pro 4x4 website.
As can be seen from the figures, the overall pattern is that the cars with the largest engines burn the most fuel and emit the most CO2, so where some people get the idea that
"a 40 percent increase in fuel economy standards would reduce greenhouse emissions by only about 0.5 percent" is a mystery to me.
I had to smile when I found this table, and saw which car was top of the list!
