leszekp’s Recent Comments

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  7 Words

  Use less. Use it wisely. Think. Act.On Here's your chance to be the Pollan of climate change posted 1 year, 9 months ago 94 Responses

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  Try some research

  "It sounds completely wrong to me. Consider that the electric car, all else equal, starts a factor of two behind. Then put transmission losses behind that. I just find the claim beyond the bounds of credibility."

  This may come as a shock, but just because you can't believe it doesn't mean it isn't true. You might have tried doing some research on the topic before saying something. Here's what five minutes on the Internet got me:

  Efficiency of an internal-combustion engine: about 10-12%. 60% is lost as heat right away, the rest is friction/transmission losses.

  Efficiency of coal-generated electricity: about 35% even without secondary power uses (thermal, smokestack generation).

  Transmission losses: about 7.5%.

  Electric motor efficiency: Around 90-95%.

  So even a simple, back-of-the-envelope analysis shows that the idea that plug-ins are substantially better than gas-powered cars in CO2/mile is plausible.

  On the flip side, the information I've found on corn-based ethanol suggests that the energy balance falls on the wrong side. But it's interesting that you mentioned that the engineers in the audience argued this point, but didn't argue about the carbon balance on plug-ins versus gas-powered vehicles. Maybe because they realized that he was right on that point?On Delusional Beltway optimism about energy posted 1 year, 12 months ago 32 Responses

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  Ironic

  McIntyre is best know for the paper he did with McKittrick that supposedly debunked the "hockey stick" temperature curve. But in the original version of another paper by McKittrick, he put the latitude in degrees into a formula that expected it in radians, completely screwing up their results. This was a much bigger math error than anything NASA has ever done.

  http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up ...On The Wall Street Journal contradicts itself on global warming posted 2 years, 2 months ago 24 Responses

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  Sea level rise

  "Maybe someone needs to brief policymakers again on what the future is bound to look like when sea levels rise 20 feet ..."

  Maybe if you show them something like this:

  http://freegeotools.blogspot.com/2007/05/truth-effect-in- ...

  Customized for their area of interest.On The cost of acting first on climate change vs. the cost of not acting posted 2 years, 5 months ago 5 Responses

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  It's even worse than you think

  The CAFE standards are based on the original EPA mileage tests, city and highway. The EPA modified the sticker numbers in the 1980s, and again recently, because nobody was getting anywhere close to the CAFE numbers in real life; but the original EPA test process is still being used to determine whether carmakers meet CAFE standards. So the CAFE numbers are about 20-40% higher than what car fleets are actually getting on the road.On But conservation isn't sexy and doesn't make headlines posted 2 years, 8 months ago 7 Responses