Brakenshire

There a massive gap between “all cars should be banned”, which you seem to be replying to, and “some urban areas should be allowed to densify and operate without cars if their citizens want that”.

They’re claiming 5% of global card transactions, that surely can’t be true, there are quite a few developed countries where iPhones are not that common, and countries where other contactless payment systems are already widespread. And what about middle income and poor countries?

Yes, given the pooled bins for items sold from different sellers, I just don’t trust Amazon not to provide a counterfeit item.

Web apps need a parallel layout engine, and such a thing exists with Mozilla’s Servo, but they’re for some reason Mozilla using it for WebVR rather than building a functional browser.

Anyone living near a busy road is swimming in particulate matter on the micrometre and nanometre scale, and particles on that scale bypass the normal defences, get into the blood stream and saturate the body. Small particles can even move down nerves, it’s really not surprising that long term exposure causes neurological problems.

British people have healthier teeth than Americans, you’re mistaking the results of invasive and often damaging cosmetic dental procedures with the actual function and health of the teeth.

Nope, China’s coal consumption peaked in 2013.

Indeed, the first part of his post was reasonable, it is true that other factors are extremely important or perhaps dominant in some of these cases, loss of habitat and insecticide use for the loss of insects, and for wildfires, suburban settlement into forests leading to suppression of regular burning and a consequent build-up on the fuel load.

But then he takes a totally unjustified leap into using a quote from an insurance executive to draw sweeping conclusions about academic institutions and climate science in general. Very strange.

> including large areas of rainforest in Queensland which has not previously been dry enough to support a bushfire?

He talked about rainforest, not Eucalyptus forest.

I don’t think it’s wrong to blame forest management in part, the problem is the clear motivated reasoning to exclusively put forward any other reason which allows the commenter to exclude climate change as a major driver.

It is genuinely bizarre to see the arson talking point being laid on so thick coming off the back of a year with the lowest rainfall and highest temperatures on record.

Could you say that the dipole effect is giving an advanced preview of what the shifting baseline of global warming will deliver every year in a decade or two?

I don’t really understand the strength of your response, it’s a 6-7 hour trip, wouldn’t you want to stop anyway? Stop off at a restaurant near a 50kW charger, the fuel savings will pay for a good meal, and then you’ll only need another 20 minute top up to stretch your legs at some other point of the trip. And even if you never wanted to stop, this is, what, five hours over the course of a year, it just doesn’t seem that important, for instance what about the time you save from never having to visit a petrol station in daily use of the car?

They’re manufacturing the ID.4 in the States, it’s only the first year’s supply which will be imported.

There are a lot of cliche comments here about Dieselgate and German manufacturers vs Tesla. The threat isn’t Tesla, Tesla will do very well but isn’t going to take over the world, it’s that manufacturing EVs doesn’t need a lot of the established supply chain, and doesn’t need the same level of employment. Mercedes, VW, BMW etc will be fine, but a lot of their specialised suppliers will go bust, and a lot of jobs will be lost.

> CNN and TYT are both partisan left. They both published content showing extreme dismay at the election of Trump. That's fine, they're allowed to do that. This just shows their political bias.

‘Extreme’ disapproval of Trump is an exclusively left wing position? Clearly that is not the case.

I used it in New York, and it also knew about line closures which other apps weren’t aware of.

One thing it’s bad at (ironically because it was made in London) is the data model for Tube stations, it seems to think a Tube station is a point, whereas they often sprawl underground over large distances. It doesn’t have much of a concept that you can be walking for 10 minutes to connect between lines, and will make dodgy suggestions on that basis.

You’re right, the climate data is likely to be solid but the economic modelling dubious.

Unfortunately it’s relatively limited, there are only a small number of wavelengths which are measured, and you can game it by tuning the peaks of the bulb to match up with those points.

There are better measures, but almost no manufacturers use them. I think just having the output spectrum and eyeballing it will do the trick.

You don't disagree with me on the science. Methane has a limited half life, this is well understood and built into the models. You are repeating the science as if it were different, and then drawing different conclusions from it.

I don't see what the absolute numbers have to do with whether or not oil or gas installations should be able to vent a particular quantity of methane.

Or why it matters that another unrelated source of Methane is limited. If cattle produced a similar but different molecule that would reduce the Methane absolute numbers dramatically, but in reality would have no impact on the question at hand. This is all like saying that driving a car in North Dakota matters less than in California, because North Dakota has lower total absolute emissions. It is sophistry.

It becomes in combination 80 fold higher over 20 years and 20 fold higher over 100 years, per unit mass.

Incidentally the reaction from Methane to CO2 produces 2.5 times more mass of CO2 than the Methane it starts with, which is one reason why the impact remains quite high. And of course everyone knows Methane emissions are relatively low, otherwise given their potency their effect on GHG warming would be a lot more than the 15% of thereabouts which it is at the moment.

This is all like attacking an IPCC claim that the sea level is going to rise by 1m over 100 years by saying it won’t rise by 5m, but by on average 1cm a year for 100 years. We know that already.

The i.MX8M as I understand is a chip for car navigation/entertainment systems. I wonder whether the shift towards OTA updates will encourage manufacturers to care about mainline support. Think about all the models and versions that a car company has, they’re going to have to be maintained for a decade or more, and doing that with fractured code bases and kernel patches sounds like an immense pain.

Yes, literally from this article about this “research”

> A summary of their paper, which has not been published in a mainstream science journal, was submitted to EPA during the public comment period on a plan to roll back regulations for methane leaked during the production, processing, transmission and storage of oil and natural gas.

> "As far as from a global effect on climate, [methane] is immeasurably small," van Wijngaarden told E&E News. So "some of these people have said, you know, that could you please just write something up that we can use as ammunition," he said.

And then it breaks down to CO2. That is a basic and well understood part of climate science, that’s how the calculations are made which show an 80 fold higher impact for Methane per unit mass than for CO2 over a 20 year period, and 20 fold higher impact over a 100 year period.

As the climate scientist says in the article, this doesn’t disprove mainstream climate science, and the calculations are correct but banal, and just presented in a way to give a misleading impression of a smaller impact. The author is quite open about preparing the paper specifically to give ammunition to efforts to roll back Oil and Gas regulations.

You don’t need broken windows for economic growth from action against climate change. We’re going to see numerous core technologies of civilization becoming significantly cheaper than the incumbent technologies.

We’ve already seen that with LEDs and lighting. Likewise opportunistic electricity use (which doesn’t depend on time and location) derived from wind or solar is already perhaps half to a third of the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel source.

Electric vehicles will also end up significantly cheaper per mile, and in fact are already cheaper at the right levels of utilization.

Fossil fueled electricity and road transport are going to be progressively undercut by the zero carbon alternatives, and that’s going to make the global economy vastly more productive.

That’s to say nothing of the economic benefits of reducing air pollution and the massive costs associated with its impacts on human health.

The alternative is a different app, not Black Cabs. Uber doesn’t provide a unique service beyond a network effect, drivers and customers can almost immediately switch to other apps.

Ah, fair enough, you’re making the distinction for others to understand.

The Overground has always worked well for me, it’s unreliable for you?

It sounds like you've never been to London? Who says 'TFL train'?

Musk has actually said outright he was inspired by that film.

As I understand HEPA filters usually remove particles down to about 20nm, which will capture a good chunk, PM2.5 is 2500nm so far smaller than that. Although it may well be that the very small particles are most able to penetrate our biological barriers, and are therefore the most dangerous. This is an active area of research and I think still not fully understood.

These are core structural elements which rely on the quoted level of tolerance.