Rubber Duckies For Global Warming Research 167
The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."
Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
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Yea I posted on the other one that if they'd just throw more ducks and plastic and crap in there'd be no evaporation and no glowbull worming.
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I think the dupe is intentional. They're actually going to post this story another 88 times and see if any of the other versions end up being read by a different demographic.
Pollution Anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
What are the chances that these rubber duckies end up inside the tummy of some sea creature? In which case, that is just more pollution floating around in our oceans.
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Re:Pollution Anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
Now lets all calm down, nobody here needs to gain any knowledge.
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What are the chances that these rubber duckies end up inside the tummy of some sea creature? In which case, that is just more pollution floating around in our oceans.
But floating oil slicks don't provide quite as much information as these rubber duckies. They're also less funny.
Irony. (Score:5, Funny)
Raise your hand if the prospect of an environmentalist dumping plastic into the ocean for research purposes is deeply amusing.
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I'm still waiting for one of them to propose creating the biggest CO2 emitting burner on earth to prove global warming.
In the meantime, yeah I'm amused.
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You can't see it, but I'm kind of half raising my hand, because they're "RUBBER duckies" but I'm not sure if they're actually made out of plastic these days. Also I wouldn't say DEEPLY amused. So count that as a 1/4 hand raise.
Rubber duckie, you're the one. (Score:5, Funny)
Rubber duckie, you're so fun.
Re:Rubber duckie, you're the one. (Score:5, Funny)
You make bathtime lots of fun. Rubber ducky I'm awfully fond of you. Too bad I must now go litter our oceans with your cute little yellow non-biodegradable petroleum product carcasses.
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You make bathtime lots of fun. Rubber ducky I'm awfully fond of you. Too bad I must now go litter our oceans with your cute little yellow non-biodegradable petroleum product carcasses.
Ahh, but biodegradable plastic releases CO2, while non-degrading doesn't.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKheYay-2MU [youtube.com]
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Shortly afterwards (Score:2, Funny)
disko bay dux (Score:1, Flamebait)
Great idea, it's happened before by accident (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure this is where he got the idea.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464768/Thousands-rubber-ducks-land-British-shores-15-year-journey.html
Re:Great idea, it's happened before by accident (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, it was a shipment of such bath tub toys washed overboard in the Pacific during a 1992 storm that accidentally launched this unusual field.
What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:4, Interesting)
How long it takes is rather important.
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In that case, they probably wouldn't learn much about glacier melt, but they could learn something about the ocean currents in the region.
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Its a great way to get a grant..
Re:What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not only wondering where the water goes, but how long it takes to get there and where it goes after that.
If they all come out at once then we know the routes they all took about the same route, or the routes they took were all more or less direct. If they emerge over years or even decades then we know some are becoming trapped, only to be released later. What if a duck washes up in India, twelve years after it was released in Greenland?
They're interested in knowing *everything* that could happen to these ducks after they're released. Furthermore, data from this experiment could confirm or falsify other oceanographic theories, all for $200 worth of rubber ducks.
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Should also be useful to climatologists, since the ocean currents and their temperature gradients have a profound impact on climate, notably precipitation (frex, El Niño/La Niña).
This isn't the first time such an experiment has been done by any means, but AFAIK it's the first time on this scale. I do find it interesting that rubber ducks seem to have a much better survival rate than more-expensive gadgets (apparently they are both durable and so obviously inedible or tasteless that random critters
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Maybe they should put GPS systems on the ducks and make a deal with Google Maps. Then we could all go to tracktheduckie.com (not sure if it's a real domain, probably a porn site if it is), and get regular updates on their locations, which one is winning, etc. Who knows, place a banner ad or two on the site, get slashdotted, they could actually make money off of it.
This is showmanship, not science (Score:4, Interesting)
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The melt waters flowing under the glacier and through small streams will flow through gravels and other obstructions that the rubber duckies can't flow through. Thus, any data coming back will have a huge caveat hanging over it and will be rather useless from a scientific point of view.
Huh? If data comes back, it's because the ducks made it through the obstructions, which is scientifically interesting; people may see where the ducks emerge into the ocean, which is scientifically interesting; and if anyone finds the ducks later, they will indicate where the ocean currents from the glacier goes, which is scientifically interesting.
Radioactive tracers etc can give far better information.
I don't know about radioactive tracers, but the article says that another scientist tried dye and it didn't work — they couldn't find any trace of it. I d
Slightly interesting, but misleading (Score:2)
I live in a place which is the result of glacial deposits and only a small % of the water here travels on the
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Tracers can be diluted. Ducks cannot. The fact that tracers can flow through obstructions and ducks cannot make the ducks a useful complement to tracers. Rubber ducks also attract attention from beachcombers, allowing them to be of service for years.
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A vast % of water flowing from glaciers etc flows under the gravels and underground. If people could not follow the tracers (dyes etc) then how will they follow ducks?
They're more visible and they can count on more people looking for them.
That they could not follow tracers indicates that the water travels via some non-obvious (ie. non-surface) path.
I don't see how that implies anything. Tracers can travel below the surface too.
Sure, the ducks might provide a bit of curiosity, but it would be misleading to take them as being representative of water flow as a whole.
If they do make it out, there's probably some fairly big channel outlet.
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Hmm, sounds like a job for the alternate scientific method at Mythbusters.
They expect to prove... (Score:2)
... that good PR achieves better results in maintaining and increasing funding than providing scientific value does.
NASA's brief is not science -- science is a rare but happy side-effect which they use to justify their budget.*
The reason they exist is to funnel taxdollars to favored companies, largely defense contractors, and congressional districts.
* No intellectually serious person could suggest that the shuttle program is an effective use of R&D dollars. NASA *loves* the shuttle. In terms of press
Yes, but what if (Score:2, Funny)
This is all fun and games until the Italians get a hold of the ducks and hold them for ransom. Then our world will have no defense against global warming. What will these "scientists" be saying when the Italians control our weather with their nefarious ices?????
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"Um, yeah hi, I want to collect the reward for finding your duckie...
"oh, well I found it in the stomach of this endangered peregrine falcon...
"hello?"
Spam begets research begets spam (Score:5, Funny)
"This duck was lost by a Nigerian prince. Email this address to claim your reward."
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"This duck was lost by a Nigerian prince. Email this address to claim your reward."
Ha ha! Like anyone would believe that a Nigerian prince could have accidentally lost a rubber duck in Greenland (AND that he could have been so long-headed that he had written a message in advance) and reply...oh, wait a minute...
The Reward...? (Score:1)
"Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward."
Congratulations! You found one of our rubber ducks! Now send us an email and we'll let you keep it!
I do wonder what they are offering though...
GPS tracker anyone? (Score:1)
Yes, a GPS. While sending 90 GPS systems might be a little expensive, you wouldn't send off 90 of them. How many of the 90 duckies would they expect to get back? 5, maybe.
It would be way more efficient for the scientist to th
Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
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Nobody's talking about tracking anything under the ice. You can't track rubber ducks under the ice either. It's when they're on the open sea that people want to track them. (Well, they'd like to be able to track things under the glacier, but they can't. They have to wait for whatever it is to emerge in the ocean.)
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They don't need to know where it is if it's still ice-locked. However, if they included a solar panel and a supercapacitor that could supply power to a little GPS tracker when the rubber ducky is bobbing about on the surface of the ocean, that could possibly supply some very useful data.
Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
Embed a hit single from Mariah Carrey in each one. Let the RIAA find them.
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Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
The article says he already tried a GPS tracker, and it failed to report in. I suppose he figured that rather than continuing to toss in expensive devices, he'd try a larger number of cheaper objects. If nobody finds them, at least it wasn't a big waste of money.
By the way, there are already robot floats in the ocean which can be tracked to show ocean currents (ARGO). Most of them don't use GPS, though, but Doppler radio tracking (here [argos-system.org]).
NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's publish the rubber duckies for Global Warming Research and ignore Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA headed by James Hansen which published falsified data [telegraph.co.uk]. James Hansen is a global warming alarmist.
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
This is simply another proof that the mainstream media is no longer interested in facts or reporting unbiased news, just like during the election of the Anointed One. Rather, they simply parrot agendas that fit their own opinion.
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Im just glad to see that California with their wildfires are doing their part to reverse this cooling trend...
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Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's publish the rubber duckies for Global Warming Research and ignore Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA headed by James Hansen which published falsified data.
I hate to break it to you, but making a clerical mistake is not the same as "falsifying data".
This is simply another proof that the mainstream media is no longer interested in facts or reporting unbiased news
Uh, no, it's a sign that quickly-fixed data reporting errors which have no impact on any major climate studies are not front page news.
I also hate to break it to you, but minor errors are found and fixed in scientific data sets all the time. It's only news when the data error is the basis for some important scientific conclusion. (That has been the case, for instance, with the XBT ocean thermometers and the UAH satellite data.)
Your post is a prime example of how ridiculously polarized the global warming debate has become. You're grasping at straws, man. A mistake in two month's data reporting, which has nothing to do with James Hansen personally, is not a global scientific conspiracy nor a disproof of global warming.
just like during the election of the Anointed One
Anointed One? Yeah, you really sound like an impartial arbiter of scientific accuracy. You might want to tone down the hypocrisy while whinging about "bias".
Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Insightful)
how ridiculously polarized the global warming debate has become
Quite true. Personally I've become nearly apathetic upon the realization that both sides exaggerate to the point of dishonesty. Well, really it's the extremists on either side that do the lying, but since the issue is so polarized there's the illusion (perhaps becoming reality) that they speak for their respective groups.
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Instead, it seems like this researcher just assumed that it was more support for a theory he liked.
I don't see any evidence that Hansen even knew there was anything anomalous either way. The article rather exaggerated that NASA "announced that last month was the hottest October on record". It appeared in their database update, but they didn't announce any press releases about it or anything — they only publish analysis of records at the end of the year.
Little things like this can add up across various studies, leading to a theory being unduly strong (self perpetuating).
That's true; I mentioned two other cases where mistakes did add up. However, considering the other temperature records out there (both surface an
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It sounds an awful lot like a case of bad interpolation of missing data. Copy previous month is a heck of a lot lower order than a simple linear function, even. But some interpolation would be necessary to start working with the results. You push out the corrections in the errata when the data comes in if you miss CD press time.
Now there is definitely some question as to why the gaps would be represented by previous data instead of nulls or flag values, and clerical error is certainly a plausible reason.
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But.. it's an awfully convenient excuse,
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by human error.
especially if there was some pressure to publish quickly or the cleverly nefarious scheme of announcing "warmest October ever"
They didn't publish it; it was just a routine data update. And, contrary to the article's implication, they didn't "announce" the warmest October ever, either. The anomalous data showed up in the data base, but they didn't issue a press release or publish a paper or contact the media about it. It looks like they didn't even notice it until someone else pointed it out.
If one wanted, every year could be the warmest on record, in a big announcement
But it isn't, which casts doubt both on global conspiracy and "co
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Clerical error does not include "hastily revising" the figures using another set of false data unsupported by satellite images.
Your conspiracy theories get lamer and lamer.
First, if they were faking data to make October come out warm, you'd think they'd fake enough of a temperature change to make October still be a record year, but they didn't. What's the point of faking data in a way that doesn't actually matter?
Second, they didn't use any second set of false data. They used existing Canadian temperature stations which hadn't reported in by the last data dump. In the previous anomaly map, they just left that area blank, because
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Ironically, brave AC I am not an American either.
You obviously disliked Obama so yes, you lost.
Next player please.
The whole world wins with the Obama presidency.
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Could you break it to me why people are so uncritical of data that supports their preconceived ideas that they would miss data which on its face is so far off the charts (Warmest October ever) as to be silly.
Even the corrected data are still close to being the warmest October ever. Globally speaking, it wasn't actually that far off the charts. However, some individual stations were far above what is normal for those particular stations. It seems nobody noticed what was going on at those specific locations, and when they got averaged in with the other normal stations, the regional temperature wasn't too out of line. I'm not surprised that nobody at GISS immediately noticed something weird going on at those p
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You don't understand. The glacier is melting at 0.2 ducks per year! Prior to this experiment, the glacier was melting at zero ducks per year. It has increased 2 whole ducks per 10 year period! At this rate of increase, the entire population of ducks will be exhausted by 2142! Don't you care about the ducks?
The only upside is that, barring any additional interference, the glacier's melting will return to zero ducks per year once all the ducks are gone.
Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Informative)
About the author of this opinion article:
He has claimed that Asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder", and the BBC has accused him of basing his reputation on "lies about his credentials, unaccredited tests, and self aggrandisement".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Booker#Criticism [wikipedia.org]
He is not a credible person.
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Pot meets kettle.
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From the Telegraph article linked to by the parent:
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
This is effectively using a single data point (the month of October 2008) to argue that the theory of global warming is false. Claims like this are just a red herring on this issue. Episodes like this can be consistent with global warming, provided that averaged across time and space they are the exception rather than the rule.
The theory of global warming states that on average the world's temperature will rise as a result of increasing concentrations of
Reward (Score:5, Funny)
Has made apperances on childrens television shows
Please report any information on the whereabouts on Rubber Duckie to Ernie, Sesame St NY. +123 (456) 789-10-11-12
Cash reward
Disko Ducks? (Score:2, Funny)
Next month's story (Score:5, Funny)
Scientists are extremely alarmed over a new phenomenon recently observed in the arctic glaciers. Melt water, which normally flows through micro rivers deep in the glacier until it reaches the sea, has started to flow over the surface instead, accelerating the rate at which the ice melts. "It's like something went and plugged up the flow, and now it's backing up like a giant toilet with a rubber duck stuck in it." remarked one researcher.
The researchers are currently seeking a $10 million grant to investigate the cause of this disturbing event.
Just a stunt (Score:2)
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Yeah, it's all a big data cover up so they have to re-brand the theory.
Sheesh.
They call it climate change now because it's important to emphasize that temperature isn't the only thing which is changing.
Easier, more 'scientific' way to do it (Score:2)
Pour a large quantity of fluorescein [wikipedia.org] into the melt water in question. Observe the ocean surrounding the glacier (perhaps from a satellite) for a bright yellow-green patch.
If you want to trace the flow, introduce a neutrally buoyant, screaming hot but short half-life gamma radiation source into the meltwater. Track it via sensitive correlated gamma detectors in 3 dimensions. Some choices include Sodium-24 with a half-life of 15 hours and gamma energies of 1368 keV and 2754 keV, or Ir-188, or Y-90.
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The article says another scientist tried (non-radioactive) tracer dyes and didn't see anything. I suppose you eventually would if you used a huge amount.
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Maybe he didn't use 'large' quantities of dye for sufficiently large values of 'large'. 8-)
I was going to originally propose radioactive fluorescein so that you could compare the isotopic ratios to determine how long it took the sample to traverse the path, but realized that the appearance of the dye would do the same thing. Duh. I like the radioactive tracking, however. If you make it radioactive enough that it's not only radiologically hot but physically hot, it'll melt it's way through any constrictions.
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I think if your tracer is radioactive enough to melt through ice, you're going to have some trouble with Homeland Security ...
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There aren't that many glaciers in their territory. 8-)
Radioactive heating (particularly alpha-induced heating) is very effective. This fascinating article [nanomedicine.com] states:
Historical research (Score:2)
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if we rode our bike to work
What the hell do you think? Muscle energy isn't free energy, it comes from food, and food is anything but green energy. Funny you should talk about "making us feel better", because it's exactly what the type of stuff does, with disputable benefits.
bought less stuff
So your idea of saving the world is downscaling the economy and living like Cubans?
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It will make people eat more, you could expect it to make them eat just enough to make up for the energy spent.
Give me a break. I could bike to work on the breakfast I eat now, as could I suspect most people; at best, I'd have to eat a small amount more. You'd have to increase your food consumption for that to matter at all, and the resulting marginal increase in food-related emissions still isn't going to match the total amount of emissions from driving. There are legitimate reasons for people not to bike to work, but "I'm not eating enough to do it" isn't really one of them.
The point being, that food is everything but green.
True, but as I said, irrelevant.
Unless they're all trying to become skinny, people are going to eat more if they spend more.
What
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Right, you're just looking at things on a small scale (i.e. I could bike to work with an empty stomach) while ignoring that on a large scale (both in time and in people) there's a necessary impact.
What the hell are you talking about? Buying more stuff doesn't cause me to eat more, unless I'm buying more food, for which I need to have a reason.
I'm talking about spending body energy. There's a context to what I'm talking about, you twit.
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Right, you're just looking at things on a small scale (i.e. I could bike to work with an empty stomach) while ignoring that on a large scale (both in time and in people) there's a necessary impact.
I didn't say you could bike to work on an empty stomach, you twit. I said that most people already eat enough for breakfast that they could bike to work without eating significantly more.
I'm talking about spending body energy.
I still have no idea what you're talking about. What does buying more stuff have to do with anything? Are you talking about buying more food? If you said the opposite, that people will buy more food if they eat more, you might make some small amount of sense. But what's the point
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I didn't say you could bike to work on an empty stomach, you twit
Duh, I know, get subtle, I was stretching your claim to show that while it's equally true, it doesn't mean that biking doesn't require food, while your claim could have been interpreted (although you surely didn't mean this way) to say that a breakfast was enough to fuel the trip. I used to bike to school with an empty stomach by the way.
Good Lord, you really don't get it. I never talked about buying more stuff, I talked about "spending more
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Right, you're just looking at things on a small scale (i.e. I could bike to work with an empty stomach) while ignoring that on a large scale (both in time and in people) there's a necessary impact.
And by the way, I didn't claim that there weren't any downsides to biking to work. In fact, I said the opposite, that there are drawbacks; as you say, time is one example. I just said that consuming more food leading to increased CO2 emissions is not really one of them.
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A human riding their bike to work produces significantly lower amounts of produced environmental pollutants.
Citation needed. How do you know that? Do you have any idea how much pollution goes in average into each ounce of food you eat? No? So? Where are you pulling your facts from?
I didn't say become Cuba, I said live like Cubans, that is with like $7 a day. The economy depends on spending, people spending. Just imagine everybody is buying twice less stuff at your local Walmart, and that for the sake of s
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Driving your car to work does release carbon into the environment that was not there last year. Riding your bike does not.
That's because you're an idiot. You only see what's obvious, i.e. "look, there's no nasty gases coming out of my bike" ADUH OH YOU THINK?? What you don't see is the pollution that goes into the making of your food, that you need to make that bike move forth, which you'll eat more of unless you hate your silhouette. The tractors and trucks used in the making of your food ate gas too, lo
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2 bananas to fuel a trip to work? Damn, can't wait until they invent Mr. Fusion, I had no idea how much power was contained in a single banana. Hey, nice comparing bicycles to cars, how about you compare what's more comparable, like bicycles and scooters? Anyways, you pretty much proved my point, your stack of assumptions are imprecise enough so that your estimates could be easily tipped to make cars seem more efficient.
Ha, the things you can make people do just by calling them idiots. *high fives self*
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[laughing] I had similar thoughts.... and muscle energy isn't even particularly efficient. I wonder how many Kcal it takes for a bicyclist to move, say, a ton of goods for a mile, vs. how many Kcal it takes for a lorry to move the same ton of goods for a mile? remember, the cyclist will have to make many trips, while the lorry makes one. ;)
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Why would you have to travel over 3,000 miles in airplane for it to become efficient? Wouldn't it be as efficient if you only travelled 2,000 miles?
Also, citation needed.
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Efficient in terms of minimal weight from point A to point B. Not so efficient if you need to move significantly more than your own mass, or under less than ideal conditions, or in time compared to distance. (Having biked in extreme wind, rain, and snow conditions, and having hauled heavy loads with a bike, I can attest to that.)
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The reason I didn't compare scooters is because thats not what most people take to work
So, they don't take bikes either. If people ponder taking bikes, maybe they could also pondering scooters, as you said.
Indeed, yes, it's unfortunate that more research hasn't been done on that, because it's interesting and as you see, it's not safe to assume that bikes are "clean", which is unfortunately what we do.
Re:Saving the world (Score:4, Insightful)
Using dollars is not a good metric. Food production is heavily subsidized; the price you pay for food at the grocery store in no way represents its actual costs to produce. (And it gets even worse when you try to take into account the externalities of food production that are allowed to be placed on the public without recompense -- the runoff from farms into water supplies and the Gulf, for one example.)
A better way is to look at energy and calories. The exact values depend on the food, your location, and other factors, but it's not atypical for 1 calorie of food energy to use over 100 calories of petroleum energy in its creation, transportation, packaging, and retail sale. If you buy nothing but raw foods at farmers' markets, the number will of course be lower, but even something as innocent as iceberg lettuce can have a huge energy debt. Michael Pollan does an analysis in one of his books, and if you are on the East Coast, eating lettuce from California, it's something like 4500 cal of petroleum for the measly 80 cal of human-consumable energy in the lettuce. It's much worse for heavily-processed foods.
I am a big proponent of bicycling, but it's not necessarily as obvious a win on carbon-emission grounds as it might appear. There are lots of other good reasons to bike, though. (To name a few, it decreases urban air pollution, which leads to health problems that consume resources, same also with obesity-related issues, if widely adopted it would make the roads safer, etc.)
I think of it as a "healthy / pleasant lifestyle" choice, rather than an "environmental" choice. You cannot claim to be much of an environmentalist while leading a resource-intensive, Western lifestyle. It simply cannot be done. Even the most "environmentally conscious," bike-riding, CFL-using, Prius-owning, self-righteous neo-hippies are contributing massively to the problem, practically just by getting up in the morning. You cannot eat, drink, shit, or die in America and not be contributing to the problem in some way. (You can't really even kill yourself without incurring a debt, since the way we deal with dead bodies is, in itself, not exactly environmentally sound. Although that's probably the most un-hypocritical approach.)
The truth is that individual choices matter very little in the grand scheme. If you drive an efficient vehicle, or ride a bike, great -- that's slightly less demand for gasoline, slightly lower prices, and slightly more gas for someone else to put in their Hummer (or someone in India to fuel their shiny new Tata). It's still getting pumped out of the ground as fast as we can find it either way. Our civilization is going to hurtle down the road it's going down, until it runs into something Really Bad -- maybe global warming, maybe Peak Oil, maybe something else -- and either engineers a clever way around it, or collapses in an orgy of suffering and death like nothing history has ever recorded. Whether or not you rode a bike to work won't change the outcome in the slightest.
It might make you feel a lot better, though, in the meantime. That's why I do it, and why I'd tell anyone they should as well.
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Our civilization is going to hurtle down the road it's going down, until it runs into something Really Bad -- maybe global warming, maybe Peak Oil, maybe something else -- and either engineers a clever way around it, or collapses in an orgy of suffering and death like nothing history has ever recorded.
Given how much money is at stake in finding a solution, my money is on engineering a clever way around it. Like more fission power plants to be later replaced by fusion or solar and efficient electric cars, pr
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No phishing here (Score:3, Funny)
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They could verify that the duck was found without asking for any personal info if they mark the ducks with some unique ID. If you report a valid ID, you've found a duck. Of course, they still have to trust that you found it where you said you found it. But that's a problem regardless of whether you give out your home address.
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If they show up soon -> Proof of Global Warming.
If they show up in 100 years -> Proof of Climate Change.
Either way, we need to stop whatever we're about to do.
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It's only 90 ducks. Sheesh. Compared to this [wikipedia.org], that's nothing.
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"if you want to get a research grant to study squirrels, you won't get funds, but if the request were to study the impact of global warming on squirrels, then there is plenty of money available."
That may be true, to an extent. Of course, people do get grants to study squirrels independent of climate change. And of course, you have more options for funding to study squirrels if you can apply in two different areas (biology and climate). But it's not clear that there's anything wrong with this. If something has the potential to, say, decimate squirrel populations, that's obviously something of interest to the squirrel research community and perhaps deserves some extra funding.
Where the cynics cro