Category: Climate Change (Page 2 of 2)

The upside of climate change. Everyone claps when the batter hits a home run.

Climate Change increasing the number of home runs in MLB.

This topic has been making the news, so it’s worth a look.

“As soon as it gets warm, the ball carries a lot better,” Washington Nationals manager Dave Martinez told The Post. “I usually tell everybody, right about the middle of May, the balls will start flying out of the ballpark.”

That’s from a team manager, so it has to be true.  More home runs couldn’t possibly come from the players getting into the groove as they get a month into the season.

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Greta Thunberg is an odd duck

Greta Thunberg is an odd duck.  She has been catching some flak for deleting a tweet about 2023,  so there is a  Newsweek Fact Check of Greta Tweet to defend her.  Who cares?

When Greta stopped going to school in 9th grade to protest Climate Change, her protest became international news.  That was fishy from the start.  Kids protest all sorts of things, but somehow, this mentally fragile girl from Sweden has everyone’s attention.  It was clear that people with influence decided to exploit her to further their agenda.

Her neuro-divergence makes her an unpersuasive spokesman for environmental causes.  More than anything, she reminds me of a scary German comedian named Brother Theodore.  I will post a clip, but watch for this quote.  If Greta were more introspective, it could come from her.

I am what you might call a controversial figure.  People either hate me or despise me.  They would rather shake the devil by the tail than shake me by the hand, but with every failure David, with every failure, my reputation grows.  One of these days, you’ll see my picture on every postage stamp.  One of these days, I’ll furorize the world.

 

Electric school buses might make sense.

Electric school buses  may actually make sense.  Electric cars aren’t a good solution for most people because they take a long time to recharge and lose range quickly in cold weather. 

When I started at North Royalton a couple of decades ago, I forwarded information to the administration about a government program to subsidize the conversion of school buses to natural gas.  The district had some capped natural gas wells, so this could have been a great opportunity. 

Are we finally entering an era of electric school buses?

It appears that way: A growing number of school districts are upgrading their student transportation with electric buses. The Biden-Harris Administration has paved the way for electric school buses with resources and funding. 

School buses have tons of room for batteries.  A school bus has two steel beams for a frame, with the body resting on top.  Batteries could easily be nestled between the beams.  District maintenance garages would have access to 220 V charging, or even 480 V 3 phase power.  Home owners may not have 220 V available for a charger, so are looking at 8 hours for a full charge.  Not convenient.

Bus drivers have fixed routes, so running out of a charge isn’t likely.  Transportation for field trips and athletic events could be a concern.  A wise district would consider retaining a number of diesel buses for those uses.

Heating uses a ton of energy.  There is no way around that.  Engines produce waste heat, so heating the passenger compartment isn’t an issue.  For an electric vehicle, getting stuck in traffic in the Winter could end the trip.  For student pickup, buses are generally on surface streets and the entire route isn’t likely to challenge the vehicle range.

The rest of the article dwells on stupid stuff.

Electric buses also provide a smoother, better ride to and from school; fewer vibrations on the bus mean lower body fatigue for students and drivers.

Nobody cares about that.

A quieter ride means children are more likely to arrive at school with a calmer headspace, ready and eager to learn.

Or that.

Electric fleets give back more energy than they consume during the day, and each electric bus has enough charge to provide electricity to four to six homes for one day.

I can’t tell what that is supposed to mean.

A mindset shift. While electric buses cost more, this should be viewed as strategic long-term investment for the betterment of our communities.

That’s a problem.

Electric buses doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but the articles proposing that approach should be more realistic, rather than just throwing in everything the author can think of.  It makes me think they are lying about something.

Climate change isn’t a problem to solve, but an opportunity to exploit.

If you aren’t skeptical of the authorities, experts and the commercial media after the disastrous handing of Covid-19, then I can’t help you.

There are dozens of valid reasons to be skeptical of the narrative on climate change.  If you are actually interested in learning, then Watts Up With That is a good place to get educated.  If you aren’t interested in getting educated, then you should get off your high horse and shut up about it.

Climate change is real and ongoing.  I am confident of that because my area was once covered by a thousand feet of ice.  Climate change would exist whether or not people existed.  What should we do if the Earth is getting too hot?

If the climate is heating up too much, geoengineering is the only solution.  Rolling back civilization to pre-industrial levels and allowing billions of people to die will not necessarily reduce global warming.  There are many approaches to cooling the planet, but there will be unintended consequences and many approaches aren’t easily reversible.  The time scales will be long, and natural processes can cause ice ages.  We must be very careful.

The best approach is a sun shade at the L1 Lagrange Point between the Earth and the Sun.

Earth-Sun Lagrange Points

In a two-body system, a Lagrange Point is a place where the forces all cancel out.  A satellite placed on a Lagrange point will just sit there, with minor adjustments necessary to hold station.

The L1 Lagrange Point is a million mile above the Earth.  That’s four times the distance to the Moon, but not particularly far.  At it’s closest, Mars is 50 million miles from Earth, and we’ve sent plenty of equipment there.  A satellite could be placed at L1, with huge shades that unfurl.  The forces all cancel, so shades could be very lightweight. 

We would want to make an infinitesimal reduction in the energy reaching the Earth, and watch for the temperature trends over several years.  A large volcanic eruption or meteor strike to the Earth causes atmospheric changes that result in global cooling.  Both of those have happened in the past and will happen again.  If necessary, the solar shades could be removed.

It is no secret that the WEF and global elites want us to eat bugs, own nothing and shut up.  I suspect that we don’t talk about solutions like this because their goal is power.

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