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Sceptic_Kev

Listed below are comments made by Sceptic_Kev between Thursday, 16th April 2009 and Tuesday, 15th September 2009.

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Leaders in step on climate 01:47am on 15 Sep 2009 A word of warning.
Once upon a time, the clergy would climb their ivory towers and dish out tales of the end of the world. The end of the world is coming, it says so in the bible.
The clergy no longer do this. Some would say it is because the scientist now do this for them, however I believe there is another reason. If the Pope were to appear on television and tell us all the world will end in year 20xx then his credibility would be destroyed. Especially if 20xx turned up and the world was still going strong.

This is a lesson the scientist need to learn because I fear, that if 20xx turns up and the world hasn't ended then science will become a laughing stock. And not just climate science, all science will be deemed as foolishness.

This will be hugely damaging as science is already witnessing a massive down turn of interest in the classroom.

We may even find ourselves in a time without science, where scientists are regularly derided as figures of fun, and no right thinking person would entertain such a career. We think that way of alchemy today, but most modern chemistry came from early alchemists.

Interestingly I posted a comment about Ozone that got a few people riled. I have an parallel:

I am a computer programmer and worked at the time of the great y2k. We all worked very hard to make y2k pass without incident. In fact programmers were regularly demanding £1000 a day such was the demand for people to fix the issue, and a lot of the people I know were working on the night the clocks changed.
Meanwhile the media got wind of what we were doing and predictably blew the whole thing out of proportion. Suddenly it wasn't just a few banking systems that were going to fail, it was the end of the world.

Due to our efforts Y2k passed without incident, and the world didn't come to an end.

Imagine my horror after all the work we did to hear the media say, that it was all just a scam, it was apparently them who had been conned by the whole y2k thing!!

I can tell you, y2k was not a false alarm, and a lot of people worked very hard to make sure things passed without incident.

OK the world was never going to end, but there could have been a few people without bank accounts / insurance policies / telephone accounts / etc come Jan 1st.

If you cry wolf and work hard to kill the wolf, then people still assume your a liar.
Can climate spending save money? 00:56am on 15 Sep 2009 While you all argue over the Tax / Trade question you might want to consider this.
1. Most people use transportation to get to work. I.e. most people work 5 days a week and only a day or so travelling for recreation. Of course this depends how far you live from where you work, but I would guess in this country the average is quite high.

2. The majority of house hold bills are for heating, cooking and washing. Heating takes a lot of energy as does cooking and washing however recreational activities such as watching TV take very little energy. TVs generally run on 5amp plugs where as a cooker needs to be wired directly into the fuse box.

So from the above the majority of energy people are consuming come from working, heating, cooking and washing. So to levy disproportionate Taxes against energy would mean one or more of the following:
A. People are unable to get to work due to fuel prices / shortages. This is a biggie if the population cant get to work, then the whole economic system collapses. If I can't afford to travel to do a days work, then as a result my job will not get done which in turn will mean a reduction in revenue for my company. So my company will have to pay more in order to allow me to travel - which leads to inflation as we witnessed when the oil prices went through the roof.

B. Nobody has mentioned the effect of pricing people out of heating their houses, how many pensioners a year die because they cannot heat their house, I would wage a few. Putting a Tax on this is murder pure and simple.

C. Washing and cooking, so far these are the only two activities we can do without, so we can look forward to a smelly future of salad eating. Until that is we all get wiped out by a plague cultivated in either uncooked food or unwashed linen.
Plan B for Planet Earth 00:03am on 03 Sep 2009 Anyone who thinks that pumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is the answer should watch the movie 'Highlander II' where they cure the problem of ozone depletion by blocking all sunlight! The result in the film is human misery, although in reality the result would be the death of every living organism on the planet.

Has everyone forgotten that when Sulphur is pumped into the atmosphere it combines with the atmosphere to create Sulphuric acid, commonly known as Acid Rain.

At a time where the suns output has dropped dramatically do we really want to be tampering? Especially as if global temperatures start to drop dramatically? We may well be thanking the CO2 we have in the atmosphere.

Coral may die with acidification and temperature rise, but how well can it survive a freezing ocean?

BTW what happened to the Ozone hole, I noticed that has gone very quite. Could it be because it never existed in the first place?
Battle rages over F1 future 5:15pm on 12 May 2009 Can someone explain to me why a budget cap is a good idea in a recession?

That's the same sort of thinking that's causing thousands of redundancies. Oh it's a recession lets make a thousand people redundant, that will help!!!!

I can't make up my mind about the budget cap, on one hand it will be good to see the competition between the poorer teams and richer teams closer. On the other hand I don't want a two tier system.

One thing is for sure, 40m is too little, and there are too many rules at the moment regardless of how much you spend.

Perhaps it could be a gradual thing where 40m lets you get away with everything but 120m you get only 1 or 2 rule exceptions.

But then that's making things even more complicated!
Honourable no more? 3:34pm on 11 May 2009 Is it just me or is it hard to imagine Gordon with yellow marigolds on?

I hate to defend Gordon but do you really expect him to pop down to his old home (which lets face it he's going to need in a few months) to do a bit of spring cleaning?

Would you expect Obama to clean all the toilets in the White House? No , but it appears we expect Gordon to?

Again I hate to defend them, but MPs work very long hours, Gordon probably works past midnight each night and then gets up before it's light in the morning to do it all again. And while your relaxing at the weekend he is probably still going!

However, what I don't understand is if I work on site for more than 2 years that becomes my home and all my expenses become taxable.

How do MPs get around this, or because they are MPs are they exempt?
Test driving an electric car in Motor City 2:28pm on 20 Apr 2009 Mnpoor:
#10 My oil change is once a year, and so have most cars I've owned. I know some of my friends have come a cropper because they bought performance cars that needed a 6 month change, and nearly lost their warranty because they thought it was yearly like most cars over here.
Also if you use artificial oil it will last a lot lot longer.
These are the specs for my car using conventional oil:
Oil Change Intervals
Engine
Miles Max 15000
Km Max 20000
Months Max 12

#11 Didn't think of the billing thing, but as I said before Com's can be built in so every charge could be monitored and billed appropriately.

Also, you don't need copper any conductor can be used, even water! In fact you could paint the coils onto the road with conducting paint.

I also had a thought about your robotic cars, you could make the cars 'talk' to each other at lights and agree path ways to eliminate collisions. You could even build in control information which would tell the car where to drive, eliminating the need for expensive road scanning technology. Of course you would still need to avoid knocking down pedestrians and bicycle fans!
Test driving an electric car in Motor City 2:47pm on 17 Apr 2009 Oh I forgot,

The idea of building charging loops into the roads at traffic lights is genius, but why stop there you could build the loops into normal road surfaces. It would be cheaper than replacing roads with rail which is what some people in this blog want.

You could also set up Com's by shorting the loops much the same way that id cards work, you could then pass on information about traffic road conditions etc.
Test driving an electric car in Motor City 2:35pm on 17 Apr 2009 Hi MNpoor,

You raise some interesting points.
1. Robots are unlikely to be driving cars any time soon:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7779093.stm

Unfortunately the sad truth is many robots would cause chaos on the roads!
See DARPA for an example of how bad these machines are!
Of course most of these machines are aimed at war zones where a few pedestrian fatalities are acceptable!
2. I thought even in the states there were cars with a service interval greater than 6 months!
I know most cars in Europe are 1 year or 10,000 miles.
I think part of the problem is loss of servicing revenue, and also that huge numbers of people will not be buying these things which is why they are so expensive.
If you make a car that costs 1 million $ to design, then after selling a million it only costs you a dollar a car. If you only sell a few thousand the development cost becomes untenable.
Of course Honda have taken the bold step of taking a hit on the development (and even production) of the Clarity.
But I guess GM at the moment can't do that, they need to make money and keep their new political masters happy with at least a fig leaf of Eco worthiness.
3. As for appliances becoming more efficient, at the moment there is little drive to produce more efficient products.
However I disagree with carbon charging, lets face it the energy balance is what keeps the economy going up and not down (like just happened). Everyone is blaming bankers but if it wasn't for fuel prices I suspect those bad investments wouldn't have gone bad.
Test driving an electric car in Motor City 09:50am on 17 Apr 2009 Hi Justin,

I think you will find Clarkson loves Electric:
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/top-gear-reviews-the-tesla-roadster/4052367588

And here is part 2, the real future:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AUurBnLbJw
The first Ethical Man film 09:36am on 16 Apr 2009 I win!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8001254.stm

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