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Post by aubrey on Jun 23, 2017 8:21:44 GMT
One hereanother here(I didn't realise until now that they were on this site: use the fichier link to dl) oh, another hereYes, research takes time. But you don't develop anything without it.
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excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
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Post by excoriator on Jun 23, 2017 8:59:00 GMT
Batteries are hopeless for powering cars, but are much more practical when you don't care much about energy density as in Grid or Domestic storage. Zinc based batterie score highly over Lithium here as they are much safer, and Zinc is a cheap abundant element.
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Post by aubrey on Jun 23, 2017 13:09:34 GMT
That is just now, and not all cars, not all the time.
If you only have to drive short distances they're a lot better than regular cars, especially in cities.
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Post by aubrey on Jun 23, 2017 13:21:39 GMT
There's a JB Priestley essay where he describes a hellish car journey to a place somewhere in the middle of Wales during a storm.
For long time he's just describing how heavy the rain is, how bad and terribly bumpy the road, and how wet everything is getting, how cold they all are; and then you realise after a while that the car doesn't have windscreen wipers so he'd had to raise the glass to be able to see out of it, and that it all leaks terribly besides, and that the headlights don't show anything and there is no lighting inside the car (I think they're using matches to see the map).
He doesn't mention any of this because cars were like that then: no heating, no inside lighting, probably no suspension, nothing to wipe the rain from the windows, no insulation. Cars have changed since then: reading it now is like reading about travelling on the mail coach.
The first part of the book The Old Dark House is based on that journey, and the first few minutes of this film show you what it was like:
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Post by marchesarosa on Jul 1, 2017 8:24:01 GMT
This is the most serious yet example of UK Green ideology leading to the trashing of the environment (and manslaughter) via social housing policy ! Grenfell: Clad In Climate Change Politics Date: 27/06/17 James Heartfield, Spiked www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/grenfell-clad-in-climate-change-politics/20003#.WVdaoYW9DJzMight CO2 targets be behind the fad for flammable cladding?
After the Grenfell disaster, local authorities are busy checking their housing stock for fire risks. Rightly, they are looking at the estates and blocks that have been retro-fitted with external cladding, which has been identified as a probable key factor in spreading the fire at Grenfell. Particular attention is being paid to those estates refurbished by Rydon, the building firm that developed the aluminium cladding used on Grenfell Tower.
But few people have asked why so many tower blocks and housing estates in the UK have been clad in recent years. Some have argued that the refurbishments were cosmetic, added to appease private investors by prettifying housing estates. But this is not the main reason for the cladding. In fact, it was added to meet the government’s targets for reducing CO2 emissions.
Just last year, Kensington and Chelsea Council proudly announced the completion of the £10million refurbishment project at Grenfell, which included ‘the installation of insulated exterior cladding’, new boilers and double glazing. The council said that the reason for the project was to ‘enhance energy efficiency and help reduce residents’ living costs’.
Here Kensington and Chelsea Council was following government instructions. As the 2008 Climate Change Act made clear, ‘it is the duty of the secretary of state to ensure that the net UK carbon account for the year 2050 is at least 80 per cent lower than the 1990 baseline’. The act also created the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme, which presented the refurbishment of social housing as one quick fix to cutting CO2 emissions.
Responsibility for meeting the government’s CO2-emissions targets was invested in the Community Energy Savings Programme (CESP). CESP, which lasted from 2009 until 2012, was run by the big energy providers, British Gas, E.On, Scottish Power and others. Its success was limited but, tellingly, its final report states that ‘almost all CESP measures were delivered through partnerships with social-housing providers’. In May 2012, the government’s committee on climate change (CCC) published its ‘advice on how local authorities can reduce emissions and control climate risk’ under the 2010 Climate Change Act. The CCC identified social housing as one of the key areas where CO2 emissions could be reduced by improved energy efficiency from greater insulation. The problem, as the CCC put it, was that ‘the very slow turnover of stock’ makes ‘[housing] relatively energy inefficient’. The CCC’s solution was to reduce emissions in existing housing stock through insulation and new boilers. As the CCC explained, ‘local authorities and housing associations have been the key partners, driven largely by their role as social landlords’.
Professor Julia King, a member of the CCC, said in May of 2012 that ‘local authorities have the potential to impact significantly on the UK’s scale and speed of emissions reduction’. At the top of King’s list for action were ‘energy-efficiency measures for existing buildings’ – insulation, such as cladding, and new boilers. While local authorities struggled to get funding for other things, austerity did not apply to the CO2-reduction scheme. Indeed, a 2010 National Audit Office report identifies 20 estate refurbishments with funding of £1.5 billion from the Department of Communities and Local Government under ‘private finance initiative’ schemes.
The programme of refurbishing local-authority and social-housing stock was augmented by the ‘green new deal’, under which local authorities and companies could get government funding to insulate houses. Householders were bombarded with phone calls and visits touting loft insulation, under the green-deal home-improvement fund. This was the small-scale equivalent of the cladding fad in social housing.
There is nothing wrong in principle with cladding. But it is a piecemeal solution to the question of energy efficiency put forward by a state that has put severe limits on new building. The glacially slow turnover of the UK housing stock is a problem created by the planning restrictions on development and construction. Greater energy efficiency could be achieved alongside new building, with a greater commitment to growth.
The rush to act on energy efficiency is undermined by the reluctance to build new houses and estates. Instead of building anew, Britain dedicated itself to a ‘make do and mend’ approach. Refurbishment made it look like the authorities were taking action on housing, but, ultimately, it came at the cost of building the new houses people need.
The problem with cladding and other kinds of insulation is that they are add-ons that are imperfectly integrated into the original design of a building, often with unintended consequences. One unintended consequence is that many of the estates that were given extra insulation were unnaturally warm, even stifling. The whole block would become a tower of hot air. On a summer evening, many tenants of these blocks would open windows to let some cooler air in. This was another reason why the fire at Grenfell spread between floors.
This make-do-and-mend approach to housing did not actually lead to savings. Rydon, which installed the cladding, claimed ‘a strong and experienced refurbishment team, which has been closely involved with local authorities and registered providers working to provide high-quality, affordable housing and enabling people to enjoy a better standard of living’. Rydon boasted of one of its projects, the refurbishment at the Chalcots Estate in Camden, that ‘the project achieved significant benefits… improving the insulation’ and adding ‘external, thermal rain-screen cladding to five towers’.
But, in fact, Rydon’s refurbishment of the Chalcots Estate was lambasted by the National Audit Office for being late and overshooting its £30million budget by an extra £35million. And now all of it is being torn down.
Though the conclusive report on the fire at Grenfell is not expected for some time, it does seem that Rydon’s cladding aggravated the spread of fire between floors. A likely cause is the gap between the cladding and the building, which can act as a flue; the use of combustible materials in the cladding; and the insulating foam between the aluminium cladding and the building. Any engineer will tell you that more moving parts means more things to go wrong – and that is true of buildings as well.
The fad for recladding tower blocks in London and the rest of the country looks increasingly like a hysterical response to international obligations for action over climate change. Social-housing tenants were the people who could most easily be made to carry the responsibility for energy efficiency because they had little control over their estates.
The government push for action on insulation encouraged shoddy workmanship and cowboy operators, who took advantage of the moral fervour of the climate-change campaign to make money.
James Heartfield is the author of Let’s Build! Why We Need Five Million New Homes in the Next 10 Years, published 10 years ago.
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Post by aubrey on Jul 1, 2017 8:40:44 GMT
Another right-wing libertarian rag complaining about regulations.
That one's easy: no.
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excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
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Post by excoriator on Jul 1, 2017 9:12:16 GMT
Cladding and insulation are two different things. The aluminium and polythene sandwich material used on the Grenfell tower was designed to protect the underlying insulation from the weather. It proved to be itself combustible, but there are alternatives which aren't. I don't know whether the insulation underneath was combustible too - it looks as if it was - but there are non combustible alternatives there too.
Not far from where I live is a small council estate of perhaps a hundred houses. They were thrown up in the 1950s I think, and I suspect they lacked even cavity walls. A few yeas back, they were all given improved insulation consisting of some kind of expanded foam perhaps six or eight inches thick with rendering on top of that. They also received triple glazing and look really good as a result. I overheard a conversation in the local shop between two women discussing the fire in London. One of them lived in one of the houses and she was concerned with how flammable the stuff was. I guess its less critical in a two storey building, and her comment was that the insulation was so effective in keeping the house warm that she would take the risk. "We only use the gas for cooking now" she said. "Even in the winter".
Our government, as part of their bonfire of red tape, abolished the requirement for high insulation standards in new builds some years back. This irritating piece of red tape was thought to be inhibiting house building. However, abolishing it seems to have had little effect in increasing the number of homes actually built!
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Post by marchesarosa on Jul 1, 2017 18:31:46 GMT
Really? Wiki describes it thus:
Well, one can understand why aubrey doesn't like it, then!
Wiki also says:
Another reason for aubrey to try to smear this source as "right-wing"!
Aubrey, you have a one track, right/left view of the world. Loosen up man. There is more than one way to skin a cat.
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Post by aubrey on Jul 1, 2017 19:01:03 GMT
Yes, right wing libertarian. The way you try to deny the term one would almost think there is something shameful in it. Came from another libertarian right wing rag, Living Marxism, which supported Radovan Karadzic (presumably because he was so politically incorrect), tried to make out the Rwandan genocide wasn't genocide and that the NOTW wasn't tapping people's phones or doing anything else illegal.
But do you really think I am a Stalinist? That's interesting. Some evidence, maybe? Bear in mind that I'd never support someone with a moustache like that.
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Post by marchesarosa on Jul 6, 2017 10:30:20 GMT
Stalinist? Yes, because you are so vitriolically opposed to any view that is neither politically correct nor Green eco-babble.
You support internet sites that exist merely to engage in character assassination of opponents whilst ignoring their scientific/intellectual disputes.
When have you ever engaged with evidence presented here, preferring to cite instead "thousands of independent scientists" or "creationism" in support of your own variety of faith?
You think "the science is settled" and think everyone who disagrees has been bought off or is morally defective.
You, and your type, little pal, are a plague on honest debate. Sure, you are a Stalinist!
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Post by marchesarosa on Jul 6, 2017 10:46:09 GMT
The Anthropocene? An evolutionary boost to speciation according to this new book!" Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction" by Chris Thomas 5th July 2017 The Times book review by Matt Ridley Humans haven’t destroyed the planet. This biologist argues that our presence has boosted biodiversity.
If human beings were to vanish from the Earth, what would their effect on wildlife have been? A rash of extinctions, a lot of mixing up so that wallabies and parakeets live in England and rabbits and sparrows in Australia, but also — according to Chris Thomas — an eventual doubling in the number of species on the planet: a “sixth genesis”, as he calls it in reference to the five previous times that biodiversity has expanded rapidly after a mass extinction. We are causing a mass speciation.
At a local scale diversity has increased a lot: “The number of species living in virtually every country or island has already increased during the period of human influence, and numbers continue to increase.” The fauna and flora of Britain are much richer today than 10,000 years ago as a result of farming, towns, gardening, climate change and the deliberate introduction of exotic species. Thomas finds the same to be true in tropical forests in Cameroon, Costa Rica and Brazil: the net effect of some human disturbance can be more biodiversity.
You can resent some of the exotic species (I do) but you should pause to recognise that in terms of the functioning of ecosystems, there has been mostly improvement. In an extreme case, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic rock with a few ferns on its summit. It is now a semi-green island capturing more moisture from the wind, thanks to a deliberate effort, begun by Charles Darwin, to enrich its ecosystem.
Professor Thomas, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist from York University, has produced an immensely significant book. It is fluently written, carefully thought through, ruthlessly argued, neatly illustrated with case studies — and shockingly contrarian. He shows the upside for wildlife in the Anthropocene. He does not deny that human beings also cause problems for wildlife, far from it, but he does think we have almost entirely overlooked the gains for wildlife that our presence is also creating.
I have for some time been thinking that while human beings have caused many species extinctions, they must also be causing many speciations. I have not quite had the courage to say so, for fear of being accused by the green thought police of going too far. While watching sparrows on a recent trip to Hawaii, it occurred to me that, though they were little different from the ones I see in London, they must, through isolation, be on the way to becoming a new species of sparrow. Just as a flock of Asian rosefinches shipwrecked on one of the Hawaiian islands six million years ago have turned into scores of species of honeycreeper, half of which are now sadly extinct.
Thomas has the courage I lack. He begins his book with sparrows, as it happens. Sparrows are not native to Britain at all. They spread from central Asia with people, the first of many birds to exploit the urban habitat. In Italy they hybridised with Spanish sparrows to produce a new true-breeding species, the Italian sparrow, already almost reproductively isolated from its parent species. Add one to the list of bird species. Sparrows are persecuted in America for stealing nest sites from native bluebirds, but protected and encouraged in Britain, where a short-lived (and now reversed) decline in the 1980s and 1990s led to concern that we might lose them. This contradictory attitude makes no sense: they are man-assisted exotics in both places.
Thomas documents the way new species are evolving. There is an ex-Australian cricket on a Hawaiian island that has fallen silent in the past few decades because of a mutation. This has been caused by the predation of a parasitic fly from North America that hunts down its mating call. And there is a species of fly that eats hawthorn berries, some of whose members have switched to eating apples. They are evolving towards a distinct species, together with their three species of parasite wasp — turning four species into eight.
The old idea that evolution happens only very slowly is being cast aside. “The biological processes of evolutionary divergence and speciation have not been broken in the Anthropocene. They have gone into overdrive. We have created a global archipelago, a species generator.”
And then there is hybridisation. In America a blueberry fly and a snowberry fly, separate species, have hybridised to form a honeysuckle fly to eat non-native honeysuckle, itself a hybrid of various Asian species. In the city of York, growing on a roundabout, there is a unique species of flower called Yorkwort, recently rescued from extinction by using saved seeds. But Yorkwort was only born as a species in 1979 when the railways allowed Oxford ragwort — itself a natural hybrid from Mount Etna, collected by a botanist in the 18th century — to spread around the country and hybridise with groundsel in, for some reason, York.
“More new plant species have come into hybrid existence in Britain in the last 300 years than are listed as having died out in the whole of Europe,” writes Thomas. If you are sniffy about hybrids, remember you probably are one: all people with any non-African ancestry have genes from Neanderthals (Europeans) or Denisovans (Asians) in them.
Thomas’s argument is that “humans must adapt and help direct change, rather than attempt to preserve the world in aspic”. Nature is much more dynamic than we generally admit. Species move about, become rare, become common again. In time and space nature is constantly on the move. In Ice Age deposits in Britain you find frequent remains of a dung beetle species today known only from the high Tibetan plateau — how did that happen? The Monterey pine is barely clinging on to a few tiny refuges on the California coast, but is the mainstay of a vast timber industry in New Zealand, Chile, Australia and elsewhere. Blue gums from Australia are found throughout California, thickets of Chinese palms blanket the shores of Lake Maggiore in the Alps and Himalayan balsam invades British river valleys.
It is only here that I begin to part company with Thomas. While he accepts that the eradication of rats from South Georgia, to save the seabirds, was a good thing, he is not convinced that New Zealand should, let alone could, eradicate its mammals — none of which is native — for the sake of its birds. Just let them evolve instead. He is right that not all non-natives are bad, but in conceding that human beings should actively manage the process of natural change, he should perhaps look on pest eradication more favourably as an example of just such management.
For instance, I cannot stand idly by and watch three species disappear from my farm, all as a result of American invasive species: the water vole (eradicated by mink); the native crayfish (eradicated by signal crayfish); and the red squirrel (being eradicated by grey squirrels). So I trap mink, signal crayfish and grey squirrels whenever possible. It may be a futile, Sisyphean task for the moment, but in the long run new genetic techniques may make it easier. Invasive species are by far the greatest cause of local and global extinction, not habitat loss or hunting.
Thomas briefly blames the extinction of harlequin frogs in Central America partly on climate change before correcting himself later to agree that the cause was a fungus spread around the world from Africa, partly in pregnancy-testing kits. He is far more balanced than most academics on the topic of global warming, conceding, for example, that “the basic expectation of a warmer and slightly wetter world is that the diversity of many – and perhaps most – regions in the world will increase”.
This is certainly true in Britain, where more warm-loving species are arriving than cold-loving species are leaving. Oddly, he omits any mention of global greening, the phenomenon by which the global vegetation has grown greener over 33 years by the equivalent of a continent twice the size of the United States, 70 per cent of the cause of which is extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That surely rates a mention in a book celebrating the gains from man-made interference with nature.
When he writes that “it is difficult to understand why any particular moment in the continuous passage of time should have special significance”, this surely applies to climate change too. The world was much warmer than today in times past and much colder at others. The rate of change was much faster at the end of the last Ice Age.
We think of human beings as unnatural, as separate from nature, and a “separation myth” permeates our writing about the natural world, but it is nonsense. Thomas writes: “We may not be happy about some of the changes that are taking place as a consequence of our existence, but they are still natural.” We caused many extinctions, especially of large mammals and birds, when we were hunter-gatherers fully embedded in natural ecosystems. Wherever human beings appeared 50,000 years ago, there followed a disappearance of mammoths and rhinos, of diprotodons and giant kangaroos, of moas and rocs, of giant elks and great auks. Modern technology is not the problem: we caused twice as many extinctions of birds and mammals before 1700 as we have caused since.
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Post by marchesarosa on Jul 6, 2017 10:47:57 GMT
I suppose aubrey will claim this evolutionary biologists as really a "creationist" in disguise.
Put on another record, pal!
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excoriator
Madrigal Member
nearly a genius
Posts: 37,165
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Post by excoriator on Jul 6, 2017 11:16:30 GMT
I thought you disagreed with anthropocentric climate change March? And here you are cheering it along.
Make your bloody mind up you idiot!
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Post by aubrey on Jul 6, 2017 11:30:17 GMT
I suppose aubrey will claim this evolutionary biologists as really a "creationist" in disguise. Put on another record, pal! No; but Matt Ridley is a right winger who thinks that AGW is rubbish. This rhetorical flourish: is bollocks. I mean, everything in it. Ridley prides himself at being fearlessly politically incorrect, at goading the green thought-police; but anyone who uses the term green thought-police is playing to his fan-base anyway: and he really means scientists, doesn't he? And he bloody knows that.
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Post by aubrey on Jul 6, 2017 11:44:34 GMT
Stalinist? Yes, because you are so vitriolically opposed to any view that is neither politically correct nor Green eco-babble. You support internet sites that exist merely to engage in character assassination of opponents whilst ignoring their scientific/intellectual disputes. When have you ever engaged with evidence presented here, preferring to cite instead "thousands of independent scientists" or "creationism" in support of your own variety of faith? You think "the science is settled" and think everyone who disagrees has been bought off or is morally defective. You, and your type, little pal, are a plague on honest debate. Sure, you are a Stalinist! "Honest Debate"? Seriously? No, I think that some who disagree are genuine in their views; but that most are paid by the fossil fuel industries to produce papers indented to obfuscate; and that the huge majority who you quote on AGW, saying it isn't happening, or that it has nothing to do with us, are not even bloody scientists. I have engaged with the evidence you present; I have pointed out that the papers you quote, supposedly questioning AGW, actually do nothing of the sort, and in support of this quoted the other parts of the same papers (that you somehow missed out). Do you think Chris Thomas is wrong about climate change, then? As the climate warms, species all over the world are relocating to higher latitudes at an average rate of 17 kilometres per decade.Or here: The real cost of damaging nature, it turns out, is at least 10 times greater than the cost of maintaining the ecosystem as it is so that we can reap the associated benefits.
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