O'rourke: Bicycles are unamerican

PedalUma said:
To @spokewrench: I am just saying that attitudes change overtime. In 1962 people would smoke cigars at Little League baseball games. Now that would cause an uproar. Banning all devices that cause inordinate toxic exposure to pedestrians but only in dense areas of humanity in the town core could be a good thing. I remember NYC in the leaded gas days, and LA's thick brown haze. A teacher's breakroom at that time used to be filled with smoke. Now people cannot smoke at a grade school or in a park. In 1962 some people couldn't live in parts of Los Angeles based on skin color. Attitudes change and leaders get out front.
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Cigarettes! I was never so liberal as to feel tolerant of that stink, especially sharing a bedroom with 60 other gentlemen, more than half of whom smoked cigarettes. It was terrible in the evening and ten times worse when they lit up at 0630. My forced exposure went on from the time I was 19 until I was 39.

JFK made a campaign promise to sign the Fair Housing Act when he took office. Once elected, he decided that a promise made to Negroes was nonbinding. Woodrow Wilson, who I think was called a liberal, was the same way.

Black and white used to be informal ways to categorize people by appearance, like the term ginger. Now they're capitalized, as if those terms define people. Who says racism isn't becoming more popular? Who says America's worst racists are white?
 
spokewrench said:
I find the 2015 Toronto study, claiming 25% of cars produce 93% of CO2, ridiculous. CO2 varies directly with fuel consumption. Their conclusion amounts to saying that if 100 cars used 100 gallons of gasoline, 25 of them averaged 3.72 gallons, and the other 75 averaged 0.093. In other words, if 25% averaged 10 mpg, the other 75% must have averaged 399 mpg.

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I’m not sure if you’re being intentionally misleading, or just don’t actually understand, so I’ll lay it out:

while CO2 (TWO, not one) can be considered a pollutant and is generally thought responsible for part of climate change, the pollutants being discussed with regard to old cars and new cars are carbon MONOXIDE (not dioxide) and a wide range of nasty particulates (soot) which get in your lungs and cause cancer, plus a bunch of stuff that turned the entire sky over most American cities brown and grey for 50 years. the idea that pollution from motor vehicles is directly proportional to gas mileage is absolutely absurd. nobody has ever said that about anything except CO2, so again, not sure if you’re making up a straw man or just don’t get it.

here are relevant excerpts from the study :

Evans and team found that one-quarter of the vehicles on the road produced:

  • 95% of black carbon (or “soot”),
  • 93% of carbon monoxide, and
  • 76% of volatile organic compounds such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes, some of which are known-carcinogens.
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you will note that carbon DIOXIDE is not mentioned.
 
spokewrench said:
I find the 2015 Toronto study, claiming 25% of cars produce 93% of CO2, ridiculous. CO2 varies directly with fuel consumption. Their conclusion amounts to saying that if 100 cars used 100 gallons of gasoline, 25 of them averaged 3.72 gallons, and the other 75 averaged 0.093. In other words, if 25% averaged 10 mpg, the other 75% must have averaged 399 mpg.

Analyzing it further, they said the gas guzzlers were the ones more than 7 years old, so if you traded in your 2007 for a 2008, your mileage would jump from 10 to 399. How did they come up with their data? They said they set up sensors along a busy road. They said there were some heavy trucks, but they were mostly cars. In other words, they analyzed the air at intervals and didn't check individual vehicles. If they didn't keep count of trucks, they didn't keep count of cars.

I can imagine several factors that would affect readings: how many vehicles had passed in an interval, whether they had sat at a traffic light, whether they had accelerated when a light turned green, and above all, which way the air was drifting. If 25% of the time, readings were 40 times more polluted, the biggest factor was probably a shifting air drift. They seem to assume the cars were sorting themselves into batches according to age.

This seems to be a better source of data, based on miles driven and gallons used. It says that after 1991, gas mileage increased about 0.5% per year.

That's just about carbon footprint (CO2). A system that takes care of other pollution also matters to me.
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each gallon of gasoline will emit the same amount of carbon wether its burnt in a new honda civic or an old fi 283 chevy,co2 is a byproduct of efficient combustion.
 
argon is a far better greenhouse gas than co2 and there is far more argon in the atmosphere than co2,co2 (wow) was tried for an insulating gas in thermopane windows and it was a miserable failure there is 2000 times more argon than co2 in the atmosphere at least co2 helps plants grow
 
kevinmccune said:
each gallon of gasoline will emit the same amount of carbon wether its burnt in a new honda civic or an old fi 283 chevy,co2 is a byproduct of efficient combustion.
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and? the discussion is not about CO2 - or at least not primarily - it's about pollution. spokewrench completely mis-states the toronto study by saying they claim "25% of cars produce 93% of CO2." they never said that, and nobody who understands the science even a tiny bit does. whether that's an honest mistake or just straight up dishonesty/an attempt to mislead, who knows.
 
mschwett said:
and? the discussion is not about CO2 - or at least not primarily - it's about pollution. spokewrench completely mis-states the toronto study by saying they claim "25% of cars produce 93% of CO2." they never said that, and nobody who understands the science even a tiny bit does. whether that's an honest mistake or just straight up dishonesty/an attempt to mislead, who knows.
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Only one of your two links says "study," and it's about the 2015 Toronto study, and it definitely mentions carbon dioxide. If you had been paying attention, you would have known that on April 16 in this very thread, I posted a link to another article about this very study. That one gave the figure 93%, and it was clearly wrong because it relates directly to gas mileage. That threw doubt on all the other conclusions, which is why I looked into how it said they collected the data.

Obviously, you have never read the article whose link you posted, either.
"The researchers took real-time measurements of the exhaust of about 100,000 cars driving past air-sampling probes on one of Toronto’s busiest roads. The study was borne out of concern that vehicle fleet emissions spread farther than previously known."

(Borne? Doesn't boston.com have an English-speaking editor?)

I had thought it was a bogus study because roadside air quality won't tell you what pollution specific vehicles produced. Your article proved me wrong. The study wasn't bogus because it wasn't designed to check specific vehicles. It's apparent that the monitors were at a site far enough away that people hadn't been concerned in the past. Of course the study would monitor pollution over time, and of course it would vary with the wind.

"Jonathan Wang, one of the authors of the study and a chemical engineering PhD student at the University of Toronto, said the chief polluters were older cars in need of a tune-up."

How did the student determine this from distant monitors of air quality?
“We found it was a large amount of transport trucks, but a good proportion was just cars – a mixture of both,’’ Wang said. “We suspect they were older vehicles.’’

If that's not Science, I don't know what is! And where were you being led by the Wang?
New cars (2012-2016) have to meet emission standards set by the federal government, so buying a newer model is always going to be a greener purchase, Wang said.

What a coincidence! The article in Tree Hugger also said you have a duty to buy a new car!

The year these articles came out, U S auto sales were on the brink of a 38% drop, from 7.5 million in 2015 to 4.7 million in 2019 (before the Pandemic). Imagine how steep the decline would have been if millions of concerned scientists such as yourself had not purchased 2012-2016 cars.

The boston.com article you linked notes a car's production of all pollutants varies directly with gas consumption. The Michigan study to which I linked found that fuel economy increased only about 0.5% per year. There would be little to gain by frequent car replacement. The boston.com article was obviously part of a hoax by the gas-powered car industry.

I'll bet Jonathan Wang is rolling in the dough he got for saving the world through his rigorous scientific study.
 
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kevinmccune said:
each gallon of gasoline will emit the same amount of carbon wether its burnt in a new honda civic or an old fi 283 chevy,co2 is a byproduct of efficient combustion.
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Exactly. If 75% of cars together produced 7% of the CO2, and 25% produced the other 93%, then the 25% must each have produced 40 times more CO2 than each of the 75%, meaning the 75% must have had 40 times better gas mileage. I found that difficult to believe.
 
Stefan Mikes said:
I think English is the second language for Rome, and he hasn't mastered that language yet :)
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Only now you figure out. I live on an island in the middle of pacific ocean.
Very diverse culture and language is spoken here. My primary language is Pigin English potpourri of flowery words derived from British English and mixture of Japanese, Portugal, Hawaiian, Philippine, Korean, Chinese. With slap slang of British accent.
I can speak 3 Philippine dialects, understand some Korean and Japanese language.
But I can't write proper English like you.
I have an admission. I didn't graduate high school level. But I'm living comfortably.
Even better if Trump is the president again.
Who is un American?
 
"Borne" means "carried." I don't think they meant the study of pollution drift was carried. I think they meant it was born, given birth, because people were concerned.
 
Don't you people have Google?

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Stefan Mikes said:
Don't you people have Google?

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"It's almost too cute to give birth to?" I stick with OED. Merriam-Webster is sloppy.
"If I were a carpenter, would you carry my baby?" In the active sense, "had given birth" can be paraphrased as "had borne."
In the passive sense, "was borne" cannot mean "was given birth."
When we say that on June 6, 1944, Brigadier General Lightning Joe Collins and Major General Charles H. Gerhardt were borne on landing craft, only someone from Tennessee would think this might mean their mothers were present.

 
spokewrench said:
"It's almost too cute to give birth to?" I stick with OED. Merriam-Webster is sloppy.
"If I were a carpenter, would you carry my baby?" In the active sense, "had given birth" can be paraphrased as "had borne."
In the passive sense, "was borne" cannot mean "was given birth."
When we say that on June 6, 1944, Brigadier General Lightning Joe Collins and Major General Charles H. Gerhardt were borne on landing craft, only someone from Tennessee would think this might mean their mothers were present.

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English is richer than you think :)
 
Tars Tarkas said:
Educated people say "borne out of concern," but I will concede that some also say "born out of concern." Both can be correct. English is indeed a rich language.

"Born out of wedlock" is probably misspelled less commonly.
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To get born out of wedlock, you need an obstetrician. To get borne out of wedlock, you need a lawyer.
 
mschwett said:
and? the discussion is not about CO2 - or at least not primarily - it's about pollution. spokewrench completely mis-states the toronto study by saying they claim "25% of cars produce 93% of CO2." they never said that, and nobody who understands the science even a tiny bit does. whether that's an honest mistake or just straight up dishonesty/an attempt to mislead, who knows.
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they would lead you to believe there is less co2 from some sources
 
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