(This professor is wrong, by the way. A two-cycle engine doesn't use its fuel/oil/air mixture for cooling. It uses it for lubrication. I hope he doesn't teach mechanical engineering.)
Quoth the professor: "I am not alone in loving Hummers. An effective tax will have to take into account all variety of Hummer lovers, the strength of their preferences and the size of their wallets."
He is, to borrow a term my Mom coined today, a "Hummer-oid".
He doesn't like the H1, which is the real deal; he likes the insipid H2, which is just a Chevy Suburban with a different body on it.
The H1 is a real off-road vehicle with a nearly insane amount of suspension articulation. You could drive the thing off the dealership lot and go rock crawling, without making any modifications whatsoever, and all you'd have to worry about is damaging the bodywork on your brand-new $100k+ truck.
A H2? Here:
The guy is driving up a rocky wash and at 0:29, the thing breaks a freaking tie-rod end. Oh yeah, that's a serious 4x4 you got there, pal. :rolleyes: But he's got a winch on it!
What happened? The front tires were unloaded; the guy gunned it, the right front tire got traction, and KA-SPUKK, the tie rod end snapped. (That winch will really help you with your steering, anus.) Thank God he was not moving and off-road when that happened; what if he'd been on the highway?
Here's an idea: if you're going to take your street truck off-road, make sure you've got good suspension components on it first, okay?
Here and here are articles discussing the impending cold spell.
The sun is entering a part of its natural cyclical variation in which it emits less energy. Less energy means cooler planets, including the Earth, despite all the H1s and H2s out there. (And the Hummeroids driving them.)
If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.The former link, from which I just quoted, has some interesting data in it, including--if I understand correctly--the fact that we're looking at cooling to "Little Ice Age" levels. And in about 100,000 years we're looking at an ice age that'll be worse than the last one.
The latter link says that we're looking at decreased sunspot activity, which is an indicator of decreased solar activity, which means--you guessed it--it's going to get cold outside. Recall that the Maunder Minimum coincided with the Little Ice Age. This link seems to indicate that we're looking at another, similar minimum. Maybe not as bad--maybe "only" as bad as the bitter winter that Washington's troops had to endure at Valley Forge.
In other words, this time in 2040, it'll probably be below zero outside. And we'll have, what, eight billion people to feed in the world?
Keep burning oil and coal, folks. We're going to need as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as possible. Why?
Fertilizer:
Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.That's why. 8,000,000,000 people are going to need food in 33 years. I don't want to starve to death in the freezing cold at age 73 because Al Gore needs his ego stroked in 2008, damn it.