New Tesla Roadster- 0-60 MPH- 1.9 seconds. 620 mile range.

[Verismo]

The holidays are a hellaciously busy time for me, sorry for the delay.

I'm trying to get back to your response, Ths61, but I'll admit that I'm confused by your request for a "non-externally funded" form of research. I still don't know what that means. Is the implication that any research not funded by the scientist him/herself biased to the point of being useless? Have you ever looked into how grant research in the sciences works? If I had a real idea of what you were asking, I would point to a single piece. Without knowing, it's hard to know what to point to. For example, the paper written in 2013 by Cook et. al, that included the 97% statistic and got politicized to death by both sides, studied roughly 12,000 pieces of research on climate written from 1991 to 2011. Are you asking me to comb through the funding of those 12,000 papers? I'm not being facetious. I would like to find some common ground and will do my best to oblige if I can figure out to what I'm obliging.

In the 1820's, Joseph Fourier(fourier transforms, same guy) was the first person to uncover the warming aspect of the atmosphere. He used the mathematical properties of molecular heat transfer to deduce that the Earth should be 30-40 degrees celsius colder than it was based on the Sun's output and distance to the Earth and surmised that the atmosphere, or possibly interstellar radiation must be doing something additionally to warm the Earth. He was right about the atmosphere, he just didn't have the tools to prove it, and he wasn't exactly sure what the mechanism was that was responsible for the warming.

In the 1860's, John Tyndall proved with absorption spectroscopy that water vapor, methane, CO2, etc., trapped heat, and therefore proved the mechanism that would later be called the greenhouse gas effect.

Maybe some of these older studies are good places to look for papers not associated with current political trappings? Is that the idea?

I'm all for skepticism from every direction. I think it's healthy. However, I wouldn't classify quite a bit of what I hear in objection to some of these notions as healthy skepticism, but as emotional narrative.

You called the Tesla Semis "vaporwear", and in the interim in this exchange more than 200 of them have been preordered by companies. That still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of real world testing and viability. However, the thing that I don't get with all the resistance(pun intended)is why anyone would object to heading in a more sustainable direction. The sun provides more than enough energy to power the planet. And even if there is a temporary environmental and financial cost in adapting solar/electric on a wide scale, doesn't that cost eventually balance itself out over time once more and more things become solar? It seems like a lot of old school people are looking at this like a simple algebra equation, where all the variables are fixed. But like most things in life, this is more like a calculaic equation, where the variables are in motion. Widespread adoption of solar means a much greater increase in technological advancement and a much greater decrease in cost. Think how much a computer cost and the amount of processing you could get per dollar in the 70's versus now. So, even if you did a financial and environmental cost analysis of alternative methods versus hydrocarbons, that analysis would change drastically as widespread adoption progresses. It seems that in many ways, the resistance from a lot of people in this country is the very thing that's making everything less attainable. I don't know if I could conceive of a society more capable of all that was necessary for success yet more committed to inceptioning themselves into a bad position.

And let's say that's not the case, and the environmental and financial cost will remain equally high for both solar and hydrocarbon. Don't we still have to head toward sustainable due to the limited supply of resources?

Jason