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Driving Leading Cause Of Climate Change Or Not?

Posted by BLOGASSAULT on Saturday, February 27, 2010 8:58:38 AM
   The first thing I come across this morning is two articles, one telling me it is the leading cause of climate change, and the next telling me it isn't.
 
   The first study was done by Nadine Unger of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). She has come up with a new way to correlate the economy with the impacts of climate change.

In a paper published online on Feb. 3 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Unger and colleagues described how they used a climate model to estimate the impact of 13 sectors of the economy from 2000 to 2100. They based their calculations on real-world inventories of emissions collected by scientists around the world, and they assumed that those emissions would stay relatively constant in the future.

In their analysis, motor vehicles emerged as the greatest contributor to atmospheric warming now and in the near term. Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it.
 
   But then we have this article on the Thin Green Line that tells us, well, something different.

As the single-largest contribution an individual makes to climate change, driving is a green bugaboo.

But some calculations made by Christopher Mims this morning on Change.org challenge that dogma.

Here's a simplified version: It takes roughly 126 calories, or 531,000 joules, of energy, to walk a mile. If you drive a fuel-efficient Honda Civic the same mile, you'll expend roughly 4,332,750 joules, or 1036 calories, of energy.

So far so good, right? Well, now remember an influential 2004 article in Harper's that made the case that, in our industrial agricultural system, it can take as many as 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce a single calorie of food.

That means those 126 calories you burn have a hidden back end of 1260 calories — more than the Honda Civic.
   
   I haven't a clue what kind of strange math that is, but in the green world, including the IPCC, fuzzy science is not all that uncommon.
 
   The point here is, being green can take on all kinds of forms, and it does not matter what side you want to play. It is much like global warming, whether it is snowing outside or it's the hottest summer in recent memory, it is all because of climate change. Environmentalism has been twisted in so many directions that it has become its own living, breathing, beast. It can now be contorted to fit any scenerio that best fits their immediate need; even if it doesn't always make any sense.



 
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