260
The weather is not melting cars. But there was a big fire in Tucson and the heat from the fire melted plastic parts on a bunch of cars in the parking lot. The pictures in this article fairly clearly match the cars, parking lot, and background building in the picture you attached.
So, are cars in Arizona melting in the heat? A few that were unfortunately ...
221
This study, by a nuclear advocacy group, is based on treating a cubic meter of used solar panels as being equivalent to a cubic meter of spent uranium.
Just digging around the links, I find the following:
Yes, slashdot's description is pretty accurate.
"Environmental progress" is a pro-nuclear advocacy group. The website initially presents as a general ...
174
No, rivers and other land-based sources account for 10-12%
From Wikipedia:
Sources of ocean-based plastic pollution
Almost 90% of plastic debris that pollutes ocean water, which translates to 5.6 million tons, comes from ocean-based sources. Merchant ships expel cargo, sewage, used medical equipment, and other types of waste that contain plastic into the ...
154
The Constitution of the Kingdom of Bhutan, Article 5, paragraph 3:
The Government shall ensure that, in order to conserve the
country’s natural resources and to prevent degradation of the
ecosystem, a minimum of sixty percent of Bhutan’s total land
shall be maintained under forest cover for all time.
136
This is pretty much true, and has happened multiple times in the past. In fact, they were introduced in the German intraday market in 2007.
For example, the same situation occurred in May 2014, when prices for energy became negative.
However, the reason that renewable energy had temporarily negative prices is that it is difficult to store energy, and that ...
121
The cartoon seems to originate from Resources Spent on Consumption of Animals (citing to a video from Bite Size Vegan) which gives slightly more detail:
1 lb of beef = 55 square feet of forest (45-55 trees)
One year using NO paper saves 8.51 trees vs. foregoing 1 lb of beef, which saves 45-55 trees
One year eating no beef saves 3,432 trees
So the ...
117
The reason for this discrepancy is because the data from the Umweltbundesamt includes construction and demolition waste (see figure below and surrounding text on your linked webpage) whereas the data from the EPA "does not include everything that is landfilled in MSW, or nonhazardous, landfills, such as construction and demolition (C&D) debris, municipal ...
112
tl;dr: The claimed range is 50% higher than the worst assumptions for battery production, and 500% higher than the best assumptions. But it's not an apples to apples comparison.
Carbon emissions from battery production
The range of values estimated for emissions from battery production varies widely in the literature:
In an answer on Sustainability.SE I ...
73
Yes, this figure is consistent with estimates from 20 years ago.
The 1995 paper Endangered Ecosystems of the United States:
A Preliminary Assessment of Loss and Degradation collates some relevant estimates from the literature in Appendix A.
50 United States
85% of original primary (virgin) forest destroyed by late 1980's (Postel and Ryan 1991).
...
68
In addition to all the other great answers there is one very important fact that's always ignored in these comparisons (Google translation, lightly corrected by me):
The total emissions of petrol and diesel are sugarcoated in this example.
For oil extraction, refinery and transport on tankers, in pipelines and trucks 44 kWh of energy was used for ...
48
To get a littler closer to the horse's mouth -- the news article is about the Living Planet Report 2018 as published by the WWF (the wildlife people, not the wrestling people.)
On page 7 of that report we have:
The Living Planet Index also tracks the state of global biodiversity by measuring the population abundance of thousands of vertebrate species ...
47
Yes, a dishwasher almost always uses less water than manual washing.
According to a study published by the University of Bonn[1], both the energy and water consumption of a dishwasher is better:
As regards the normal household practice of
washing small amounts of dishes and heavily
soiled articles, our comparison confirms the
advantages of ...
46
Yes, the 'ecological footprint' can be useful in suggesting areas where humanity has unsustainable practices which need to be improved.
However, the footprint is usually presented in a very misleading way, as it dramatically oversimplifies sustainability and implies that all efforts to achieve sustainability are equal. If such a score was used as a basis ...
39
In a word, no. Weather stations are (as their names suggest) designed for collecting information for weather forecasting (i.e. short term variations in temperature, precipitation etc.), they were never intended for collecting information for climate research (long term statistical behaviour of the weather). As a result, the instruments used tend to have ...
38
Yes, but it's a small fraction of what they produce.
Wind turbines need measures to deal with cold and ice. Heating is one of them.
Canada address the problem in Wind Energy in Cold Climates.
Based on actual measurements, icing can occur up to 20% of the time between the months of November and April. Wind turbines must therefore be able to sustain at least ...
35
No, The Register has misrepresented the story.
There are several parts to this question. The summary is:
"Peak Wind" is a myth: there is nothing similar in wind to how hydrocarbon stocks will get to such a depletion point that annual production will decline inexorably thereafter.
The modelling methodology smackdown - Have previous estimates over-...
35
Leaving aside the fact that termite CO2 production is on few, if any, secondary school syllabuses, its more complicated than that.
Termites are not burning fossil fuels. The carbon they produce comes from decomposing wood. This carbon came from the atmosphere, and as the wood rots this carbon will wind up back in the atmosphere whether termites eat it or ...
34
A search on https://tineye.com led me to this tweet by @AyeElleJay with the caption "Slimmmmm! Arizona weather real different 😩" against that image.
Replies to the tweet questioned its validity, and a user named @TheMutHouse replied "this is from a recent fire in tucson, the neighboring apartment buildings cars were melted."
I'm not sure if it's the ...
32
The short answer is that no, electric cars are most definitely not at a thermodynamic disadvantage compared to a combustion engine. Quite the reverse, they have the advantage.
Electric cars are about 4x as efficient as fossil-fuelled combustion engines, tank-to-wheel: ICE engine efficiency is around 20%. Electric engines tend to be around 80-90%. And the ...
32
What is the claim?
Are you asking about total biomass, biodiversity, regional populations, ...?
Are you asking about specific areas / countries, or worldwide (which will be hard to exactly quantify)?
Are you asking about whether we have wiped out at least 60%, or are you asking whether a ballpark figure of about 60% is plausible?
And are insects exempt from ...
31
Summary
The figures are correct. However, the definition of "protected" in the claim is very specific.
The Harper Government decided to remove protection of navigation for all bodies of water in Canada. These bodies were formerly protected by the 1882 Navigable Water Protection Act.
The original Navigable Waters Protection Act protected the lakes from any ...
28
This quote apparently comes from a 1916 USDA study on Hemp Hurds as a Paper-Making Material,
The most important point derived from this calculation is in regard to
areas required for a sustained supply, which are in the ratio of 4 to
1. Every tract of 10,000 acres which is devoted to hemp raising year by year is equivalent to a sustained pulp-...
28
According to GEOCARB III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time and the corresponding paper
Calculated paleolevels of atmospheric CO2 from the GEOCARB III model, which
models the carbon cycle on long time scales (here a 30 million year resolution).
The long term carbon cycle is primarily geochemical, a result of the exchange of
...
26
Your answer is pretty much entirely contained in the IPCC's Fourth Assesment Report, section 1.3.6.2 (Forestry), except for the part about the Sahel in Africa. It's pretty short and concise, so I recommend reading it for yourself.
Some quotes, with my emphasis:
Thus, the overall trend towards longer growing seasons is consistent with an increase in the ‘...
26
A very simplistic calculation shows that the initial energy input is quickly paid back. The cited numbers show a manufacturing energy difference of 1.8 - .11 = 1.69 kW-hr = 1690 W-hrs. A CFL with a light output equivalent to a 75 W incandescent bulb typically uses about 20 W, or about 50 W less than the incandescent. 1690 w-hrs divided by 50 watts = 34 hours....
26
The claim really originates from 1986, and over the years has been stripped down to a factoid, to fulfill Bradbury's prophecy "Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm".
It started from the editorial Our steak in the jungle BioScience (November, 1986), page 642 on the effect of Central American beef production ...
26
As the top answer to this related question states, plants in general are oxygen neutral. In other words, whatever oxygen is emitted today will be emitted as CO2 later. So what really matters from a climate perspective is CO2 storage, not oxygen emission.
That said, short-term oxygen emission is apparently difficult to measure, but it is largely a function ...
25
The question points to Rhutan's source as this page, which has the original diagram, and attributes the numbers to
CO2 after R.A. Berner, 2001 (GEOCARB III) PDF
This GEOCARB III model is addressed by Skeptical Science's FAQ answer to the common question: Do high levels of CO2 in the past contradict the warming effect of CO2? [Simpler version also ...
24
Miami did have sunny day flooding, 3 feet above mean sea level, (2 feet higher than average high tide) in October and November of 2016.
In November, it was reported that fish and an octopus were in a parking garage due to such flooding.
However, this is primarily due to a local seasonal phenomenon, whereby tides are about 10 inches higher in mid-...
23
Safety rules
According to a December 2013 article in USA Today, the XL1 cannot meet US safety rules.
The latest teaser: XL1. It's a spaceship-like, ultra-high-mpg, plug-in diesel-electric hybrid. VW used exotic, but obtainable, materials and technologies to craft a mileage-above-all car able to get 261 mpg in European tests, equating, very roughly, to ...
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