January 20th 2009
Enough Obama? How About Some Car News?
I
ncredible Daughter #1 is, incredibly, even more of a car buff than her dad, so I can count on her to send me interesting car patter on a regular basis. And today, with the Obamameter needle buried in the red, I thought you could use some relief, so I’m sharing a couple of her links with you.
It’s not all about Detroit
The photos shows Nissan’s corporate test track at its manufacturing plant in England, parked full of cars the Japanese car maker can’t find buyers for in jolly old. Autoblog reports that the plant’s extra parking lots were already jam-full of new, unsold cars, so they opted to park the testing track full, too.
So beware of DC politicians asking the impossible of Detroit. Yes, the auto makers should come back to DC with a good business plan in return for the money they got - but they’re up against a global downturn in the business, and anyone who just declares Detroit a one-off that can’t get its act together is ignoring a lot of great, green cars they’re making, and blaming them for problems that aren’t all of their making.
What Next? Cars Kill?
Another Autoblog post tells how researchers have linked increases in lightning strikes to auto exhaust:
Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that in the southeastern U.S. from 1998-2008, there was 25% more lightning during the work week than on the weekend.
This follows from research by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that found rainfall in that same area of the country rose during the week. The suspected culprit is automobile pollution, which is causing more storms during the week and increasing the severity of storms. That pollution, and the humid air in the southeast, makes for more clouds to rise and create more conditions for lightning strikes.
Just. What. We. Need. Hybrid owners are already glaring at me and my gorgeous German V8, convinced that even Obama won’t be able to stop the oceans from rising if I continue selfishly tooling around in something that gets “only” 19 mpg. I’m seriously afraid that they’ll start throwing red paint on my ride, like they do on fur coats.
And now they’ll look at me like I’m responsible for the 90 lightning strike deaths a year in the U.S.
Except for one little problem: Auto emissions are down considerably since the 1970s and 1980s, as internal combustion engine efficiency and exhaust-scrubbing technology have vastly improved, so even though there are more cars now, the air was dirtier then.
What are we talking about here? Climate science. No wonder it jumps to questionable conclusions!
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Posted in Cars, Global warming | 1 Comment » | 
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Comments
January 21st, 2009 at 8:11 am
I think you’re missing another possibility. Fact: Burning gasoline produces more water vapor than it does CO2– if you count molecules. Doesn’t it stand to reason that this water vapor would form clouds that might create more rain and thunderstorms? Another factor may be the fact that modern autos create more ionized particles and fewer particulates, which make it easier for lightning to be formed. Neither of these has anything to do with global warming and, even if it did, would not account for the long, slow march of global warming to take weekends off.