The Tesla Pick-up truck!

[mothmachine]

Lots of years ago I saw one of those Teaching Company lectures about energy and global warming (I think it was this one) wherein the lecturer postulated that if Cold Fusion ever became a viable technology, it might be the undoing of us. As I recall he was saying that if all of us had access to basically limitless energy, we'd go nuts with it and the planet would heat up faster than any greenhouse gases would ever do. Think about it -- how good are humans at controlling our collective behavior? We're not, we can't hardly do it at all. And if any dumb*ss wanted to make some crazy super reactor, how could we stop it. I guess that's the idea, minus the physics aspect that Professor Wolfson would also be accounting for.

 

[jcs]

@Mitch indeed AGW’s conspiracy theory was a good one, many good willed people jumped onboard, though independent critical thinkers were rightly skeptical when the financial angle was exposed (the fake science didn’t get past real scientists (vs. those bought and paid). I found it amusing their papers were hidden behind pay walls.

Or are you referring to debunking UFOs? Thought UFO believers were into the tin foil hats?

Cold fusion is real and works; this has been known since 1989.

The Navy has portable fusion reactors- see the MSM articles (unless you believe all MSM is fake news); you can also review the patents online at the USPTO.

Fusion et al will reduce net heat re: power plants (thermal), all ICE sources, and emissions. Pollution will drop radically too.

Electric vehicles are going to take over soon.

 

[jcs]

1 minute to design sounds about right.

 

[Barry_Green]

And yet, 250,000 people have already put cash down to pre-order one.

 

[Razz16mm]

@Mitch indeed AGW’s conspiracy theory was a good one, many good willed people jumped onboard, though independent critical thinkers were rightly skeptical when the financial angle was exposed (the fake science didn’t get past real scientists (vs. those bought and paid). I found it amusing their papers were hidden behind pay walls.

Or are you referring to debunking UFOs? Thought UFO believers were into the tin foil hats?

Cold fusion is real and works; this has been known since 1989.

The Navy has portable fusion reactors- see the MSM articles (unless you believe all MSM is fake news); you can also review the patents online at the USPTO.

Fusion et al will reduce net heat re: power plants (thermal), all ICE sources, and emissions. Pollution will drop radically too.

Electric vehicles are going to take over soon.

Catalytic cold fusion reactors are commercially available for industrial process heat applications.

The hard physical reality of AGW is that humans have added 27% of total CO2 above the natural background variability for at least the last 800,000 years in less than 200. That amounts to roughly 120 trillion tons of excess CO2. That traps petawatts of excess solar energy constantly every day. The spectral physics of CO2 have been known since 1854. Its effects in the atmosphere have been measured since 1908.
We lost the battle in the physics sense to stay under 1.5C increase by 1987, when CO2 exceeded 350ppm. At 406ppm currently and still rising, we will see between 2C and 3C average rise by the end of this century. We know this because since the late 70’s we have satellite systems to track the daily balance between solar energy in and surface radiation out. We are measuring the retained energy directly. It’s hard physics, hard reality. The only long term solution is to get atmospheric CO2
under 300ppm. The rest is just politics.

 

[Bruce Watson]

Electric may work for people that only do in-town, short distance type commutes and can put the vehicle on charge whenever it is parked, like at their office and home, but for those that travel and can't plan their day/trip around "where can I plug my vehicle up", it's not gonna work.

Range anxiety is something that people who do not own an EV experience. Owning an EV ends this. You don't have to believe me -- talk to anyone who owns one.

This discussion is interesting to me from a camera standpoint. For years in the very near past, people said more or less the same thing about digital cameras. As digital cameras got better and better, people had less and less to complain about, until all that was left was dynamic range. Digital couldn't beat the dynamic range of film stock. I must have seen a new thread on that topic on DVXuser.com at least once a week for years. And that's where we are with EVs today. The only category in which they don't beat ICE (internal combustion engines) is range.

EVs are a better way to build a vehicle. Resisting the change over to EVs from ICE is as futile as resisting the change over from film stocks to digital. That's not to say that people won't resist; some will. But the technology adoption lifecycle still applies.

 

[Paul F]

And yet, 250,000 people have already put cash down to pre-order one.

The pre-order is $100 and fully refundable. So that doesn't indicate much to me. Nothing like getting a $25 million shot in the arm while people wait for their trucks.

 

[Guest]

The pre-order is $100 and fully refundable. So that doesn't indicate much to me. Nothing like getting a $25 million shot in the arm while people wait for their trucks.

Hey guys, i am making a truck better than the Cyber, and it has 1,000 mile range. Accepting $95 deposits now. My payp....

 

[DLD]

A friend of mine drove a Tesla and really liked it but what he was really interested in was Taycan (different dealership, obviously) ... was told that Porsche is falling two years years behind in deliveries ... not because Porsche is turning into BMD but because they were planning to manufacture 20,000 units per year and, all of a sudden, received 40,000 preorders.

Side note : he didn't think that Tesla was as good as the high end Mercedes but thought the next generation might get it close.

Side note Numero Dos : electric or not, mild hybrids with an electric (i.e., battery powered) twin charger is the next big thing ...the design is relatively inexpensive and provides a lot of horsepower per liter of displacement. Mahle was getting something like 216 hp/l on a test VW GTI.

 

[jcs]

Catalytic cold fusion reactors are commercially available for industrial process heat applications.

Are you referring to muon-catalyzed cold fusion, or higher level atomic exothermic chemical catalyzed heat? Muon-catalyzed nuclear cold fusion can produce megawatt levels of clean power: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15361055.2018.1546090 . This kind of power (and others including the US Navy's compact fusion reactor: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a29427713/navy-compact-fusion-reactor/ ) are key factors in the change-over from ICE to electric transportation. The other key element is energy density storage, which will provide over 1000 mile range, and eliminate range anxiety. This includes carbon nanotube and similar technologies (related to super capacitors) and solid state batteries. There's a revolution coming very soon in electric power storage: https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets...in-seconds-last-months-and-power-over-the-air

 

[jcs]

The hard physical reality of AGW is that humans have added 27% of total CO2 above the natural background variability for at least the last 800,000 years in less than 200. That amounts to roughly 120 trillion tons of excess CO2. That traps petawatts of excess solar energy constantly every day. The spectral physics of CO2 have been known since 1854. Its effects in the atmosphere have been measured since 1908.
We lost the battle in the physics sense to stay under 1.5C increase by 1987, when CO2 exceeded 350ppm. At 406ppm currently and still rising, we will see between 2C and 3C average rise by the end of this century. We know this because since the late 70’s we have satellite systems to track the daily balance between solar energy in and surface radiation out. We are measuring the retained energy directly. It’s hard physics, hard reality. The only long term solution is to get atmospheric CO2
under 300ppm. The rest is just politics.

Have you ever done your own research, looking for and analyzing the data yourself? I did this task about a year ago, and was surprised by what I found: the papers that weren't behind paywalls had extremely limited data and time ranges, where they performed e.g. a simple least squares fit of this limited range data to try to make their point. Here's a short 12min video which shows data with a much larger time scale and also shows how using only recent data with least squares fitting showing false trends:

Interestingly YouTube puts a Wikipedia link to global warming above the title and comment section!

See also: https://realclimatescience.com/

Mann made climate change fraud: https://principia-scientific.org/should-michael-hockey-stick-mann-be-prosecuted-for-climate-fraud/
Lawsuit by Mann against Tim Ball dismissed with prejudice: https://www.manhattancontrarian.com...ck-update-now-definitively-proven-to-be-fraud
Court ruling document (Mann also has to pay Bell's legal fees, in excess of $700,000).

The story of Ball’s vindication, and of Mann’s shame, is a somewhat long one, and turns on Mann’s flat refusal to share publicly the data and methodology by which he constructed the Hockey Stick graph. In about 2003 a very talented Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre began an effort to replicate the Mann/Bradley/Hughes work. McIntyre started with a request to Mann to provide the underlying data and methodologies (computer programming) that generated the graph. To his surprise, McIntyre was met not with prompt compliance (which would be the sine qua non of actual science) but rather with hostility and evasion. McIntyre started a blog called Climate Audit and began writing lengthy posts about his extensive and unsuccessful efforts to reconstruct the Hockey Stick. Although McIntyre never completely succeeded in perfectly reconstructing the Hockey Stick, over time he gradually established that Mann et al. had adopted a complex methodology that selectively emphasized certain temperature proxies over others in order to reverse-engineer the "shaft" of the stick to get a pre-determined desired outcome.

[...For graphs, etc., see full article at link above...]

The bright pink plus the dotted line in between the two pink portions shows one of the data series used in the construction of the Hockey Stick graph; but the pink portions were deleted when the graph was presented. Obviously, inclusion of these pink portions would have thrown off the nice, flat "shaft" of the stick, while also revealing that this particular group of "proxies" had totally failed at matching the twentieth century rise in temperatures derived from the thermometer record, thus undermining the whole idea that these were valid proxies at all. In other words, Mann et al. had truncated inconvenient data that failed to match the narrative they wanted to present. Most would call this kind of data truncation a clearcut instance of "scientific fraud."

This was the state of play in early 2011 when Ball uttered his famous line, “Michael Mann belongs in the State Pen, not Penn State.” Mann then immediately sued Ball for libel.

Now, as readers here know, I spent my life in the litigation business. My practice was in the U.S. rather than Canada, but I have good reason to think that many of the basic ground rules would be the same. And one of the basic ground rules is that a plaintiff in civil litigation needs to provide “discovery” to the defendant of whatever factual information is in his possession that would either support or undermine his claims. When Mann brought his case, I was frankly amazed, because it was obvious to me that Ball would request as “discovery” the very data and methods that Mann had been aggressively resisting giving to anyone to check his work. How could Mann’s case survive if he refused to provide this information?

Sure enough Mann absolutely refused to provide the underlying information in the Ball litigation. For better or worse, when a litigant does that, a court will try every possible avenue to try to get the parties to resolve the matter, before it will take the ultimate step of resolving the case against the non-compliant litigant. And that is in fact what happened in the Mann/Ball case. The court repeatedly tried to get an agreement that something would be produced that would satisfy Ball, and repeatedly gave Mann more time to comply. Could this really go on for eight years? In the U.S., that would be extraordinary, but not impossible. Maybe in Canada it is less extraordinary. It appears that in 2017 Mann actually agreed (under court pressure) to produce to Ball within 21 days the key technical information about construction of the Hockey Stick graph that Ball was requesting. But the information was not produced. Undoubtedly there have been multiple returns by Ball to the court since then to enforce compliance, finally seeking the dismissal of Mann’s claims as the ultimate sanction. On Friday, the court granted that relief.

Here’s a twist that is simply beyond belief. On February 17, 2018, the American Association for the Advancement of Science — the largest professional association of scientists in the world, claiming to have more than 120,000 members — gave its supposedly prestigious “Public Engagement with Science” award to none other than Michael Mann. Here is its announcement of the award. Some choice excerpts:

The honor recognizes Mann’s “tireless efforts to communicate the science of climate change to the media, public and policymakers.” In the past year, Mann has had 500 media interviews and appearances and directly reached public audiences via social media. . . . He has also advised actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who spoke about climate change during a 2014 speech delivered to the United Nations.

The AAAS did this in the face of the clear demonstration of Mann’s misconduct from the ClimateGate revelations, and in the face of Mann’s ongoing obstruction of proper discovery in the Ball litigation. This whole “climate” thing is truly unbelievable in how it warps the minds of seemingly sane people.

Anyway, the bottom line is that, after eight long years, Mann’s lawsuit against Ball has been dismissed “with prejudice” — meaning that he has no right to reinstitute the case. Also, the court has said that it will award at least some “costs” to Ball, although the amount has not yet been determined. Presumably, written opinions and a final judgment will follow, and I will update this post with links to those if and when I receive them. I would expect some triumphant claims of vindication from Ball and his supporters. In light of the court’s decision, Mann will be severely constrained in what he can do in response. Hey — why not produce your data and methods?

Will any of this embarrass or rein in the likes of the IPCC, the AAAS, or any of the many mainstream climate-hoax-promoting outlets that continue to publish Mann’s screeds? (Examples: New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post). Don't bet on it. As of today, I can’t even find any coverage of the court result in any “mainstream” outlet.

Meanwhile, note that this is only a trial court decision. Theoretically, Mann can appeal, and an appeals court might send this back. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that, even if an appeals court reverses and sends the case back, that it won’t condition further proceedings on Mann producing his data and methods. I can’t believe that he will ever do that. The only fair inference at this point is that the Hockey Stick is and always was a scientific fraud.

Now ask yourself, why is MSM pushing the AGW narrative? Do you believe the MSM is a truthful/accurate source of information? (I think the fair answer is it's a mixed source, both truth and fiction).

If GW is really AGW (A = anthropic = man made), why are proponents making up false narratives? Truth and actual data stands on its own. Fake data and stories will diminish the ability to make positive change. When I tried to get friends to look at the actual data, they stated they weren't qualified, and when I offered to go over the data with them, they stated I wasn't qualified (not the right kind of scientist, "You need to be a Climate Scientist"). So all they could do was believe what MSM sources told them. Fortunately, more and more people are waking up to the fraud, and collective beliefs are finally changing. Hopefully this also means more people are doing their own research and thinking for themselves in general: not a good idea to simply believe what others tell them, regardless of which side of a polar issue.

Michael Crichton on Consensus Science (regarding "97% of Scientists Agree" promoted by MSM):

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."

Crichton went on to conclude, "Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E = mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way."

Again, if we focus on pollution, and deal with that, which is something much more easily measured, it solves any potential CO2 related issues (regardless of what one believes WRT AGW). Fusion (hot & cold), zero point, and other clean energy technologies along with efficient energy storage will provide a rapid decrease in pollution and CO2 output.

Regarding the Cybertruck's 250K refundable $100 pre-orders: sounds like good marketing. This doesn't make the design more appealing aesthetically; consider that trucks are utility vehicles, and that's the main selling point of this truck-like vehicle. The cool thing about electric vehicles as they can be radically different designs vs. ICE vehicles. As others have noted, expect to see a lot more options from the big automakers as the transition to EVs accelerates with the availability of cheap clean power and safer higher energy density storage technologies.

Personally, I'm looking forward to modular vehicles, where we can choose a rolling chassis and spec (or even build ourselves) a custom design suited to our needs, where we can get replacement parts and do 99% servicing from our own garages. For example, a damaged panel can be swapped and replaced with ease at low cost vs. spending $1000's of dollars in a body shop to repair even a minor collision (body work, filler, paint etc.). My ideal car for LA would be a sports car that can dramatically change ride height with an active suspension that always has a smooth ride, even with giant potholes and speed humps, and tire/rim designs that won't get curb rash when parking or hitting potholes (currently around $200+ to refinish a rim; even with careful parking, potholes can damage sports car rims which can't always be avoided, especially when in traffic).