OT: BC wildfire smoke has now reached the Ottawa valley

[Engineer]

You say it irrelevant but its not to me ....

I'm not saying urea or it's costs are irrelevant. I believe you when you say it is a significant expense on your rig. I'm saying gasoline cars driving at 140km/h is irrelevant to why you need to use urea. If those cars were diesel they would also require urea.

I know why I have to use Urea,my point is why that crap??Is that the best they could come up with...Or the only one they can continuously charge me for,both for the liquid and the maintenance??

Urea is the only technology that removes NOx from a diesel engine in a suitable manner to meet our required NOx emissions to prevent smog and air pollution.
It is injected into the exhaust, and using a technology called selective-catalytic reduction (SCR), to decrease the NOx emissions. It isn't only used for the trucking industry, it is also used in the marine industry, as well as industrial facilities such as power generation and cement production.

Gasoline engines use non-selective catalytic reduction (NSCR), which isn't effective on diesel engine exhaust, and why they don't need urea.

While we have billionaires making money off of this movement ,is more than just a piss off

Yes, it can be, seeing people get rich off of what you deem as a financial burden, I can understand that point of view.
But the Elon Musk's are exceptionally rare. There are thousands and thousands of scientists trying to work to a better cleaner earth, that aren't getting rich off of the research they conduct and it's findings.

 

[topshelf15]

I'm not saying urea or it's costs are irrelevant. I believe you when you say it is a significant expense on your rig. I'm saying gasoline cars driving at 140km/h is irrelevant to why you need to use urea. If those cars were diesel they would also require urea.


Urea is the only technology that removes NOx from a diesel engine in a suitable manner to meet our required NOx emissions to prevent smog and air pollution.
It is injected into the exhaust, and using a technology called selective-catalytic reduction (SCR), to decrease the NOx emissions. It isn't only used for the trucking industry, it is also used in the marine industry, as well as industrial facilities such as power generation and cement production.

Gasoline engines use non-selective catalytic reduction (NSCR), which isn't effective on diesel engine exhaust, and why they don't need urea.


Yes, it can be, seeing people get rich off of what you deem as a financial burden, I can understand that point of view.
But the Elon Musk's are exceptionally rare. There are thousands and thousands of scientists trying to work to a better cleaner earth, that aren't getting rich off of the research they conduct and it's findings.

I have been driving rigs for over 15 years now ..I know why and how the system works,Iam just fed up with the clumsy attempts at actually trying to do the right thing,from windmills to hugely overpriced gas plants...

That have skyrocketed hydro prices ,and other energy costs..That right there is almost criminal,we have people that cant afford to heat their homes...Mostly the elderly,that live off a fixed income...So yes I come off as standoffish ,its not directed at honest people that do care and that are willing to work to make things better...Its the other shitheads that just use what is supposed to be good thing for everyone,and make about how much the can make off it ...That has me royally pissed off

 

[topshelf15]

Also ,I do try to do thing different..I dont have my rig twisted up,and removed my passing gear to take away any temptation...I have the cruise set at 101kms and 105km on the pedal...It has helped ,my older much more powerful and faster truck could easily pace cars...

But it was in the low to mid 7mpg ,at best....Now with my new fuel saving ...(My wife had a huge imput on that one) ways Iam seeing an uptick to mid to high 8mpg ....Which while i get lapped by old women and having olden asian men flip me the bird ,Iam at least recouping some money by just slowing down...

 

[Stylizer1]

I think it has to do with the process and how there are some scientists not on board with the "consensus". Looking at 12000 papers and judging that 97 percent of them seem to be in favour of climate change doesn't seem like a scientific process.

Took me some time to find this but I read it about a year ago.

'97% Of Climate Scientists Agree' Is 100% Wrong

If you've ever expressed the least bit of skepticism about environmentalist calls for making the vast majority of fossil fuel use illegal, you've probably heard the smug response: “97% of climate scientists agree with climate change” — which always carries the implication: Who are you to challenge them?
The answer is: you are a thinking, independent individual--and you don’t go by polls, let alone second-hand accounts of polls; you go by facts, logic and explanation.
Here are two questions to ask anyone who pulls the 97% trick.
1. What exactly do the climate scientists agree on?
Usually, the person will have a very vague answer like "climate change is real."
Which raises the question: What is that supposed to mean? That climate changes? That we have some impact? That we have a large impact? That we have a catastrophically large impact? That we have such a catastrophic impact that we shouldn't use fossil fuels?
What you'll find is that people don't want to define what 97% agree on--because there is nothing remotely in the literature saying 97% agree we should ban most fossil fuel use.
It’s likely that 97% of people making the 97% claim have absolutely no idea where that number comes from.
If you look at the literature, the specific meaning of the 97% claim is: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that there is a global warming trend and that human beings are the main cause--that is, that we are over 50% responsible. The warming is a whopping 0.8 degrees over the past 150 years, a warming that has tapered off to essentially nothing in the last decade and a half.

Because the actual 97% claim doesn’t even remotely justify their policies, catastrophists like President Obama and John Kerry take what we could generously call creative liberties in repeating this claim.
On his Twitter account, President Obama tweets: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Not only does Obama sloppily equate “scientists” with “climate scientists,” but more importantly he added “dangerous” to the 97% claim, which is not there in the literature.
This is called the fallacy of equivocation: using the same term (“97 percent”) in two different ways to manipulate people.
John Kerry pulled the same stunt when trying to tell the underdeveloped world that it should use fewer fossil fuels:
And let there be no doubt in anybody’s mind that the science is absolutely certain. . . 97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible. . . . . they agree that, if we continue to go down the same path that we are going down today, the world as we know it will change—and it will change dramatically for the worse.
In Kerry’s mind, 97% of climate scientists said whatever Kerry wants them to have said.
Bottom line: What the 97% of climate scientists allegedly agree on is very mild and in no way justifies restricting the energy that billions need.
But it gets even worse. Because it turns out that 97% didn’t even say that.
Which brings us to the next question:
2. How do we know the 97% agree?
To elaborate, how was that proven?
Almost no one who refers to the 97% has any idea, but the basic way it works is that a researcher reviews a lot of scholarly papers and classifies them by how many agree with a certain position.
Unfortunately, in the case of 97% of climate scientists agreeing that human beings are the main cause of warming, the researchers have engaged in egregious misconduct.
One of the main papers behind the 97 percent claim is authored by John Cook, who runs the popular website SkepticalScience.com, a virtual encyclopedia of arguments trying to defend predictions of catastrophic climate change from all challenges.
Here is Cook’s summary of his paper: “Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 percent [of papers he surveyed] endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.”
This is a fairly clear statement—97 percent of the papers surveyed endorsed the view that man-made greenhouse gases were the main cause—main in common usage meaning more than 50 percent.
But even a quick scan of the paper reveals that this is not the case. Cook is able to demonstrate only that a relative handful endorse “the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.” Cook calls this “explicit endorsement with quantification” (quantification meaning 50 percent or more). The problem is, only a small percentage of the papers fall into this category; Cook does not say what percentage, but when the study was publicly challenged by economist David Friedman, one observer calculated that only 1.6 percent explicitly stated that man-made greenhouse gases caused at least 50 percent of global warming.
Where did most of the 97 percent come from, then? Cook had created a category called “explicit endorsement without quantification”—that is, papers in which the author, by Cook’s admission, did not say whether 1 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent of the warming was caused by man. He had also created a category called “implicit endorsement,” for papers that imply (but don’t say) that there is some man-made global warming and don’t quantify it. In other words, he created two categories that he labeled as endorsing a view that they most certainly didn’t.
The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested:
“Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.”
—Dr. Richard Tol
“That is not an accurate representation of my paper . . .”
—Dr. Craig Idso
“Nope . . . it is not an accurate representation.”
—Dr. Nir Shaviv
“Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument . . .”
—Dr. Nicola Scafetta
Think about how many times you hear that 97 percent or some similar figure thrown around. It’s based on crude manipulation propagated by people whose ideological agenda it serves. It is a license to intimidate.
It’s time to revoke that license.


This is the best reason to be skeptical. None of this looks like scientific process.

Mods: I needed to post the whole thing as a way to defend the opposing view and pretty much my stance.

Anybody?

 

[Sens of Anarchy]

 

[thinkwild]

That's where it gets tricky.

I know where you're coming from. I work in a warehouse, and I'm seeing videos of all these super little drones doing my job for a fraction of the cost, and it scares the hell out of me. I don't have a bunch of wealth, or a university degree...and after a long shift doing a physically demanding job, I'm lucky to get the kitchen counter cleaned up after putting some garbage fake food in the microwave. The thought of somehow going out and getting retraining or a degree or something to still be employable after skynet takes over my spot....it just isn't happening. I'm too old and my body is too worn down to do anything more then get through the day as it is. It's scary as hell, knowing a freaking machine is going to take my place, likely within the next decade.

It's going to happen whether we like it or not. Life has a way of screwing over a lot of blue collar workers and regular joes. It happened to the buggy makers, the switchboard operators, etc....

I don’t know if this will make you feel any better but there are a heckuva lot of university grads looking at the advent of Artificial Intelligence and feeling just as insecure. In a decade or two, if you go to your doctor and they give you a diagnosis without consulting their AI, you probably wont trust them as much as a nurse that does consult it. Hopefully AI will figure out how to capture carbon and alleviate our climate concerns. But massive change is coming for all it seems. We need non-ostrich politicians to develop smart policy to deal with this.

 

[thinkwild]

Anybody?

It's important to be skeptical. But skepticism without an open mind and critical thinking is just conspiracy theorizing. You shouldn't dismiss the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, investigative journalists, and academics because of one website, one you searched out, that apparently attempted to quantify some dubious 97% figure and then dismissed an entire body of research.

There’s doesnt appear to be a lot of rigor or context to this link of yours. Most climate scientists that publish papers aren’t making sweeping conclusions about the big picture; they are looking at small specific experiments that incrementally add to the body of knowledge. I wouldn’t expect many climate scientists papers to come to any grand conclusion about whether climate change is real and mostly man made.

But among the scientists, academics, et al that do attempt to synthesize the data into a broad conclusion, you seem smart enough to me to be able to distinguish between credibility and fringe. Have you put in as much effort into finding out for yourself if its possibly true as you have searching out ways to dismiss what should be rather obvious? I think once you do, the 97% figure will become easily credible to you.

There are many people invested in not finding out if what the people that are studying this and desperately trying to warn us about is true. Some because they fear big govt programs, some because they fear change that will be expensive, both valid concerns for sure. But the right change should allow us to get more efficient energy that is cheaper. That is the goal. And then we can subsidize those that are unfairly penalized during the period of change by having to use expensive fuel additives and the like during the transition to cheaper energy. Carbon tax redistribution can be helpful there. Yes there is a danger that developing countries will gain a huge advantage on us by not having to put in the fossil fuel infrastructure, but its opportunity for us too. This I think would be a clever skeptics approach.

 

[Nac Mac Feegle]

I don’t know if this will make you feel any better but there are a heckuva lot of university grads looking at the advent of Artificial Intelligence and feeling just as insecure. In a decade or two, if you go to your doctor and they give you a diagnosis without consulting their AI, you probably wont trust them as much as a nurse that does consult it. Hopefully AI will figure out how to capture carbon and alleviate our climate concerns. But massive change is coming for all it seems. We need non-ostrich politicians to develop smart policy to deal with this.

That's true. I've seen AI and robotic tech that is starting to do incredibly complex work. I wouldn't be surprised in 40-50 years if we have no human doctors, engineers, drivers, pilots, etc. I don't think there's any industry that is immune at this point. It's only a matter of time.

 

[Stylizer1]

It's important to be skeptical. But skepticism without an open mind and critical thinking is just conspiracy theorizing. You shouldn't dismiss the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, investigative journalists, and academics because of one website, one you searched out, that apparently attempted to quantify some dubious 97% figure and then dismissed an entire body of research.

There’s doesnt appear to be a lot of rigor or context to this link of yours. Most climate scientists that publish papers aren’t making sweeping conclusions about the big picture; they are looking at small specific experiments that incrementally add to the body of knowledge. I wouldn’t expect many climate scientists papers to come to any grand conclusion about whether climate change is real and mostly man made.

But among the scientists, academics, et al that do attempt to synthesize the data into a broad conclusion, you seem smart enough to me to be able to distinguish between credibility and fringe. Have you put in as much effort into finding out for yourself if its possibly true as you have searching out ways to dismiss what should be rather obvious? I think once you do, the 97% figure will become easily credible to you.

There are many people invested in not finding out if what the people that are studying this and desperately trying to warn us about is true. Some because they fear big govt programs, some because they fear change that will be expensive, both valid concerns for sure. But the right change should allow us to get more efficient energy that is cheaper. That is the goal. And then we can subsidize those that are unfairly penalized during the period of change by having to use expensive fuel additives and the like during the transition to cheaper energy. Carbon tax redistribution can be helpful there. Yes there is a danger that developing countries will gain a huge advantage on us by not having to put in the fossil fuel infrastructure, but its opportunity for us too. This I think would be a clever skeptics approach.

I'm not looking at one website and saying here is the proof. It is the process used to form the consensus. Science is not about consensus, it's about proving theories wrong until it becomes an objective truth. You can be right 9 times out of 10 but it only takes that 1 time that makes a theory invalid in science. The guy who invented the hockey stick graph at the time made a very compelling argument and sold many books and went on to have many speaking engagements. Now science has proved it was flawed yet people still hold that up as evidence. Looking at 12000 papers and cherry picking the statements that coincide with the results you're looking for is not science.

When the US invaded Iraq a small minority opposed it while the vast majority were in favour of it. They used every trick in the book to convince the public that Iraq was to blame for 9/11. Push a head to today and the consensus is it was a mistake even though Saddam was a "bad guy". It's the politicians, celebrities, and anyone with air time who are the ones convincing the public to jump on the gravy train. When Obama comes out and says 97%.....Dangerous..... most people take him for his word. People are not in the business of looking into things because their lives are too consuming and it is easier to go along to get along. No one knows how much longer oil is going to be "cheap" so I think industry is thinking ahead.

The media massages our senses and slowly convinces us of everything a la Edward Bernays. I look at the media as a tool used to heard us into certain pens. Politicians have repeatedly shown very few have our best interests in hand. There are many academics against the notion of how climate change is being used and one only has to look over this thread to see how such academics get discredited for not being scientists.Things get accepted whether real or not by society and most people just live with it. I'm not against going green, I'm against the roll out that burdens the majority because of the minorities greed.

 

[Ray Kinsella]

That's where it gets tricky.

I know where you're coming from. I work in a warehouse, and I'm seeing videos of all these super little drones doing my job for a fraction of the cost, and it scares the hell out of me. I don't have a bunch of wealth, or a university degree...and after a long shift doing a physically demanding job, I'm lucky to get the kitchen counter cleaned up after putting some garbage fake food in the microwave. The thought of somehow going out and getting retraining or a degree or something to still be employable after skynet takes over my spot....it just isn't happening. I'm too old and my body is too worn down to do anything more then get through the day as it is. It's scary as hell, knowing a freaking machine is going to take my place, likely within the next decade.

It's going to happen whether we like it or not. Life has a way of screwing over a lot of blue collar workers and regular joes. It happened to the buggy makers, the switchboard operators, etc....


But...looking at the bigger picture. I can see why we need to go green. As a kid, I'd fish in the Ottawa River...now, you can almost walk across the river with all that pollution and stink. I used to catch a ton of neat bugs as a kid....now I can't remember the last time I saw a butterfly, a firefly, or even a caterpillar. Thirty years ago planting a garden, each shovel of soil revealed tons of bugs....now, there's earwigs, ants and the occasional worm...and nothing else. Trees are dying. As a kid, I'd never heard of allergies to peanut butter, and asthma was incredibly rare. Now, it's in every classroom. You don't have to be a scientist or have a fancy degree to see that something is wrong with this planet. If we don't start to try and at least begin the process of fixing things now, then perhaps in 40 or 50 years, it will be too late to go green. I don't see how we can continue using the planet as a garbage dump forever.....sooner or later we'll hit a point where we can't fix things.

I really appreciate your post. I can relate to many things you've stated. At the same time... some things are still ok.

I agree with the new "jobs" - I read about it often... next generation being trained for a high percentage of jobs that don't yet exist - it's scary... and I think of my son all the time when reading about that.

People still fish, and I get what you're saying. Also, my father worked at E.B. Eddy when he was young and still in school. It was the place to work... a big deal. I tried to find some relevant report on this just now but my internet is sucking lemons at the moment. Nonetheless, my dad is now 84 and we were just talking about this last weekend. The pollution they put in that Ottawa River at the time would be criminal today (if found out... ) - we're talking about the early 1950's. I agree with you, I would never swim in that river today... or most bodies of water for that matter. I feel that back then, people were perhaps more innocent or more happy and less worried about things...

I also remember catching fireflies when I was little. Man... I loved them. Also... I live in the country, and those guys are still very much around, tons of them. Butterflies, tons of them, caterpillars... aslo

As for trees, I much agree on that. I have around 40 trees on my property. I would say that at least 5 of them are now dead, this within a couple of years... and another 5 are dying. I'm talking about the bark just completely falling off. This happened from one season to the next and not from old age. My fruit trees didn't bloom at all this year... and I've been here 21 years. This is a first.

I fully agree with the peanut butter deal. Never heard anything of it at school when I was younger. My son has a full blown allergy to everything in the nut category - came close to death when he was 4 in relations to that and has carried an epipen since... what is that all about? But then again, when I was young, I had terrible asthma... was on so many different medications that constansly failed. I missed school from being in the hospital so many times and had my homework sent home so I could keep up. Even as a little kid, I always wondered what affected my breathing so much. My parents and older brother spend nights carrying me in their arms so I could fall asleep because being vertical was the only way I could breath.

Apologies for the long post... since I was very little, I always questioned what was wrong with all of that, and why there were still undervelopped countries with children dying everyday from malnutrition... but, that's another topic altogether.

 

[Caeldan]

Pretty sure we're way off the original topic at this point and it's not really going anywhere good.