The other day this story was reported on the BBC about how scientists may have found a way of storing hydrogen for use as a fuel in vehicles through extracting it from Methanol. This hydrogen would then be used to create an charge for an electric vehicle. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21618350 Sounds great right? Well, surely not. The idea of fueling vehicles on alcohol has been about since Henry Ford, so it certainly is not a new idea. What the new idea with this story is is that they are using a flammable liquid to power an electric car. I think you can see where I'm going with this...
Petroleum is around 95 Octane, methanol is around the 115 mark. Hydrogen fuel celled cars on the other hand will have also have to had encorporated complicated computers and the complete redesigning of the infrastructure we have come accustomed to in the modern world. Now, I'm going to go out on a whim here and say that its probably much more cost effective and easier for the world to sell conventional combustion engines which can run on methanol and kits to convert ordinary petrol vehicles into being able to use it too. There would be very little modifications needed, if any if someone could invent a good enough additive to put in with methanol to stop it corroding seals and aluminium parts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8flqK4pRKU0 Methanol has been used to fuel racing cars for years already afterall... And it can be made from rotting organic matter. I have no objections against using all that unused food that ends up in landfill, (and the by-product of the food we do eat) to make fuel to power our cars. Fuck, anything to bring down the cost of motoring has to be a bonus.
This may well be old news to some but as it was new to me I thought I'd just quickly up this information for anyone else out there to read and take note of. I only caught wind of this through an AA engineer who was aware of this. If you are good with cars you may remember a few years back when manufacturers began putting 'pollen filters' on their cars. The reason I assume given was to stop you from having a dangerous sneezing fit whilst driving at 140 on the autobahn, but apparently given other recent information the real reason may be a little more worrying. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18415532 According to research, diesel fumes from modern engines are able to burn the diesel so well that the resulting particles are small enough to be absorbed by human skin and has been attributed to skin and lung cancer. Kind of worrying if you are someone who spends a great deal of time in the car or if you live on a main road. This information tends to tie in with why the international guidelines given to car manufacturers have become so stringent. Not only do car manufacturers tend to install these 'pollen filters' on their vehicles air vents, but most modern diesel cars now have to have a 'Diesel Particulate Filter'. This is essentially a catalyst which is meant to store the deposits so it can be fully burnt off before it gets into the environment to cause harm. Trouble is, whilst they lie to our faces about carbon dioxide being the cause of every affliction known to mankind, things such as this are relatively toned down, despite the possible major health complaints it can cause.
The 'diesel particulate filters' are therefore likely nothing to do with carbon dioxide at all, and are more likely a way to try and prevent every commuter from dieing within fifteen years.
So the news today is reporting on how half the worlds food produced ends up in the landfill. What took the news so long to pick up this story? This has been an obvious situation for decades and it as per usual it surprises me how newsreaders can roll this out randomly one day and call it 'news' but there you go. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20968076
I mentioned this combined with a general overview of real environmental issues about two or three years ago on a youtube video:
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has said that "the waste was being caused by poor storage, strict sell-by dates, bulk offers and consumer fussiness." Ok. Well lets just consider these points for a moment. Poor storage? Yes, blatantly. Strict sell-by-dates? Yes. Once upon a time it was good enough just to use common sense to determine whether food was past its best or not. Generally speaking if meat or vegetables is gone you won't want to eat it, the strict sell-by-dates is merely a ruse to get us to chuck more away and therefore carry on buying more the next week. Trouble is lately through a combination of bulk buy offers and the short use by dates, half the food we do buy ends up going out of date within days of buying it which of course exacerbates the problem. Customer fussiness? I would argue against this point, but generally if people in the modern world, or at least the west, had time to cook meals from scratch this would not be an issue. As it stands it is much cheaper to buy a prepacked meal then it is to buy all the ingredients and do something from scratch, something which is a real shame and which is partly to blame for the amount of obese kids you see these days. The report called Global Food; Waste Not, Want Notfrom the UK-based institution, as much as half of the world's food, amounting to two billion tonnes worth, is wasted. Up to 30% of the vegetables in the EU are either thrown away or the farmers themselves do not even bother to harvest them because they know they will not meet the EU's 'criteria'. (http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/fruit-and-vegetables/marketing-standards/index_en.htm) The EU has already it seems sought to reduce the number of fruit and vegetables they are putting size and shape (as ridiculous as this sounds to begin with) restrictions on. At the end of the day pressures from groups such as this who created this report usually financed by the UN are going to end up forcing legislation in most countries to reduce food wastage. This is not a bad thing and as much as I usually hate the UN, I have to agree with this particular scheme, especially if we are not going to do anything pro-active about population growth. That said I do have some concerns. In the past few weeks an idea was announced by the Tories about reducing benefits for claimants who were overweight: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20897681 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/03/obesity-benefits-cuts And labour has suggested putting restrictions on fat, sugar and salt in certain foods: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20914685 And as I stated in my last blog post the reduction of benefits for overweight claimants is pretty much unenforceable so my concern is that they will simply use a different method of imposing tax on unhealthy foods to subsidise losses to supermarkets who will have to improve food wastage on fresh fruit, vegetables and meat. In any case, no matter what happens, as soon as the Government gets involved you know it will just cost the people more money regardless. A negligible reduction in NHS costs whilst spending more in taxes to give back to corrupt banking families of which the Government is to blame for taking loans with in the first place. Time will tell, but don't tell I didn't tell you so.
The BBC is well known for its zealous support of the 'anthropogenic global warming' theory, and this fact is reflected constantly by its Science correspondance. Usually the general public has little to no clue how to interpret the facts and so a large majority simply believe what they are told, however occasionally you get stories so ridiculous, so outrageously wrong that something makes you stand up and shake your head in hysterics.
As the title of this story suggests, the BBC ran a story at the end of September about how fish in the seas were likely to shrink "by up to 24% because of global warming". http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19758440 This entire presumption is based on the idea that warmer seas therefore means more carbon dioxide in the water, and the shrinkage in fish populations would be down to a lack of oxygen, but this doesn't even begin to make sense.
In the past the planet has been alot warmer than it presently is and when you look at the kind of creatures that prospered in those times then these facts simply do not add up. During the eras of the dinosaur, usually cold-blooded reptiles which eventually grew to the size of the average house generally lived on a planet so warm that there was an absence of polar ice. Whilst perhaps you cannot include land animals in the equation as they are talking about marine life, consider these:
Sharks (thats fish to all you people unversed in marine biology) who grew to between twenty five and thirty metres long in times which were largely tropical and then who were extinct by the time the climate became its more recognisable 'modern' temperate temperature. This of course is not proof in itself, but look back at any time in the past where warm and wet weather was the global norm and you will usually find a correllation with larger creatures and greater diversity in general.
Nature.com. Another one of those phony science journals which mis-guides the public by chopping up data to suit an agenda. You know, same as AmericanScientific, NewScience etc, magazines which spout shit they later refute the week later with new data.
In actual fact, recent fishing quotas have actually led to a rise in fish stocks in British waters. It shows that we can occasionally get the environment management done properly, but it seems odd that our completely professional and well-read journalists would get such an important story wrong...
The BBC and the Government have since corrected the media's apparent inaptitude in reading scientific data correctly.
The other day this story was reported on the BBC about how scientists may have found a way of storing hydrogen for use as a fuel in vehicles through extracting it from Methanol. This hydrogen would then be used to create an charge for an electric vehicle. 
