Archive for August, 2007
links for 2007-08-31
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my newest faves
links for 2007-08-28
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this is ben stein’s “michal moore”-like anti-evolution film. he gets shredded in the comments.
links for 2007-08-27
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shakespeare
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i ran across this… i subscribe to all photos tagged “berkeley”
links for 2007-08-25
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put potato flakes in, french fries come out.
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you can see his little ears flapping in the wind.
links for 2007-08-24
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“they’re here!”
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this is not a joke. truly amazing.
links for 2007-08-22
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(1) they were newbies (2) they weren’t using predictive text. still, an important consideration if you are a heavy messager
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fiction masquerading as inquiry.
Drudge misleads on global warming facts
Matt Drudge posted a wildly misleading headline on his site today: “Burping moose ‘more destructive to environment than cars’”.
Of course the implication is that we’ve all been fools for exaggerating the impact of auto emissions when nature’s Norwegian moose are a far greater problem. Except for the fact that it’s not true.
If you read the article you’ll discover there’s only 120,000 of these moose in existence, and each moose lets off the equivalent of 13,000 km, or 8,076 mile’s worth of CO2. That’s a total equivalent of about a million mile’s worth of CO2 driving emissions from burping moose.
But compare that to the CO2 emissions from U.S. passenger cars. Wikipedia reports that in 2004, there were 243,023,485 passenger cars in the United States. And, according to the EPA, the average passenger car travels 12,000 miles per year. If you do the math, and that’s about 3 trillion miles worth of CO2 emissions emitted by passenger cars in the U.S. Keep in mind this is passenger cars only. It doesn’t include light vehicles, mini-vans, trucks, etc. And it includes the United States, only, and not the rest of the world.
That means that these moose contribute .00003% of the CO2 emissions as U.S. passenger cars each year. Yes, that’s 3 hundred-thousandths of a percent. Hardly “more destructive to the environment than cars.” But Drudge isn’t interested in reality, he’s interested in pandering to a base that disputed global warming even exists up until a few years ago. But what you expect? If you’re wrong about something, what choice do you have but to mislead others?