Technology Articles
Climate Change, Carbon Dioxide and the Automobile
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Are we arrogant in changing the climate? Or arrogant in thinking we can?
Climate change and CO2 have been much in the news of late, and I thought it would be interesting to collect information, chat with specialists and share my findings with fellow auto enthusiasts. I gained insights from Scott Samuelsen, Professor of Mechanical, Aerospace and Environmental Engineering, and Director, National Fuel Cell Research Center, University of California Irvine; from Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, M.I.T.; from Robert Socolow, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University; from Marlo Lewis Jr., Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute; and also from specialists at Honda, GM, Volkswagen and Toyota. I read Executive Summaries of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (hereinafter, the IPCC) and the Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, as well as commentaries in Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scientific American, M.I.T.'s Technology Review and Weatherwise magazine. I accumulated items from sources as varied as Automotive News, the Internet, The New York Times and our local Orange County Register (on this particular topic, these two respected newspapers couldn't have been more contrasting). I compared popularizations such as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth with contrasting viewpoints, some scientific, others decidedly less so. Here's what I gleaned from all this.
