When Elk Grove established its own transit system 19 months ago, it was hailed as another first for a city that prides itself on maverick moves. A hybrid-powered commuter bus fleet -- the cleanest in the nation -- would be the heart of what's called the e-tran. But now, Elk Grove's path to clean-air mass transit has taken a detour. Diesel buses, both chartered and purchased, currently make up nearly half of e-tran's 42-vehicle fleet and most of the daily commute buses to downtown Sacramento.
Instead of cruising into the nation's history books, the hybrid fleet has had trouble accelerating into the fast lanes of the freeways. Instead of comfortable rides, hybrid bus air conditioners have quit in triple-digit temperatures, leaving passengers sweating in ovenlike heat. Now, only five of the city's 21 hybrids are used on freeways. "In the quest to be leading edge, you have to take chances at times on new technology," Mayor Rick Soares said. "We took that chance."
No one is saying that the hybrid purchases, at a cost of $434,300 each, were a waste. The city, once served by Sacramento Regional Transit, has seen a huge growth in demand for rides within Elk Grove, and that's where most e-tran hybrids now operate. But there is disappointment. "Hybrid may not be the way to go for commuter service," said e-tran Transit Manager Carlos Tobar, who was hired to run e-tran more than a month after the start of the new service. "Live and learn."
So, what's the problem with the hybrids? They perform best during stop-and-go traffic, Tobar said. The hybrid's electric energy booster, an ultra capacitor, works in tandem with a 145-kilowatt generator. That booster is recharged every time a driver applies the brakes. That's great for intercity transit, but is troublesome on freeways where brakes are less often applied. "At highway speeds, many of the systems are stressed," Tobar said.
Among the stresses are air conditioners that switch off on ultra-hot days during freeway travel. To relieve passengers, Tobar either pulls buses from service or delivers bottled water in ice buckets to buses on afternoons hotter than 105 degrees. Still, passengers have been howling. With sunlight beating into bus windows, the hybrids have been compared to rolling hot houses. "Last night, you were sweating in there," Fred Burriell said of his commute home to Elk Grove during the latest heat wave. "You didn't need a sauna."
This isn't the first year the fledgling bus service has had these problems. Last year customers had similar complaints about air-conditioning breakdowns.... The sources of maintenance problems also aren't easy to detect, Tobar has said. Last month, he called in experts from both ISE Corp. of San Diego and Complete Coach Works of Riverside to solve the air-conditioning problems. ISE provided the hybrid system to Complete Coach, which remanufactured the buses for sale to Elk Grove. "I still believe that Elk Grove made a visionary decision" in purchasing the hybrids, Complete Coach's Macy Neshati said Friday, noting the company believes the fleet will improve.
And Elk Grove is still committed to its goal for lower-emission buses. "We really care about our riders," Tobar said. "We have had our challenges. But, like any champ that is knocked down, we get up and continue to fight."
Source
GLOBAL WARMING CAUSES HEAVY RAIN, etc., etc.
Reuters report below from June, which blames GW for both heavy rain AND record cold. On the other side of the Atlantic, global warming has been causing causing drought and now from Britain to California it's causing record heat! Sure is pesky stuff!
Images of swamped homes in the U.S. Northeast deepened suspicions over global warming, giving ammunition to scientists and others who say greenhouse gas-spewing cars and factories are fueling extreme weather. Meteorologists cautioned that no one should read too much into one storm. But the Atlantic Ocean is unusually warm for this time of year, they said, creating excess moisture in the atmosphere that can swiftly build a powerful rainstorm.
Paul Epstein, associate director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, said the Atlantic is warming faster than scientists projected even a decade ago, and he expects such storms as the one seen this week from Virginia to New York to become common. "Scientists and climatologists are looking at one another and we're just stunned because no one, even in the 1990s, projected the magnitude of the storms and degree of warming in the Arctic that we are seeing," he said.
Epstein sees a clear pattern: rain has increased in the United States by 7 percent in three decades; heavy rain events of more than 2 inches a day are up 14 percent and storms dumping more than 4 inches a day rose 20 percent. The floods that forced up to 200,000 evacuees from a historic Pennsylvania coal town on Wednesday followed a year of erratic weather in other parts of the region, including record rainfall in May and June in Massachusetts, a spring-like January in Maine and Vermont's worst autumn foliage in memory.
On February 12, Boston dug itself out of its largest snowfall for a single day when 17.5 inches fell -- an abrupt change from the second-warmest January on record in much of New England. Rhode Island's January was the warmest in 56 years. In Maine, lakes froze later, then thawed, faster than many could remember.
Most scientists say greenhouse gases could cause huge climate changes like floods, heat waves, droughts and a rise in sea levels that could swamp low-lying Pacific islands by 2100. But not everyone blames human pollution for drenching the U.S. Northeast. "The climate is warming," said Bernie Rayno, senior meteorologist at Accuweather.com. "The real question is: 'Are humans causing it or is it occurring because of natural cycles?' We believe that we are in a natural cycle like we were back in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. And that was a time of big climate swings."
Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists sees a gradual shift over the past 50 years toward heavier rain and more violent weather, including the record-shattering hurricane season that produced 28 storms last year. "We do expect to see an increase in the intensity of rainstorms particularly in the Northeast," she said.
Reuters, 29 June 2006
PESKY ICE-CORE DATA
Big natural fluctuations in recent times? There are clearly both "good" ice-cores and "bad" ice-cores
For the first time, glaciologists have combined and compared sets of ancient climate records trapped in ice cores from the South American Andes and the Asian Himalayas to paint a picture of how climate has changed - and is still changing - in the tropics. Their conclusions mark a massive climate shift to a cooler regime that occurred just over 5,000 years ago, and a more recent reversal to a much warmer world within the last 50 years.
The evidence also suggests that most of the high-altitude glaciers in the planet's tropical regions will disappear in the near future. The paper is included in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Lastly, the research shows that in most of the world, glaciers and ice caps are rapidly retreating, even in areas where precipitation increases are documented. This implicates increasing temperatures and not decreasing precipitation as the most likely culprit.
The researchers from Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center and three other universities combined the chronological climate records retrieved from seven remote locations north and south of the equator. Cores drilled through ice caps and glaciers there have captured a climate history of each region, in some cases, providing annual records and in others decadal averages. "Approximately 70 percent of the world's population now lives in the tropics so when climate changes there, the impacts are likely to be enormous," explains Lonnie Thompson, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State.
For the last three decades, Thompson has led nearly 50 expeditions to remote ice caps and glaciers to drill cores through them and retrieve climate records. This study includes cores taken from the Huascaran and Quelccaya ice caps in Peru; the Sajama ice cap in Bolivia; the Dunde, Guliya, Puruogangri and Dasuopu ice caps in China.
For each of these cores, the team - including research partner Ellen Mosley-Thompson, professor of geography at Ohio State - extracted chronological measurements of the ratio of two oxygen isotopes - O18 and O16 - whose ratio serves as an indicator of air temperature at the time the ice was formed. All seven cores provided clear annual records of the isotope ratios for the last 400 years and decadally averaged records dating back 2000 years.
"We have a record going back 2,000 years and when you plot it out, you can see the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA)," Thompson said. During the MWP, 700 to 1000 years ago, the climate warmed in some parts of the world. The MWP was followed by the LIA, a sudden onset of colder temperatures marked by advancing glaciers in Europe and North America . "And in that same record, you can clearly see the 20th Century and the thing that stands out - whether you look at individual cores or the composite of all seven - is how unusually warm the last 50 years have been. "There hasn't been anything in the record like it - not even the MWP," Thompson said. "The fact that the isotope values in the last 50 years have been so unusual means that things are dramatically changing. That's the real story here."
While the isotope evidence is clear throughout all of the cores, Thompson says that the more dramatic evidence is the emergence of unfossilized wetland plants around the margin of the Quelccaya ice cap, uncovered as the ice retreated in recent years. First discovered in 2002, the researchers have since identified 28 separate sites near the margin of the ice cap where these ancient plants have been exposed. Carbon-dating revealed that the plants range in age from 5,000 to 6,500 years old. "This means that the climate at the ice cap hasn't been warmer than it is today in the last 5,000 years or more," Thompson said. "If it had been, then the plants would have decayed."
FULL STORY here
(Benny Peiser cautions: "It should be pointed out that there are serious questions about whether oxygen isotopes O18 and O16 are reliable proxies for air temperature (let alone growing doubts about statitical accuracy of alleged proxy-disasters). Anyone unfamiliar with the scientific debate on these and other proxy claims may wish to consult Steve McIntyre's "Climate Audit")
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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