Spent time in Nome, AK this year. Summer temperatures followed the trend of an annual "highest ever recorded" report. The natives all have stories about migration patterns of birds animals and fish they rely on for sustenance changing and permafrost melting. 1-2 degrees average annual temp is a bit of a smokescreen because it is an average and not evenly distributed. There are places other than wherever you are which falsify," there simply is no place on earth, where over any preceding 30-40 year period, average temperatures in summer, or number and severity of heatwaves, has risen enough to make what you say is factually true." Please entertain the notion that the issue is more complex than what you personally have yet been able to understand. Not your fault. We all struggle to keep up. Pthalates in plastic bottles have no discernable effect on climate change, but they are worth knowing about and worrying about.

I think you transposed a figure. Wikipedia gives a theoretical limit of 86.7%. That seems unattainable but a jump to 68.7 is not, just difficult. Infinitesimal improvements can point towards great leaps. As pointed out by others, a gain of 1.15% efficiency lowers the cost per watt of a large installation. As we think about this, we need to account for change. rejecting many things because they are impractical given current technology is not useful unless the hurdles are identified. Which is to say we must use qualifiers on almost any," it'll never work" statements. "LED's will never replace incandescent light bulbs, they are too blue."

Given technology that exists today, you are correct. we are not static and there are somewhat intriguing solutions to all H2 problems. Hydrogen generation at home is near, though kinks still need to be worked out. https://newatlas.com/energy/ar... For short drives, Liquid nitrogen is still interesting. ~600x expansion to STP and costs about $3.00 a gallon to produce using only incrementally better equipment than in the '60s. No harmful emissions, not really more dangerous than gasoline. Fairly easy to store and use. It seems to me a dangerous fallacy to say no to something because the tech available now doesn't support it.

Before jumping into a shouting match about crazed exploiters vs. crazed environuts, ask yourselves," Was this trip necessary?" This is not the only or even the easiest place to get Li. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1027... from 1955 tells of Li from working mines which are now abandoned in South Dakota. More digging here will not appreciably alter a landscape as pockmarked and a smallpox survivors back. I have seen 25' plus long spodulene crystals exposed on the wall of a mine in South Dakota. The mine is on private property and is all pit and tailings from 100 years ago. Exploit this first.

" Fuel sources for electricity in the individual countries of the world and the consequent emissions from driving electric vehicles"- Sivak and Schoettle, 11/2017 (http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/SWT-2017-18.pdf) Uses a couple of credible analysis to compare ICE vehicles to Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in manufacture and driving of a Battery Electric Vehicle(BEV). Their conclusion is stated in terms of MPG for an ICE to match a typical BEV. In Germany in 2015, the ICE would need to get ~52 MPG combined avg to equal a BEV. This is slightly above average for the rest of the wortld, but behind the US at 55.4 MPG and way behind Canada at 169.5 MPG. Best in the world? Albania at 5100 MPG since Albanian electricity is all generated by renewables sources. It is reasonable to expect that Germany, the US and even Canada have improved on those numbers in the last four years and will continue to do so. The study cited in the source might be correct for last year, might be a push this year, surely is incorrect in future years. Physicists little t ( time) is often disregarded in studies of this sort. BTW, there are Facebook memes out there that are even further from reality on this topic which baffles me since a thirty second google search produces actual numbers from credible sources.

Kindergarteners have much homework because they are still malleable enough to learn fast and learn to enjoy learning. They have homework because they also need validation that they are doing a good thing and is making Mom and Dad proud and happy with their effort. Not perfect results, but effort.

I have a ten year old daughter that has just completed eighth grade math online through an accredited provider while she sat in her fourth grade classroom. When we saw she had an easy time learning arithmatic concepts, we started her on Kahn Academy learning and I took a look at the Common Core standards which were published on my states Department of Education pages. Kahn tracks well with the standards. She has been introduced to basic statistics, column and row arrays, and dozens of tricks to estimate values and reality check her estimates. The online class demanded many pencil miles, but I stopped making her do every problem because I believe much grade school and middle school math is designed to make children hate math as much as their parents. When the commenter above expressed outrage that 3x5 is five sets of three not three sets of five, he was imprinting a basic disrespect for the precision of order of operations. Yah, I know it doesn't matter in that problem, but the habit of thinking that way will serve in good stead not only when his son encounters linear algebra, but also when he is trying to understand legal documents or engage in basic communication with someone of the opposite gender. Our challenge is finding teachers for elementary or middle school who understand where all this is going, as almost none of them have see linear algebra or approximations or other useful algebras. For what it's worth, I believe many folks are uncomfortable with math because they are uncomfortable with a language in which one may not lie and get away with it for long.

I'm a building official and can tell you that building regulations are prescriptive and at minimum standards for safety and longevity. The age of barely restrained building practices brought the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire and the events fictionalized in the novel "Christ in Concrete" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I hope the restraint my office provides keeps all of the residents and craft workers in my town safe and that their grandchildren will also be safe in a well maintained home or apartment.The "Nobody" who doesn't know what's going on hasn't done his homework and should not build. More likely he is feigning ignorance hoping someone with thew city or county will let him do less than the minimum in building that he might maximize his own profits and the public be damned. Of course I'm more than a little cynical from having developers and builders lie to my face day after day.

I had high deductible ACA insurance for two years. During that time, my little girl broke her arm and my wife had emergency appendectomy surgery. Yes I shelled out $4500 for each of them, but thaqt was far far less that the $12,000 ER bill for my daughter and the $44,000 ( no, really) for my wife. Yes, I was insured, but the high deductible kept me fropm using the system much. Great for my provider, easy money.

This seems as useful for refrigerators as Cortana is for a PC, which is to say,"Not at all." there is no description of what the features might do for the consumer, and the only real benefits listed above are for advertisers, much like Cortana. when I purchase one of these things, will I be required to pay for the bandwidth it uses? What about my IoT range, Washer,Dryer, hot water heater and microwave? What do I get? A shopping list with dry spices, fabric softener, dryer sheets and an add for a water softener which can tell me to buy salt? Unless some appliance maker can show me how I do better because something is connected, and enough better that I am compensated for the bandwidth I pay for, I will never buy a connected appliance.( I believe unconnected appliances will still be produced and sold in underdeveloped countries for the foreseeable future.)

I see this article as a confirmation that gravity is conserved. Since America is becoming more obese, all that mass gained has to be offset by loss elsewhere. More workouts= more Antarctic land ice !!?!

Income Inequality?

Please reread your source carefully. You might get more exposure downwind from a coal plant, but there are no large quantities of highly active waste which must be disposed of or stored for a many generations. I'm reminded of the assertion not long ago that nuclear electricity is the cheapest of all sources....as long as you don't burden the palnts with waste disposal costs etc. All the facts matter if we are to make good decisions..

Like the swallows to Capistrano and the buzzards to Hinckley, these sort of stories return every spring. We can't get enough good workers to fill the positions we have open...at substandard wages. So a welder somewhere is making 150K . How many welders left to do something less dangerous and more lucrative while companies were offering less than median incomes? The construction industry is also whining about the labor shortage, but their complaint is about getting workers as skilled as the Russian and Mexican immigrants who will work for $10-15 per hour. I weep huge tears for the poor company owners who " Built this themselves" who are trying to gin up a surplus of trained workers drive wages back down. One other problem with the whole article is the notion that welders or plumbers or whatever skilled craftsman is in no way worth $150K so this must be a labor supply problem. Is there any non-emotional argument against a welder earning six figures?

The reprocessing canard has gone on long after plenty of information about it's future pitfalls has been in public record. See Here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ... "MOX is also three times as hot as spent uranium fuel, thanks to an accumulation of transuranic isotopes such as americium and curium, making it less fit for underground storage. Therefore, according to a 2000 consensus report on reprocessing prepared for France’s prime minister, spent MOX must cool for 150 years( in a water pool) before it can go into an underground waste repository... " A newer report : http://fissilematerials.org/li... says"Reprocessing has not led to a simplification or expedition of radioactive waste disposal;"..."France, which has the most extensive reprocessing and recycling program, does not attempt to recover the plutonium from the spent MOX fuel. In effect, it has exchanged the problem of managing spent fuel for the problem of managing spent MOX fuel, high level waste from reprocessing, plutonium waste from plutonium recycle, and eventually the waste from decommissioning its reprocessing and plutonium fuel fabrication facilities." As we are thinking about these issues and what the fire at WIPP means, we have no flip, easy answers. That doesn't mean the problems are insurrmountable, but we need to acknowledge their scope and work from reality.