Points of Interest | Green Energy News

August 31, 2003 – Vol.8 No.23

POINTS OF INTEREST.

A weekly collection of websites worth visiting.

Perhaps one of the reasons many people can’t believe that the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing the world to warm is the mistaken belief that our planet’s atmosphere is very thick. It isn’t.

The lowest part of the atmosphere - the troposphere - the part where life survives, and coincidentally where this build-up occurs, is less than ten miles thick on average. But the graphics many people see that show how the greenhouse effect works might be giving the impression that the atmosphere is hundreds of miles thick. Skeptics might think, how could such a thick atmosphere possibly fill up with our own exhaust ?

For example the greenhouse effect graphic from the Tufts University website http://www.tufts.edu/tie/tci/ClimateChange.html shows the thickness of the atmosphere in relation to the diameter of the earth at what appears to be more than 1000 miles. (The Space Shuttle orbits in Space at about 200 miles.)

Closer to reality, though still not correct, the graphic from One Sweet Whirled http://www.onesweetwhirled.org/html/learn.html shows the earth’s atmosphere at perhaps a few hundred miles.

(Click on both. Scroll down. See the difference?)

Even with the others layers of the atmosphere such as the stratosphere included, it’s not nearly as thick as many of these graphics would lead people to believe. Our life-giving atmosphere is very thin - the skin of an onion.

(Note: Almost all the depictions have other problems as well. That’s for another day, another edition.)

Probably the sometimes-calm-sometimes-boiling oceans will eventually provide a significant amount of green (blue?) power for populations living dozens miles from from the world’s coastlines. A number of research companies and organizations recognize the potential for energy that covers 2/3’s of the earth’s surface. Apparently there’s now another entry into the ocean energy business - Macroshaft. Pty of Australia.

Yet while the company has grand plans for its technology - 1.6 gigawatt ocean energy power plants to feed the grids of California and Australia - the company offers little, if any, technological detail - renderings, drawings, a prototype under construction - on its website to support its claims and ambitions. http://www.macroshaft-dunk.com/

THE most popular vehicle sold in the United States for the last 21 years is not a car, it’s a pick-up truck, the Ford F-150. The least expensive commercially produced, supposedly street-worthy, battery electric car in the world is the Reva from the Reva Electric Car Company in India. At a little more than 8 feet long and 1500 pounds, it’s hard to imagine Reva’s sharing the same road as the mammoth pick-up trucks and even larger vehicles.

Still, Reva plans to expand to world markets - at least in places where the driver sits in the right hand seat - such as the U.K. The car is being leased there for GBP 3995 ($6350) as the G-Wiz by a company called Goingreen. No word if the Reva ragtop, the Zephyr, will be sold there. It’s really cute. http://www.revaindia.com/ , http://www.goingreen.co.uk/