But Will Green Cars Sell? - Henry Payne - Planet Gore on National Review Online

Detroit, Mich. — The disconnect between the inside of Cobo Convention Center’s Detroit Auto Show Press Preview and the outside this week has been jarring. While automakers rolled out electric concept cars they claimed will solve the global-warming crisis, East Detroit public schools cancelled classes as the thermometer barely crawled above zero and wind-chill factors plunged to dangerously low levels — 20 degrees below zero.

But when the public streams onto the show floor next week, the disconnect between what government wants and what consumers need will be almost as jarring.
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But the larger disconnect will be with the daily drivers like the Chevy Volt.

Questions—not anticipation—will abound. Can I afford a $40,000 small sedan? Where do I plug it in when the battery runs out of juice? Can I remember to keep the gas tank filled, so that when the battery does run out of juice, the backup gas engine will still kick in? Will the gas go bad in my tank if I don’t use it for a while? Will the lithium ion battery overheat like the one in my laptop? Will it be as unpredictable?

Washington promises that green concepts are the future of transportation, but politicians don’t have to follow through in the consumer marketplace.

Dalton Minimum Returns: Alert: A Probable New Dalton

[Timo Niroma] This prolonged minimum and the delay of the cycle 24 mean that the cycle 24 will be very low, in the range of 30-50, or at most at a Dalton level. This means that the maximum will be reached only in 2014. All this means there will be a cooling for decades, at least for 30 years, but we cannot be sure we are on a course to a new LIA (Little Ice Age). A low Dalton is more probable, but one can't be sure, there are too many indications of the solar magnetic field having a deep dive. (A sidestep: The rise of the CO2 in atmosphere from 0.03 to 0.04 % does not have any meaning in this play as the last 200 million years in Earth's history show. I am a statistician and this is a statistical study, but a remark for those, who urgently for years have asked me about the physical reason: I find the Svensmark theory (2006) of cosmic rays oscillating to the rhythm of the Sun's magnetic field as the most promising. The CERN investigations in 2010 probably will settle the issue.)