this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed (phys.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Electric cars are not THE solution.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The trouble is that motorcycles are generally way higher-performance than cars (in terms of e.g. HP/weight ratio), so putting low-friction, long-lasting tires on them is irresponsible. It'd be like putting Prius tires on a Lamborghini: sure, you could drive the thing responsibly and within the performance limits of the tire, but it's missing the point of the vehicle.

Now, if more motorcycles were built sensibly -- with much less horsepower -- then I'd expect the tires to last a decent amount of time. For example, do 49cc scooters have the tire wear problem you're complaining about? I'm willing to bet the answer is "no."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This is where the debate constantly diverges to extremes ... either have sensible long lasting tires ... or high performance racing tires ... but nothing moderate in between.

Manufacturers are more than able to produce a reasonable motorcycle tire that would have enough performance and would last far longer. There just isn't any incentive to do it. It makes them far more money to make tires that don't last as long and at this point, I think everyone knows that, we are just not able to do anything about it.

Like my 1998 BMW ... it's an ancient machine at this point and it was originally a performance bike when it was new and would have benefited from a high performance tire ... but its 26 years old and I really don't trust it to go fast any more but I love the look of the bike and I enjoy riding it. I maintain and service it myself but there are far too many old parts on it that there will inevitably something that will fail and I really don't want that to happen at speed. All I need is a good decent tire, not a tire that is meant for the race track for a modern newer bike.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Like my 1998 BMW … it’s an ancient machine at this point and it was originally a performance bike when it was new and would have benefited from a high performance tire … but its 26 years old and I really don’t trust it to go fast any more

I guarantee your '98 BMW is still way faster than my '90 Miata, and even that is still a sports car that still deserves and requires decent tires. Therefore, yours still does too.

I wasn't being hyperbolic when I used 49cc scooters as an example -- I really do think that's pretty close to the limit of how much power a motorcycle can have and still reasonably use long-wearing, not-very-grippy tires.