Global warming

I never said it did. As Seth pointed out above it did go through the consultation progress, but went through a lot faster than most policies, and became full legal barely a month before the due date for the announcement of the planning permission… maybe you can explain to us the why the Green Party felt CAP 2019 needed to be replaced so fast?

As To your assumption of me ignoring the "extremliy well known understanding of induced demand of road cinrtuction"..... well the way I see it, the traffic is using the roads anyway. Now routing it all through towns and cities means a lot of idling engines spewing out CO2 and other harmful gasses, but going nowhere. Now, as to the likes of bypasses and motorways inducing traffic,....well that is the idea of them, now isn't it. They are meant to induce the traffic that has no reason to be in a town or city and route it around so that it does not obstruct the traffic that has to be there. I know I use the example of Limerick and Ennis a lot, but then I live between them and have plenty reason to be in those locations, or go beyond them to further destinations. No more waiting in traffic with engines running, wasting fuel and going nowhere. And in case you think the bypassed roads are full of traffic.....no, the old sections of the main Cork to Galway route that are now bypassed are pretty empty and reduced to the status of local roads at 80kph, the nose to tail traffic that once used them, now uses the motorway and bypasses and moving freely at farmore efficient speeds.

Not actually how it works. Each vehicle has an optimum speed. Its where the engines optimum speed and the gearbox and all the gearing come together to give the best fuel efficiency. Even the size of the vehicles wheels and tyre pressures contribute to it. As I have already said, this is what Nissan's e-power system is based on. An engine and gearing system that runs at only one speed, Its optimum one, to turn a generator to charge a battery to power a motor which moves the vehicle.

First gear in slow moving or stopped traffic with the engine idling is not that optimum point where fuel efficiency is at its highest. The higher the MPG the lower the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere for the distance travelled, or if you prefer to look at it another way, think about this. E10 petrol creates 2.1 kg of CO2 for every litre burned, which works out at about 10Kg per gallon. If you look at it as miles per 10 kg CO2 emitted, you will see what I mean.

In very few towns can you travel at 30 MPH, and that is not because the speed limit is lower. It is because of traffic holding things up. Traffic like trucks, vans and cars whose only business in that town is to get through it. Charleville in Cork and Athy in Kildare are perfect examples of this, and the only towns I know I can even get close to travelling at 30MPH are those that have been bypassed, and even at that it is a lower gear than top gear to prevent the engine labouring.

Even Limerick and Ennis before the tunnel and motorway were complete nightmares to get though, often taking an hour.

But as another poster pointed out previously, in 11 years time the emissions argument will be a moot point as the sale of fossil fuel burning cars will be banned and they will eventually go the way of the steam engine. I wonder what will happen to the Green Party Chair persons argument then if the bypass was resubmitted along the same route then. Fuel economy is a major reason to bypass a town. Next time, look at your own fuel economy gage and see what it does.

The principles I outlined are universally applicable. What you are trying to convince us of goes against everything that has been analysed by experts in this field. You want us to believe that only bypasses can save energy which is simply untrue.

Only when a vehicle is stopped will it not be using less fuel than it does cruising at 70mph on a bypass. Slow moving vehicles simply use less fuel than fast moving vehicles.

The premise here been promoted is that bypasses save fuel - the evidence simply doesn't support this claim.

I am in favour of some bypasses for entirely other reasons but it's in no way an environmentally based reason to build bypasses.

This whole tangent is a complete red herring to a discussion of global warming and only started as yet another excuse to bash green politicians. It's frankly pathetic.

The reality is that only in Rush hour is city traffic in constant start stop, for the rest of the day traffic is moving slowly at a relatively constant speed.

Also bypasses are far from immune to start stop traffic jams at rush hour

Any claims that stop start traffic is more efficient than a bypass are just fantasy.

But so is religion.

So the Galway CC were lying when they calculated that fuel consumption would increase if the bypass was built.

Forgive me if I take their expertise over your hunches.

The CO2 emissions from cars is a good thing. It helps to green the planet which is to be welcomed.

Higher CO2 levels also make plants (at least C3 ones) more drought tolerant, thus reducing desertification in drier areas.

I don't know what they were doing, but I'll use my own expertise over theirs..

It's the take of the founding president of Greenpeace, who is a biologist. Patrick Moore, who quit Greenpeace because the loons hijacked the boat and rejected reason and science.

Since leaving Greenpeace in 1986, Moore has criticized the environmental movement for what he sees as scare tactics
and disinformation, saying that the environmental movement "abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism".

CO2 is the source of all the Oxygen animals and insects breathe. The reason there is 20% O2 in the atmosphere and only 0.04% CO2 is because plants over time have taken all that C and put it to good use, while getting rid of the useless O2. O2 is plant excrement.

CO2 is present in the atmosphere in absolutely tiny quantities - 0.04%. It's almost a trace gas. Without sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere for plants to conduct photosynthesis there would be no life on Earth. It's far more important there be CO2 in the atmosphere than oxygen in terms of there being life on Earth. You can take away all the oxygen and all the animals and insects die, but the plants would live on, but take away all the CO2 and all life dies.

The planet used to have vastly more atmospheric CO2 than it does today, and contrary to the runaway global warming bollocks being pushed by climate alarmists, the planet did not catastrophically overheat and become venus when there was 5000 ppm - 0.5% - of CO2 in the atmosphere. Our current ~492 ppm of CO2 is extremely low historically, even though the climate alarmists claim it's too high.

Over time, plants have hoovered up most of the CO2 and spat out O2 in the process. All that C has been sequesterd in rocks hydroCARBON deposits, methane hydrates and other carbon sinks. The plants nearly gorged themselves to extinction, consuming almost all of their food supply. Luckilly bacteria exist and have saved their arses by digesting dead plants and releasing some CO2 back into the air.

There is barely enough CO2 in the atmosphere to allow plants to live! During the previous interglacial period to the one we are living in, the CO2 levels reached such catastrophically low levels that at higher altitudes, where the amount of CO2 dropped due to general thinning of the atmosphere, all the plant life died.

And the poster who you are deriding, is correct - the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are causing a surge in plant growth, which I am very glad to see. NASA have tracked and measured this general greening due to higher CO2 levels and slight warming:

"Replaced by local traffic who now consider that route now quicker" you claim. First of all, is that not the idea of a bypass, to keep the only traffic in a town to be the local traffic by allowing the non-local traffic to go around allowing the local traffic to move more freely and go about their business within the town instead of being stuck behind non-local traffic that had no reason to be there in the first place, except to get through the town.

Secondly, I've yet to see that happen in Ennis or Limerick. In fact even if you look at Shoog's example of Carrick-on-Shannon, where he omitted to mention there is a bypass road around the town on the N4, he made the same claim I made about Limerick, that rush hour was the only time there was congestion, and in Limerick's case even that is nowhere near as bad as it was in the pre tunnel days, same for Ennis.

Now, the only reason I can see for people not using the bypasses are the tolls. Even the motorway they are planning from Cork to Limerick is going to be tolled, but we need the people to use these bypasses, not avoid them so they move their vehicles at the optimal rate to reduce emissions, not avoid them. That goes for all types of vehicle, ICE, Hybrid and EV alike. But the subject of tolls is a different debate.