I do watch the Discovery Channel (and in HD baby!) The chances of gamma-ray burst, super-volcano or the death of the sun destroying our planet...... are insiginificant (combined, I think think they are more then 1 in a few million...)
Like an auto accident,seriously, would you care about the statistics if it happened? It is so normal for humans to quantify things in terms of their own life span. More than likely, there is hundreds or even tens of thousands of years of technogical progress we won't be around to see. Look out ten or even a hundred thousand years hence and all of a sudden the inplausable becomes the relatively plausable. Dino's ruled the earth for millions of years, and they are far less adaptable than humans. The era of fossil fuels will eventually come to a close being inevitable, as the cost to survey, drill, extract, process, etc... looms tall. Other technological advances will fill the void, long after I depart the earth.
The chances of John's straight pipe speeding up Global Warming are.... significant :biggrin:
Not really, no. Racing is a relatively niche hobby.
As mentioned prior, all of the engines in a F1 race pale in comparison to a single regional jump jet than is dumping in hundreds of gallons of fuel a minute and emitting C02 by the pound. As most production car engines burn close to the stoichiometric point using small fuel injectors, frankly the more harmful emissions are relatively mitigated. Even so, an improperly running 70's pickup truck at cold idle is far more a heavy polluter than a modern sports car from Honda at max rpm.
The fact is, this is a PR game, and motorsports has become a battle ground for hippies and special agenda groups that lack basic engineering degrees. They make the facts that they like work for them, and you could have the cleanest burning 120mpg diesel engine in the world and eventually... they would still stick their nose up at it.
It is a long road between envisioning hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles and making them a practical production reality for five hundred million people. It is even more of a challenge to design a technology that is truely clean from manufacturing to operation to de-comission. It should be obvious that painting a F1 car green might serve to raise awareness to the cause, but does little to solve any significant engineering bottle necks in the field of commuter cars. They have nothing in common to begin with, nor are they intended to.
In short, if they want to help out and reach point B sooner- they can move out of urban centers so they can be with their trees, quit lobbying and start engineering during the work week, and more than anything just leave the rest of us with our see-do's and race cars on the weekends alone. If they want to impress me in their off time, they can follow the lead of the actually smart home tuners that have converted their VW's to burn veggy oil and done meaningful R&D in their home garage. That at least requires actual smarts, as opposed to blabbing of the mouth. It is the same protestors that show up at every rally in Seattle, and eco-activism should be a design standard, not a career goal.
Its like Jumbo/Shrimp... Just don't make sense 
