H1!!!!!
now thats a mans car

sports vwagen...
 

I actually used to work for toyota supply chain and drove a 4Runner as my daily driver...mpg was appx 16 but it was never a problem...ever...having said that...the best handling winter vehicle i've owned is my current 4motion VW Passat Wagon...it just scoots around in the snow...in the winter i run 16" alloys and Blizzaks LM25's and have never had an issue...i'm getting appx 23mpgs with the 3.0L v6 and i can actually out manuever the larger suv due to the lower center of gravity...at any rate...the vw 4motion system is simply astonishing around corners and always tracks straight and true with no sideways drifting...yes, it kills me...but even better than the 4Runner on snow covered streets....provided it's not more than 5-6" deep...if your roads aren't kept clean..then an suv may be your best bet...

however, my routes are generally kept very clear...so this year, since I enjoy my 986 so much, i've just put on some 17" twists with Pirelli 240s that I picked up from Suncoast porsche...i love driving it so much that i'm going to give it a go...

good luck in your search...

cheers,

--ts

Hi,

I'm originally from the East Coast and what you guys call snow there we call a clear day here in MN. You all don't know what snow is...

Happy Motoring!... Jim'99

All "chick car's" jokes aside, I think that the H3 is a crime to the environment and I find it unbelievable that people actually buy these cars!

Out of SO many car to choose from why pick the worse one for the environment...People keep talk about gas as a comodity/cost but there is more to it. People need to be more accountable for their own part...I mean 12 MPG is plain crazy!

So, if you are thinkijg about several cars PLEASE don't get a H3!

Yeah, but if we don't keep the globe warm with all of our emissions, then it will start getting cold...and I don't like to be cold. Who needs the polar ice caps anyway? If we would have warmed the earth 100 years ago, we wouldn't have lost the Titanic. Think about it...

Don't worry about global warming. California has just passed a law that will take care of everything.

Well, then again, maybe it is NOT the H3 we have to blame.

Wouldn't that just upset all the greenies!

See Below!


A new study provides experimental evidence that cosmic rays may be a major factor in causing the Earth’s climate to change.

Given the stakes in the current debate over global warming, the research may very well turn out to be one of the most important climate experiments of our time – if only the media would report the story.

Ten years ago, Danish researchers Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen first hypothesized that cosmic rays from space influence the Earth’s climate by effecting cloud formation in the lower atmosphere. Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover – that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth’s climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.

The hypothesis was potentially significant because during the 20th century, the influx of cosmic rays was reduced by a doubling of the sun’s magnetic field which shields the Earth from cosmic rays. According to the hypothesis, then, less cosmic radiation would mean less cloud formation and, ultimately, warmer temperatures – precisely what was observed during the 20th century.

If correct, the Svensmark hypothesis poses a serious challenge to the current global warming alarmism that attributes the 20th century’s warmer temperatures to manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.

Just last week, Svensmark and other researchers from the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Centre published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A – the mathematical, physical sciences and engineering journal of the venerable Royal Society of London – announcing that they had experimentally verified the physical mechanism by which cosmic rays affect cloud cover.

In the experiment, cosmic radiation was passed through a large reaction chamber containing a mixture of lower atmospheric gases at realistic concentrations that was exposed to ultraviolet radiation from lamps that mimic the action of the sun’s rays. Instruments traced the chemical action of the penetrating cosmic rays in the reaction chamber.[Click here for more details about Svensmark’s hypothesis and experiment, including high-quality animation].

The data collected indicate that the electrons released by the cosmic rays acted as catalysts to accelerate the formation of stable clusters of sulfuric acid and water molecules – the building blocks for clouds.

“Many climate scientists have considered the linkages from cosmic rays to clouds as unproven,” said Friis-Christensen who is the director of the Danish National Space Centre. “Some said there was no conceivable way in which cosmic rays could influence cloud cover. [This] experiment now shows they do so, and should help to put the cosmic ray connection firmly onto the agenda of international climate research,” he added.

But given the potential significance of Svensmark’s experimentally validated hypothesis, it merits more than just a place on the agenda of international climate research – it should be at the very top of that agenda.

Low-level clouds cover more than a quarter of the Earth’s surface and exert a strong cooling effect. Observational data indicate that low-cloud cover can vary as much as 2 percent in 5 years which, in turn, varies the heating at the Earth’s surface by as much as 1.2 watts per square meter during that same period.

“That figure can be compared with about 1.4 watts per square meter estimated by the [United Nations’] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the greenhouse effect of all the increase in carbon dioxide in the air since the Industrial Revolution,” says Svensmark.

That is, cloud cover changes over a 5-year period can have 85 percent of the temperature effect on the Earth that has been claimed to have been caused by nearly 200 years of manmade carbon dioxide emissions. The temperature effects of cloud cover during the 20th century could be as much as 7 times greater than the alleged temperature effect of 200 years worth of additional carbon dioxide and several times greater than that of all additional greenhouse gases combined.

So although it has been taken for granted by global warming alarmists that human activity has caused the climate to warm, Svensmark’s study strongly challenges this assumption.

Given that the cosmic ray effect described by Svensmark would be more than sufficient to account for the net estimated temperature change since the Industrial Revolution, the key question becomes: Has human activity actually warmed, cooled or had no net impact on the planet?

Between manmade greenhouse gas emissions, land use patterns and air pollution, humans may have had a net impact on global temperature. But if so, no one yet knows the net sign (that is, plus/minus) of that impact.

Not surprisingly, Svensmark’s potentially myth-shattering study has so far been largely ignored by the media. Though published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society A, it’s only been reported – and briefly at that – in The New Scientist (Oct. 7), Space Daily (Oct. 6) and the Daily Express (U.K., Oct. 6).

The media’s lack of interest hardly reflects upon the importance of Svensmark’s experiment so much as it reflects upon the media’s and global warming lobby’s excessive investment in greenhouse gas hysteria.


Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert , an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute .

Yep, just call tirerack - they can hook you up with a second set of wheels/ winter tires for $1200. You can survive a VA winter no problem.

Hi,

I've seen this report and it is very intriguing, but also very speculative. What isn't in dispute is that the World is unlocking and releasing into the atmosphere Billions of Metric Tons of Carbon annually and this has to have some effect.

Perhaps more interesting was a study done by Harvard scientists in the days after 9/11 in '01. As you recall, Air Traffic was curtailed for 3.5 days after the incident.

Well, it turns out that the 3400 or so airliners which are airborne over this country at any given time create contrails when they reach their cruising altitudes at 30k+ feet. These vapor trails reflect a significant amount of sunlight back into space, the study said 20%.

Anyway, these researchers took average temperatures on each of these days and found the temps rose on average 1.5°F over those same temperature measurements made both before and after the cessation of Air Traffic. The implication is that Global Warming is even more severe than scientists were originally led to believe and that these Airliners and their contrails actually help in mitigating the warming.

Now, I'm no Greenie, but I do believe that we have severely impacted the Earth's climate by definitely altering the Carbon Cycle. I believe that this is unavoidable - a fact of life in an Industrialized World of 6 Billion people.

Further, I think we'll continue these ways and in a relatively few years push the Earth past the point of no return, where the environment cannot recover. At 52, I doubt that my life will be severely impacted, but my teenage nephews will live in a world very different than the one I am and I don't believe that there will be many more future generations. 'Course, the Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and North Koreans are likely to poison all life with Nuclear Radiation before the Environment has a chance to get us all anyway...

Happy Motoring!... Jim'99

_____________________________

For a different perspective on this modern, commonly held belief, please consider the following link. You'll find that we've been down this road many, many times.
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp

"For a different perspective on this modern, commonly held belief, please consider the following link."

Just curious... According to the proponents of the "alternative" view, is there ANY level of pollution ("growth", "prosperity", etc. embraced by these 6B enterprising, "GDP-growth-or-bust" people) that this feeble planet of ours may eventually NOT be able to sustain? Is there such a line, and if so, where could it possibly be? How would we know if we ever cross it? Just curious...

As for the "cost"... Every year for the last 20 years I've paid my car insurance premiums. And every year it was "money thrown to the wind". Been there 20 times already. Hence, I must conclude that paying my insurance next year will be, idiotic, at best.

Z.

EXACTLY!!!!!! :D

^ post of the week.

"Every story that talks about new regulations or forced cutbacks on emissions should discuss the cost of those proposals.

Report Accurately on Statistics: Accurate temperature records have been kept only since the end of the 19th Century, shortly after the world left the Little Ice Age. So while recorded temperatures are increasing, they are not the warmest ever. A 2003 study by Harvard and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “20th Century Climate Not So Hot,” “determined that the 20th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1,000 years."

Gee, I hate it when facts get in the way of a good story!@

AGREE :) :)

See Rail,

Cosmic rays, just like I told you. Keep wearing the hat I sent you, dude. Whatever the voices tell you, don't take off the hat!

That's it Grizz, I am offended and I called the "Feelings Police". She wants to talk to you about two issues.

This interrogation could take all night... Well, O.K., three minutes at least.

__________________________________

Hey! She looks familiar! Last time I saw her she was looking for her bra in her boxster.

Her bra would fit my Boxster!