« Cluelessness Compounded | Main | Social Decay Rots Recruitment Prospects »

It would be ironic if "hy-birds" gave people butt and ball cancer, forcing makers to install heavy lead shielding making the vehicles even more inefficient than they already are, cutting the range down to 3 or 4 miles between charges.

you don't need a PHD To understand that for over 120 years that electromagnetics can and will cause people a great deal of Harm and death in the long run and with a nut government that is so nuts it would be happy to kill millions or people and millions on millions of little kids to make a dollar.

but the fact is the end game is to take cars away from the working people and replace it will bus for the mass population.

The writers of the article seem to be confusing electromagnetic radiation, otherwise known as light, with electromagnetic fields. The amount of radiation from a battery is far, far lower then direct sunlight, so I assume they're referring to the fields.

Of course, most research indicates that EMFs are harmless:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/eael1nx1ymblvj2h/

As long as the polar bears are safe, that's all that matters. They're so cute and cuddly that I just want to eat them. I wonder what a polar bear porterhouse tastes like?

Next unintended consequence: How to dispose of all those batteries.

I can just see this unfolding. As more and more electric cars come out there will be a need for even more electricity to charge them. Demand becomes so great that the only solution is build more nuclear power plants or drill for natural gas. Things we should have done in the first place. Unfortunately the aging flower children can't get a nice warm-fuzzy from common sense solutions using already abundant resources.

The whole thing is nonsense. Pure, utter nonsense.

Where to start? Batteries store DC; emission of electromagnetic radiation requires AC. A battery does generate an electric field (between the anodes and cathodes), but it's DC. Unless the field varies in time - i.e., is AC - it does not emit electromagnetic radiation. Furthermore, emission of electromagnetic radiation of substantial frequency - say, radio waves - requires AC in the megahertz range.

And that's just talking frequency. Even if batteries were sources of electromagnetic radiation, the intensity would be trivial. TV sets - and computers - emit electromagnetic radiation as well - in trivial amounts.

Last, the article appears not to realize the distinction between electromagnetic radiation, electric fields, and radioactivity.

This is just another example of how lousy our science education is. We laugh at practitioners of santeria, but 90% of our population is no better informed about science than they are. It's why nuclear magnetic resonance imaging had to be renamed MRI: too many people freaked out about the "nuclear" part, not realizing it had nothing to do with radioactivity.

The visible spectrum that we sense is a narrow bandwidth of electromagnetic radiation. Indeed it is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the term 'radiation'. We would not even exist without it.

The term "electromagnetic radiation" includes radio waves, shortwave, CB, TV, two way radios, cellphones, radar, infrared, light, ultraviolet, x-rays, cosmic rays, and gamma rays. Many things emit them, intentionally or not. Now, the load on the battery may not be a clean resistive load, so some radiation may occur. It will be at a very low frequency compared to most, and a very low intensity, certainly less than keying up a CB or holding a cellphone next to your head. I wouldn't worry about it.

@ Nanc - the last paragraph of your post sums it up................ LOL

Oiao - I didn't write this - just alerted moonbattery central of developing news...

I think the irony is being missed here.
Green moonbats will now demand investigations, one particular one will campaign, fringers will reproduce the loony toon. We are seeing it with biofuels, solar power, wind.
It's there in the Bible:
"And nothing will ever please a greenie, yea, they will always find something to moan about."
(Somewhere near the back I was told)

I'll bet the study concludes that the electromagnetic field has completely inconsequential effects on human health.

There's something about action at a distance that seems to stir the moonbat soul. It's spooky, possums! Next thing Shirley MacLaine will be talking about sticking magnets up her butt or something of the like.

HYG-
Every day you troll on this site and every day you get your ass handed to you. This is no decency problem, what you need is a doctor...

Huh? I wasn't trolling this one. I'm not as good as Jay with the exact physics, but we were making the same point. They're worrying about a fictional problem.

All those eco-wacko approved sub compacts where more people are killed in becuase the fewer people the more the eco-freaks want it becuase their stuck on all this over population hog-wash of PAUL EHRLICH

HYG, I was agreeing with you. You were absolutely right.

The funny part is that even science Ph.D.s often have surprisingly little grasp of relative magnitudes, i.e., what is large, and what is small, especially with regard to energies. I used to try to teach my grad students this, but it's complicated by the enormous range of energies involved, which makes any one unit either way too large or too small for some other purpose. Experienced scientists can translate easily between eV, joules, calories, wavenumbers, frequencies, and wavelengths, but most newly minted Ph.D.s cannot (and certainly cannot do so readily). As a consequence, they often worry about pea under the mattress effects, while ignoring the bank safe under the same mattress.

Let's just give up on the whole thing then.
Fuck the environment.
(That's what you sound like)

Do you ever read back what you write and think “wow, I am such a mean-spirited, curmudgeonly asshole”?
Try it, you might just learn how to overcome it.

The funny thing is, you can't complain about this comment without confirming what a douchebag you are.

a nut government that is so nuts it would be happy to kill millions or people and millions on millions of little kids to make a dollar.
Posted by: Fred Dawes

Well done, you have just described capitalism.