FAQ: The End of the Light Bulb as We Know It

[RiversideGator]

4)  As for the light bulb discussion, the reason why the cars vs. SUV debate crept in is that the same asinine bill that banned incandescent bulbs requires car makers to raise the fuel efficiency for new cars in 12 years thereby probably putting some car makers out of business and costing Americans jobs and reducing the availability of SUVs thereby costing some Americans their lives.  So, we are being significantly inconvenienced and even hurt and killed because of a total hoax - global warming.

There is much evidence supporting global warming and the effects of mankind's way of living on the environment.  To say we have no impact on our climate and the world around us when we outnumber any species on the planet we share, have the power to literally knock-down a mountain, empty a lake, divert a river, and create landmasses in the middle of the ocean where there were previously not any, is what is  truly "asinine".

Actually, this isnt even close to being true.  In fact, humans arent even the most numerous mammal type on Earth.  This honor goes to rodents followed closely by bats.  http://www.awf.org/content/wildlife/detail/bat

Man is the most numerous large mammal species, but there are many more large mammals.  There are 50 million crabeater seals in Antartica alone, for example.
http://www.coolantarctica.com/gallery/seals/antarctica_seals17.htm

There are twice as many Antartic krill, measured by biomass, than humans and humans comprise just .33% of the total biomass of the Earth.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_%28ecology%29

Also, there are an estimated 100 trillion insects on earth and beetles alone constitute 40% of all insect species. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle

When you look at the grand scheme of things, mankind really isnt that big a factor on Earth and there is so much that we dont even yet know.

I will say that your faith in this global warming claptrap goes to show that, even among self-professed atheists, the God-given religious instinct is still very strong but has just been redirected into the false-religion of global warming.   

[RiversideGator]

Well, the fuel efficiency rating is for all cars, not just American built cars. All auto manufacturers will remain on a level playing field with the new requirement. Are you suggesting that American auto manufacturers don't have the engineering ability to produce a fuel efficient car?

Also, the Japanese have built their auto manufacturing empire by selling small cars in America. Toyota and Honda appear to be outperforming Ford, GM, and Chrysler.

Your statement is contradictory.  Japanese and other foreign car companies sell more small cars than American car companies so the American car companies would likely suffer more in terms of not being allowed to sell their products to the market.  American car companies have the "ability" to produce smaller cars but have not specialized in this for some time, selling instead larger cars, trucks and SUVs, and are outsold with small cars by foreign makes.  To retool and restructure their operations would cost the American companies lots of money and jobs.  The end result will probably be libs will complain that there arent as many manufacturing jobs in America anymore and then blame it on Republicans.   

[second_pancake]

Excuse me RG, I meant to say the largest "intelligent species" on earth.  I kind of figured that was understood given the fact that neither a rat, nor a bat, nor krill, nor seals, nor any number of insects have ever knocked down a mountain using a machine(s) they created, designed siphoning technology to empty a lake, or built a damn large enough to divert the enormous rivers we have (yes, beavers do this by nature, but show me one who has recreated the Hoover in trees and rocks and I'll eat my words).  I'll be more specific next time.

As for global-warming "faith", you should know by now that I don't believe something for the sake of believing it.  It is a fact that we (homo-sapiens) have a direct ecological impact.  The extent in which we impact our environment is, and always has been, the debate; recent scientific evidence has shown that there is a direct correlation to major lifestyle changes and modern inventions of our kind and the increase in global temperature.http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/globalwarmA.html

That's just one site, I have hundreds more, but something tells me you're not interested in facts.  Your statement that we're not that big in the great scheme of things, followed by there's so much that we don't yet know after you just stated as fact that global warming is a farce, proves that point.  If you were truly interested in finding out the truth, you would consider any and every study and statistic, BECAUSE there is still so much that we don't know.  But, I guess you'd rather just continue to live life as you do and when you and the planet die, you can look down from heaven, shrug your shoulders and claim ignorance, eh?

[gatorback]

RG:  Why don't you spend 1 day with a federal fire fighter with 20 years experience they will tell you first hand that we've changed the global climate.

[second_pancake]

Japanese and other foreign car companies sell more small cars than American car companies so the American car companies would likely suffer more in terms of not being allowed to sell their products to the market.  American car companies have the "ability" to produce smaller cars but have not specialized in this for some time, selling instead larger cars, trucks and SUVs, and are outsold with small cars by foreign makes.

Well, then, shame on them.  If I'm not mistaken, aren't you coming across a bit on the "lib", or even, dare I say it, Socialist side?  This is a democracy.  There is competition amoung businessmen.  If you want to compete, you must make a competetive product.  If you can't do that, then you fail and you are left with a decision to either dissolve your company or find some niche where you can create a competetive product.  Does that sound too harsh?  I mean, I guess you're right.  I guess we really need our government to step in and extinguish all foreign trade, and force Americans to buy only locally-produced products.  And while they're at it, they'll pass a law that will "allow" all those same car companies to produce whatever vehicle they want, gosh darn it, because this is America and if they want to make a car out of plastic with a V10 diesel-burning engine, then that's what they should do.  And if others don't like it, then Uncle Sam will just have to send them to bed without their supper.

Btw, the last I looked, small cars were outsold by SUVs until just recently and American auto-makers were outselling foreign because of their SUV sales.  The only reason SUV sales are down is because of rising gas prices.  If the fuel bill causes American manufactuers to create a more fuel-efficient SUV then they will, once again, be on top of the market...holding a niche that foreign manufactuers can not, and have not, been able to compete with.  Oh, and, to your dismay, guess which type of vehicle had a 57% increase in sales in 2007?  That's right, the hybrid ~gasps~.  So much so, in fact, that manufactuers had to increase production.  But, there's no demand for fuel efficiency, it's just a ploy by the government to keep it's own money-making, nation-building corporations down

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080104/BUSINESS/801040379/1003/rss03

[Jason]

When you look at the grand scheme of things, mankind really isnt that big a factor on Earth and there is so much that we dont even yet know.

Did you really just say that?  Your right to say that the human race is mere peanuts when calculating the biomass of Earth's species but to suggest that mankind isn't really that big of a factor is absolutely absurd. 

Take a look around!!

Second_Pancake hit the nail on the head with her statement.  The human race is the only major organism on the planet that does not live in harmony with its surroundings.  As far as nature is concerned we are very similar to a virus with no cure.  Humans move to an area and multiply thereby consuming every possible natural resource available to us and when everything is used up we simply move to a new area and start over again.  There are very few places left on this planet that have not been grossly and negatively impacted by mankind.




Edit:

After re-reading your statement I believe that I have taken the referenced comment completely out of context and I apologize.

[RiversideGator]

Pancake:  I have read all of that and more about global warming.  The arguments are just not that persuasive and the increasing desperation by the left to prove it by making more and more outlandish claims is just one more indication that it is bunk.  Also, I dont believe in things just because they are the in things to believe in (e.g. global warming).

gator:  I am talking on a macro-level not a micro-level.  Of course, we can change the course of rivers but this is a far cry from changing the weather.

[RiversideGator]

As for man's relative insignificance re the climate, look at termites for example.  Did you know they alone produce 20 million tons of methane per year - a gas which is 120 times more potent in terms of global warming.
http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/climate_change/gases.htm

There are also all sorts of microbes in the sea which sequester CO2 and methane and prevent it from becoming a problem.  In fact, scientists theorize that these creatures may have played a role in creating conditions on Earth to support advanced life forms as CO2 and methane levels used to be far higher millions of years ago.  We know next to nothing about them and their role in the larger climate.

Also, did you know that there have been periods with higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 but lower temps?  This alone casts significant doubt on the gw religion.

[RiversideGator]

This is a great article.  We know this much:

In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: January 1, 2008

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change â€" and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year’s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record â€" it was actually lower than any year since 2001 â€" the BBC confidently proclaimed, “2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.”

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm â€" by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades â€" the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, professor of economics and political science at Duke University, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

“Many people concerned about climate change,” Dr. Sunstein says, “want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people’s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don’t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there’s a danger that any ‘consensus’ on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.”

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting â€" or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.

Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention â€" and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

Guess which paper jibed with the theory â€" and image of Katrina â€" presented by Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”?

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December â€" by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”

“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[gatorback]

gb:  would you consider mankind 'accelerated' global warming.  Perhaps you're right, "we" “can't” "change" "global" "Climate" but we can accelerate it.  Better?

[Lunican]

RG: Did you also oppose the Ocean Dumping Bans that were put in place in the 70's and 80's to stop radioactive materials, medical and industrial waste, and raw sewage from being dumped into the oceans? These bans also had the potential to cost Americans their jobs by putting companies that could not afford to comply out of business.

[RiversideGator]

RG: Did you also oppose the Ocean Dumping Bans that were put in place in the 70's and 80's to stop radioactive materials, medical and industrial waste, and raw sewage from being dumped into the oceans? These bans also had the potential to cost Americans their jobs by putting companies that could not afford to comply out of business.

1)  This is apples and oranges;
2)  I do not recall taking a position on this issue at the time but I think that it is easily and logically proveable that dumping waste into the ocean causes far more localized harm to the ocean than 25 mpg cars and incandescent light bulbs do to the atmosphere.

[RiversideGator]

BTW, on the subject of global warming, what happened to it??

Br-r-r! Where did global warming go?

By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / January 6, 2008

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

Now all of these may be short-lived weather anomalies, mere blips in the path of the global climatic warming that Al Gore and a host of alarmists proclaim the deadliest threat we face. But what if the frigid conditions that have caused so much distress in recent months signal an impending era of global cooling?

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: "The debate in the scientific community is over."

But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, "the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it."

Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming - especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/01/06/br_r_r_where_did_global_warming_go/

[Lunican]

Regardless of the validity of global warming, it still makes sense to reduce our energy consumption since we are mainly still relying on fossil fuels which create pollution and are in limited supply.

Was the sole purpose of this legislation to combat global warming?

[gatorback]

thanks for being the voice of reason here Lunican.  PS Let's put in another Starbucks downtown!