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I wonder if there are moderate terrorist groups that only want to

Have those scientists been in my neck of the woods in the past few days with the weather we’ve been having? Temps in the 30s in early April oughta give them pause…

And the land that Lillian and I moved from will soon be another dust bowl. Nothing but cheerfulness on all fronts.

300 feet is what we hear if the Polar ice caps melt. Looks like you have beach front property, too, Link!
Surfs up!

Funny, the IPCC report was a text book for a Climate class I took at Berkeley. But it was the IPCC 1995 report. It said pretty much the same thing. Thousands of scientists banding together saying we had to do something. It worked so well then….

Interestingly enough, doing something actually benefits those who do something. Replace incandescent lights with fluorescents and you end up saving money, not just energy. If big business could actually get this through their head we’d be much better off.

“And The Winner Is!!!…”.

Planet Earth in the year 2089. The climate change is everything they said it would be back in the Aughts. Sea levels had risen; drier dries; wetter wets; but the Ozone Hole did seem to finally be healing itself after everyone south of Montevideo, Uraguay was forced to evacuate into the Amazon, sparking World Food War IX and resulting in the taming of the biodiversity in Brazil. Famines, pestilence and disease had mowed down huge swathes of humanity. All carbon fuels were banned in 2021. NASA and the space program were shelved and satellites ceased to function and fell out of orbit - one of the Soviet models (as big as 3 buses) hit in the city center of Mumbai, but fortunately the plague had already wiped out the all but 3% of its citizens and only 30,000 died. Civilizations and economies crumbled.

The remaining two cultures that survived formed a coalition to come up with a way to speed evolution, so humans would adapt to the new environment before all was lost. The leaders consulted scientists, geneticists, philosophers and anthropologists to come up with the best way to solve the problem. Each discipline was given an island to populate with small numbers of similar human types - the geneticists developed humans with no opposable thumbs, to limit toolmaking mischief; the philosophers populated their island with the mentally retarded looking for the same end result; anthropologists found a culture in Central America that had sex in public but would only eat the privacy of their own homes. These were put on an island as well. And so on.

After several generations of inbreeding between only the inhabitants of their own island, an evaluation was made of the resulting off-spring. The decision of the best adapted human was to be made at the end of Lent, which with all the famines, was very nearly impossible to determine when that might be.

Unknown to the citizens of Earth, in 2043 a brown dwarf star, which was so dim that Hubble and all the other telescopes had missed it, traveled close enough to the Oort Cloud that 57 comets were nudged into a new orbit, an orbit that put our planet in the cross-hairs of 8 of the comets. Since humans no longer ventured into space or studied the heavens, they were clueless of the coming disaster. Just as the best human was to be chosen, the final Ice Capades came to town, striking all populated regions of the Earth. Fires burned for decades, trillions of tons of ash and dirt were exploded into the atmosphere. When the fires burned out, a new Ice Age began and lasted for 25,000 years. At last the ice cover began to recede. A brown German cock-roach pushed the last bit of ash out of the way and emerged onto the surface. Earth once again was a paradise. He turned around and signaled to 1,000,000 of his closest friends to come on up. Life was good.

My family and I have been replacing incandescents with fluorescents for years - sorry, decades -, even before they were really affordable. But they still have their drawbacks. Their light is harsh, even in the lowest-wattage bulbs. It tends too much to the blue or the green, even in the “yellowest” ones that I’ve found. They can’t be used with timers, light or motion sensors, or other things that automatically turn them on - something to do with the ballast, I suspect, though I’ve never gotten an adequate explanation. They can’t be used with dimmers, either, because they don’t work like that. And the almost infrasonic buzz they emit makes my skin crawl. Add to that the added mercury waste in landfills from disposed tubes and environmental costs from manufacturing them, and fluorescents are an imperfect and partial solution at best.

Just like I’m going to keep driving my 35+ mpg Tercel as long as I can rather than jumping into a hybrid or electric, I’m going to still be using a few incandescents until something better than fluorescents comes along to completely replace them - LEDs, perhaps, once they’ve cracked the white-light spectrum problem (which will probably involve an array of different colored LEDs rather than a white LED that produces a pleasing white.)

…. conventional BULB, not bult….

(I wish I could blame it on pinot typing.)

My experience with the cfl’s is that they aren’t as bright as they say they are - and I’m getting so I really need that 150W on the top level of the 3-way bulb to read, sigh. The “50-100-150″ cfl has a top of about 100 watts. They work great in undimmed ceiling lights, though. Marc, these wondrous cfls with no buzz sound interesting, but I bought a pure white one and then couldn’t stand the contrast with the orange incandescents. If you live in a house with a lot of wood trim, the pure white light just looks cold. I’ll have to check out the LEDs.

And K. Trout is perfectly right about the whole climate change business. Everyone is running around screaming that the earth will be destroyed by climate change. No, it won’t. Our ability to live on the earth, as comfortably as we have so far, may be; but the earth itself? It’ll still be there, just as Stephen Schwartz and Leonard Bernstein described it in MASS:

… dark are the cities, dead is the ocean
silent and sickly are the remnants of motion
world without end turns mindlessly round
never a sentry, never a sound…

We need the world; but the world doesn’t need us. Only our arrogance makes us think so.

I haven’t bought an incandescent bulb in over 12 years. I can’t hear the buzzing and the color seems fine to me. You can buy dimmers that work with the cf bulbs and I’ve had a cf lamp on a timer for at least a decade. When you buy the bulbs in a three pack they aren’t that expensive, and you don’t have to buy them that often.

Two years ago I spent a week at my youngest son’s house and I switched out all the bulbs I could. It was expensive but I know that his energy bills are less now.

I just bought a couple of the new energy saving fluorescent bulbs.

Of course, they came in enough indestructible plastic packaging to offset any possible energy savings well into the next century, so go figure.

I have begun the cfl journey, but I’m at the novice stage.

The highest point in Florida, near Lakewood in North Florida, is about 360 feet. Orlando is 50 feet above sea level. I think the Green Swamp is about 150. Seafront property in Florida will be along the interior Georgia and Alabama state lines. The Swamp, home of the national champion Florida football team, will belong to the sharks again. Fascinating.

Meanwhile, William Gray has called Al Gore an alarmist, and the WaPo editorial page (Bob Woodward, I assume) has trashed Nancy Pelosi for trying to help avert WWIII. Fuck the both of them and the arrogance they rode in on. Also, Go You Mighty Gators ‘07-’08.
And women’s gymnastic team is currently #1 (eventually they will have to learn coordinated swimming routines, I guess).

Hey, anybody else doing their own taxes this year? Jesus Christ on a crutch!

Murray, I think the real issue is the human race’s ability to convince ourselves that It Can’t Happen To Me. Americans especially have spent the past several decades convincing themselves that Those Rules Don’t Apply To ME (watch any jaywalker, red light runner, city bicyclist, etc. - Murray, I give you the credit of assuming that YOU obey the traffic laws when you ride on the street, but believe me, you are in a minority). It doesn’t surprise me that they’re currently convinced that global warming Won’t Apply To Them either. Unfortunately by the time they wake up to reality it may be too late.

I actually think some people are waking up to the facts; I regard the current movement toward earth stewardship among evangelical Christians as very promising. There are a lot of them, and they have good political connections. America’s biggest problem right now is the Awl Bidness’ lock on the White House. Two more years (sound of teeth grinding)…

Hedra, I know what you mean about cyclists. As the owner of a bicycle touring company, getting along with cars is very important. When a cyclist blows through a stop sign or light in front of a bunch of cars, he makes a lot of enemies. Then the cyclist wonders why the drivers try to run them off the road and throw things. Yes people who think they can get away with things flaunt the rules. It is a bad strategy for cyclists and humans avoiding the problems of global warming.

Mr. Fowler, actually it’s the first time this winter that we’ve used the gas logs. They are the ventless type (yes, I have a CO monitor.) and actually made a big difference in the end. I’m talking to a HVAC representative tomorrow night. Might git me on’a dem “Green” furnaces. No offense meant by the J.C. crack. I’ll find a different way of venting in the future.

your pal, cooper

But what you suggest, SpottedDog, while well considered, would require the human race to admit that climate change is out of its control. The human race, and particularly the subset of it that lives in the United States, doesn’t ever want to admit that anything is out of its control, no matter how irrational that might seem.

“I think it would be more prudent to focus our efforts on preparing for environmental change rather than spending too much energy on arguing about which ‘green’ products to buy.”

Wouldn’t that be like deciding which hospital to go to before the accident rather than try to avoid the accident in the first place?

No we don’t need to spend our way out of this problem. Quite the contrary, conservation is about cutting back. On the other hand when you need to buy something new, getting the most efficient is always a good strategy.

The MOST cost effective way to save energy is passive solar which only requires orienting the house properly and moving most of the windows to the south side. If you go to the further step of adding thermal storage and thermal shades you can get 1/4 to ¾ of the energy needed to heat your house free. No sacrifice is needed, just a little thought when the house is in the planning stage. This even works in the South

What kind of solar panels? Domestic hot water? Pool? Photovoltaic? The photovoltaic panels made by the BP (formerly Solarex) plant in Fredric MD uses only photovoltaic panels to power their plant. So the answer at that plant is 0 oil is used. The amount of electric used to create solar panels is minute versus the amount of energy produced over a lifetime. The solar collector on my shop is made of, coil stock about 1/3 the amount needed to trim a house, 200′ of copper tubing and 2 4X7 glass panels. For the next 40 years this collector will provide about 75% of my hot water needs, and it does so by pulling heat OUT of the atmosphere, not by making heat from long dead plants and animals.

Claiming that producing solar panels uses more energy than they produce, is laughably wrong and is as much a subterfuge as is the constant name calling of those who want to point out the danger of screwing up the only earth we have.

Rather than argue a losing position better to just heap scorn on the other person.