Hi Jennifer,
I suppose you've heard about Sydney's "Earth Hour".
I'm not sure whether to be amused, or saddened, by TV footage showing people turning off their lights, and using candles instead. It seems to indicate a total lack of understanding.
Leaving aside whether CO2 emissions are really a problem, if these people thought they were reducing CO2 emissions by their actions, then I rather think they were deluding themselves. Earth Hour was held during a time of peak electrical load, so any electricity generation displaced would be peak load, probably running on natural gas. Such generation produces about 500 grams of CO2 for every kilowatt-hour.
So turning a 100 watt light bulb off for an hour saves 50 grams of CO2, or 13 grams of carbon. A candle is mostly carbon by weight, and candle wax is only moderately less dense than water at room temperature. This means that burning just 5 cm of a typical 2 cm diameter candle will produce more CO2 than running the 100 watt light bulb for an hour. If the light that was turned off is fluorescent, then even less candle can be burned if there's to be a net reduction in CO2.
By the way, the Sydney Morning Herald published these pictures to show the effect of Earth Hour
In the 'after' picture, the lights that are still on are dimmer than they were in the 'before' picture, which rather implies that the 'after' picture is artificially darkened. That really is dishonest reporting.
Sylvia.
hehehe its false but true 😛
Bring on Power Hour~
The scorn so many of you delightfully informed and interested citizens of this goodly earth heap on the ignorant masses that hover like moths about the media's flame is quite disheartening... come on! better the media hype up an event that encourages awareness of the impending perils of global warming than not! Better the trivial masses participate at least in gestures, token or not, that could stir a glimmer of insight. Remember the knowledge you cuddle up to at night did not have it's genesis in your shiny brains. Pass it on! Spread the word with patience and compassion, learning along the way!
Sylvia,
Re your comment on the 'before' and 'after' pictures in the SMH. That's the good old 'honest reporting Herald'. Particularly when reporting (and photographing), matters 'Global Warming'.
I have a copy of a front page SMH article from April, 2004, by their co pinkest/greenest, (with Wendy Frew), enviro. reporter, Stephanie Peatling, on the evils of AGW. With the article, was a photo of water vapour coming from the cooling tower of Wallarawang Power Station...Deliberatly taken with the rising vapour against a red sunset. The caption read 'Wallarawang pumps out poison greenhouse gas.'!!
And it's been happening ever since.
Well. at least full marks to Media Watch for exposing the lie about the danger to Polar Bears.
Not so - Qld had great health systems, power and water supply under Joh's regime. Civil liberties and dodgy deals not so good. But you can't have everything and don't you worry about that.
You are getting it all ballsed up; when given a situation requiring attention the free market is far more likely to respond effectively than a govt.
Look at countries where the govt plays a central role in the provision of services (food, water, power, transport, housing, medicine..) and you see a decreased lack of services.
So calling for forward planning equates to "religion" while sitting back and waiting for "certainty" that there really is a problem and belief that the "free" market will get us out of trouble at the last moment is not a form of "faith"? Whose not testing their assumptions here?
Science hasn't got all the answers. Its a matter of whether we are willing to take the risk that what it doesn't know will be good for us.