Discussion: Earth hour

Earth hour arrives in 52 minutes. Take an hour off attackpoint.

Yep - it will be interesting to see the impact. I'm going to shut off the main breaker for an hour. Right at the end of an important Flames hockey game too!

I'm dialing down the outside lighting for the Hour on my 3 apt bldgs here in downtown Chicago. Then my wife and I will stroll around our politically-correct neighborhood to see how others are celebrating an energy-less evening. Let's hope no one is mugged...

gonna sit on the earth and have a beer...

we had a camp fire with smores in the back yard!

Scrabble by kerosene lamplight.

ended up having beer, pizza, and burning some trees in the outdoor fireplace

asparagus, bell pepper, feta cheese pizza BTW

My daughter used my headlamp because she couldn't see her toy cars. Didn't slow play time down.

http://www.esar.ca/images/DSC00746.JPG

I wonder how much CO2 we produced using candles and having fires compared to Lights? and how much more polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons we produced to give us all cancer! (just did a science project on them, turned out though i was supposed to do another chemical though not them, still learnt a ton though!)

I didn't know about Earth Hour til this afternoon.... Shut off all the lights and the furnaces. Didn't notice anyone else in the neighborhood doing anything.

I would suggest the candle PAHs are minimal compared to the typical original source of the electricity for the lights - coal, gas, oil, drowned forest.

I would suggest the candle PAHs are minimal compared to the typical original source of the electricity for the lights - coal, gas, oil, drowned forest.

You have to be careful on this -- it is easy to get lost in the words and the hype. For example, I don't think it takes a "downed forest" to create the equivalent photon output of a candle. And where I live, my electricity is generated by nuclear power, and ignoring the probability times the cost of an environmental catastrophe (which, when considering efficiency I guess you really shouldn't ignore), is probably much more efficient than turning off the lights and getting the equivelent amount of photons from a fossil source such as kerosene. But I don't know that.

And when you consider biofuels, which are supposedly the rage over fossil fuels in some quarters (typically quarters that stand to profit from their deployment), serious doubts have been raised there as to their effiency, in terms of the environmental damage of clearing land to plant crops (there goes a carbon sink, among other problems), fertilizer runoff, inefficient transport (its more efficient, for example, to transport fossil fuels via pipeline than biofuels via fossil fuel powered transport), catastrophic world commodity cost increases of corn and other grains, especially in regions that can ill afford these costs, which when considered in toto to the people actually suffering, seem much less earth-friendly than on the surface.

Again, I don't know which technologies are more efficient when considering everything, but serious science has considered these issues, and in my mind the jury is still out. I simply don't trust right wing pundits, left wing media, and other prima facie sources on these issues, and am waiting for the dust to settle in the peer reviewed science zone before forming an opinion.

As for turning out the lights and doing nothing, I am also not convinced that that is more efficient than spending that time either generating or consuming economic output. But what do I know?

Well, enough for now, off to a race :)

well said, but maybe too rational, after all isn't it all about feeling good about what we do, rather than having a real effect?

One of the goals of something like Earth Hour is to spark discussion. Guess it worked.

I could get in to this more as this was my world for 10 years (PAHs, dioxins, PCBs, and so forth) and now my world is green energy, but suffice it to say, science/technology/economics are human tools that we like to pick and chose to suite our purposes - even if they can be poor decision making tools (applied without wisdom). We'll all look for the numbers we want to back up our beliefs. What makes those original beliefs? Earth Hour was a social experiment far more than a scientific one, and I'd encourage more of that.

How a one hour celebration where we turn on every single(?) TV in our house, turn on every single light, blast the stereo, leave all(?) the cars idling in the driveway, let the air out of our bicycle tires, throw worrisome unidentified plastic remains in the garbage, turn on the leaf blowers, stereos, snowblowers, ATV's, motorcycles, leave our refrigerator doors wide open, microwave dustmotes, turn on the heat and the AC simultaneously, take airplane trips to the nearest city to buy a bunch of bananas and rare tropical rain forest woods, open all the windows and shout ALLELUJAH!

And then get back to our normal sober and responsible and self-effacing caring lives?
HA HA......HA!!HA HAHAHAHAHAH!!!

I live in a part of the world near the 45th parallel north where only 20,000 years ago a sheet of ice a kilometre thick covered the land. In the next 8,000 years or so there was enough warming of the Earth that the ice sheet receeded northward. The land was next covered by a great sea of water which drained toward the Atlantic as the globe continued to warm and the land rebounded from the weight of the ice.
All this global warming happened without the help of mankind. It seems to me the globe is going to continue to warm and cool (the latter more rapidly than the former) with or without the help of our species just as it has several times in the several hundred million years this planet has existed.
The best we humans can hope to be is neutral in the process. I guess Earth Hour is a good thing if it helps us do that. However I think it is disengenuous for new age hucksters to suggest we can stem the tide of climate change by buying in to this or that program.

Gee, I never thought it about it that way. You've saved me several minutes twice a day - I now figure that if I live long enough, my teeth will probably rot and fall out no matter what I do. I've decided to stop brushing. Thanks!

Yes. Barring an apocalyptic event on a galactic scale, the Earth will continue to evolve/change until our star renders it uninhabitable. In the next billion years, there will be many cycles of global cooling and warming. Species will come and go. It is not rational to think of the Earth or the ecosystem as static or indefinitely maintainable in a given state.

However, it is clear that humans have thrown a wildcard variable into the evolutionary formula. CO2, and other 'greenhouse' gasses have reached unprecedented levels (at least for the last 800,000 years). From the same data, there is a strong correlation between global temps and CO2 levels.



For me, the question is: Do we sit back and let events unfold as they will? Or do we, as a species, conclude that driving the 'greenhouse' gas levels higher may not be a good idea and make a conscious decision to take a different path?

Maybe it's too late. But maybe it's not. I suspect if we do nothing, our descendents won't like the results.

To stir the pot...

I am intrigued by your perspective, Gordhun. Could you be a little more specific about your concerns? If the hucksters get us to buy into a program, is your concern that money will be wasted?

(Er, and what does this have to do w/ orienteering anyway?)

None of this has much to do with orienteering but that is the beauty of Attack Point. Members seem to enjoy to enjoy following each other off on tangent routes from time to time.
About hucksters. I'm sure we have all seem old movies where hucksters would get the gullible to part with their money for some false hope.
To me the modern version are those who put all the blame for global warming on reasons such as increased CO2 emissions then get governments and industries to commit to spend billions on programs such as carbon credits which do not in any way reduce carbon emmisions.
As I said in my first post the best we humans can hope to be is neutral in the process of global climate change.

So gordhun does that mean you think we shouldn't go and look into alternate energy and spend time "going green"?
In my opinion i actually think that we are part of the cause of climate change. and even if we aren't i still think that if we don't start cutting down on our consumption there are going to be major health problems. Also what really got me interested in climate change and environment was the fact that at some point we may not have all our great forests and outdoors that we have now. Which means less places to orienteer, which is a sad thought! So i guess rudy that is how it connects to orienteering for me.

I remember a film with David Suzuki and Robin Williams in it in 1986 when I was 12 years old warning us of teh dangers of global warming and the greenhouse effect. Scared the hell out of ME. Didn't seem to stir the decision makers though. We did nothing then ..we will do nothing now.

Acampbell, i hear you. Around here, you are going to hear highway noise and see plastic wrappers and beer cans when you orienteer, you will never be more than a mile from the nearest road, your lung capacity will be diminished by ozone on hot summer afternoons, and leftover dioxin sludge not significant enough to be in the Superfund site will be washed onto your favorite trail. And those are the most favorable condtions.

grodhun, there may be a carbon credit program that is high priced and totally useless. You could find that in any industry today. That doesn't mean that we can't help ourselves. There was a hole in the ozone. Fluorocarbons or whatever were controlled. The hole closed up.

Now ice shelves, tundra and glaciers are melting, climate seems to be disrupted. Maybe we can help. We know our lifestyle is destructive on many fronts, but maybe changing it will help with climate change. We have been able to save eagles, clean up lakes, close the ozone hole at the poles. That is truly amazing, considering what we are up against.

Why does 'climate change' seem to encourage people to say 'this is too big for us to do anything about, so we are off the hook' or 'this is too big for us to do anything about, so we have to wait for somone else to do something about it'.

I think what we can do is encourage the wonderful regenerative power of life to heal in spite of our trial and error method of dealing with it, and hope. Without hope, Cristina is right. We might as well stop brushing our teeth. And why take showers?

>Why does 'climate change' seem to encourage people
>to say 'this is too big for us to do anything about

in the risk of this discussion being moved way off course... again I post this link....

http://www.thestar.com/SpecialSections/EarthHour/a...

I've said it before - the ecosphere will survive, perhaps in some astonishing (and beautiful, always beautiful) new form, even if conditions change really radically on the planet. The real point is that we humans need to keep conditions somewhat the same in order to survive ourselves (comfortably, or not-so comfortably, heheheh) - to my eyes, the challenge is really to save ourselves, and it is a magnificent challenge. Educate yourself, discuss, do everything you think you can on personal/political/etc fronts, and then a bit more, and over the years, we'll see if it is enough. Very exciting life-or-death stuff, better than a video game...hmmm, what new thing shall I do today to try and help??

Well, the surface of Mars is "beautiful, always beautiful." But I'd hate to be cast away up there.

Recent Mars exploration has revealed that at one time, the planet had a decent amount of water on its surface...and maybe life.

Was it Global Warming that cost Mars its water...and its life?

I don't have a position on this, but might it not be possible that humans will develop technology/coping mechanisms/etc... necessary to survive/thrive on a comparable time scale to this insidious environmental catastrophe that threatens our survival?

(This is a purely rhetorical question, not judgmental, pointed, or anything...)

I am just not sure that quest for survival is prima facie justification for unproven behavioral modifications.

Put differently, I don't think this is a great argument:
1. Humans are modifying the environment
2. These modifications will have uniformly deleterious impact
3. Human survival will be threatened
4. Humans have to change their behavior
5. These changes will have .... effects, ensuring (or allowing for) their survival.

There are variations to this argument which are stronger. I think it is important to distinguish logical necessity from our anthropocentrist inclinations.

BTW--I am all for the initiatives discussed herein, generally. I just think that emotion often is at odds with reason. That said, I don't want to be a Vulcan. (Star Trek, or classical contexts....) Emotions are valid reasons for things, too.

For my own part, I think that this introduces some remarkable ethical questions. I don't have tidy solutions to the these vis a vis myself or others.

yes, exactly, chi, you GOT it :) perfectly lovely, but not our cup of tea at all, so we have to work to keep THIS planet more to our liking, yes?
anyhow, I popped back here to clarify that I hope that any "doing" that we each choose for ourselves as I suggested above would be uh, fitting & fulfilling & perhaps even somewhat fun, & NOT too stressful for the people who are "doing". (trying to address the sensitivity of the topic, urk)
BTW, in meantime have decided that my bit for the planet today involves more beans, oh yeah.
and yes, ethics aren't simple, they're complex & fascinating & worthwhile! (wasn't going to mention internal aspects of making these types of choices, those aspects being very significant but quite independent of external effectiveness etc... Certainly at this point the results of my "planetary choices" are more morally satisfying than visibly effective. But I still keep doing them)

prima facie... well, my horizons are being expanded by AP as usual -
j-man, my entire cup of coffee is going to be gone before I get off of AP this morning :)
What you wrote out in the five points looks like what I was trying to say... but it's a weak argument logically? what about bottom line biological survival of humans? could biological necessity just run roughshod over logic when push comes to shove? (just asking cheerfully, not grumpily arguing "MY" point, I am adoring prima facie - learning new things & trying to get new concepts thru my head is fun)

and my bottom line is still "do what we can"...on whatever naive or sophisticated or technological or educational level we are comfortable with...

My coffee has worn off so my thoughts are a bit muddled at this point. I am hoping that some of the superior logicians that lurk around here might take this up.

Anyway, I think some of the premises are suspect. The form of the argument could still be valid if that is the case, however, I think the argument (although maybe not as I awkwardly distilled it) suffers from affirming the consequent.

I guess I should unpack this... maybe later.

I have had this "discussion" many times and my current stand is that we are releasing more carbon emissions etc into the atmosphere, but as for the actual effects of it, whether it is actually accumulating and how fast and because of our added emissions has not been sufficiently proven. I have not be satisfied that this could not be part of a periodic oscillation of the gases and temperatures that has continued since life on earth began. For example look at the ice ages, if the temperature had been constant they would never have occurred (or receded). I remember learning somewhere that it took only 10 years for the temperature to drop and cause the most recent one.

To support my thoughts, most data that is published on the issue only shows the last 100 years or so, on a scale of millions of years, that is too short to show periodic changes. And there was a scientific paper published, with sources etc, in a respected journal, one the research techniques used to obtain most of the data that supports the global warming theory. The paper stated that the techniques used in the original papers on the matter which are most commonly used, had inaccurate methods that skewed the data, and they adjusted balloon heights and various parameters that would also affect the data.

I am not saying we shouldn't look for renewable energy and try and reduce emissions, because if it turns out that we are a large part of the cause then we are screwed, and the worlds oil and coal reserves are depleting. But I do think people need to think for themselves on this issue, just because Al Gore made a movie doesn't mean he is right. Also, did anyone else have issues with that movie, his methods and lack of facts?

As for the prime minister turning off his lights; I could care less, he was probably working, and I would hope, that if he had work that needed to be done, he would use the energy and do it, he is 'running' the country after all. I would bet that Bush's lights were on. I for one had work that had to be done in my lab and was probably using more energy than most houses would, but I was working to a deadline and it needed to be done.

Also, did anyone else have issues with that movie, his methods and lack of facts?

Haven't seen the movie, but I've read the book. His science is, for the most part, spot on. He cites research from the leading scientists in the field, and most of the facts and graphs and concepts are exactly the same ones that professors use to introduce the topic in global change or climatology classes (and did so before Al started using them).

There's a lot of weird skepticism from people who've obviously never read anything about the actual science. Please check out http://www.realclimate.org and see what the experts have to say.

As far as whether or not we should actually *do* something, I like to look at it as a socio-political problem, not simply one of feeling warm and fuzzy about 'saving the Earth' or 'protecting our species'.

We've already caused the Earth to warm at a rate faster than societies can adapt. People tend to talk about climate change in the future tense, but it's already here and the political ramifications are beginning to show. Aside from the observed increase in frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events, we already have countries, like Australia, taking climate refugees from islands that are no longer habitable. Not too many so far, but it's started. Arctic countries are poised to battle for drilling rights in the freshly accessible northern sea. And that's the relatively friendly stuff. We can't entirely blame humans (well, we sort of can) for the 2003 heat wave in Europe, but we can say with certainty that such events will be more common as the Earth continues to warm. With ~35000 dead in the most advanced and industrialized nations in the world, we can only imagine what kind of death tolls we'll see in the future. Yikes!

Anyway, I told myself I wouldn't respond and I still did. Bad discipline.

If it is merely a social-political problem it may be less tractable than if it were some sort of ethical/moral one. One may eschew natural laws or categorical imperatives, but these may at least lay a claim to universality (as can species-saving ones from an evolutionary perspective). If this discussion devolves to a social-political one, it admits to manifold perspectives. Russia may have a different take on that than China, than the US, etc.

Part of my issue with knee-jerk crusades (I apologize for the categorization--this discussion may be informed, well-intentioned, etc., but not all are) is that they often stem from (as I think many, many phenomena do) from our susceptibility to representativeness biases and our tendencies to extrapolate the present forward (and backwards.) Our experiences and the state of the world which we perceive are overweighted relative to those that could be (for good and for bad.)

We may see a planet on the edge of imminent catastrophe due to a remarkably accelerated build-up of human produced carbon dioxide. Some of this no doubt comes from our "unnatural" agriculture practices. Some, from things like the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution (all of +/- 160 years of it), such as the internal combustion engine, etc... And, in absolute, not per capita terms, the fact that there are several billion more people on the earth than there were 100 years ago probably doesn't help. (I think sheer numbers of people are the elephant in the room, but anyway...)

My only point in that the world has changed so dramatically over the past 200 years to be unrecognizable, especially relative to forces capable of driving climate change. If the world changed so starkly in that time, and the pace has accelerated, isn't it reasonable to expect that it will continue to change in ways that can't be foreseen? Unless we do things that sidetrack this change and perpetuate the current state of the art.

Of course, that is not to say that technological progress is uniformly good. Would we be better without atomic energy? Perhaps, but we don't have the luxury of disentangling it from all the ancillary, derivative, and prior developments that made it possible. The same goes for all these other technologies.

The world, technology, and the environment are dynamic systems. It is good to talk about these things and even talk about and implement "solutions". But, not to be flippant, it is harder than flicking a light switch.

Agreed j-man, the "merely" a socio-political problem is the real challenge.

I've tended to not agree that technology will save us (despite being an engineer making a living doing that). We have a culture of labeling I'll call it. Too often in practice, this is can be a distraction and give us a false sense of understanding and poor responses.

A smoker can have all the science they want thrown at them and will still smoke (through choice, stubbornness, or addiction). We are a culture that smokes.

I'm encouraged by Yukon Kings' enthusiasm for facing this challenge - or at least in seeing the interesting outcome(s). It will be these type events that allows us to see if we can respond as humans on a planet or not respond as self-interested nations behind political boundaries. Or magically/accidentally stumble upon some formula for success in the middle perhaps...

And it's not just a socio-political or ethical/moral issue. Climate disruption also has *huge* economic ramifications, and that's what gives me the most hope - given that the majority of voters and politicians don't have the capacity to understand the science nor the will to change their current lifestyles simply to benefit future generations.

Those who are concerned about over-population should consider this: If we somehow 'initiate' zero-population growth, there will still be the same number of people in the world.

If however, each person alive uses only a tenth of the resources they did formerly (excluding oxygen), there will be only 1/10th of the number of people in the world (equivalent). That would have to be the 'western world' effort to make up for the 'developing world'. So cut the equivalent world population in HALF. Not bad.

You could start tommorrow, get there in a month or two. Its sounds brutal, but really its not that bad, no it pretty darn fine actually. Abandon car, move to very small house, become vegetarian. Bingo.

Move to cave. No fires to keep warm. Become hunter/gatherer.

Ugh hggggh hggge hgggee me want to orienteer....me be happy

1 stalk of wheat feed as many as 10 pigs (feedlots)
100 bikes move as many cavemen as 1 car (energy use)
ugga ugga, me cave has computer me happy

it is cool to think how the first orienteer probably had a crude charcoal on bark map showing that the deer were next to the grove of trees by the big mound.

perhaps a smaller, personally chosen change, perceived as more "manageable"? gradual increments may get us to the same place albeit more slowly...
on another topic, I heard on CBC this morning that global warming may be the underlying cause of "pitch inflation" in western music... relating more to the fact that today is April 1, I think rather than to any scientific observations...

Switch to Geico and save money. So simple even a caveman can do it.

Build a fence. It's good for the environment (see end of article).

Another article that may induce eye rolling or even an OMG http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/house...
A junior congresswoman from MN thinks the push to change to cf lightbulbs is an attack on her right to choose...really.

Its really sick that auto insurance has become politicized. Is nothing sacred?

Wow! We're just getting started here on this thread...that Star Tribune article about compact fluorescent light bulbs has inspired over 400 comments so far!

But one comment that I think was instructive to me regarding CF bulbs: for those that are worried about the small amount of mercury unloosed into the environment by a discarded CF bulb, consider that much more mercury would be unloosed by the extra coal needed to generate power for the equivalent incandescent bulb.