Watts Up With That?

Only 18 percent of survey respondents strongly believe that climate change is real, human-caused and harmful.

Yes you read that correctly, it is all in this article on the Nature Conservancy webpage. And that goes along with what was discovered in June this year by the newspapers UK Guardian and Observer, which reported that:

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans – and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem…

The Nature Conservancy story citing 18 percent, is citing the American Climate Values Survey (ACVS), conducted by the consulting group EcoAmerica It also found that political party affiliation is the single largest indicator as to whether people see climate change as a threat.

It seems it is all political, as there are some other fascinating tidbits. For example: Read the rest of this entry »

My 100KW solar panel project at a local school when I was a trustee - all for nothing now?

I used to be really big on solar energy, putting panels on my house as well as a local school when I was on the school board. But that may all be for naught. There’s a new boogeyman in the world of global warming: Nitrogen Trifluoride

NF3 molecule

On Lubos Motls The Reference Frame he has as pointed out that a greenhouse gas emitted during the production of solar panels and HDTVs, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) that is used for cleaning the electronics, is about 17,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The concentration of NF3 in the atmosphere was artificially increased by a factor of 20 during the last two decades. The measurements of the concentration surpassed the previous estimates by a factor of five.

According to the Scripps Institute; “ the present 5,400 tons in the atmosphere…is on the rise at 11 percent per year” - that will stay there for 700+ years – creates the equivalent warming of all Finland’s CO2 emissions.

According to Lubos, given the fact that the solar panels produce about the same percentage of the global energy as Finland, it is reasonable to guess that the state-of-the-art solar panels that would replace fossil fuels would cause a comparable amount of warming per Joule as fossil fuels.

So let’s just say – everything causes global warming, and leave it at that. Read the rest of this entry »