From the “bah humbug department”. I have nothing against energy efficiency, I have LED’s myself and I didn’t even put them up this year. But, timing is everything, and people already stress out during holidays. Adding a guilt trip over Christmas lights hardly seems necessary or productive. – Anthony
From Australia’s Courier Mail
By Graham Readfearn
December 24, 2008 08:06am
SCIENTISTS have warned that Christmas lights are bad for the planet due to huge electricity waste and urged people to get energy efficient festive bulbs.
CSIRO researchers said householders should know that each bulb turned on in the name of Christmas will increase emissions of greenhouse gases.
Dr Glenn Platt, who leads research on energy demand, said Australia got 80 per cent of its electricity by burning coal which pumps harmful emissions into the atmosphere.
He said: “Energy efficient bulbs, such as LEDs, and putting your Christmas lights on a timer are two very easy ways to minimise the amount of electricity you use to power your lights.”
He said the nation’s electricity came from “centralised carbon intensive, coal-based power stations” which were responsible for emitting over one third of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr Platt added: “For a zero-emission Christmas light show, you may consider using solar powered lights or sourcing your electricity from verified green power suppliers.”
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It’s just a thought, but what happens to my lava lamps when the bulbs become unavailable?
When will the Edisonia Black Market start up?
And, for those of you who want to parrot the ‘crime safety’ line, the only published studies of Steet Lighting deterring crime indicate that only the CHANGE in lighting deters crime. As soon as the neer-do-wells determine that nobody is watching, they’ll be back to their nefarious deeds.
Which is why somebody came up with motion sensors. That really makes ’em nervous, but even then, eventually, you better appear with your shotgun to back it up.
John Egan and others wondering about arctic sea ice decline in December:
If you go to this link and use the “Previous” link a number of times, you can see on the map that the sea between Nova Zembla island and mainland Russia lost quite some ice over the last weeks:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/cgi-bin/seaice-monitor.cgi?lang=e
Now I do not know whether this area is large enough to account for the flat graph. Just used google maps to do a quick&dirty size check, it might be close to 500*500km or 250,000 sq km. It looks to me to cover for big part of the gap that starts to exist in Dec between the red (2008) and blue (2003) lines, which by eyeballing seems to be around 350,000 sq km.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Warmer sea water currents? Warmer air coming in as the cold arctic air is being blown out to Russia, Europe and North America? Who can tell?
Merry xmas to all!
Remmitt
Heh. And here we thought that the Puritans/Pilgrims had all died out because people got really tired of having everything that might be fun forbidden. Nope. They just switched religions in order to make sure that they can harangue us for being eeeevil for not toeing the line (that they established and do not have to conform to) on CO2.
LED’s certainly last longer. Even cheap ones run 15-20k hours. For typical use, that’s far longer than I will last. My efficiency comment was mostly to poke fun at those pompous ‘scientific’ types who tell us we are wasting energy. After all, if the lights are indoors, they help to heat your house. Not quite as good as gas heat, but better looking. Heating water for my hot chocolate uses more energy in 30 seconds than running my old evil (but very small) incandescents all night.
Worse, most of my electric bill is ‘customer charge’ and not commodity. If I pull the plug on everything, I would still pay about 2/3 of what I pay now. Not much incentive to buy new lights when my old ones still work.
“Find the bulb” ? I’m really out of date. My clunky lights stay on when one goes out. Low voltage, in series, so if I unplug one, the string does go out, but still very easy to find. That was a real problem 40 years ago, but I thought it had been solved. We’ve gone back in time?
It’s cold. I think I’ll plug in another string of lights. I can even see the blue ones.
Right there, in Dortmund … I can clearly see Christmas lights … 😆
I feel like this is something that should be shared. I mean this isn’t News to me, and it shouldn’t be to anyone else out there. You can’t possibly think that Christmas Lights wouldn’t do anything to the environment, could you? The “bah Humbug department” should report more often for those idiots that think that what they do has no effects on the world around them.
Environmentalism is such a flexible pseudo-cause. It’s the vehicle by which busy bodies can control us even further.
WHEN are we act collectively (as the libs would want) and demand a stop to this mindless bullying?
WHEN are we ^going to act collectively…
A switch to energy efficient lights is a good idea.
Permanent Makeup – Melbourne
Australia
Tattoo Removal –
Melbourne Australia
Maybe Dr Glenn Platt could move to North Korea.
See?
No lights at all.
“” Jim B Canada (00:01:08) :
Quick point the picture you are showing is GREATLY ENHANCED picture. In reality from that distance NONE of the lights shown would be visible.
Another giant leap in exaggeration, but just a small propaganda step for NASA. “”
How do you know that ?
All that the camera records, is the contrast between what is lit and what isn’t. Nobody has to enhance anything. Just as most stars are invisible to the naked eye; but recordable by the camera as bright against a dark background; so too can the lights on earth be seen against the background with perfectly ordinary camerea equipment.
And if I was CSIRO, I wouldn’t complain. some of the better LEDs have more than 50% external quantum efficiency, so more than half of the energy they consume, is radiated in the visible region and a good fraction of that exits to space with little effect from GHG, so they are helping to cool the planet. If all that electricity went into incandescent lamps, they would mostly heat their environment.
As for that free (one day) thermo-nuclear energy; as they say the energy of the future; and always will be.
Better hope it never happens in your lifetime; unless you really want to see this planet get screwed up by too much energy consumption. today’s “global warming” will be peanuts compared to a thermonuclear future; just fancy; extinction by slow Hydrogen bomb.
In Massachusetts, the “waste” energy from my indoor incandescents helps heat the house – which brings up the efficiency approaching 100%. Kudos to Jeff Id for noting this above – is it really hard to figure out? We also get a good portion of our electricty from Plymouth Nuclear, so my smaller outdoor incandescent bulbs don’t produce much carbon either, and they sure look pretty!
If these frauds really cared about carbon output, they’d all be demanding a total shift to nuclear for power plants.
“” Robert Bateman (09:55:53) :
You should NOT be looking at Blue LED’s at night, the human eye is not made to do that. “”
So what is it about blue LEDs at night that you should not be looking at them ?
Certainly in the dark adapted eye, the vision changes from photopic response to scotopic; but ordinary evening light is hardly dark adapted.
The major way in which blue lights (LEDs aren’t any different from any other blue lights) exhibit vision difficulties, is that the human eye is highly chromatic aberated, because of the vitreous, and aqueous humor filling the eyball, so the blue focus and the red focus are quite separated, so blue and red lights, will not focus together ,bu that is just as much a problem of the red as it is of the blue. Geen/yellows will focus in some intermediate plane; but other than that there is no reason to not look at any colored LEDs at night.
Now I wouldn’t recommend anybody look at the brightest yellow LEDs (AlInGaP), as they are among the most luminous, and can damage the retina from close up viewing. It used to be that laser based systems were classified accodring to vision hazards, and one didn’t have to worry about incoherent light sources too much, but modern LEDs are such high luminance, that now they have to be certified as to vision hazard resrictions. Every one of those LED illumination systems underneath your Optical mouse, has to pass strict rules for eye safety.
Yes Kids pick up the mouse and jam their eye to the hole to see how bright it is.
Many of those seemingly innocuous mouse illuminators actually form multiple images directed in different directions , so that not more than one beam can enter your iris at one time. You can’t get your iris, where the mousing surface is, which is where the multiple beams all overlap.
And given that I designed the vast majority of the more than one billion optical mouse optical systems that are in circulation worldwide, and hold most of the patents on the multiple beam illumination optics; I think I would qualify as somewhat knowledgeable on that one.
Why oh why, in these miserably poor times, can’t the jokers turn down the lights?
Everytime I see that jpeg of the Earth at night, it makes me sick thinking of all that wasted power, oil, gas, coal etc. that is being burned for nothing.
Nothing but fact that Retired Engineer brings up:
If I unplug all my lights, turn off all my devices, I still pay the surcharges and monthly. They give no incentive, but wan’t me to buy more bulbs.
And they want me to buy a twisted CFL hand grenade that will break in my hands if I am not careful, and maybe break in my hands if I am careful.
The jpeg at the top turn my stomach to knots.
Oh, what an awful waste.
joealmun :
You can’t possibly think that Christmas Lights wouldn’t do anything to the environment, could you? The “bah Humbug department” should report more often for those idiots that think that what they do has no effects on the world around them.
Right. Christmas lights are a “threat to the environment”. How exactly? What about breathing, which expels C02 – wouldn’t that be a “threat” as well?
As for “effects on the world”, well, everything effects everything to some degree, doesn’t it? Of course we have an effect, how could we not, except by dying? Of course, that, in a nutshell is what the environazis want, isn’t it?
Yes, there are some effects we want to try to minimize, such as pollution (which does NOT include C02), and forest and land degradation. In the grand scheme of things, however, the idea that Christmas lights are anything to worry about is completely absurd – something only an idiot would worry about, in other words.
It looks like the majority of Australia is in the dark. OK they really need to get those carbon taxes in place! 🙂
I had cause to try to deal with the CSIRO a few years ago. Pretty much a sheltered workshop.
George E. Smith (16:02:18) :
“As for that free (one day) thermo-nuclear energy; as they say the energy of the future; and always will be.
Better hope it never happens in your lifetime; unless you really want to see this planet get screwed up by too much energy consumption. today’s “global warming” will be peanuts compared to a thermonuclear future; just fancy; extinction by slow Hydrogen bomb.”
Really. I hope you are kidding. BTW Google “Bussard fusion” The fusion future may be about to happen. Only it isn’t “thermo”
And Tibet is in the dark, too. I guess those monks up there went green, or they hide thier candlepower well.
Your use of a computer and the huge infrastructure required for you to be able to voice your opinion here affects the “environment” much more than a few holiday lights which are only on for a short time during the year. Yet I don’t see you forgoing your luxuries to “save the planet”. Obviously you feel only other people should make sacrifices and not yourself.
sheesh!
“joealmun (14:50:19) :
I feel like this is something that should be shared.”
Feelings… nothing more than feeelings…..
“SCIENTISTS have warned that Christmas lights are bad for the planet due to huge electricity waste.
…
He said the nation’s electricity came from “centralised carbon intensive, coal-based power stations” which were responsible for emitting over one third of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
Maybe he meant to say “over one-third of Australia’s HUMAN greenhouse gas emissions” which would be something like 1% of Australia’s total greenhouse emissions. And there is a subtle psychological play here that connects “Christmas lights” to “one third of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions” which is preposterous. One would need to look at the delta … what is the difference with and without the lights. I would imagine it would be hard to figure exactly because December 25 is about the time of the longest day in Australia, when regular lighting is burning the least.
But what it speaks to most of all is a personality disorder. There is no intangible value placed on the lights. People might decide that the uplift given by the lights is worth every ounce of the extra greenhouse emissions. The “scientists” place no value on that and are seeming only interested in their sacred greenhouse gas. They seem to be saying that what makes them feel better should also make everyone else feel better. Or better, what makes them feel unsettled, should also make everyone else feel unsettled. The implication being that if you are more like them, then you are “good” and if you have less anxiety over the greenhouse gas, then you are somehow “bad”. It seems pretty narcissistic of them to assume that they are “right” and that to be good you must do as they say you should.
Maybe it would knock them down a peg or two if some powerful spokesman in government or media told them to buzz off. I am tired of media attempts to use a guilt trip on people for exercising their family traditions that really in the overall scope of things don’t hurt a soul.
I have been too busy working to post much lately. (That’s a GOOD thing.)
I notice that most of the places without lights are hellholes I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.
Merry Chirstmas. Say it with lights.
I just noticed a story that San Francisco airport will be giving travelers the option to purchase “carbon credits” to offset their travel carbon footprint. Next time I fly through there, I am going to ask if they have “carbon credit credits” and if they ask me what those are, I will say “they are credits that offset the guilt of not actually buying the carbon credits that offset the guilt of not actually cutting down on your energy consumption but making you pay something so you feel you have somehow made up for it … or something”.
Send these CSIRO scientists into the outback saltpans to shovel salt and cure global warming by increasing the reflectivity of the desert. That would do a heck of a lot more to cool the planet than turning off Christmas lights.