Earth Hour in California – Success or Bust?
Guest post by Russ Steele, NCWatch
At our house we set the timer to remind us to turn on all the visible out side lights. We have multiple security lights on the garage and the barn that come on when the sun goes down. My friend George Rebane has evidence that he turned on his lights for Earth Hour at Ruminations. I should have done the same, but was working on a sea level issue in R and forgot. I am glad I set the timer to remind me to turn off the outside house lights at 9:30.
The real question is did it Earth Hour make a difference one way or the other?
Roger Sowell had a good idea, he download the the graph below from www.caiso.com, the California Independent System Operator. CAISO is in charge of receiving power from power generating plants, and distributing the power throughout the state grid to the various end users.
Now compare the graph from Saturday 3/28/09 to the one on Sunday 3/29/09 shown below, note the similar slopes during the same time period. Note that annotations were added by Anthony Watts on both graphs.
Roger notes:
There was no apparent decrease in the power load throughout the state, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. No step changes, nothing, nada, zip, zilch.
There you have it, scientific data showing that the Earth Hour was a total bust in California. If you look close, you can see a little bump up above the forecast demand, which tracked very closely with actual power consumed prior to the witching hour 8:30 to 9:30. But, it is clear that power consumption did not drop, it stayed up. Maybe all those protesters forgot to turn off the lights.
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Memo to Jim Hansen:
LightsOut = 0!
Since you are on the subject of California and climate is this for real?
“News that California may ban the sale of black cars for climate protection reasons raised the hackles of many a petrolhead yesterday.”
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/03/california-to-ban-sale-of-blac.html
REPLY: Sad but true
Sad but true. (The premise seems to be that black cars require more air conditioning. But “auto-albedo” is the running joke.)
Huh? Another moderator seems to have had the same exact words in mind.
It’s kind of amazing. Google News gives about 8,000 articles that were trying to hype the reduction during one lousy unproductive weekend hour, and the result is undetectable – probably less than 1%. Now predict the reduction of electricity not during one special unproductive hour but during many productive days, weeks, years, and decades.
It’s clearly impossible. People don’t turn the lights off even if they don’t need them. Forcing them to reduce energy consumption when they do is a utopia and a green military junta would really be the only setup to achieve such a result.
The earth at night:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights2_dmsp_big.jpg
You can see how dark Africa and other less developed regions are relative to population.
http://maps.howstuffworks.com/world-population-density-map.htm
then look at life expectancy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_Expectancy_2008_Estimates_CIA_World_Factbook.png
I think this post misses the point. Earth Hour wasn’t about saving energy, it was a symbolic act to generate publicity and get people talking about it. This it has obviously done 🙂
You mean, in the state where lives the great martyrs of environmentalism, where they seek to ban black cars, where they seek to ban flat panel TVs, where the hippies founded paradise….they did not practice what they preach?
SHOCKED!
But what is this peculiar piece of propaganda…
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jTPC5ic6tJh9PiHscwgOANkJ17-wD977R3400
They claim a resounding success, yet all we have evidence of mostly public buildings dimming some of their lights.
I had my lights off. How come all those Californians did not practice their Green Ramadan?
Richard Heg: so what, are you trying to say that leaving the lights on at night makes you live longer? That’s a pretty silly conclusion to draw, but I can’t think of any other point you could be trying to make, other than just linking to random graphs.
Anyways, I seem to think that people who thought earth hour was about making any kind of significant impact in energy usage are missing the point by a mile. Anyone who thinks leaving the lights off for one hour a year is an energy solution needs to sit down and shut up while the grown ups talk. And I don’t think much more highly about those who thought that was the point of earth hour, even though they knew it wouldn’t ‘work’.
It was an educational/attention-getting exercise, and ‘8,000 articles’ seems to indicate success.
Didn’t have any impact on this side of the pond (certainly not in my postage stamp of a village – too many hard working farmers and realists). Maybe it’s because all the hardcore eco-nut greenies have descended on London in anticipation of the G20 protest jamboree.
With any luck they’ll stay there…
If the entire world stopped using all forms of energy for one day….. then armageddon would be postponed by exactly one day.
Julian GAll:-)
I rcently received a You Tube clip from a relative all about the first Earth our. It was a little sickening for me in its pathos, but it did say that some 50 million people worldwide participated. Put another way that means that 5,950,000,000 people didn’t! I also point out that a large number of these people who “didn’t”, “couldn’t”, even if they wanted to, which I find a little patronising for them. I would like to see some numbers for this years efforts.
Also, fairly famous personality in UK was on the radio news Saturday morning, talking about the G20 protest about jobs, globalisation, & climate change. He rather let it out of the bag when he said that the ambition was to tell governments that the “people”, whoever they may be, no longer wanted this kind of politics. Reading between the lines that is ditch free-enterprise & capitalism, & adopt marxist-socialism I guess? The writing is in the wall!
I read one article where some greenie casually mentioned how he charged up his laptop so he could run it on batteries during earth hour. You can’t make this stuff up.
Jason A – what I get from Richard Heg’s post is a link between longevity and the technology by which it is sustained. That connection seems infinitely more plausible than that between ‘death trains’ and climate change don’t you think?
” Richard Heg (22:42:57) :
Since you are on the subject of California and climate is this for real?
“News that California may ban the sale of black cars for climate protection reasons raised the hackles of many a petrolhead yesterday.””
Jason A. (00:07:42)
i do support saving energy, however, a propaganda show to promote the global warming swindle is undoubtedly condemnable.
“Jason A. (00:07:42) :
Richard Heg: so what, are you trying to say that leaving the lights on at night makes you live longer? That’s a pretty silly conclusion to draw, but I can’t think of any other point you could be trying to make, other than just linking to random graphs.”
Jason i did not comment further because i think the image i posted tells a million stories. For me the image of a dark Africa makes me think of how hard it is for children to get an education when they have to work during the day and have no light to read by night. Why would i think of that on a story relating to climate change? well because in my mind the resources and attention given to climate change takes away from more pressing human and environmental issues.
“It was an educational/attention-getting exercise, and ‘8,000 articles’ seems to indicate success.”
Yes i think you are right as an attention getting exercise it was successful however i think the AGW campaign has all the attention it needs. I am seeing a lot of attention getting exercises but not a lot of action, i am not bothered that there has not been much action because i don’t see AGW as a big problem, however the attention getting has damaged/has the potential to damage science and progress on more pressing environmental and human welfare issues.
Well Jason, perhaps it’s all a bit too sophisticated for you light switch campaigners but a quick look at the correlation between the amount of light and life expectancy could have something to do with the difference between living in a hut burning animal dung for fuel and relying on a witch doctor to mend your ailing body and living in a modern climate controlled house with its hygienic waste disposal and access to modern medicine etc.
Just a thought.
Check out this piece of communist idiocy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/28/green-future-carbon-emissions-climate
Though mass public transport will be the travel mode of choice, personal cars will remain. You might not own one yourself, instead borrowing from clubs when needed.
That’s called car hire. It has been around for decades.
Expect punishing taxes on plane tickets, tied to their carbon cost, to discourage flying unless there really is no alternative. In these situations, a personal carbon-rationing system, linked to national CO2 emissions targets, will allow individuals to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Right, so we have to live on rations based on bad science. Get a clue, in a future full of clean abundant energy with energy security for all nations, the global warming scare will have fallen apart by then and so will the villianisation of CO2.
Bricks coated with solar paint will be held together with cement that soaks up CO2 from the air around it.
The brick, the cement and the solar paint have a limited volume. How can they soak up CO2 indefinitely?
Automatic controls will warm rooms only when needed and switch appliances and lights off when they’re not needed.
We’ve had them for years.
Our throwaway culture will disappear.
So no packaging, no bad products, no faulty products, no wear and tear?
Someone is being naive.
Products will be made to last
Therefore Apple will sell you a computer made to last, and then shut itself down. Levi’s will sell you jeans made to last, and then shut itself down. Sony will sell you a TV made to last, and then shut itself down. Tesla will make you a car built to last, and then shut itself down.
Naive.
Rain will be collected from home and office rooftops and filtered using carbon-free electricity so that it is drinkable. Any water drained away in a building will be recycled and treated locally to wash clothes or flush toilets. Bottled water will be banned.
This guy knows less about the human body and water than he does about everything else so far.
Drinking purified or distilled rain water washes electrolytes out of your body. This leaves you feeling depleted and unhealthy. Bottled mineral water does the opposite.
Food will come from local farms or factories to reduce the carbon cost of transport.
Yes, I can see it right now. Glaswegians will have to use chillies grown in Scotland despite the climate being wrong for chillies. Siberians will have to grow rice, tomatoes and potatoes in the freezing cold. All food trade routes will disappear but, hey, Ethiopia is a good place for Ethiopians to grow any food they need, right????
Meat lovers, because of their high-carbon diets, will have to use up their personal carbon rations whenever they bite into a steak or else make sure their food comes from local, sustainable farms that produce meat artificially.
Ah, those communist rations again.
Working class and poor people around the world rely on meat, of any quality, to make up for any deficiencies in the rest of their diet. Asking them to live on carbon rations is the same as asking them to take meat off their menu and substitute it for a low carbon alternative, which are all lower in protein. The quality of their health would decrease as a result.
This idea of personal carbon rations is elitist because only the rich can afford it. For them it is free because they interest they earn on their savings is enough to always buy more carbon credits. Everyone else pays through their teeth.
What would happen is that those elitists who try to impose such a system on others will meet the same fate as Nicolae Ceauşescu or Saddam Hussein.
They can be sure of that.
@Jason
The details of “earth hour” were actually so vague that people could claim success and failure at the same time.
Were we asked to just switch off the lights – or switch off everything ?
Was it supposed to make a big difference – or just be an empty gesture ?
Do we really need more “consciousness raising” ?
There is a real danger now of a backlash – people are just fed up of this sanctimonious posturing and will turn their backs on even the sensible parts of the eco-manifesto.
Julian Gall (23:37:57) :
I think this post misses the point. Earth Hour wasn’t about saving energy, it was a symbolic act
It is you who is missing the point. the graphs show how few took part in this symbolic act.
Dear Julian Gall, that’s a surprising statement of yours that the goal was publicity. I think that the publicity about global warming issues is huge. I think that none of us disagrees that there’s a lot of talk – and articles in newspapers – about global warming (non-)issues.
I personally estimate that this topic is being talked about roughly 1,000 times more frequently than what this non-problem would deserve. Well, you can try to increase the factor from 1,000 to 10,000. There can be not 30,000 Google News articles per month about “global warming” but 300,000. Articles on skeptical webs can be multiplied by 10, too. Is that the goal? What is it good for?
What people like me are saying is that this global warming talk has nothing to do with reality. If there is a man-made contribution to climate change, it is completely unspectacular and wouldn’t be worth 5 minutes of a sane person’s time in a sane world, except for a few specialists who are interested in this discipline as academicians. Ideas about decreasing the energy consumption by 50% or 80% (in the absence of a technological breakthrough similar to a miracle) are completely insane.
So this complete failure of the Earth Hour indeed shows that the global warming policies are what they are – inflated and meaningless talk by people who have lost all the contact with reality – the reality of thermometers and graphs showing the consumption of electricity or fuels. And I am confident that this insight – that this whole AGW industry is fraud and makes no sense – will be getting increasingly clear as people continue to talk about it.
So I think it is not really in the interest of the AGW ideologues to make people talk (and think) about this issue because the more they talk (and think), the more it is getting clear to them that this whole machinery is based on nonsense and lies, and the closer is the day when the main exponents of this megafraud (measured by the money they have earned from it) will be sitting in the jail because unlike the energy savings, the money that these people earn by saying untrue things at important places are real.
“Richard Heg: so what, are you trying to say that leaving the lights on at night makes you live longer? That’s a pretty silly conclusion to draw, but I can’t think of any other point you could be trying to make, other than just linking to random graphs”
Jason A, what are you trying to say? That anthropogenic sources of CO2 are somehow linked to a trivial change in global temperature than can be almost completely explained by solar variability and nearly fraudulent manipulation of data that is incorrectly adjusted for urban heat island effect? That’s a pretty silly conclusion to draw. I can’t imagine any other point you’d be trying to make, other than just linking two random graphs.
We’ve just had a blackout in Sydney which left a big part of Downtown and some suburbs without power for several hours – less than two days after “Earth Hour”. Interesting comparison between the faux outage and a real one here :
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/now_thats_a_real_earth_hour_or_two/
Fear mongering about Britain’s rivers drying up and more talk of rationing an infinitely available resource
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/29/environment-agency-water-household-bills