Don't Turn Off the Lights

MODs the first Youtube link doesn’t work

I’m finding hardly any of the links working.

Who would want a climate scientist or environut near them when the lights go out, it would be just an excuse for them to produce a hockey stick. I hope universities produce guidelines for students on how to stay safe once the lights go out.

Dave says:
March 21, 2013 at 1:08 pm
While they are at it, perhaps they will only use one sheet of toilet paper per sitting.
*
Dave! The waste! At the very least, they should use both sides.
😀

Do all the people who got hit by Sandy have to do this, or can they charge against the time that they were without power?

Didn’t we just have one of these exercises in futility? I’ll probably be watching basketball with all the lights I need on.

Every time I hear a Republican talk about the burden the national debt places on our children, I cringe. We’re heading for an economic crisis that will make the ’80s pale, and long before our children reach maturity. Besides, we never pay off our national debt. And when I hear Bjorn Lomborg chastise the warmists for their little fantasy about electric cars, I cringe. He believes in the CO2 model for warming, and endorses that nonsense by nit picking it. Earth’s climate follows the Sun, and CO2 follows the warming or cooling! It’s time to turn out the lights on Dr. Lomborg.

I will turn on EVERYTHING all night.

From the archives-a not so moldy oldie:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/27/earth-hour-in-north-korea-a-stunning-success/
That is our future if the greenies have their way..

I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about CO2, but I think electric cars are the bomb. They are faster, smoother and quieter than IC powered cars and there are no (real) emissions (e.g. CO, NOX, SOX, HC), particularly at the local level. Sure, right now they are more expensive and have limited range, but that gets better every year. A colleague just got a new Tesla and that thing rocks (of course, it should for $100K).

Lance Davis: That you like electric cars is nice. Certainly you should have that choice — but do i have a choice about subsidizing your purchase? I don’t think so.

“but I think electric cars are the bomb”
I think that’s a bit unfair, the lithium might burn violently but does not explode like gasoline vapor. However, the idea that a $100k Tesla is good for the environment needs to addressed. Sure, part of the markup is the extra engineering and luxury cost which will help fund cheaper electric cars in the future. But the rest of the expense is due to higher production costs and those are mainly due to higher use of energy. Energy is money, and anytime you see a higher price for alternatives like electric cars, you can chalk it up to the extra energy needed to provide their inputs.
Go back to your colleague in about 5 years and find out how much money he “saves” driving his electric car. The battery capacity and efficiency will have gone down from merely bad to terrible.

Paul, thanks for the link to Ross McKitrick’s excellent essay, which I reread each year about this time. Here’s the link again for those who may have missed it:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/17/earth-hour-a-dissent/
Here in Australia, blogger Tim Blair runs an Earth Hour competition each year for who can use the most energy at home – or anywhere else – during that hour. There are always awesome entries. People who own hotted-up cars have a distinct advantage.
Al Gore could win with daylight second if he entered, but for some reason he has forgone the opportunity so far.

Time for The Don Meredeth version of “Turn Out The Lights – The Party’s Over”

eric1skeptic says:
March 21, 2013 at 4:36 pm
Go back to your colleague in about 5 years and find out how much money he “saves” driving his electric car. The battery capacity and efficiency will have gone down from merely bad to terrible.
——————————————————————————————————-
He probably won’t have it in 5 years – by that time he will have had it responsibly recycled* (using energy) and be driving the latest, even more eco friendly version (newly built using even more energy), also with an expected lifespan of 5 years or so.
And so the cycle will continue.

OK I moved from the UK to Ontario, the power here is referred to as “hydro” I suspect quit a lot of locals dont know why !! so on earth hour do they turn down the generators that take days to spin down, of course not they turn down the hyrdro stations for an hour! says it all for me!

Personally, I won’t be switching off any lights this weekend. I will be turning up the central heating though, since freezing tempratures and snow are forecast for many parts of the the U.K., including my region.

All the lights will be on and I’ll crank up the heat with the windows open.
Yeah. I celebrate earth hour brightly!

I’m going to bake some cookies…… Earth hour treats..:)

Hah! This year we’re not even going to break 40F for Earth Hour in upstate New York. Should I turn off my heat for an hour just to satisfy the narcissistic whims of some Climate Clowns like Mann? No thanks.

Well I’m betting that the most complete compliance with the Earth Hour of lights out, for the good of the planet, will be demonstrated by the enthusiastic environmental folks of the DPRK.
Those folks led the world every year; there simply is no competition.

Don’t turn off the lights?
It seems that Britain is about to do just that. After all with all those wind generators and that planet warming at an incredible rate we don’t need all those nasty power stations so lets cut generating capacity by 10% for starters. The CEOs of power generating companies are warning that this might not be a good idea:
Meanwhile, back in the real world the Met Office is issuing warnings for snow and blizzard conditions for Northern England and Scotland in particular plus lots more “drought” in the South West:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21885817
Mmnnn. I wonder if the politicians have got the right plan. We shall see, albeit with candles…

Lomberg: “Earth Hour teaches us that tackling global warming is easy. Yet, by switching off the lights, all we are doing is making it harder to see.”
That’s a pretty good metaphore for climate alarmism and their response to criticism: close your eye’s ; fingers in ears and shout ” I can’t hear you” as loud as possible.
When we try to shine a light on malfaisance of climate scientists, they respond by trying to get everyone to turn off the lights.
Pretty symbolic.

Around 75% of Africans have no choice but to participate in Earth Hour – night after night, year after year. Tell them that co2 is a pollutant so they should continue without electricity as many don’t have expensive solar panels or windmills.

Some 24 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa has access to electricity versus 40 percent in other low income countries. Excluding South Africa, the entire installed generation capacity of sub-Saharan Africa is only 28 Gigawatts, equivalent to that of Argentina.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/0,,contentMDK:21935594~pagePK:146736~piPK:146830~theSitePK:258644,00.html

Last month we had a power outage. It lasted for almost 3 hours. It’s especially annoying because in my neighborhood all of the utilities are underground, so it was not a distribution problem. Most neighborhoods around me got power within 1/2 hour but we had to wait.
Living in a winter climate, it only takes a short time in February without power before you realize why you need power. The chill began slowly at first, but at a seemingly accelerating rate the house began to cool. And this is a heavily insulated house with all triple-glazed windows. The only thing that saved us from dropping too cold was that the entire basement floor is a heated slab. There was enough heat that even when the power came back the floor was noticeably warm. I realized that I couldn’t even turn the natural gas fireplace on, since it requires power to switch on the valve and pretty much has to have the circulation fan running to even heat anything.
We dug out an old battery-operated radio, which served to tell us that there was a power failure in my neighborhood. Yay. No HDTV, no discs to watch, only a half hour battery life on my laptop (I need to replace that battery!) and no internet even if I had power. Heck, even the cell towers in the vicinity were off for a while. Since my phone comes through the Cable system instead of the old-school phone lines, it had no power, and even if it had been live all my phones are cordless, so no power to the base.
Soon it became obvious. Pretty much everything we need to entertain ourselves or get any work done requires power. And failures in this area are rare enough that the lesson was relatively new. We had little problem with light, I have been something of a collector of white-LED flashlights, from tiny to large, and have a bag full of those hand-powered ones. So it was possible to see, but I’d sure hate to have that happen again.
There is NO POSSIBLE WAY I would voluntarily give up the magic of electricity, not even for an hour, not even it was for a cause that I didn’t think was ridiculous. To me electricity is the very symbol of our lifestyle, our civilization. To me, the desire to turn off the lights in a misguided attempt to celebrate the Earth or whatever they think they’re doing is a sign of mental illness, a desire to tear down everything we’ve built up. There are not enough caves in the world, so even living in caves is out. Take down our civilization and we’re reduced to living in teepees or igloos and becoming hunter-gatherers like the previous societies that occupied this land. That’s so not me.
So, as every year, I will celebrate Enlightenment Hour by ensuring that every light in this house is burning brightly for all to see. I will bake cookies so the oven is drawing power, and I’m pretty sure my laundry needs to be done. I won’t truly be satisfied unless the meter is spinning like a fan motor.
(PS. The generator I bought is capable of powering the furnace and a few other essentials for a day or so… more if I need to siphon gas from one of the cars… and I guarantee it’s a LOT less efficient than a generating station)

What’s this authors bigotry about electric cars? They are not bought by greenies. Never have, never will. Educated nationalists bothered about their countries balance of payments, airline pilots, lawyers, architects and university Dons are the statistics in this market.
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The Li cells are mostly (sooted) aluminium and copper sheet with a plastic separator. Which is the bulk of the cell. The fluid inside is chemically similar to coke and brandy with a lithium infusion. Either housed in a plastic bag or box. The price of these things at $1.12/WH to the man in the street is not that much more than their material value. Admittedly, the particular kind of cells chosen by the manufacturers are not the most long lasting but they are bounds ahead of the Li-Co garbage they use on your laptop and Boeing 787. Cars expect -30% range loss in a decade/100K miles.
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Youtube shows owners driving their cars at 4.5 miles per KWH. My (UK) car costs six times more in fuel alone, plus, simple to service; few consumables. You can buy a Nissan Leaf <£18K, same price as an equivalent diesel and by driving 60K miles, the UK cost saving is not only recouped, it's paid for. As a second car driven on regular use, its an absolute no-brainer!
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Lastly, turning off street lights for an hour will make no difference to the nations electric consumption because they take hours to run up just for the kettles to start when the adverts come on between Coronation Street! Would be nice if the skies were clear though: Telescope would be out ready.

None of the fox links work.

To Mike:
You wrote: “Who would want a climate scientist or environut near them when the lights go out, it would be just an excuse for them to produce a hockey stick….”
Yes! But in the darkness, you can take the hockey stick away from them and bash them with it,
hopefully pounding some sense into their thick skull(s)!

By the way, a few years ago a hurricane came through our area and we were without power for 5 days (and some neighborhoods were out for 2 weeks!). There had been heavy rains before, so when the rains and WIND from the (cat. 3? 2?) hurricane came through, trees went down all over the area. And this was in a fairly warm month.
The goddam greenies are welcome to live without power all they want; they can have my electricity when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
(‘course, mine might not the hands that end up cold and dead. Just sayin’)