(Update: see the trend graph I found on Earth Hour popularity below.)
Otherwise, we celebrate living in North Korea:
The Earth Hour stunt wants people to turn off their lights from 8:30-9:30PM local time. I plan on having our lights on.
Bjørn Lomborg writes on his Facebook page:
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1.3 billion people in the world live without electricity. Celebrating darkness at Earth Hour sends the wrong message.
Unfortunately, Earth Hour tonight is nothing but an ineffective feel-good event. It does little for the climate in terms of reducing CO2 emissions and distracts us from the real problems and solutions — especially giving light to those in the darkness.
Read my new column in USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/03/27/bjorn-lomborg-earth-hour-electricity-column/6975265/
And watch a 2-minute video by the Copenhagen Consensus Center: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SVVADAX_cU
Lomborg: Earth Hour just a feel-good campaign
Instead, give light to the 1.3 billion people who still live without electricity.
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UPDATE: It seems sanity is starting to take hold and the global interest in Earth hour is falling off significantly. Here is the Alexa Internet traffic plot for this year plus 2013 and 2012. I’ve added the trend arrow aligned with the peaks of the Earth Hour events over those three years.
Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/earthhour.org
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I think I’ll replace my porch light with an incandescent. (I still have a few.)
I’m keeping the lights off as much as possible here in the UK, because of the ever increasing price of electricity as we subsidise the building of wind turbines and solar PV arrays on roofs. We used to be threatened with blackouts by the trade unions back in the 1970’s. Now it’s the privatised energy companies that are threatening us with the lights going out as part of their bargaining process with the UK government over a suggestion that they might be ripping off their customers here. I have never been in a union and nor have I ever been involved in using industrial muscle to rip folks off. Two classes of creeps to add to the government class of creeps.
I plan on watching NCAA b-ball tonight. I’ll throw on all the lights in the house and backyard, before I head over to the local sports bar to watch the games on big screen TVs for brews with friends.
After this cold N Am winter, global warming is just so underappreciated.
grumpyoldmanuk says:
March 29, 2014 at 1:51 pm
Yes, I did not mean to exclude those of the Brassica oleracea persuasion.
Just keep your windows open and the telly/radio on high volume so as not to frighten the young ones.
The Earth Hour is a real life equivalent of The Hunger Games. A ritual for the citizens of the Capitol to enjoy once a year; with no consequences for them but deadly effects for the people from the Districts. An exciting, feel-good social event during which the fortunate can imagine having a bond with the wretched fighting for bare survival. I hope Hugh Winkler and his friends conform to the Capitol’s haute couture dress code during the reenactment.
When I was a kid, we could not afford electricity. We were so poor we had to sit huddled around a candle for warmth.
When it got really cold, mother used to light it
I commented on this article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592304/Lights-everyones-Thousands-cities-towns-world-join-big-switch-annual-green-campaign-Earth-Hour.html#comments.
I wrote the following:
“I have all the lights in the house on, I have two cars outside in the drive, both idling with lights on, I have the washing machine running, my daughter is baking a cake in the electric oven and, even though this evening is mild, we have the central heating turned on but we’ve had to open the windows so as not to get too warm. All of this is costing me just a few pounds but I’m doing it to show my utter contempt for the ‘green’ idiots who thought up this ridiculous stunt. CO2 is PLANT FOOD, not a ‘pollutant’.
EternalOptimist says:
March 29, 2014 at 2:25 pm
You Had a CANDLE? We had to make do with a half-sucked mint candy Mum found in the pockets of the washing she took in. And it had to last until Easter.
A MINT ??
you were lucky….
grumpyoldmanuk says:
March 29, 2014 at 2:35 pm
You had candy and Easter?!
Only because the vicar let Mum use the font to give us our yearly bath, and eat the daffodils after the service.
I’ll see if I can fire up my old multi- TFLOPS antique giant monster of a power- sucking computer and run a few benchmarks… won’t have to turn up the heat in the house tonight and I hope not to make my neighborhood look like North Korea by knocking out the local grid.
Here’s the Real Time Total Load graph from the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (covers all or part of 15 US states and Manitoba, Canada):
https://www.misoenergy.org/MarketsOperations/RealTimeMarketData/Pages/RealTimeTotalLoad.aspx
They should call it “Stupid Hour”. More honest.
I have always believed we should have Earth Month.
Cut off everybody’s electricity for a month…
and find out how much they appreciate it, when it’s turned back on.
See, the claim to legitimacy of wattsupwiththat is that it’s the place you go to find real inquiry and lucid analysis countering the groupthink. So it’s disappointing when it tales on the character, from time to time, of a grumpy all-purpose anti-green trolling operation.
Thanks for the heads up – I would never have remembered to turn on every light in my 4500+ sq ft poorly insulated but cozy warm single-person home. I only wish the original gas lamps still were operational – then I could add some additional CO2 and soot to the endeavour to prevent global cooling!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYG_SOHZ_fA&w=560&h=315%5D
Like Michael Mann his friends the North Koreans are also totally and enthusiastically committed to the CAUSE!
I’m devastated that you think so poorly of us, but as I don’t have enough time left to detour on guilt trips, I won’t let it bother me.
South Korea, an Island of Light in a Sea of Darkness. They could use that and the pic for tourism campaigns.
Its possible I might turn some lights off. But it’s not in celebration of Earth Hour – it’s to stave off for an hour the apparently inevitable energy poverty that is now threatening my retirement (as in, there will be no retirement), and if energy costs continue to escalate as they have this winter and coming, I’ll be forced to adopt plan C – commit a criminal offense in my old age and let the state provide shelter, 3-sq and a TV.
Earth Hour dutifully ignored as the hypocritical waste of time that it is.
I have around 100 bulbs, inside and out, including 7 outdoor 500 watt floods.
That’s not enough so I may poll my car out of the garage and run the engine during the hour as well.
If you all join me in running your vehicle for an hour I’ll feel like I too am a super hero.
We can offset several wind farms by needlessly pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Plus we can all deny we ever did it. 🙂
Hugh Winkler
WWF claims “your power, amplified”. Not if I can help it. I’m voting for the opposition.
I am currently supervising a drill site in Alberta. We plan on ‘celebrating’ Earth Hour by having an array of Caterpillar turbo-diesels 2 x 3508’s, 3 x 3512’s and 2 x 3516’s running at mostly full throttle from 2030 to 2130 local time (and pretty much 24/7)…..just doing our part to ‘fight climate change’. 🙂 I mean the planet’s cooling off right?….so shouldn’t we be pumping more and more C02 into the atmo to ‘control’ the climate??…if we don’t it’ll just change on us won’t it??? :)…..damn, gonna have to order another couple semis full of diesel. 🙂
Hugh Winkler says:
See, the claim to legitimacy of wattsupwiththat is that it’s the place you go to find real inquiry and lucid analysis countering the groupthink. So it’s disappointing when it tales on the character, from time to time, of a grumpy all-purpose anti-green trolling operation.
I must admit, I should be classified as ‘anti-green’. That is a rational position to take, since the “green” lobby has been thoroughly co-opted by the Left. The only true environmentalists these days are groups like Ducks Unlimited, and similar non-government organizations that provide money to maintain wetlands. [DU has been in operation since the ’30’s.]
But this nonsense about ‘Earth Hour’ — and nonsense it is — is simply a touchy-feely sop to keep the eco-lemmings in line.
Yo, Hugh: you wouldn’t be one of those eco-lemmings, would you? ☺