Dimwits: Why 'green' lightbulbs aren't the answer to global warming CHRISTOPHER BOOKER UK Daily Mail Tuesday, March 13, 2007 They have to be left on all the time, they're made from banned toxins and they won't work in half your household fittings. Yet Europe (and Gordon Brown) says 'green' lightbulbs must replace all our old ones. Every day now we are being deluged with news of the latest proposals from our politicians about how to save the planet from global warming. We must have 'a new world order' to combat climate change, Gordon Brown proclaimed yesterday. We must have strict 'green' limits on air travel, proposes David Cameron, so that no one can afford to take more than one flight a year. A fifth of all our energy must be 'green' by 2020, says the EU, even though there is no chance of such an absurd target being met. We must have 'green' homes, 'green' cars, 'green' fuel, even microchips in our rubbish bins to enforce 'green' waste disposal. Have these politicians any longer got the faintest idea what they are talking about? Do they actually look at the hard, practical facts before they rush to compete with each other in this mad musical-chairs of gesture politics? Take just one instance of this hysteria now sweeping our political class off its feet: that which was bannered across the Daily Mail's front page on Saturday in the headline 'EU switches off our old lightbulbs'. This was the news that, as part of its latest package of planet-saving measures, the EU plans, within two years, to ban the sale of those traditional incandescent lightbulbs we all take for granted in our homes. Gordon Brown followed suit yesterday, saying he wanted them phased out in Britain by 2011. No doubt the heads of government who took this decision (following the lead of Fidel Castro's dictatorship in Cuba) purred with selfcongratulation at striking such a daring blow against global warming. After all, these 'compact fluorescent bulbs' (or CFLs), to which they want us all to switch, use supposedly only a fifth of the energy needed by the familiar tungsten-filament bulbs now to be made illegal. Among the first to congratulate the EU's leaders was UK Green MEP Caroline Lucas, who claimed that 'banning old-fashioned lightbulbs across the EU would cut carbon emissions by around 20 million tonnes per year and save between e5 million and e8million per year in domestic fuel bills'. Who could argue? Certainly one lot of people far from impressed by the EU's decision are all those electrical engineers who have been clutching their heads in disbelief. Did those politicians, they wondered, actually take any expert advice before indulging in this latest planet- saving gesture? In fact, the virtues of these 'low-energy' bulbs are nothing like so wonderful as naive enthusiasts like Ms Lucas imagine them to be. Indeed in many ways, the experts warn, by banning incandescent bulbs altogether, the EU may have committed itself to an appallingly costly blunder. It is a decision that will have a far greater impact on all our lives than most people are yet aware, presenting the UK alone with a bill which, on our Government's own figures, could be £3 billion or more. The result will provide a quality of lighting which in many ways will be markedly less efficient. Even Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor who put forward the proposal, admitted that, because the energy-saving bulbs she uses in her flat take some time to warm up, she often has 'a bit of a problem' when she is looking for something she has 'dropped on the carpet'. But even more significantly, because they must be kept on so much longer to run efficiently, the actual amount of energy saved by these bulbs has been vastly exaggerated. So what are the disadvantages of CFLs over the traditional bulbs we will no longer be allowed to buy? Quite apart from the fact that the CFLs are larger, much heavier and mostly much uglier than familiar bulbs - and up to 20 times more expensive - the vast majority of them give off a harsher, less pleasant light. Because they do not produce light in a steady stream, like an incandescent bulb, but flicker 50 times a second, some who use them for reading eventually find their eyes beginning to swim - and they can make fast-moving machine parts look stationary, posing a serious safety problem. Fluorescent CFLs cannot be used with dimmer switches or electronically-triggered security lights, so these will become a thing of the past. They cannot be used in microwaves, ovens or freezers, because these are either too hot or too cold for them to function (at any temperature above 60C degrees or lower than -20C they don't work), More seriously, because CFLs need much more ventilation than a standard bulb, they cannot be used in any enclosed light fitting which is not open at both bottom and top - the implications of which for homeowners are horrendous. Astonishingly, according to a report on 'energy scenarios in the domestic lighting sector', carried out last year for Defra by its Market Transformation Programme, 'less than 50 per cent of the fittings installed in UK homes can currently take CFLs'. In other words, on the Government's own figures, the owners of Britain's 24 million homes will have to replace hundreds of millions of light fittings, at a cost upwards of £3billion. In addition to this, lowenergy bulbs are much more complex to make than standard bulbs, requiring up to ten times as much energy to manufacture. Unlike standard bulbs, they use toxic materials, including mercury vapour, which the EU itself last year banned from landfill sites - which means that recycling the bulbs will itself create an enormously expensive problem. Perhaps most significantly of all, however, to run CFLs economically they must be kept on more or less continuously. The more they are turned on and off, the shorter becomes their life, creating a fundamental paradox, as is explained by an Australian electrical expert Rod Elliott (whose Elliott Sound Products website provides as good a technical analysis of the disadvantages of CFLs as any on the internet). If people continue switching their lights on and off when needed, as Mr Elliott puts it, they will find that their 'green' bulbs have a much shorter life than promised, thus triggering a consumer backlash from those who think they have been fooled. But if they keep their lights on all the time to maximise their life, CFLs can end up using almost as much electricity from power stations (creating CO2 emissions) as incandescent bulbs - thus cancelling out their one supposed advantage. In other words, in every possible way this looks like a classic example of kneejerk politics, imposed on us not by our elected Parliament after full consultation and debate, but simply on the whim of 27 politicians sitting around that table in Brussels, not one of whom could have made an informed speech about the pluses and minuses of what they were proposing. Even if it does have the effect of reducing CO2 emissions, those reductions will be utterly insignificant when compared with emissions from China, for example, which is growing so fast it is using half the world's cement, 30 per cent of the world's coal, one quarter of copper production and 35 per cent of steel. There was not a hint of democracy in this crackpot decision, which will have a major impact on all our lives, costing many of us thousands of pounds and our economy billions - all to achieve little useful purpose, while making our homes considerably less pleasant to live in. Such is the price we are now beginning to pay for the ' ecomadness' which is sweeping through our political class like a psychic epidemic. The great 'Euro-bulb blunder' is arguably the starkest symbol to date of the crazy new world into which this is leading us.
Simple, the extincted species were not the fittest. It is call "survive of the fittest" or "natural selection". Ask Darwin who kill extincted species? The extinct species extincted before there were human. Many Many species go extinct with or without human activity. We also find new species all the time. Wouldn't it be nice if we still have dinosaurs running around nowadays? What killed the dinosaurs? The last few Global Warming, Global Cooling, but human sure didn't cause any of the previous global warming or cooling. Lastly, wouldn't you want to kill all the roaches?
The problem is that it is happening at an alarming and increasing rate. Far faster than normal evolutionary processes. New species are not evolving to fill the ecological niches. Those niches and habitats are being wiped out. One consequence will be the loss of biodiversity and part of pool of organic compounds that show great promise in molecular biology. There are many others. It is disingenuous to call this darwinian evolution as the mechanism of mutation is preempted by the very short time frame. And no I don't want to kill all the roaches.
Why do we need to "replace" extinct species? It is obvious to me that if the earth need these extinct species, they wouldn't have extinct, wouldn't they? Name one extinct species that we cannot do without? We are surviving without them right now. Name one extinct species that would have improved anything should this species survived? What is this "biodiversity" or "diversity"? Only human being has idea about diversity. Nothing else on earth knows or cares about diversity. Lions, wolves, tigers, eagles, alligators don't care about diversity. It is survived that is most import. When the big fish eat the same fish, it doesnât care about diversity. There is no diversity concept in the jungle. The food chain just balances itself. Too many wolves and they wouldn't have enough food. They starve to death. Too many rabbits, the wolves will increase in number until they are in balance with the number of rabbits. When animals eat, they don't think about diversity. The lion is not going to think, if it kills too many zebra, there will not be any more zebra steak to eat!!! If there is no more zebra, it is going to be the rabbit or something else or death. The snake is not going to consider if it swallows one more rat, there will be no more rats to eat next time. It is going to the rat or frog or something else or death. They just eat whatever they eat with no concept of preservation or diversity whatsoever. It is survived of the fittest. There has been no chain reaction that certain species extinct and cause the next to extinct, than the next to extinct.... Whatever activity of human, animal, plants, fugues, bacteria...all balance itself in the long term on earth!!! Who put out forest fire before human existed? No body. But the forest fire destroy the âbio-diversityâ. No one cares. The earth take care of that by burning until there is no more tree to burn, or rain, or snow. New tree will start growing. âBio-diversityâ starts anew. Global Warming is Chicken Little shouting: the sky is falling.
The science behind "global warming" is non-conclusive ....... that's why the environmentalists keep reminding all of us that there is a "consensus". If something is a fact, you don't need a consensus. We don't go around saying there is a scientific consensus that the sun will rise tomorrow or that a plastic ball falls to earth at the same rate as a metal ball. When something is proven by reproducable scientific experiment, it becomes fact. It is only when things can't be proven that people try to shove down other people's throats by invoking a "global scientific consensus". This is nothing more than peer pressure and the fear of being different at work. I don't understand how people who believe that the weatherman can't give us a reliable 7 day forecast can have so much confidence in a 100 year prediction involving a stupendous number of variables using scientific understanding that is only just evolving. The margins of error involved in ANY conclusion are simply mind boggling. There is only one explanation - when people steadfastly refuse to listen to reason and hold desperately onto "facts" that fail the simple scientific test of reproduable falsifiable results .... what we have is religion. We can take measures to reduce carbon etc. - nothing wrong with playing it safe, but lets not elevate hearsay and supposition to the level of fact and science. *Especially* when it becomes valuable ammunition for regulation and tax loving politicians to exploit on the mindless masses. PS : It is worth nothing that a recent expedition by two women to prove Global Warming at the North Pole was scuttled because of unseasonably cold weather. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/ap_on_sc/polar_trek_1
Perhaps billions of $ of research grants need a consensus, as in don't let the real facts cut off funding. "They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability." Global Warming unpredictable? GW was called the greenhouse effect, then global warming, lately it's being called Climate Change. They don't know if it will get colder or warmer, but eventually it will change. Sounds like a good reason for the socialists to substantially damage the US economy to the level of a 3rd world country by social engineering and de-industrialization.
"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability." We absolutely positively must not do anything if Global Warming is so unpredictable. How do we know we don't do exactly the wrong thing!!! What if we decrease CO2 and make the green house effect worst!!! It is unpredictable! Then there is the blame EVERYTHING on Global Warming game: Too hot, it is Global Warming. Too cold, it is Global Warming. Katrina, it is Global Warming. Draught, it is Global Warming. Flood, it is Global Warming. Shit Happened, it is Global Warming. Anna Nicole Smith's body deteriorate too fast, it is Global Warming. It is called the Global Warming scientific consensus because you get a herd of sheep to make a consensus to fool the unsophisticated, un-informed and simple minded other herd of sheep.
gW is a tool for politicians, no way they gonna give it up...no matter what science says. in usa the dems needed something to base an agenda upon and they got it, it's a total creation of politicians and bureaucrats....and it will be exploited to drive policy...just like 911.