Well, actually I forgot my original point of all of this, which was that I the climate change and “global warming” people do have to put such concepts into perspective that regular people can understand.

The reason I switched to CFL for lighting, is because it saves on electricity costs and lasts practically forever (well, I hated having to buy incandescent light bulbs every 3 to 4 months and having them in stock). The problem is that when I moved and went back to my mothers where I had the lights, my mom switched it back to incandescent! WTF? I thought.

Here is what I thought: 1 CFL lasts ~3 years, which is 48-72 months. I can buy 1 CFL for around $2 USD (6 pack at Wal-Mart for $12-$14). I can buy a regular light bulb for $0.40 (2-pack is usually $0.80). A regular light bulb, lasts on average 3 months. So in three years, I would have used 16 regular light bulbs for a total of $6.40 (to $9.60). Three times the amount over the years that I spent on the CFL. This amount doesn’t include the savings on electric bill from using less power.

What my mom (probably) thought: “Oh, $0.80 vs $7.00 (2-pack CFL), I’ll go with $0.80!”

My only complaint with CFLs is that they contain Mercury, which is harmful to the environment in that it is harmful to humans and other animal / plant life.

The good news is that the emerging OLED market should bring LED lights down further or at least enable it to be more efficient. Not that OLED is going to be cheap, but the power usage will be less than that of even LED lights and if they can get the lights to last 50,000 hours.

Well then damn, that is five years, if you left it on 24/7 and 19 years, if you used it 7 hours each day. That is the initial lifetime, they should be able to extend that life to closer to 100,000 hours, which, I mean, is even more truly forever than you can get.

Plus, with that, you can expect it to run at the same brightness of a 60-watt regular light bulb at less than a watt (estimate from the 3-6 watt LED equivalent). Also,given its nature, you can expect the light to be more natural than CFLs and less of a strain on the eyes.

So I mean, the focus for me wasn’t, “I have to save the environment,” it was more, “How can I save money and do less work?” When the price for LED lights come down, must be less than $20 for a single one equivalent to 60-watt regular light bulb, I’m going to jump right on to them. You can bet I will be using OLEDs when they become cheap enough to justify the initial cost.

The problem with it all, is that scientists aren’t all in agreement, you can find them. However, I mean, people are biased. If you start saying, well, you know, “Maybe…” people tend to think you are pulling shit out of your ass and stop listening. Therefore I can kind of understand why Al Gore said it that way. It just doesn’t further his argument when other scientists come out and say that the theory isn’t all there.

Well, that is to say that while it is true that the Earth’s temperatures has increased (if you go off the current proof and statistics), it is a little premature to say that it is humans that are causing it. The problem I think, is that governments aren’t really interested in the facts, just the hype and I think that is where rational people tend to converge from the whole “Humans caused it.” Governments appears to be a little bit more concern with raping the piggy bank of the people (You hear about the governments attempting to prevent and tax cow farts?) and less concerned with the environment.

If governments were more concerned with the environment, then more trees would be planted, more land would be declared protected, more of a group political effort will be pushed towards preserving forests (or reforesting after cutting down) in governments that have no restrictions and the lumber corporations are taking until there is nothing left. Well, more so than they are doing today, I mean they have tried in the past with little success.

The bigger problem is that cap and trade and government regulation runs counter to progress and the thing called an economy. I will predict that there wouldn’t be one, if the current USA government continues its push to cap and trade carbon-dioxide.

I mean, at what point are they going to start taxing my breathing? Carbon-dioxide exists naturally and the process for regulating it also exists naturally, so, people overall aren’t going to really change their behaviour, so I guess a few hundred-million trees planted now might make a difference in 2020 and hopefully a few hundred billion will be planted by 2100. Well, you would create jobs planting trees, instead of killing jobs by restricting human behaviour.

I also have problems believing that humans can affect something so massive as the planet, by adding to something that exists naturally. The problem then becomes is that given that we are adding such and such amount and such and such is being subtracted, then at what point should we be at? The percentages aren’t changing that much and temperatures are hardly being affected by it. By current estimates, if the trend continues, whether caused by humans or not, then the Earth will be only a degree or two hotter in 2100 than what it is now.

Well, I suppose the other problem is that if cap and trade was enacted, then basically what would happen is that people would be so ticked off at the prices of everything that the next election would be a fairly landslide one for the party not in power.

Each component in the atmosphere (well, most of them), has a role in the existing climate structure. Ozone (remember that hole, a while back?), CO2, Oxygen and Nitrogen, all have their own roles, and their percentage in the atmosphere matches that role.
The role of CO2 is to keep the earth warm, by “stopping” the heat from escaping the earth surface. If there was no CO2 in the atmosphere, life as we know it now could not exist, as earth would be completely frozen. CO2 is about 0.038% today, much less than a percent, but this low percentage enables all life to live on this planet (you too, by the way). So, it seems that there is quite an effect to less than 1% of a gas in the atmosphere.
Ozone, for instance, is about 0.000007% (thank you, Wikipedia), but still keeps you from getting skin cancer.

Because the earth-atmosphere relationship is so complex, we cannot actually predict the results of atmosphere composition changes (chaos theory, bla bla bla), but because the percentages match the roles, it is clear that drastic percentage changes will change the existing balance.

Now, some will say, that climate changes naturally. It changes all the time, true, but not so fast. Evolution keeps up with climate changes over the natural history, but when we change it too fast (a couple of centuries is nothing in evolutionary terms), evolution can’t keep up.

So, global warming, climate change, and all of these nice terms mean one thing – Something is changing, we are causing it, and we have no clue what the results of the change will be. However, as we (and all other life forms), have adapted to the current atmospheric balance, this change will probably not be very good for us…

Of course, we can all ignore this balance shift, and maybe nothing drastic will happen for a while. But because these changes take time, when and if something does happen, it will be too late to fix it. Then we will all mutate into gray-green puddles of ooze and die horrible deaths (or just get cancer, instead).

One final comment:
The term “Global Warming” refers to an increase in the average temperature, not to everywhere warming at once. This increase has been observed, but since people are too dumb to care about averages and scientific crap like that, you have to scare them with floods.

Thanks for reading,
Ofri