Right On The Right

I've had some quiet reservations about the massive use of Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs), but nothing major until recently. A while ago I wrote about CFLs damaging my laptop, but that was nothing more than a joke. The new evidence about the damage CFLs can do however is not a joking matter. Via Ed Morrissey of Hot Air:

Compact fluorescent light bulbs, long touted by environmentalists as a more efficient and longer-lasting alternative to the incandescent bulbs that have lighted homes for more than a century, are running into resistance from waste industry officials and some environmental scientists, who warn that the bulbs’ poisonous innards pose a bigger threat to health and the environment than previously thought. …

As long as the mercury is contained in the bulb, CFLs are perfectly safe. But eventually, any bulbs — even CFLs — break or burn out, and most consumers simply throw them out in the trash, said Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and editor of the journal Environmental Research.

“This is an enormous amount of mercury that’s going to enter the waste stream at present with no preparation for it,” she said.

How bad is the mercury problem? According to Ed, each individual bulb can contaminate thousands of gallons of water, putting trace amounts of mercury into our water supply that can be very toxic. Also, there's a huge problem when it comes to disposal. Perhaps Rush was right about these things afterall. Glenn, any thoughts on the matter?

Update: For idiots that disqualify FOX News simply because they're... well... FOX News, Daily Tech has all the information on the study you should need.

There's a huge concensus in the scientific community that humans are causing global warming and that global warming is going to destroy the world, in like 11 minutes or something like that. By huge concensus I mean Al Gore and people who get grants for supporting that theory. A reader with a solid scientific background e-mailed the following:

Sadly, the general public and the college/university students and professors in their scientific communities are woefully ill prepared to think critically (rather than be brainwashed) about most things political and scientific as of now! That has to change! Many of my colleagues and I are doing our best to aggressively address the misinformation campaign by the media and, sorry to say, unethical spokespersons on the global warming Issue. (We need common sense celebrities, I guess! Are there any? We're looking! Really!)

Emphasis hers. We do need some common sense in dealing with the global warming issue, and we do need to analyze reports for what they are, scientific theories with evidence. We also need to analyze reports with conflicting theories and evidence. The huge 'concensus' on the issue isn't that huge at all. In fact, the issue was addressed on the show Special Report with Brit Hume:

Earlier this year the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it was "90 percent likely" that man was having an impact on global temperatures. And dailytech.com reports an analysis of scientific papers in 2004 concluded that a majority of researchers supported what it called the "consensus view" that humans were effecting climate change.

But now a study of all research papers between 2004 and 2007 indicates only seven percent give an explicit endorsement of that so-called consensus. Forty-five percent give an implicit endorsement. But 48 percent of the papers are classified as neutral — neither accepting nor rejecting the hypothesis. And only one of the 528 papers reviewed makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

That one paper was the script for the movie The Day After Tomorrow. I'm joking of course, but the lack of concensus is something more people need to know about. It's now assumed that human-created global warming and climate change are legitimate scientific fact. It's simply not true. The verdict from the scientific community is still out, and the issue is beyond being politicized. Let's get a common sense concensus before putting on our Doomsday hats.

BUMP: NASA fixes temperature data and it turns out that 1998 was not the warmest year in the millenium. In fact, the warmest year was prior to WW2.

I don't know if anyone noticed lately, but a giant ball of fire, and by giant I mean 1,000,000x the size of the Earth, is burning relatively close to our planet. It's giving off more energy lately, and it's warmer. Many people would like us to believe that it's our fault. Bill Steigerwald nails it:

Going back 10,000 years, a 1998 study found that past periods of global warming coincided nicely with increased sunspot activity, which occur during increases in the sun's brightness and energy output. In 2004, a study by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said Earth was getting hotter because the sun was burning brighter than it had in 1,000 years.

We don't want to get into an ugly debate about the prime cause of global warming. But maybe all those sun-worshipping ancestors of ours were not such dummies after all.

Let's go ahead and weigh the options here. Are humanity's actions, which are relatively small in the grand scheme of things, destroying the planet, or is the giant ball of fire that's putting out more heat causing our temporary kick-up on the farenheit scale? I'm going to go with the second one. The sun, now the officially endorsed cause of global warming here on Right on the Right.

When it comes to alternative energy, the environazi crowd describe tons of benefits, and not very many withdrawals. Over at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Loyal Citizen Jackboot has a great post up about alternative energy and where the real hope lies. Should the green movement go nuclear? Check out this verbiage:

Ramping up the use of renewable energy would lead to the “rape of nature”, meaning nuclear power should be developed instead. So argues noted conservation biologist and climate change researcher Jesse Ausubel in an opinion piece based on his and others’ research.

Ausubel (who New Scientist interviewed in 2006) says the key renewable energy sources, including sun, wind, and biomass, would all require vast amounts of land if developed up to large scale production – unlike nuclear power. That land would be far better left alone, he says.

Would environmentalists be willing to rape nature just to shun nuclear energy? If it means shunning all the values they hate (business, capitalism, progress), then I'm sure they'll be willing to give Mother Nature a scissor kick to the ovaries. Raping nature to save nature. What will these wacky Goracle-followers think of next?

The circus of exaggerated ideas, also known as Live Earth, has begun. Al Gore once again is on top of his soapbox screaming about a threat that doesn't exist. Michelle Malkin also asks some questions for one of her readers about Live Earth. The reader's comment:

1.) What will be the true source of the power that will power all the lighting, the amplifiers and speakers, the concessions stands? Will it be massive arrays of solar cells?, Hydrogen fusion cells?, Wind Turbines? Ethanol Bio-Fueled generators?

Short answer? The hot air from Al Gore and his fellow propagandists.