OT; Widespread Global warming

No I don't, no, it isn't, and no, they aren't. You're wrong on every count, making it all up as usual, using your imagination instead of actual information.

Dress like other Americans? I make clothes last many fold longer just by treating them with care. My suits from nearly 30 years ago still fit, still look new, and I still wear them. Dress shoes serve me at least a decade before being resoled, to be used some more. My Sperry topsiders were given to me in 1992; sneakers I wear to the bitter, bitter end. My Dad bought me a jacket when I was 16--it's very slightly tight, but I still wear it, still love it. Typical American?

Eat like other Americans? I'm a vegetarian, bake my own bread, cook all my own food, and grow some in my garden. Two pounds of sugar last me a couple years (sometimes just one if I bake a lot of goodies). I walk to shop--a few miles--for the exercise, the scenery, and the (environmental) savings. I put out the garbage but every two to three months because that's how long it takes me to fill a can. Yes Bill, I'm a typical American.

My house and furnishings? Suffice it to say you're wrong, again.

You, the libertine, would lecture me on temperance, about tallying my footprint, then recommend yet another one of your absurd, wrong, prejudiced, moronic over-generalizations to quantify it. Your ignorance and audacity are an amazement to us all.

You rate your own "footprint" at "less than 10 tons" a year based on your association with a particular country? Why your annual pilgrimage to Australia alone uses the fuel I consume in an entire year twice over. Try doing the math Bill.

I do all of this and more--always have--and neither boast, nor try to force it on you. That's the difference between us.

No sir Bill, *you* are the problem, not me. You're the profligate wastrel, the energy spendthrift, the one who's callously and selfishly indifferent to the environment, your fellow man, and the fate of the planet.

You're a bigot, and a pompous, presumptuous fool in your presumptions. But nevertheless you do continue to amuse, and I thank you once again for that!

And I say none of this in anger or of a spirit of unkindness--if anything I feel an odd affection and sympathy for you. No, I'm just stating the obvious, out loud, for once. Besides, it's USENET and I know you can take it. Shoot, you might even start conserving...

-- With best regards, James Arthur

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That's fun, isn't it? For a while there I was running my shaver off solar power, and the flashlight I use every night, but I admit I've slacked. So has the sun for that matter--it's snowing again.

Roofs are a pain, but I betcha I could fix yours. Maybe next time I'm out the gang could give it a whirl... (Other people's home- improvement projects are always more fun than your own.)

Hey, I heard from Buzz too. He's fled CA for greener pastures, all puns intended. :-)

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Well said.

And look at the way all these alarmist fly around the world for mega conferences to try and impress on us there is a problem. 45000 at Copenhagen in 2009 with 1200 limos, some brought in from Sweden and Germany to cope with demand, and 140 private planes.

They could have had a video conference.

Global warming conferences are self-fulfilling prophesy.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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I'm not wrong on every count, just the one's where your personal eccentricities make you bizarre.

Figure 3 of the carbon footprint article divides the average carbon footprint up into eleven catagories. I gave you the full benenfit of your heating economy on the oil gas and coal segment, good for 15%. You want to claim clothes and personal effects, for another 4% and food and drink which is another 5%. Private transport is 10% - and you work so you have a car so your occasional walks may save 5%.

This sums to 29%.

Suffice it to say you can't say why. Your house was built, it's got appliances, floor-coverings and it gets painted from time to time. You use financial services, public transport (in the sense that it exists so that you could use it), electricity, "public services" which presumably includes sewage and water, go on holiday from time to time and indulge in the usual amount of recreation and enterainment.

I'd be surprised if you come out lower than 70% of the US average, at about 14 tons of CO2 per year.

So far, my generalisations look more plausible than your wildly over- opitmistic - if convneinetly un-specific claim about how exceptionally low your carbon foot-print is.

I'm audaciously challenging your self-satisfied self-image. How very wrong of me ...

A return flight from Amsterdam (AMS) to Sydney (SYD) represents 3.8 tons of CO2 emissions. It may exceed the fuel you directly consume in one year, but it's a fraction of your carbon foot-print - albeit a signficant fraction.

Since the rest of my life is less extravangant - lots of doing the shopping on my bike, car milage about 7,500 km per year - say 4,500 miles - the ten tons probably isn't too far off the mark.

It's a difference between us. The main difference is that you are convinced that you are right, despite any evidnece anybody else can find and I'm scepticl about everything, including my own expertise.

Extravgant rhetoric, granting that you don't know much about how I live. Flying to Australia once a year doesn't make me an energy spendthrift, so you seem to have imagined some other - convenient extravagance to justify your mad claim.

Scarcely a bigot, and the pompous must be in the eye of the beholder.

A slightly implausible claim.

I've been conserving - in small and practical ways - all my life. Your eccentricies don't represent the sort of consrvative life-style that one could sell to the population at large, and merely make the approach look ridiculous. But you don't mind making ridiculous and nonsensical claims, as you've just demonstrated - again.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Actually typical Jame Arthur rhetoric - long on loaded words and short on verifialbe facts.

But then the reporters wouldn't have paid any attention.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

If there were enough of them to represent even a small proportion of the tourist ai traffic, you might be justified in making this claim - as it is, it's just another example of your incapacity for quantitative thinking.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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But since this means that he might have shaved 3 tons off his notional

- American averge - 20 ton CO2 footprint - nowhere near enough to do anything useful in delaying anthropogenic global warming.

Keeping my house at the normal 70 degrees F is "the opposite"? I'd have to be just as eccentirc as James Arthur, but in the opposite direction, to qualify there - if his thermostat is at a life- threatening 45F (illegally low for a work place, by the way) I'd have to set mine to 95F qualify as equally strange in the opposite direction.

What a bizarre reading of what I've suggested. I'm all for letting the free market adjust people's behaviour, once taxes have been used to set prices that include the environmental costs now being ignored.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I typed in my stats and got 3.13 metric tons (annual) from this calculator:

Don't hold me to that though--now that Bill Sloman's convinced me that conservation is eccentric, stupid and futile, I'm thinking I'm not wasting enough.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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I wonder what he's claimed? 3.13 metric tons seems improbably low.

Figure 3 from tht website put finacial services as 3% of the carbon footprint, share of public services as 12%, and public transport as 3% for an irreducible total of 18%, or 3.6 metric tons as a proportion of the American average, which means that James Arthur sems to be claiming to consume nothing, to not own or drive a car, to never buy new clothes or underwear and to expend nothing on recreation and leisure - when we know he goes skiing with John Larkin.

That web-site does put my annual flight to Sydney and back at 3.08 metric tons of CO2, when the caluclar I found put it as 3.8 metric tons, so it could be one of those lying feel-good sites aimed at rich Republicans.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Your attitude seems to be the same as this guy. "I'm all right it's the rest of you that are the problem." He works for the Guardian and BBC amongst others.

He wants to reduce population from the billions to the millions and he has a family...

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Few people want to hear that agriculture is unsustainable. Fewer still care to consider that the civilization it supports will therefore come to an end. Who wants to hear their whole world is going to go away? Yet as surprising as it may seem, there is room for opti­mism. The way our will be diffcult, but will open to a new beginning. Ideally we could begin systematically scaling back agriculture and gradually disman­tling civilization. We could turn instead to small scale, localized horticulture and then to tribal, non-industrial and non-agricultural ways of living. The transition could include a concerted worldwide effort to support humane, voluntary measures enabling our numbers to decline gradually and dramatically.

/end quote

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Though this raises the frightening specter of triggering loss of life before it would happen other­wise, the argument is that bringing down civilization sooner would leave more life intact than would a delayed and drawn out collapse. We face hard choices.

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the rest of you that are the problem." He works for the Guardian and

If he is right - and this seems improbable - agriculture isn't going to be capable of feeding our current population for much longer, which would make population decline inevitable. Large chunks of Europe are already on the road to reducing their populations, as birth rates fall well short of replacing the current population, and we could sustain our current culture with many fewer people, so there's nothing intrinsically objectionable in his attitude.

I don't quite see why Ravinghorde interprets this as "I'm all right, it's the rest of you that are the problem" or why he attributes this attitude to me.

I know perfectly well that my carbon footprint is unsustainable, along with that of pretty much everybody else in Europe, Australia and North America. If we all chose to live as James Arthur claims to live, our carbon footprimt would still be unsustainable.

What is needed is for us to replace our fossil-carbon fired power stations with sustainable power sources embedded in a big grid - wind and solar power backed up by enough energy storage to carry us overnight (for solar power) and in a big enough grid that the wind will always be blowing somewhere, and increase the power than can be delivered by the grid until it can also replace the internal combustion engines in our cars, trucks, tractors and buses.

This needs the cooperation of society as a whole. I don't see much point in making futile and irrelevant gestures before society as whole is ready to start making - and keep on making - the large investment involved.

Since James Arthur doesn't understand enough to see that this investment is necessary, he does represent the real problem. Ravinghorde isn't quite a bad a James Arthur - Ravinghorde does at least read some of the scientific literature, albeit with a very partisan eye - but he's still a long way short of being persuaded that such an investment is either necessary or desirable.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I am persuaded that investment in energy is required. I don't consider wind to have much of a part in this. My reasons have little to do with AGW.

Peak oil will occur, not as soon as the alarmists claim, as will peak coal. It seems daft to use these for fuel when there are better alternatives such as nuclear, hydro, tidal and, in the right parts of the world, solar.

It is daft for Europe to be dependent on Russsia for gas and for Europe and North America to be dependent on the Middle East. Energy independance should be a government priority. I am just waiting for Russia to turn off the gas again this winter to bully some ex Soviet state.

It is also clear that for much of the world the base load has to be provided by nuclear and hydro. Wind and solar only have much use when backed up by pumped storage or similar schemes.

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Yes Bill, conservation is the opposite of conspicuous consumption. Heating just the room I'm in to, a lower, greener delta_T (thus conserving), is the opposite of your indulgently and unnecessarily heating an entire house to a lossy, earth-wasting high delta_T.

Tis' a lovely free market indeed where you get the government to economically ban all the choices, then let the people "choose." One again Bill, you parody yourself.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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That's extremely impressive--are you sure you covered everything? If you clip your toenails, why that's a quarter-ton penalty right there.

I threw in all my figures, plus padded ~15% and added an some extra travel for a safety margin.

They're just estimates, but it was kind of fun finding that Bill burns more on vacation than I burn the entire year.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Ah, so you, Bill, deem a quick reduction by half or more unworthy of your personal inconvenience? Naturally. There's no price we shouldn't pay for your comfort.

Instead the obvious solution is to urge gov't force to compel 'investment' in stupid, wasteful, expensive schemes, political payoffs to favored supporters with long leadtimes, abysmal fiscal efficiency, and high technical risk. (And huge carbon cost of construction, while we're at it.) Gov't geniuses on the re-electio^H^H^H^H^H^H central planning committee can centrally plan it, because they're, well, geniuses.

In short, you'd make the planet worse immediately, and crush prosperity in the bargain by re-allocating productive capital to unproductive--nay, destructive--ends. The tsunami of destructive effects that ripple forward from that misallocation are legion, but beyond your ken.

OTOH as my low consumption experiment demonstrates, with no risk, no investment, and no technology at all, we can cut our consumption substantially, immediately, voluntarily, with little cost, zero waste, and no ill effect whatsoever, *whenever we so choose*. You don't have to take it as far as I have to make a huge difference.

Voluntary conservation, however, should be disdained and discouraged. Forcible stupidity is so much more thrilling.

Right. Make (other) people invest trillions, incur negative benefits for decades, increase atmospheric CO2 immediately, and likely never break even. That's a lot better than the Bill Slomans of the planet voluntarily adjusting their thermostats.

Wind, in the US anyway, is quite economic in places. The drawbacks are that it only works where it's windy, while the wind blows, and the machines scream like banshees--something of a cross between a bird- blender and a jet engine. You would not want one on your block (or anywhere close).

Harnessing the tide seems certain to harm all sorts of critters who depend on it, doesn't it?

Hydro's fully tapped in the US.

Yep. If you could just get your Slomans to cut back a tad you'd be way more secure.

Hydro's a limited resource and not without considerable environmental cost. ISTM the first, best step is to use what energy we have more wisely--do more, using less.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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The drawback is the problem. The UKs wind power was almost non existent in December during the coldest December on record (since about 1910) for the UK and second coldest for Central England since

So the power had to come from other sources which means at peak demand wind might as well not have existed.

The solutons are a Europe wide scheme or more pumped storage then wind might have a use.

Yep, less spotted goblins or some such put paid to the Bristol Channel tidal scheme capable of generating 10% of UK electricity.

I hope you don't need more dams to stop a water shortage anywhere. The rising US population will require more water.

Agreed. Don't waste it.

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The joke is that the thermostat in the living room actually controls the temperature of the circulating water in the central heating system. The temperature in evey room is actually individually controlled by thermostatic radiator valves on the radiators in each room.

The thermostat on the radiator in our bedroom is set low because we can't sleep in an overly warm room, the thermostat on the guest bedroom is set low whenever we don't have a guest in the room, the thermostat in the living room is set high because if it wasn't the control on the circulating water wouldn't work. It is a messy system, but it was grafted onto an existing central heating system - parts of which go back to 1936 - and works well enough that our heating bills were quite a lot lower than those of the previous owners, who had the house from 1960 to 1993, and did a couple of up-grades of their won.

There was a time when I had a programmable battery powered Honeywell thermostatic radiator valve on the radiator in the bedroom - bought in the 1980's in Cambridge for a different bedroom - which could adjust the target temperature to be different at different times of the day, but that got lost in the move from Cambridge.

The choices that you want to retain are economically banned - in the long term - by the consequences of anthropogenic global warming. You lack the education to perceive this, but allowing short-sighted twits to wreck the world does strikes me as taking freedom a little too far.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The trip to Australia isn't vacation. It's work-related, and forms part of a slow process that will leave us living in Australia for most of the year from 2013.

-- Bil Sloman, Nijmegen