Earth Hour!

[Michaelangelica]

This is the sort of crap, dissembling science from the promoters that angers me:-

On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour.

If the greenhouse reduction achieved in the Sydney CBD during Earth Hour was sustained for a year, it would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year.

Information about Earth Hour 2008, history, 2007 - Earth Hour 2008

 

See this site for some real stats

Earth Hour crashes to Earth | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

As with the graphs, so with the crowds:

 

More than 1000 people braved the chill and the rain to see Premier John Brumby and Lord Mayor John So lead the countdown to 8pm… At the top of the Rialto, a small crowd had a sense of anticlimax when there was no widespread blackout at 8pm. In fact, across the CBD rows of illuminated office windows, with little sign of beavering workers behind them, showed not everyone had read the memo.

 

The organisers will say never mind, this was about raising awareness (although not of raising awareness of the facts). But here’s the awareness it should raise: how difficult it is to get even a tiny cut in just electricity use for one lousy hour, in a country responsible for just 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions.

. . .

Again, it’s raising awareness of anything but the truth. In fact:

 

(T)he claimed dip in power was just for the CBD, not all Sydney. (Moreover), the 10 per cent cut claimed for the CBD is itself a gross exaggeration. A cut so tiny is trivial - equal to taking six cars off the road for a year. But David Solomon, a finance PhD student at the Chicago University’s graduate school of business, crunched Sydney’s power figures to exclude seasonal and daily fluctuations, and concluded… “the drop in electricity use during Earth Hour is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Earth Hour crashes to Earth | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

 

On coal and mercury that is new to me but perhaps it depends on where the coal comes from?

This is a local scientist talking about Australian Coal

"Dr. Karl's" reaction to coal power stations

In his book "Sensational Moments in Science", ABC Press, 2001. He has an interesting take on coal power:-

 

"In 1982, some 111 (US)nuclear-fired power plants consumed about 540 tonnes of nuclear fuel.

In the same year, coal-fired power plants released over 800 tonnes of uranium." into the atmosphere.

"If a single nuclear-fired plant released 8K of uranium into the bio-sphere. there would be . .an enormous outcry."

He says the nuclear content of coal has not yet reached general public awareness in the same way that the greenhouse effect AIDs, or the ozone hole have.

There are no nuclear regulations about the disposal of coal ash

 

Coal apparently contains a heap of uranium and thorium

He concludes that you will get three times more radiation from a coal fired power plant than a nuclear fueled power plant! That's if you include the complete nuclear fuel cycle mining, processing operating, disposal(!?)

If you don't include these your average coal-fired power plant puts out 100 times more radiation than a nuclear-fired plant.

p103-104