a Good Environmental Article

queen · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 4:08 pm Post subject: a Good Environmental Article

This article is the god's honest truth. I can speak from experience dealing with mercury "spills" in my former life as an environmental consultant. And the bulbs they speak of are absolute lunacy. I have been on demo jobs that were stopped because of a single flourescent bulb that was not removed properly and shattered, and mercury was released. Now, they were not the same flourescent bulbs as described here, but it was the same mercury. I won't have these things in my house because of the hazards and because of the cost of the bulbs, and the light sucks. Read it, it really is a good article. Love Junk Science!

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Junk Science: Light Bulb Lunacy

Sunday, April 29, 2007

By Steven Milloy

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About $4.28 for the bulb and labor — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about $2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favor of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) — a move already either adopted or being considered in California, Canada, the European Union and Australia.

According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter’s bedroom:

It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter.

The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a “low-ball” estimate of $2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began “gathering finances” to pay for the $2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn’t cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as $180 annually in energy costs — and assuming that Bridges doesn’t break any more CFLs — it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.

Even if you don’t go for the full-scale panic of the $2,000 cleanup, the do-it-yourself approach is still somewhat intense, if not downright alarming.

Consider the procedure offered by the Maine DEP’s Web page entitled, “What if I accidentally break a fluorescent bulb in my home?”

Don’t vacuum bulb debris because a standard vacuum will spread mercury-containing dust throughout the area and contaminate the vacuum.

Ventilate the area and reduce the temperature. Wear protective equipment like goggles, coveralls and a dust mask. Collect the waste material into an airtight container. Pat the area with the sticky side of tape. Wipe with a damp cloth. Finally, check with local authorities to see where hazardous waste may be properly disposed.

The only step the Maine DEP left off was the final one: Hope that you did a good enough cleanup so that you, your family and pets aren’t poisoned by any mercury inadvertently dispersed or missed.

This, of course, assumes that people are even aware that breaking CFLs entails special cleanup procedures.

The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007, and, surprisingly, environmentalists.

It’s quite odd that environmentalists have embraced the CFL, which cannot now and will not in the foreseeable future be made without mercury. Given that there are about 4 billion lightbulb sockets in American households, we’re looking at the possibility of creating billions of hazardous waste sites such as the Bridges’ bedroom.

Usually, environmentalists want hazardous materials out of, not in, our homes.

These are the same people who go berserk at the thought of mercury being emitted from power plants and the presence of mercury in seafood. Environmentalists have whipped up so much fear of mercury among the public that many local governments have even launched mercury thermometer exchange programs.

As the activist group Environmental Defense urges us to buy CFLs, it defines mercury on a separate part of its Web site as a “highly toxic heavy metal that can cause brain damage and learning disabilities in fetuses and children” and as “one of the most poisonous forms of pollution.”

Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury thermometer factory in India. But where are mercury-containing CFLs made? Not in the U.S., under strict environmental regulation. CFLs are made in India and China, where environmental standards are virtually non-existent.

And let’s not forget about the regulatory nightmare known as the Superfund law, the EPA regulatory program best known for requiring expensive but often needless cleanup of toxic waste sites, along with endless litigation over such cleanups.

We’ll eventually be disposing billions and billions of CFL mercury bombs. Much of the mercury from discarded and/or broken CFLs is bound to make its way into the environment and give rise to Superfund liability, which in the past has needlessly disrupted many lives, cost tens of billions of dollars and sent many businesses into bankruptcy.

As each CFL contains 5 milligrams of mercury, at the Maine “safety” standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter, it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to “safely” contain all the mercury in a single CFL. While CFL vendors and environmentalists tout the energy cost savings of CFLs, they conveniently omit the personal and societal costs of CFL disposal.

Not only are CFLs much more expensive than incandescent bulbs and emit light that many regard as inferior to incandescent bulbs, they pose a nightmare if they break and require special disposal procedures. Should government (egged on by environmentalists and the Wal-Marts of the world) impose on us such higher costs, denial of lighting choice, disposal hassles and breakage risks in the name of saving a few dollars every year on the electric bill?
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Wandering Nick · Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 10:19 pm Post subject:

well...............................................................................................................................that couldnt have been too "Jolly" i wasnt going to ask why the cost was so high...but umm yea i found out. This article has convinced me to get LEDs

Lord Clarke · Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 10:34 am Post subject:

queen · Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 11:12 am Post subject:

have you replaced a carpet lately????

Still a good hunk of cash...
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Lord Clarke · Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 9:36 pm Post subject:

Anarae Borealis · Guest 0 Gold

:shock:

ok ok, Wasnt flurescent lighting out in the 70's, 80's? Long tube that went across your ceiling? Then we moved onto "normal" shape bulbs, and now energy saving ones..... I really need to keep an eye on this, Dryktnath has a bad mercury allergy...

Lord Clarke · Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 5:35 pm Post subject:

Here is another article for those of you who take what your local papers and your bleeding heart liberal tree hugging teachers are feeding you....

.....If you are going to be informed, read this and many other articles....don't take my word for it, or Al Gore's, or your teacher's, or 1 or 2 different studies.....read as much as you can about a subject, any subject, and form your own opinions....and you might find what you know to be true today is what you know to be false tomorrow.

Runaway Climate Captured?
Monday, September 03, 2007

By Steven Milloy

Runaway global warming, the climate alarmist fantasy let loose on the public, has not yet been captured, but it certainly appears to have at least been cornered by new data from researchers at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH).

In a study published in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters on Aug. 9, the UAH researchers provide more real-world evidence of the atmosphere's self-regulating nature. If this particular self-regulatory mechanism is confirmed by additional research, it will represent yet another deal-breaker for the scientific hypothesis that has propped up climate alarmism thus far.

Global warmers claim that increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases are raising global temperatures. But even if this claim was true — and there is ample reason to be skeptical — greenhouse gases by themselves could only warm the planet by so much.

One of the oft-cited predictions of potential warming is that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from pre-industrial levels — from 280 to 560 parts per million — would alone cause average global temperature to increase by about 1.2 degrees Centigrade.

But such a modest warming by itself is unlikely to cause catastrophic climate change. At a current atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 380 parts per million, we have already observed about half that predicted temperature change without experiencing any climatic chaos.

Recognizing the ho-hum nature of such a temperature change, the alarmist camp moved on to hypothesize that even this slight warming will cause irreversible changes in the atmosphere that, in turn, will cause more warming. These alleged "positive feedback" cycles supposedly will build upon each other to cause runaway global warming, according to the alarmists.

Existing climate models, for example, assume that a warmer atmosphere will cause an increase in high-altitude cirrus clouds — a positive feedback into the climate system since cirrus clouds trap outgoing radiation emitted by the Earth.

When you feed the above-mentioned warming scenario — the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels causing 1.2 degrees Centigrade of warming — into a climate model that has been turbo-charged with positive feedback, the resulting estimated warming increases by 250 percent to 3 degrees Centigrade.

Many have questioned the validity of the hypothetical positive feedback mechanism. Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen, for example, proposed in 2001 an explanation called the "iris effect" for why amplified warming has never materialized.

Based on a limited set of data, Lindzen hypothesized that cirrus clouds and associated moisture actually work in opposition to surface temperature changes. When the Earth's surface warms, Lindzen supposed, the clouds open up to allow heat to escape. A cooling surface, in turn, causes clouds to close and trap heat.

This elegant atmospheric self-regulatory mechanism was soon attacked for being based on limited data and the inability of other researchers to be able to identify the iris effect in other cloud and temperature data sets.

But the new research from the University of Alabama-Huntsville supports the validity of the iris effect.

Analyzing six years of data from four instruments aboard three NASA and NOAA satellites, the UAH researchers tracked precipitation amounts, air and sea surface temperatures, high- and low-altitude cloud cover, reflected sunlight and infrared energy escaping out to space.

Rather than the hypothesized positive feedback of the climate models, the UAH data actually shows a strong negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease, allowing infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space.

"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce [climate model-based] estimates of future warming by 75 percent," said UAH researcher Roy Spencer in a media release.

"The role of clouds in global warming is widely agreed to be pretty uncertain," Spencer said. "Right now, all climate models predict that clouds will amplify warming. I'm betting that if the climate models' 'clouds' were made to behave the way we see these clouds behave in nature, it would substantially reduce the amount of climate change the models predict for the coming decades."

If you think about it for a moment, none of this should be surprising. As explained in greater detail at JunkScience.com, if positive feedback from warming was really a dominant climatic effect, then it should be very easy to identify by considering an unusual recent weather event — the 1997-98 El Niño event which caused temperatures to spike to the highest level since the 1930s.

But since the Earth cooled almost as abruptly as it warmed, we can only assume that no positive feedback occurred. Our El Niño experience indicates that the Earth is not precariously perched upon some critical temperature threshold beyond which a whole new type of physics takes over and runaway global warming becomes a self-perpetuating nightmare.

The seasonal heating of the hemispheres — quite a severe annual warming event — is also worthy of mention. Average surface temperature in the northern hemisphere, for example, warms by 3.8 degrees Centigrade from January to July every year without triggering any self-perpetuating positive feedback.

It is, therefore, somewhat difficult to view ongoing global temperature change — amounting to an estimated 0.6 plus or minus 0.2 degrees Centigrade over the past 120 years — as being dangerous.

No doubt the iris effect will require more research to confirm its existence. But at least real-world data encourage such research. That's a lot more than can be said for the imaginary notion of runaway climate and the climate models that are rigged to make-believe it exists.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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"The American Indians found out what happens when you don't control immigration."

queen · Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 7:01 pm Post subject: