in using common sense to protect our environment.

Environment

I’m an environmentalist, but moderate. I care for, and respect nature. But we also can’t save every little species of insect that pops up. Species come and go all the time. There will always be alarmists and nut-cases. The trick is understanding the science and statistics well enough, understanding how nature works, so that you can make decisions on the real issues and weed out the bullshit. If you really want to do something about the environment, then we need to pressure China and India. They’re pumping more crud into the envronment right now than we ever did. The world is like an aquarium, and whatever they dump in, eventually affects us too.

Mercury: Outright ban on this toxic element. There is absolutely no reason for it to be in anything anymore. Not even fluorescent lights. There are now viable alternatives for everything. The EU has already imposed a ban on this substance. Why are we so far behind? You can thank the “greenies” for putting mercury back into your house! Yes indeed. In a package that can, and does, leak and break. That compact flourescent light bulb you bought to save energy... is a toxic time bomb. Expect to spend roughly $10,000 on a hazmat cleanup of your home if you drop it... or it leaks.

Natural Foods: Glad to see this movement thriving. I will help by banning antibiotics from animal feed. Where do you think MRSA came from? We are exposed to antibiotics every day, especially in red meat and milk, our staples. There is no reason for this any more. There are probiotic alternatives. Have you compared natural milk to regular lately? It’s like comparing ice cream to water. I will ban bovine growth hormone as well.

Food packaging: You know what irks me? I go to the grocery store, and buy a box of something to eat, and it’s less than half full. I mean really a lot less! We’re talking huge box, damn near empty. What a waste of packaging! And how much is all that extra packaging costing me in terms of product I could have had anyway? It’s absurd. It’s a waste. I will impose a maximum 10% ratio of packaging weight to product weight for food items. And it must all be recyclable, or biodegradable, and non-toxic. Less packaging = less junk in our landfills.

Wind Power: Hey guys, get a clue. Imagine a big circle defined by the rotation of the tip of the propeller. Your goal is not maximum efficiency per square inch of propeller surface, or even maximum efficiency per square inch of circle. Your goal is extracting the maximum possible power out of the wind moving through that circle, efficient or not. I can tell you right now that the skinny little propellers you’re using now are just not doing it. I bet you can almost triple the output. Why do you think the old-style windmills had big huge fat fins? I think you got into the science too far, and missed the point. Call me if you need help.

Hydrogen Power: This would be nice, but just where are you going to get all that hydrogen, eh? By burning fossil fuels to create electricity to power the hydrogen generators, that’s where. Didn’t think it through that far, did you?

Ethanol: Again, nice try. But some of us did the math and figured out that it takes almost as much energy to create, as it produces. This process still needs a lot of work.

Solar Energy: Now we’re talking. This is good science. There is more to be done, but it’s a good direction to go. If we can get this functional, then we can create hydrogen fuel, and everyone will be happy.

Alternative Energy in General: We have to be careful here. If you run the numbers, you would find that to use wind power to meet our energy needs, we would have to literally cover the planet with windmills. Every square inch, and then some. Ethanol is even worse, in that every square inch of arable land, every last rain forest, every last protected reserve, would have to be tilled under and converted to corn. And then some. Solar? Again, we would literally have to block out the sun. Alterative renewable energy can only meet some small fraction of our needs, not all of it.

Nuclear Energy: Hands down winner. No contest. Nuclear energy provides pollution-free energy with no disruption to the environment. No CO2. No emmissions. Zero. And no rain forests cut down. No birds chopped in half. The sun can remain warm over our heads. We have enough nuclear fuel for hundreds, if not thousands of years. This will provide us with sufficient time to switch to fusion energy, which is very likely the energy of the future. My only three concerns with Nuclear energy: safety, safety, and safety. I will do my best to make sure that radiation leaks, even small ones, cannot ever happen.

I’m an outside person: There is nowhere I would rather be, than outside. I live for spring, worship summer, revel in fall, but hate winter. The Playstation is reserved for rainy days and below 50. Personally, I think we should incorporate the “Golf Index” forecasts into the NWS so we can have “absolutely-perfect-day” warnings like we do for severe thunderstorms and such. Then we can all know when to play hooky... :)

Global Warming

I used to like Al Gore. I even voted for him. But he’s gone off the deep end. He’s just plain flat out wrong, and lying about, global warming. The scientific community is in an uproar over his exaggerations and distortions of the facts. I was believing it too, until I took the time to do some research.

It is pure hogwash. A recent study correlated increases and decreases in cosmic rays with temperature fluctuations on earth, much more strongly than any man-made interference. The graphs and charts that the greenies are waving around show only a simple correlation between CO2 and warm air! Which, if you think about it, makes sense, because more critters that make CO2 live in the warm places where that warm air came from.

And to boot, there is actually no evidence that a warmer earth is a bad thing. Warmer generally means wetter, and wetter is generally better for crops, which generally means more food. So how is more food a bad thing? Did you know that corn grows better with higher CO2? Most plants do.

Did you read the report on Cosmic Rays and temperature variations? Have you seen the graphs of carbon dioxide levels .vs. temperature (over the last 400million years)? No, I’m sure you haven’t. But I have. I took the time to look it up and study it. Cosmic Radiation shows a very clear correlation to temperature. Carbon dioxide, methane, actually just pick a gas, any gas, they all show correlation for just the last couple years. Yeah, when you measure temperature in cities, of course they do! Really. It’s all hooey. I don’t know why the “greenies” made this up, but they did. They even skew the graphs. You’ll notice that they all start at 300ppm and go to 400ppm, to make it look bigger. It’s fictitious. Go *study* the scientific reports. Carbon dioxide has not been proven to be the cause of the current warming trend.

In fact, we are at the start of a minimum for solar output, which has definitively been shown to increase temperature (yes, it’s backwards). We are also at the start of a cosmic ray minimum, which has also been shown definitively to cause an increase in temperature (yes, this is backwards too). Add the two, and they equal the temperature rise we are seeing. It simply doesn’t matter what we do. Even had humans not inhabited the planet at all, the temperature would be going up right now anyway. This is normal.

The Kyoto protocol is a bad deal too. Sell and buy the rights to produce carbon dioxide? Give me a break. This is simply yet another way for non-productive countries to suck up our hard earned dollars. That’s right. We would just end up buying carbon rights from countries that have not yet industrialized. It’s a give-away, a freebie. We would be paying poor countries to stay poor! Forget that.

If not us, somebody else will burn all that oil, and coal, and methane. I guarantee it.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not anti-environment. Lead and mercury emmisions, CFC emissions, pollution controls. Those are all well and good and I give credit to the scientific community for them. I am open to more when the evidence is solid.

The moral of this story is not that the Greenies can’t be trusted, no, but rather that statistics lie. I think you knew that. What you don’t know is that I know how to make statistics tell the truth. That’s the moral of this story, that I cannot be so easily fooled.

My alternative energy policies will reduce CO2, even though I do not believe it causes Global Warming. It’s win-win, either way.

Update 6/7/07 - Dirty snow. Yes, you heard right. Dirty snow. A study just out shows definitively, that soot from the air causes snow in the polar regions to darken. This, in turn, traps more heat, causing temperatures to rise and the snow to melt faster. In fact, it accounts for over 75% of what some think that CO2 was responsible for. CO2 is looking less and less like the culprit for global warming. Where is all the dirty soot in the air coming from nowadays? India and China, to name a few. Not the USA.