EARTH HOUR - worldwide event - Please participate on 3/28/09!!

[TheDuckCrew]

cool! i wanna do it!

 

[hippiechicks]

 

[Rhett&SarahsMom]

we are in.

We had no power for an hour last night. And only Half power for a hour before that.

Yeah that freaked me out. Lights flickered. I looked at the stove clock and it was dead. But the over head light was working. The fridge was dead. Pantry and bathroom were fine. Upstairs dead. Basement dead. Half the living room dead.

No breakers flipped. Yeah. Panic mode.

Turns out it was a transformer had lost one of its thingys. So the polarization(sp) was off. All the hosues on the street were same as mine.
The Unitil(If your local you know why) guy got to the street and seemed afraid to get out of his truck. LOL

 

[countryboy93]

all lights are off in my house

 

[suebee]

Well I turned all the lights off but watching "Cops" on TV, and laptop is on BYC. So is that cheating?

 

[countryboy93]

i don know. laptop isnt hooked up so its not using elec. and me and my dad are watching dragracing so oh well we did something. lol

 

[cackle]

everything is off but the incubator.

 

[amamaofmany]

Since differing opinions are permitted by some here:

You can see our house from the Space Station.

Not really, but we don't participate in stuff like this.

The earth isn't warming, actually, scientifically it seems to be on a cooling trend much like it was in the 1970's, when the enviornmentalists were just getting started with the Hysteria Movement in Enviornmentalism. I was kickin' in elementary school in the years when every enviornmentalist screamed to us kids that the new Ice Age was going to freeze us alive if we didn't turn off the lights.

I lived "earth hour' for more than a year. My dad, trying his best, made about 40 candles every week, and every night we had to turn off all the electric lights and burn c02 emitting candles in every room. And kerosene lamps. I wore long underwear & sweaters in a 60 degree house all winter in the Carter years and everyone used to comment that there was an awful lot of snow...maybe there was something to this ice age thing.

I fell down the steps in the dark. My brother set the BATHROOM on fire accidentally. And how much good did it do? Just a slightly lower electric bill, because he had to use the ELECTRIC stove to heat up all that wax to make 40 candles.

Then again, maybe living in the dark for a year did work. We left the scaremongering of the new Ice Age for the scaremongering of the new Man-made whatevertheheckAlGoreiscallingitnow. I'm all through with being scared to the point of doing seemingly silly things for no real reason other than to 'feel good'.

The sun has had very little to no sunspot activity, which means the earth isn't being surrounded by the sun's magnetic field. Sunspot activity causes the solar magnetic field to deflect cosmic radiation from the earth (because the Sun's magnetic field is HUGE) When it is deflecting the radiation, the earth gets a little warmer because we have less cloud formation over the oceans. The oceans do heat up a little. We had solar maximum (highest degree of activity) in the recent years when we were seeing aurora borealis in summer where we usually never see it, like here in West Virginia.

We are now at a solar minimum, which began in 2006. And it has been a long one. There have been very few sunspots, and when there are, some are actually still from the old cycle not the new. The new cycle sunspots are very unstable and barely last an earth day. [www.spaceweather.com is a great site that gives a lot of information on daily activity of the sun and other astronomical and atmospheric phenomenon. I love that site!] And the earth is cooling down.

The solar magnetic field, when it is not strong does not surround Earth strongly, and does not deflect the cosmic radiation. This radiation from stars cools the earth by reacting in our atmosphere to cause clouds to form over the oceans, cooling them (the oceans are cooling, not heating up)

We are in a cooling trend, not a heating up trend, and it has very little to do with 'greenhouse gasses' or our use of electricity or our need to be scared out of our wits for no good reason. Excellent book to read is called "The Chilling Stars" by Svensmark and Calder. Readable. Explains this in depth and shows graphs that correspond from solar activity to earth cooling/heating.

Cooling trends are much more dangerous than warming ones. More famine due to cooler summers, more disease (like the worldwide epidemics of flu) and more civil unrest as poorer countries struggle to find enough food for their citizens and deal with the higher instance of diseases.

We wouldn't be in the mess of having weak and unstable power grids if we had been improving our electric power plants, upgrading them, and building more clean coal or nuclear power plants as we use more and more electric stuff. But we've been hampered by these enviornmentalist scaremongers, and instead have left our technology and capabilities in the last century. I live in a clean coal producing state. People here are losing jobs because of this and it makes me mad. Everyone wants to use the computer and electricity and have 4000 square foot houses that are well heated, but we can't make more clean coal burning plants and upgrade out of fear? Next comes the 'cap and trade' taxation of our electricity with typical fearmongering/weaselword reasons for it and y'all are going to be making 40 candles a week and burning down your bathrooms, too.

Now, I understand that there are a lot of reasons people are sitting in the dark for a while, and that's cool with me. You gotta do what you gotta do.

But that is why our family is not doing it.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/30sep_blankyear.htm
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/06mar_solarminimum.htm

 

[gumpsgirl]

We did it!

My kids and I really enjoyed doing without power for an hour! They even asked if we could do this every night!

I was happy to do my part. I think this is a great program to raise awareness of the impact of global warming. Do I think things will change overnight due to this one hour without power? No I do not, but I think it's a neat way to get my kids thinking a bit more about the earth and a great way to get the topic started (get us talking about ways to conserve) in my home.

BTW - The earth might not be "warming" but the emissions that are being produced from the huge amounts of natural resources being used, sure isn't helping things.

 

[DuckyBoys]

Quote:
You have no idea! LOL...ya wanna know what my official title is at work: Environmental Protection Specialist.

Yeah, you can LOL at that if you want.

In fact, I even have a better one - I am teaching environmental science for an online college...

Why do I have these jobs - because they are jobs. At least I have two.