Thank you for reminding me, I will try to remember to turn all my lights and domestic appliences on.

Don’t forget the other contributions you can make;

Leave all your taps running

Leave your TV on

Put heating on full for but leave all the windows open

Drive to a fast food outlet and buy the entire menu

If there’s any of the hour left, go on a pointless drive through the most congested part of your town/city

Can’t believe people are still falling for this “global warming” shite

So we’ve gone from Earth Day to Earth Minute – will we see Earth Second?

Declining free time and shorter attention spans have won.

Can’t believe people are still falling for this “global warming” shite

Aahh, global warming deniers. It’s always good to know the kind of stupidity that infects your political opponents.

I actually can imagine bloggertarians doing the sort of shite Matt Munro suggests. Remember their hysteria whenever someone suggests that eating meat isn’t environmentally friendly? They really think they’re heroes too, rather than pathetic overgrown teenagers who wouldn’t last three months in the sort of society their “policies” would create.

Thanks for the advice, Chris — in some places, the night of 28th March may be good for amateur astronomers if people turn off outside lights. As far as “making a statement to the world’s governments for more urgent and effective action on global warming”, I believe that conversation between Chinese government officials and the governments of developed countries may be significantly more beneficial.

As a geek, you are probably familiar with the Donald Knuth quote: “Almost all of a program’s runtime is taken up by very few lines of code (the generally quoted rule is that 90% of the runtime is taken up by 10% of the code). Optimising anything else is most likely a waste of time.

So it’s almost invariably true that you don’t want to optimise any particular part of the program. Instead, profile your program, find the hotspots that make up the vast majority of the runtime, and optimise those.”

That same rule applies to energy/resources management, reduction of CO2 emissions etc. We can achieve a lot more for the environment by persuading the Chinese and Indians and others to industrialise conscientiously — for which we will have to pay up front because of higher manufacturing costs — but which provides long term benefits. Persuading Europeans to run around their homes unplugging unused phone chargers is like urinating into a force 9 gale; convince Europeans to drive less if you want to make a difference.

What ever about the science of global warming, I’m turned off by what I’ve been hearing in the media, from pious green campaigners who have said that THEY will switch the lights off in Canary Wharf on saturday if they see ”provocative” lights still shining in contravention of the lights out edict.
In fact I’m prety unimpressed by a lot the people I’ve been hearing talking about saturday, and next wednesday too.
It’s going to be such a difficult job for the Met Police on wednesday.
Smashing up McDonald’s and Starbucks and these ”Stop the City” actions (as well as squaring up against the police) are childish actions in my opinion.

Frank and Matt @ 1 & 2,

Well you guys must not have been hit very hard by the credit crunch. It must be comforting to know that at a time when energy bills are soaring and people are losing their jobs and can’t afford to heat their homes or cook proper meals, you two can afford to throw energy away just to spite those who want to be less greedy with the Earth’s resources.

Pair of Pricks.

Whilst I wouldn’t recommend wasting any energy, effort or time on this Earth Hour malarkey (either in demonstration of one’s eco- piety, disbelief or agnosticism) I would suggest that those with a scientific bent acknowledge that actually there are very live debates amongst a range of scientific disciplines about the actual contribution of anthropogenic GHGs to climatic changes as compared to the natural phenomena at play.

As demonstation of that, here’s a peer reviewed paper that was recently published in a physics journal:

Gerhard Gerlich, Ralf D. Tscheuschner
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
Int.J.Mod.Phys.B23:275-364,2009
preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161

Now, obviously I’m not arguing that: “see this a published peer reviewed work so it must be true and anything that naysays it is false.” But what I am arguing is that this work at least merits being part of a comprehensive discussion of the subject.

The thing is, even if the greenhouse effect is disproved, it is obvious that humans have some impact on climates. That statement is uncontroversial. The key questions are
a) what are the human impacts and
b) how significant are they?

What is extremely likely is that “the IPCC Reports as a repository for scientifically cogent reasoning on this issue” was always a mistake, and that that in itself will become the received wisdom within a relatively short time frame, unless of course it undertakes radical reform.

The reason for this is the underlying assumption (from the political world that gave birth to the IPCC) that a “consensus approach”, which was not a search for consensus, but a process of firming up an original assertion – that a set of predefined notions were not only true but were assented to by an overwhelming majority of scientists – would be sufficient to take the issue “beyond science”.

Well, real science cannot be so commandeered, because real science relies on dissent to fuel its ongoing conversation.

Consensus, when it occurs, emerges. And it remains subject to revision.