Posted on 03/30/2008 11:02:27 AM PDT by Libloather
How did your Earth Hour go?
My husband and I enjoyed it so much, we want to try to do it weekly.
I looked around to see how many of my neighbors are idiots.
Dmocrat, we don’t need no steenking qualifications. We have feeeeelings.
We fired up the charcoal Weber and grilled some Spotted Owl.
spacedaily.com
KHUN SAMUT CHIN, Thailand, March 30 (AFP) Mar 30, 2008
Crabs scuttle across the wet floor of the near-deserted Khun Samut temple, the only building left in a Thai village that has disappeared beneath the rising and advancing sea.
Waging a battle against an encroaching tide that has sent all the villagers fleeing inland, a monk in orange robes and faded tattoos meant to ward off evil spirits stalks the newly-built sea wall, planting mangrove shoots.
Somnuek Atipanya points 20 metres (65 feet) out to sea, where electricity pylons poke out of the water, now useful only for resting marine birds.
“The waves attacked here and they will destroy everything,” says Somnuek, chief abbot of this Buddhist temple south of Bangkok which is surrounded by water and accessible only by a concrete walkway.
“I don’t know what happened, but when the experts came they told me it was global warning and melting ice in the North Pole.”
Over 30 years, the sea around Khun Samut Chin village has engulfed more than one kilometre (0.6 miles) of land, World Bank figures show, mostly because fishermen have cut down mangrove forests — the Earth’s natural sea barrier.
Tourism development, sand mining and damming rivers upstream have also taken their toll in an area naturally prone to coastal erosion.
The community have realised their errors and are trying to replant the mangroves, but the situation may soon be out of their hands as global warming sends sea levels rising and powerful storms lashing the coast.
“The process has been occurring over some time and accelerating with land use changes and local human activity,” says Jitendra Shah, the World Bank’s environmental coordinator in Thailand.
“Climate change impacts are likely to accelerate the pace and make things worse in the future.”
Coastal erosion of varying degrees affects 21 percent of Thailand’s coastline, says Greenpeace climate campaigner Tara Buakamsri, citing figures from Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.
Along the Gulf of Thailand, seaside areas seriously affected by erosion are receding at a rate of five to 20 metres per year.
Climate scientists say that as global warming heats the Earth up, glaciers and polar ice caps will melt and sea waters will expand, sending oceans rising by at least 18 centimetres (7.2 inches), or possibly a great deal more by 2100.
World sea levels rose 3.1 millimetres per year from 1993 to 2003, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says.
This is not good news for the five monks who remain at Khun Samut temple. Despite their best efforts, they may not be able to save the site from the same fate that befell Khun Samut Chin’s sunken school and homes.
Visanu Kengsamut, 26, has already moved three times in his life, while his mother — the village chief — has fled the crumbling coast and rebuilt her home eight times, and each time the village has paid for its own relocation.
Khun Samut Chin now sits about one kilometre inland from the temple.
“We know that the cause of this is the effects of global warming,” says Visanu.
“This problem, everybody should take responsibility and the government should help. If possible, the international community should come to help because they started the problem.”
As the world tries to work out a new pact to battle the threat posed by global warming, poorer countries — who the IPCC says will suffer the most from climate change — are battling to have their voices heard.
They argue that because the industrialised world was historically most responsible for global warming, they should contribute generously to a fund to help poor countries adapt to the changing world.
The so-called adaptation and mitigation fund will likely be discussed at key United Nations climate change talks in Bangkok from March 31 to April 4.
“Whether or not it is a small contribution or major contribution related to climate change in the past, this community needs to be taken into account when they discuss about the mitigation measure or adaptation fund,” says Greenpeace’s Tara.
“Because they are facing the impact — they are one of the first groups in Thailand that is facing the impact.”
Yet another carbon-based product you'll pay for FOREVER!
I was over at a friend’s house. She always has her TV and computer running.
About 7:55pm as I was getting ready to leave she was going around the house, turning out the lights. She didn’t turn off the TV or the computer. I asked her about this and she said, “What am I gonna do for an hour? Watch TV. And I want to check email, too.”
As I was leaving I apologized that I couldn’t drive my truck home with the headlights off as it was too dark. LOL
My buddies and I burned old tires and clubbed some baby seals......
Then we cut down some old growth trees when we ran out of tires.
Cigars were smoked, PBR was consumed....good time was had by one and all{excluding the baby seals”}
Huh? Did I miss it.........
I think I was out on my deck smoking a $35 cigar.
Oh darn if I’d have known further a head of time I’d have put Christmas lights up! I did run the dishwasher, washer, and all of the lights to include both porch lights.
(From Harper's Magazine, March, 2008)
“Don’t be evil,” the motto of Google, is tailored to the popular image of the company—and the information economy itself—as a clean, green twenty-first-century antidote to the toxic excesses of the past century’s industries. The firm’s plan to develop a gigawatt of new renewable energy recently caused a blip in its stock price and was greeted by the press as a curious act of benevolence. But the move is part of a campaign to compensate for the company’s own excesses, which can be observed on the banks of the Columbia River, where Google and its rivals are raising server farms to tap into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. The blueprints depicting Google’s data center at The Dalles, Oregon, are proof that the Web is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.
Every time someone clicks the “Google Search” button, thousands of servers, like those Google will amass inside these three projected 68,680-square-foot storage buildings, reel into action. (Only two of the buildings have been constructed so far; the company is tight-lipped about how many servers it owns, but current estimates run as high as a million.) A query for American Idol, the top search on Google News in 2007, trolls through petabytes of data, using tens of billions of CPU cycles. Velcroed together, stacked in racks, and lined up in back-to-back rows, the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing, and Google leads the field in squeezing more servers into less space. Based on a projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot in 2011, the Dalles plant can be expected to demand about 103 megawatts of electricity—enough to power 82,000 homes, or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington.
Google’s addiction to cheap electricity, by Ginger Strand Google’s server farm represents a new phase in the transformation of the Columbia River over the past half-century. Completed in 1957, The Dalles Dam obliterated the area’s famous salmon runs by drowning nearby Celilo Falls, a Native American trading site with a peak water volume ten times that of Niagara Falls. The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a federal agency that sells electricity from thirtyone dams and one nuclear power plant, then lured aluminum smelters to the region. Across the street from the Google data center is an idle Northwest Aluminum smelter that once used 85 megawatts. In 2000, when energy prices soared, it was decommissioned, and it now is being dismantled for scrap. As the products on which the river’s economy depends—fish, metal, bytes—have dematerialized, so has the demand for labor. Northwest and its sibling smelter, Goldendale, employed 1,100 people; Google says it will bring 100 to 200 jobs to the region. And like the vanished salmon, the workers who live in this twenty-unit, fauxrustic transient-employee dorm will merely be passing through.
In 2006 American data centers consumed more power than American televisions. Google—whose zeal for secrecy is evident here in the data center’s code name, O2 PROJECT—and its rivals now head abroad for cheaper, often dirtier power. Microsoft has announced plans for a data center in Siberia, AT&T has built two in Shanghai, and Dublin has attracted Google and Microsoft. In all three locations, as in the United States, the burning of fossil fuels accounts for a majority of the electricity. Google is negotiating for a new site in Lithuania, disingenuously described as being near a hydroelectric dam. But no matter where the data center is located, Google will be tapping into Lithuania’s power grid, which is 0.5 percent hydroelectric and 78 percent nuclear. As the functions long performed by personal computers come to be executed at these far-flung data centers, the technology industry has rapturously rebranded the Internet as “the cloud.” The metaphor is apt, both for our foggy notions of a green Web and for the storm that awaits a culture that squanders its resources. Google’s infrastructure buildup has triggered an arms race. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com are also building data centers on the Columbia River. As they compete to offer software, music, and movies over the Web in the coming era of “cloud computing,” they will need more servers running faster and hotter. This way upstream, in Quincy, Washington, Microsoft and Yahoo have contracted for a combined 90 megawatts of electricity—more than the World Trade Center humming at peak power on a hot summer day. The EPA estimates that by 2011, U.S. data-center power use will double, but a quirk in its accounting excluded Google from the study. Even if Google offsets its own energy use with green power or carbon credits, it cannot guarantee that its competitors will do the same. The company’s motto is perhaps due for an addendum: “Lead others not into temptation.” If any acts of charity figured in Google’s arrival at The Dalles, they were the handouts extended to the company by local officials. The real estate deal, announced in February 2005, was delayed six months by Google’s conditions—a tax exemption, assurance of cheap energy from the BPA, and the city-built fiber-optic ring indicated here. The state tax breaks and the fiber-optic ring were in place by April, but bargain power could not be guaranteed. With energy prices soaring, the Bush Administration had floated the idea of privatizing the BPA, which would raise the cost of its electricity to market rates. After a conference call between Google, the BPA, and Representative Greg Walden (R., Ore.), the congressman pledged to the press that privatization would be blocked. That August, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included an estimated $85 billion in subsidies and tax breaks for the energy business and left the BPA alone. Four days later, Google closed on the land. Thus, through city infrastructure, state givebacks, and federally subsidized power, YouTube is bankrolled by us.
Google’s infrastructure buildup has triggered an arms race. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com are also building data centers on the Columbia River. As they compete to offer software, music, and movies over the Web in the coming era of “cloud computing,” they will need more servers running faster and hotter. This way upstream, in Quincy, Washington, Microsoft and Yahoo have contracted for a combined 90 megawatts of electricity—more than the World Trade Center humming at peak power on a hot summer day. The EPA estimates that by 2011, U.S. data-center power use will double, but a quirk in its accounting excluded Google from the study. Even if Google offsets its own energy use with green power or carbon credits, it cannot guarantee that its competitors will do the same. The company’s motto is perhaps due for an addendum: “Lead others not into temptation.
In 2006 American data centers consumed more power than American televisions. Google—whose zeal for secrecy is evident here in the data center’s code name, O2 PROJECT—and its rivals now head abroad for cheaper, often dirtier power. Microsoft has announced plans for a data center in Siberia, AT&T has built two in Shanghai, and Dublin has attracted Google and Microsoft. In all three locations, as in the United States, the burning of fossil fuels accounts for a majority of the electricity. Google is negotiating for a new site in Lithuania, disingenuously described as being near a hydroelectric dam. But no matter where the data center is located, Google will be tapping into Lithuania’s power grid, which is 0.5 percent hydroelectric and 78 percent nuclear. As the functions long performed by personal computers come to be executed at these far-flung data centers, the technology industry has rapturously rebranded the Internet as “the cloud.” The metaphor is apt, both for our foggy notions of a green Web and for the storm that awaits a culture that squanders its resources.
Ginger Strand is the author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies, to be published this spring by Simon & Schuster.
Me too.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! ROTFLMAO
Glock rocks;
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1994057/posts?page=15#15
The local airport kept the landing lights and the tower light on, the casinos didn’t shut off a single light, I turned on the porch and front room lights.
I turned on all of the lights in my apartment, as well as both TVs, microwaved some pizza and surfed the net. It also got a little chilly last night, so I turned up the heat.
“My husband and I enjoyed it so much, we want to try to do it weekly.”
Must have been the first time for them to have sex...
It came. It went. I never even noticed.
I don’t even know when it was.
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