It seems that anymore, wherever I look, I always seem to find myself in a discussion about global warming, either in my head while watching the news or with other people. To save myself a lot of future useless breath discussing my feelings, I think that I am just going to refer everyone to here 
Global warming as far as I can tell started coming into light back in the 1970′s with catalytic converters on cars. People were concerned with car emissions into the atmosphere so this car exhaust system addon would filter out the most harmful toxins that would be released into the air. Sounds great and all, but global warming really didn’t come into light here. I first paid attention to it when Al Gore brought it up in his film “an inconvenient truth” if I recall correctly. Al gore used a lot of seemingly factual information to prove a point, man is killing the earth.
Is man kind really polluting our earth? There are 2 basic groups that answer this question differently, the yays and the nays. I can’t say that I’m a definite yay or a definite nay on this question because of my beliefs in cycles. If you know any science, we have evidence that suggests the earth has gone through ice ages and calm periods. I believe that we are in a calm period preparing to go into the next cycle, either a really hot period, or another ice age.
To take a quick side, remember that polar bear photo on “an inconvenient truth”? The main reason why I got on this topic was due to a world renown polar bear expert was banned from an international polar bear conference. Why? He didn’t believe in man made global warming, saying it was more a cycle of the earth. THIS IS FREAKING OUTRAGEOUS if you ask me. WHO CARES WHAT HE BELIEVES!!! I care about what he knows about the polar bears. Turns out the polar bears aren’t suffering. They tend to get on ice chunks and float for miles for fun! Its just rare that photos of this are taken. These polar bears were not in any danger contrary to popular belief!
To get back to that original question, I firmly believe that mankind may be partially contributing to the overall cycle (thus accelerating it), but we alone are too small to affect the mass of the earth. I’m going to stick to the car emissions and power usage strictly on this post to back this up.
If you ever look around, you will notice that most cars today get 20 miles to the gallon. This is just disgusting to me, we can do much better! Why do I say that? Simple, I know of a friend who went to a dealer about 5 years ago with cash for a new Cadillac. This Cadillac said 17mpg on the sticker at the dealer. My friend bought it and took it home. About 3 days later, the dealer called him and asked him to return it (they offered him a new caddy every year on them if he would return it). He said no deal because he already figured it out. He was averaging about 70mpg on his v8 gas engine and this was NOT hybrid. Turns out that caddy was never supposed to be sold and was a development vehicle or something to that effect. I know that we have the technology to get much better milage with our same old inefficient vehicle designs (although they could be improved to be much more aerodynamic). So why is this technology not out there yet? Its quite simple, the oil companies and the car companies are in bed with each other as the old slang would go. The way our capitalist society is, the oil companies want maximum profit, meaning sell more and more gas. I’m not sure if government regulations are wise because they hurt the car companies more than anything, but you can draw your own conclusions.
In addition, I live about 60 miles from the Niagara Falls, a world wonder. Although I live so close to it, my electric bill is outrageous. As far as I can tell, the falls have plenty of potential for cheap energy, so why aren’t we using it!!!??? I imagine if an engineering group took the time to map out a plan, the falls could power the entire east coast of the US. There is very cheap, clean energy. For the environmentalists that will complain it will hurt the fish, think about Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest”, I’m sure the fish sense a damn coming up and will keep away from danger. Also, we can net the damn intakes so the fish don’t get swept in if they do happen to get too close to the current. Still, I’m a big fan of hydro energy where it is available. It will also cut oil / coal generators though, and this is another place where capitalism could be seen as harming the environment. The coal companies / oil companies don’t want to lose profits from clean energy (as per elementary capitalism thoeries). So I’m sure the coal companies pay off anyone who wants to bring in more hydro power that takes away from their huge profit stashes. I’m sure it also saves them money in the long run to just pay off these people.
Now onto the light bulbs. The other day on glenn beck‘s program on Fox News, I saw that New Jersey is giving away new environmentally friendly florescent bulbs to get people to be more energy efficient (I won’t get into the politics of why they would give these out to begin with, I’d father just focus on the bulb type). My first problem with florescent bulbs is they contain mercury, this is a very harmful element to our environment, so alone these bulbs when thrown out will harm the environment more than a glass incandescent bulb. Florescent bulbs may be energy saving (once they are on, they end up taking much less energy and last much longer), but I really don’t see any huge savings to them. I especially don’t see savings if we would find renewable hydro energy that is free and harmless to begin with! I’d actually then consider these worse for the environment. Finally, there is a major issue with these bulbs discussed in the next paragraph.
If you know anything about electric, electric pulsates at a frequency of 60hz (hertz) in the United States. This means all appliances get 60 pulses of electric per second. If you know anything about florescent light, you will know that it flickers on and off at 50-60 times per second depending on transformers. More Natural light (including incandescent bulbs) still flicker, but they are really fire trying to catch onto the filament (the thing the light comes from). This fire doesn’t immediately go out during the pulses, so incandescent light is more of a continuous light, while florescent lights tend to go off and on 50 to 60 times a second while the internal electrons which emit light are not charged. Florescent light is very artificial and hurts many people’s eyes because of this!!! That is why I use incandescent bulbs.
Finally, you may ask, why don’t we go solar?! Well, during the night, there is no sun. With no sun, there is no solar power available. Harsh huh? Currently we use batteries to store the energy during the day. There are a few types of battery materials which store energy from panels, we have Lead, Nickel Cadium, Alkaline, and Lithium Ion. Of the 4, lithium ion makes the most sense due to charge storage and longevity, but lead is often used. Of all of these though, they will still become useless within years and end up in a landfill. Batteries are NOT the solution to energy storage and I’m against solar power because of this.
For cars, If we could focus on much better fuel mileage, I’m sure that we could easily get hundreds of times more power out of a single drop of fuel. If you ask me, capitalism is what hurts our environment the most. I’m certainly not for abolishing capitalism, it is by far the best system on the planet that has been conceived, but we seriously should start considering loosening its hold on our energy so we can save as much resources as possible for future generations, oil won’t be around forever you know!
Thats enough about this. Hopefully this enlightened you a bit 
Feel free to criticise or back up my remarks.
Tags: cars, energy, global warming, gore, inconvenient truth, polar bear, pollution, power
Posted in Student Life, Technology
[...] Original post: Global Warming [...]
Interesting post! Especially that about the car…
As for flicker, correct about incandescent bulbs but most CFLs nowadays are run on integrated electronic ballasts which increase the on-off cycles to somewhere around 30,000 Hz (= 60,000 pps), in order to reduce flicker.
Some sensitive individuals still have adverse reactions to CFLs but if that’s probably due to other irritating properties, such as glare, unnatural light colour, discontinuous spectral distribtion, small amounts of UV or RF-emissions from some, etc. (See my site for more info on problems with CFLs.)