Climate Denial Ain't Just a Climate River in Climate Egypt

No, that's an ice cube.  It's different.

Climate change deniers up and down the Northeast Corridor are snickering in their little snow boots. Over the past week in the Delaware Valley, every resident was treated to 50,000 cubic feet of snow per acre. That's enough snow to build a 50,000 cubic foot snowcube!

We've also gotten twice as much snow at this point in the year as the average. The word "snowpacolypse" is now the most common search phrase, overtaking "is facebook shutting down?" But before we throw a Phew, That Was Close! It Looked For a Minute As Though Man May Be Irreversibly Altering the Climate, But Thankfully, No, It Was Merely Some Zany Scientists That Love a Good Hoax party, let's actually remind ourselves of what's going on up there.

Not to scale.  Which is the problem.

Starting here on the surface of the earth and rising 15 kilometers is the troposphere. The next 35 kilometers comprises the stratosphere. Another 40 kilometers, that's the mesosphere. Above that, for 250 more kilometers, is the thermosphere. Those four layers make up the Earth's atmosphere, the space beyond which we typically refer to as, well, space.

To understand how the cumulative volume of what we call "atmosphere" relates to the size of the planet itself, picture an image of Earth as photographed from space. Now draw a circle just outside Earth's perimeter, only one percent of the radius of the planet. That's how relatively thin all the gases are that control life on Earth.

Due to limitations in dry-erase marker technology, this diagram is not to scale.  The atmosphere is actually five times thinner than as shown above.  It should be noted that while the inner circle was an outlining of a compact disc, the outer circle was drawn by hand, and I should be applauded for it.

For more mental imagery, envision a basketball as Earth. How big would the atmosphere be around old Spalding? A mere one-tenth of an inch thickness all the way around. That's not much, and that's my point.

Our atmosphere is a highly-delicate environment. It's evolving on its own just like any grouping of organisms that lay within its realm. But even in the midst of its natural evolution, we - you, me and all of humanity - are precipitating far greater rates of change than the 'background noise' of gradual progressions of millions of years.

The deniers, still in their snow-boots (and in the house, no less), then ask: Who says?

Ice cores: nature's most perfect murder weapon.

Ugh. Fine. The answer lies in the decades of empirical data, studying the proportions of gases in the atmosphere and how it changes over time. It's in the findings within ice cores that reveal temperature changes over hundreds of thousands of years. It's in the geological examination of ancient rock, revealing what organisms lived when, what the climate was like, and indications as to disruptions (extinctions, natural disasters, etc.).

Does any one individual want to pore over all this data? Frick no. But once you do, you'll likely come to the same conclusion that 97% of accredited scientists have come to: something drastic happened right around the mid-1700s. When we consult our history books, we see that the Industrial Revolution coincides fittingly with that timeframe. Could it be that the exponential rise in carbon dioxide spewed into the air from factories and vehicles and overall mechanization not only direct correlates - that much is fact - but directly caused the severe uptick in the very same gases as currently represented in today's measurable atmosphere? Those that honor logic would unequivocally say yes.

This looks complicated, and its implications may attack my personal wealth, therefore it must be a fiction someone created to gain power over me.  Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a hole in the ground that's missing my head.

Climate science is a hell of a venture.  It has required the aggregate work of generations of interested parties.  It's all documented, transparently viewable to the general public.  Is it difficult to understand?  Sure it is.  But so is chemotherapy.  So is molecular physics.  And yet we don't impugn these as falsehoods.  We only challenge the nearly-settled science because of the massive and yes, inconvenient, ramifications.  It really is going to suck to put up with rising sea levels, intensified natural phenomena, and the loss of biodiversity.  But anticipated suckiness does not a hoax make.

I believe that was Descartes.

My Trash Can is Trash? I Refuse!

The idea of throwing away a trash can is one of those meta-paradoxy things.  Like when you see a sign that says "SIGN" on it.  Or a door that has a smaller door inside it.

My wager?  This kid gets a tractor-trailer stuck under an overpass in about 20 years.

I don't expect much out of a trash can.  There's really only two qualities I demand - capaciousness, and the ability to remain stationary.  The white, elliptical one in my kitchen has been serving me just fine for several years now.  Oh, the things I've placed into it!

But as of late it's been causing me more trouble than it's worth.  The lid stopped working.  How?  See, I had one of those fancy lids.  You merely press down on a plastic latch, and the lid rises, granting you unfettered access to the garbage within.  The wonders never cease.

The problem came when I decided to pull a Danny Tanner and clean the trash can itself.  I took her outside, sprayed her down, gave her a decent scrubbing, and rinsed.  Was that gleam in my eye the feeling we call pride?  No, it was just some Formula 409 that splashed into the old ocular cavity, but still, things felt right.

Reassembly time.  The reassembly of a trash can is one of the easier home improvement projects one can undertake.  Step 1: put the lid back on the container.  Step 2: Hey, it's 10:30 AM - isn't Frasier on?  And yet, I blew it.  Suddenly the latch that should be flinging the lid from horizontal to vertical was laying down on the job.  It was no longer spring-loaded.  It no longer had springs.

The search was on for those pesky buggers.  It went on for days, weeks even.  In the meantime, I tried a variety of configurations so as to continue using the waste basket: 

"The Gaga"

"The Kareem"

"The This Guy"

None were particularly pleasing.  I learned it takes some serious dexterity to manually open a lid while carefully balancing a swept-up pile of dog hair and debris, while also trying to program the Bluetooth on your iPhone, because it's 2011 now, and you have to multitask.

Torsion springs.  Obviously.

Many people would declare this trash can ready for the great landfill in the sky, or even just the regular landfill.  Not I.  Not now.  What with my deep consideration for this planet, and my utter, utter lack of money.  They're merely springs, I thought.  I refuse to be impeded by tiny coils of torsion-loaded aluminum!  And if I didn't think in those words then, I surely did after a web search or two.

A trip to my local home improvement store resulted in purchasing a pair each of three different springs.  Two didn't fit.  One did, but offered far less resistance than needed to fling the plastic lid up.

Something about "can hardly contain myself".  That should work.

In a fit of rationality, I decided to contact the manufacturer and see if they'd send me some freebie replacements.   Sterilite Corporation.  Makers of all things plastic in your home.  Doing their thing up near the northern-most border of Massachusetts.  Good looking website.  Contact Us form.  It's on.

I wrote, explaining my springless circumstance.  A few days passed.   Sandra LaPointe in the Customer Service Department wrote back.  Sentence One: "Thank you for contacting Sterilite."  Great start; offering the customer gratitude.  I'm liking it.  Sentence Two: "We apologize for the spring problem you experienced."  Already got my apology - a lot of people would stop right here.  And she specifically referenced "the spring problem".  Unlikely to be auto-generated. Sterilite, you're off to a great start.

She went on in detail describing how I could locate the product code so they could see if such replacement springs were available.  I hit her back with the info within hours.  A few more days pass. Yesterday I get an email.  It's LaPointe.  She doesn't waste any time and jumps right into the resolution:

Hell yeah.  Sterilite straight up delivers. 

Now that the logistics of the matter are behind us, let's address this story's moral.  Was it simply an example of fine customer service?  A socially-conscious corporation doing the right thing?  A softened stance on the part of Big Spring?  Nope.  This here's about me.

How easy would it have been to walk - forlorn - to my curb, trash can in hand? Stupid easy.  I resisted.  If I had done so, my next step would be a trip to any of myriad retailers within a five mile radius: Home Depot, Lowe's, Target, Walmart, Kmart, or dozens of smaller purveyors of home goods.  I'd be out $25.  Relatively little harm - but major foul. 

If we're going to make it as a species - that's right, I'm taking this argument humanity-wide - we need to properly make use of our things.  That's one less structure of injection-molded polypropylene that needs to be produced.  It's what we call a baby step.

Now I haven't received the springs yet.  For all I know they may be the wrong ones, or brittle or rusted, or maybe they'll belie a terrific misunderstanding and be tickets to see Bruce at Madison Square Garden.  But for the time being, I'm satisfied.

EDITOR'S NOTE:  I know what you're thinking and I agree - I passed on too many good 'spring' jokes.  Right at the end there - after "I'm satified" - the classy phrase "Hope springs eternal" would have been a dynamite drop-in.  I took a pass.  Something seasonal would have been appropriate - "More like spring of our discontent!".  I would have also liked to have used the onomatopoeia boing, but it didn't come naturally.  I could go on and on about similar regrets, but I better bounce.  I leave you with the only spring that has its own song.

Slinky's one of those words that if you say too many times, it loses all meaning.  Marginally fun fact.

Soon To Be Obsolete? Owning Things

In theoretical energy-saving circles - those exist - there's an expected shift in the ownership model of various home goods you use everyday.  Today, you buy a dishwasher, run it till it won't run no more, drag it to the curb, and then buy yourself another.  You're the owner - you control that dishwasher's entire lifecycle.  Such a practice might be considered quaint in a decade or so.

You don't really want to buy a dishwasher, do you?  Unless you're a passionate collector of aluminum-and-plastic mechanisms, you're probably seeking something else - not a good, but a service.  You want clean dishes.  What you're paying Best Buy (and Kenmore, and so many other supply chain intermediaries) for is the service of expedient foodware sanitation, and it happens to come with a 115-lb cubic anchor.

Same goes for your furnace.  Your clothes dryer.  Even your lightbulbs.   You don't covet a $3500 steel-caged firebox, you covet the warmth it proffers.  You don't need a spinning metal cylinder, you need clothes that aren't soaking wet.  And no one's in the market for gas-filled glass ornaments - instead, we seek illumination.  It just happens that when we procure a service to fulfill a need, the transaction leaves you saddled with a "thing".  You buy it, you own it, and at the time of your choosing, you dispose of it.

Energy industry gurus foresee a future where a new sector rises up that specializes in taking your ownership of the "thing" out of the equation.  It'll no longer be your responsibility to shop for, purchase, and replace your burned-out bulbs with new ones.  Instead, you'll auto-pay your monthly light bill.  Sensors will monitor rooms, know when a replacement is called for, and ship you a new one.  In some cases, you'll ship the old one back.

For $49 a month, my fictitiously-dubbed Visicor Illuminaries will assure you of optimal lighting throughout your manor. Actually that's not a bad name. Don't steal it.

Ah, but here's the critical part.  Visicor isn't just covering the cost of the bulb, but the electricity, too.  So for six hundred bucks a year, you're assured a round-the-clock well-lit world.  And here's the value proposition - were Visicor not your lighting supplier, you'd be buying cheap, inefficient bulbs, and paying closer to $1000 a year, and sacrificing lighting quality (burned out bulbs, insufficient luminosity, mal-applied color temperatures, and so on).  Your purchasing decision has changed from upwards of a half-dozen annual stops to the hardware store for a wide variety of bulbs, lamps, fixtures and such, to one perpetual choice: what single-source vendor can supply all my lighting needs?

This is a significant departure from today's model.  And it will manifest itself in all sorts of ways. Your furnace - a large, upfront capital investment.  It either combusts natural gas or petroleum-based heating oil, both of which are supplies you'll pay for at an ever-increasing rate (fossil fuels in finite supplies).  And as it ages, it requires perennial service.  One day, you'll need to make a difficult decision and bite the bullet to have it replaced.  Not if you had a climate comfort supplier like Idealaire Temp Controllers.  ITC is the owner of your ultra-efficient furnace - one that costs twice the model you would have bought.  They have a roving crew of servicepeople that keep it optimally tuned - filters replaced, ductlines cleaned out, every weatherization function you can imagine.  They're overarching mission is to keep your family comfortable in all seasons.  For that, you pay a flat fee, year-round.  One of your most critical tasks as a homeowner was just taken out from under you - and it will save you 25% over your current costs.

Like it or not, it's a major paradigm shift, and it's coming.  As fuel prices steadily rise, the efficiency of your appliances will be increasingly prized.  There will emerge market opportunities for a player that has the capital backing to outlay for that top-of-the-line refrigerator - with a set, profit-packed payment package that helps smooth out your budget-making.

Meanwhile, the environment proves the ultimate winner.  When Visicor collects your spent bulbs, they recycle them.  The hyperefficient lighting they manage for you means fewer coal plants are built. When Idealaire retrieves your dead furnace, they disassemble its parts and dispose of them in the appropriate fashion.  The resources stay in the production loop.  Industry waste plummets.  Oil imports plummets.  Those dollars stay domestic - getting split between your climate comfort supplier and you, the savvy homeowner. 

Everything is in place for such a transition to begin.  There are no technological barriers, and economically there are only incentives.  The battle will be a cultural one - changing long-held behaviors that have been ingrained for generations.  But market forces are a powerful thing.  When the invisible hand begins putting things in motion, don't resist.  This paradigm shift will be a welcomed one.

Nissan Leaf : 73 Miles from Consumer Acceptance

Article first published as Nissan Leaf: 73 Miles from Consumer Acceptance on Technorati.

So let's say you have a car company, Otto's Autos, and you just manufactured a long-awaited car that runs on an unconventional fuel source - oh, I don't know, marshmallows.  The only tailpipe emissions are smores, and ain't nobody complaining about that.

Of course, marshmallows aren't found at every traffic intersection throughout the country.  And the last thing your customers need is to sputter out on a major highway for lack of 'mallow.  Should such a thing be a regular occurrence, the ensuing PR nightmare would hit a frenzied pitch.  You (Otto, remember?) would watch your stock swiftly sink, and you may find yourself looking to dump 35,000 engines that run on internal confection .  And worst yet, eBay fees just went up.

Gotta love parables.  They help you see a greater truth without having to endure the hard-fought struggles that wisdom usually requires.  And it's a real-life one, at that.  Nissan Motor Company is dropping the mythically-hyped Leaf this winter.  Unlike the Chevy Volt, the $25,000 Leaf has no gas engine at all, giving it sole claim to the title of first all-electric vehicle to reach dealerships.

Nissan touts the Leaf's range at 100 miles between charges.  But a week ago, in stepped the EPA to set the record straight: under normal driving conditions, the Leaf's range is actually just 73 miles.  Given that range anxiety is one of the inhibiting forces stifling consumer adoption, this was a heavy blow to a public that ordinarily expects three hundred miles between fill-ups.

The American car-buying market is a stubborn bunch.  An average year's worth of driving (12,000 miles) will cost a Leaf owner less than $500 (using the conservative figure of 4 cents per mile, which of course depends on your electric utility rates), while a gas vehicle will soak you closer to $1500 (25 mpg at $3 per gallon).  The proposition, then, is this: are you willing to stop to recharge every seventy miles in order to have a car that reduces our nation's dependency on foreign oil, (marginally) cleans up the environment, and saves you a grand a year in operating costs?

The Nissan Leaf waiting list of more than 20,000 hopeful buyers seems to think you will.

But it's all about those seventy-three miles.  That number will scare the coal-powered daylights out of people.  Where does seventy-three miles get you, anyway?  To the forefront of the electric car revolution, that's where.

Image source: insideline.com

To Kill a Kill-a-Watt

Killy, during better times.

Have you ever lost a best friend?  I don't mean like in the mall or something.  I mean for good.  And I don't mean 'for good' to mean 'in order to defeat evil'. I can hardly imagine a situation arising where that would be an effective tact.

My best friend was Kill A Watt­™ by P3 International.  Yes, that Kill A Watt­™, the one that runs you $25 and lets you monitor the electricity appetite of all your hungry gadgets. Does your best friend's name have the word "trademark" in it? If he's Mark Tradesman, yeah, okay, I guess, but mine's no man at all.  He's a machine.  A watt-killing machine.  Or at least he was.  Cue flashback interlude.

We used to laugh together.  "Can you believe my refrigerator?  It's so powerful!"  "Yeah. EnergyStar? More like EnergyBlackHole!" "Dynamite astronomical reference, Killy." "Thanks."

That's just one example.

Together we studied the energy consumption of all my appliances.  We judged their instantaneous power draws.  We evaluated their electricity usage over long periods of time.  We never figured out what to make of the other buttons.  We didn't care.

How much energy does my microwave use, Killy?  Eleven kilowatt-hours per month.  Is that more or less energy-intensive compared to my oven?  I don't know, the oven runs on 240 V and my Kill-a-Watt only measures on 120 V lines. Anti-climactic, I know, but even the best superheroes have flaws.  Come on, you know you watched the first season of Heroes.

The perp, lookin' all smug...

But our time together was cut short.  Killy was cut down in the line of duty.  With winter approaching, I made the decision that I'd be keeping my nighttime central heat at a nippy 61° F, and supplementing with a ceramic space heater in my bedroom.  Naturally my next step was to gauge the watt-hours I would be racking up.  I was offsetting $3.49-per-gallon heating oil, but burning lumps of coal to stay toasty.  It proved fateful.

My Bionaire BCH9221 ceramic tower heater ran me $70 at Home Depot, less here.  With an electric thermostat, a remote control, oscillation, it had all the earmarks of a real energy saver for my heating needs.  Operating at 1500 watts means that four hours of use per night amounts to 6 kwh daily flung onto your electric bill - nearly 200 per month.  But the impact of turning down a furnace a whole five degrees that runs at 4000 watts and guzzles precious petroleum, well that's truly significant. 

Let's get to the lesson.  Fifteen-hundred watts of electricity flowing through one outlet - no problem.  But flowing through an extension cord into an outlet that also shares a laptop, and, on that somber, black night, a floor lamp - that's what we call a suicide mission.  What I discovered the next morning was graphic.  If you have children in the room, specifically plastic ones, you may want to shield their eyes.

Killy, 2010 - 2010

How does one go on from here?  Can I waltz into my local hardware store and snag a replacement?  Well duh.  Will it be the same as the glory months Killy and I spent together one magical Summer and Fall?  Is it ever?  If question marks cost a quarter each, would our society be more declarative?  Who can know?

Kids, relish your time with those who matter to you.  You never know when a surge of electrons will fry their internal components and melt their exterior casing.  No metaphor here.  I just miss my Kill A Watt.  Trademark...

Eagles Land on Top of Power Rankings - Not in American Football Of Course, But Still

The Philadelphia Eagles just learned that the line for Stadiums With Cleanest Energy Sources apparently condones frontsies.

Upon further review, the turbines appear to be on-sides.

A $30 million project is soon to be underway at Lincoln Financial Field, home of the footballing Eagles.  The facility will enjoy all its power from renewable sources.  The project includes 80 wind turbines and 2500 solar panels.  It will also feature a cogeneration plant relying on biomass and natural gas.  The Eagles just scored a touchdown environmentally, which reminds me - when faced with the opportunity for glaringly obvious word play, you just need to go for it.

The Linc: one of Philadelphia's finest drinking establishments - now with football!

Such a project is unprecedented in the sports world.  And time will be the judge, but it ought to be the first in a wave of progress in this arena.  Sporting complexes are highly unproductive energy hogs.  Consider a dedicated football stadium - open for business an anemic two-tenths of one percent of the time (eight home games lasting three hours each).  Compare that with an office building, which operates more than 20% of the time - a one-hundred-fold difference.  Both the stadium and the office building are still constructed the same energy-intensive way, but one sits idles almost constantly.  It seems that city governments should be mandating such progressive stances on energy.  Want to build a new stadium?  No problem - now when does the solar array go up?

It should be noted that Lincoln Financial Field will not hold the title for world's most energy-sustainable sporting arena - that honor goes to Taiwan's Kaohsiung National Stadium.  Built in 2009 in preparation for the World Games, it features nearly four times the solar capacity as the Linc.   The Taiwanese don't front.

I don't know whether to attend a professional athletics event in it or wrangle it into a box.

Are Your Hot Water Pipes Insulated? Mine Weren't, and Gosh Do I Feel Foolish.

What am I, an idiot?!  Politely don't answer that.

For all the "care" I allegedly have for this planet, I haven't had insulated copper pipes.  Eight years I've been living here.  Eight years, no insulation on my hot water pipes.  I'm disgusted.  Am I an idiot or what?  Politely continue not answering that.

It's exactly like this.

Shake it off.  We learn, we grow, we et cetera.  I studied the labyrinthine maze of copper tubes that hang from the ceiling in my musty cellar, right-angling every-which-way like that one screensaver.  Some pipes carry hot water.  Some cold.  Some inexplicably do nothing, which may come in handy during a future Home Alone-esque booby-trapping, the specifics of which I can't yet envision.

Oh, it's already remedied.  Don't you worry about that.  Yeah, about thirty bucks worth of polyethylene foam sleeves, and my copper's nothing short of cozy.  It was remarkably easy.  They comes in 6-foot lengths - 1" diameter or 3/4" diameter, both of which I needed about thirty feet worth.  A 6' length runs you about two and a half bucks.  They're pre-slitted along one side making it a breeze just to slip them over the pipe.  They also have adhesive strips so they seal nice and tight.


It's a long video, yes, but with a host like Passionate Pat, ten minutes feels like a mere twelve.

Yup.  Just yesterday morning I heard my furnace a-purrin', so I descended, felt all the pipes, and whichever ones were hot got a brand new sweater.  And it all seemed very obvious to me - if the metal itself is emanating heat, that heat's being stolen from my water!  Same goes for the hot water tank itself.  Give it a bear hug and if you suddenly feel a rush of second-degree burniness, your tank needs insulation.  Most new tanks won't be hot to the touch, and thus can go au natural.

How much money will this save?  Well, considering the average home (two adults, two children, and heavy, heavy debt) spends about $630 annually on hot water, and this foam should last a good ten to fifteen years, even a mere one percent efficiency boost saves twice the cost of the insulation itself.  And if that savings is more like fifteen percent, it's like someone knocking on your door in ten years time and handing you ten crisp Benjamins.  (They're worth more crisp, obviously.)