- Bishop Hill blog - McKitrick on Earth Hour

Ross McKitrick has posted some thoughts on Earth Hour, as told to a journalist last year:

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

Beware solar cycle

Scientific evidence shows a likely connection between the Japanese earthquake and climate change, in that both the global cooling since 2002 and the increased tectonic activity of the Earth are linked to solar activity.

As we enter solar cycle 24, solar activity is mimicking the pattern of the Dalton Minimum that brought an extension of the Little Ice Age and signalled a period of intense tectonic activity that included the largest volcanic eruption in modern history in 1815.

Not Evil, Just Romm | Watts Up With That?

If they can get something bozo simple like the population growth rates that wrong, I fear I don’t really have time to hack my way through their more outré propositions regarding “super-exponential acceleration”, whatever that may be.