Summer of the Shark, Global Warming Edition - Forbes

It’s simply amazing to me how many otherwise smart people attempt to prove a trend with one data point.

Prisoners + Gilligan’s Island Invention = Green Energy! - By Greg Pollowitz - Planet Gore - National Review Online

Brazil’s Santa Rita do Sapucaí prison has found a new source of alternative energy: its own prisoners. The prison has offered to shave time off of prisoners’ sentences if they’ll charge batteries using special bikes and their own two legs.

Bicycle Generators: Using a bicycle to make electricity

A typical bike generator can produce 100 watts. If you pedal for an hour a day, 30 days a month, that's (30 x 100=) 3000 watt-hours, or 3 kWh. That's less than 1% of what a typical family uses in a month (920 kWH). You generated 0.3% of your energy, and continue to get 99.7% from the grid. Good job.

But how much money did you save? Well, since the average cost of U.S. electricity is 12¢/kWh, that one month of pedaling saved you $0.36. Congratulations. If the system cost $400, it would take only 93 years to pay for itself.

And that's before we consider the cost of food. If you're overweight, like most Americans, then you can consider your biking energy "free" since you could be burning fat. Likewise, if you ride the exercycle instead of doing some other kind of exercise that you were going to do anyway, then the cost of your energy is also free. But if you're not overweight and not exercycling instead of some other exercise, then you'll be buying more food to fuel your effort. Since it takes about 1 calorie to produce 1 watt-hour of electricity, your month of pedaling would require 3000 calories. With the cheapest food you can buy, oil or flour, you're looking at $0.85 to create $0.36 of electricity. So instead of saving money, it's costing you money to run your generator. Other foods are even worse: Figure $5.41 for Cheerios, $6.15 for bananas, or $22.22 for Big Macs.

Skeptics Are Not Deniers: A Conversation (part 4) | Climate Abyss | a Chron.com blog

[John Nielsen-Gammon] I think the consequences of 5C colder would be much worse than the consequences of 5C warmer.