As a scientist, I don't give a damn for the far-out claims of the
new-age "enviromentalist" religion that seems to have become
mainstream in 1989. I might give a damn if the believers could point
to statistically significant effects (there is no evidence whatsoever
for global warming), avoid extrapolation many decades in advance
(sometime around 1850 it was confidently predicted that given the rate
of increase of the horse population, Britain would be 6 feet deep in
horse-shit by 1950), avoid reliance on "computer models" (which give
random numbers for output, which contradict each other and which are
only reported when they fit the dogma) etc, etc.
It's worse than medieval fanaticism... no thought required! In fact
avoid thinking or you'll realise how bogus it is! Science is your
enemy! Basic numeracy is most definitely not needed!
For example the claim above. I burst out laughing at it. Gordon's
reply is correct, in fact he was using conservative estimates. The
solar energy incident on the atmosphere is 36 megawatts per capita or
so as he said, of which about half reaches the ground (or ocean).
Gordon estimated his energy consumption at 10 kilowatts max. Actually
an American uses 3 kilowatts average but Americans are by far the most
greedy per capita. An average human consumes about .6 kilowatts.
I'm including industry, cars and so on of course.
Now you don't need to work out the factor of 60000 between 36
megawatts and 0.6 kilowatts to realise how bogus the claim is.
Trivial order-of-magnitude guesswork is plenty.
I should keep a note of the worst excesses because this is a new
record. The previous best was the oft-repeated feminist claim that
100000 American women die of anorexia each year. Give or take a few
orders of magnitude.
-- Rob "my dick is 6 miles long" Harley.
PS: These electrons were posted from a 75% nuclear-powered computer.
.-. Robert.Harley@inria.fr .-.
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`-' Linux - 500MHz Alpha - 256MB SDRAM `-'