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I knew that I probably paid dearly for a time premium when I bought the light bulb with regular socket adapter at Home Depot for about $18 a couple years ago . . . nowadays a 10-LED flash light with battery costs only a couple dollars. OTOH, I probably got my money back in saved milk alone. The biggest problem with incandescent light bulb in fridge is local heating: the area immediately adjacent to the light bulb heats up rapidly, and fridge compressor would have to spend 3x the energy pump the heat out afterward, and that takes time. Milk seems to last much longer after I changed bulb; $18 is cheap insurance against food poisoning, and is probably even cheaper now. CFL is unsuitable for fridge because of mercury risk on breakage and slow lighting up in low temperature.
People the world over spends far more energy on heating than cooling, despite the fact that it much less energy to produce 1 BTU of heat than to remove 1 BTU of heat in a house. That's clear indication that the planet overall is still too cold for the average human inhabitant. Besides, far more people take vacations every year to warmer areas than to colder areas; that's a clear indication where market and individual preferences are. As I suspected for a long time, and recently published in the Journal Science, the rise and fall of civilizations were very much correlated with rising and falling climate conditions; the Science article cited tree ring data going back 10,000 years. I found it intuitively obviously looking at historical synchronicity of relative power balance between sedantary civilizations vs. their northern (and southern) nomads across different sides of the planet.
Palm trees and skiing are not necessarily incompatible. The bubblicious Dubai gave a glimpse of the future with their indoor ski slope design a few years ago. It was a bubble only because for now there are more important human needs to attend to, such as feeding the workers who would be building all that wealth. Given our historical success in turning California desert into America's food basket, and given recent Israeli discovery of vast gas field off-shore and Saudi/Qatari experience in burning gas and oil to produce water, it would not surprise me if we see massive farming on middleastern deserts in the years to come. After the rebalancing is done, humanity can get on with building more dreams. Even for a place like Boston, if it ever become as warm as Florida (I doubt that will happen any time soon), it would take less energy to maintain an indoor ski slope than the energy we spend on snow shoveling and heating homes in winter nowadays; that's before counting deaths from freezing, snow-shoveling-induced heart attacks, and snow/ice caused road accidents.
posted by 76.118.39...
, Fri, 4 Feb 2011 17:11:03, Sat, 5 Feb 2011 07:10:28, Sat, 5 Feb 2011 11:50:28
, Thu, 3 Feb 2011 18:27:38
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