Custom Search

Save Green

10 Ways to Go Green and Save Green

How can we live lightly on the Earth and save money at the same time? Staff members at the Worldwatch Institute, a global environmental organization, share ideas on how to GO GREEN and SAVE GREEN at home and at work.

Climate change is in the news. It seems like everyone's "going green." We're glad you want to take action, too. Luckily, many of the steps we can take to stop climate change can make our lives better. Our grandchildren-and their children-will thank us for living more sustainably. Let's start now.

We've partnered with the Million Car Carbon Campaign to help you find ways to save energy and reduce your carbon footprint. This campaign is uniting conscious consumers around the world to prevent the emissions-equivalent of 1 million cars from entering the atmosphere each year.

Keep reading for 10 simple things you can do today to help reduce your environmental impact, save money, and live a happier, healthier life.

  1. Save energy to save money.

    • Set your thermostat a few degrees lower in the winter and a few degrees higher in the summer to save on heating and cooling costs.
    • Install compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) when your older incandescent bulbs burn out.
    • Unplug appliances when you're not using them. Or, use a "smart" power strip that senses when appliances are off and cuts "phantom" or "vampire" energy use.
    • Wash clothes in cold water whenever possible. As much as 85 percent of the energy used to machine-wash clothes goes to heating the water.
    • Use a drying rack or clothesline to save the energy otherwise used during machine drying.

  2. Save water to save money.

    • Take shorter showers to reduce water use. This will lower your water and heating bills too.
    • Install a low-flow showerhead. They don't cost much, and the water and energy savings can quickly pay back your investment.
    • Make sure you have a faucet aerator on each faucet. These inexpensive appliances conserve heat and water, while keeping water pressure high.
    • Plant drought-tolerant native plants in your garden. Many plants need minimal watering. Find out which occur naturally in your area.

  3. Less gas = more money (and better health!).

    • Walk or bike to work. This saves on gas and parking costs while improving your cardiovascular health and reducing your risk of obesity.
    • Consider telecommuting if you live far from your work. Or move closer. Even if this means paying more rent, it could save you money in the long term.
    • Lobby your local government to increase spending on sidewalks and bike lanes. With little cost, these improvements can pay huge dividends in bettering your health and reducing traffic.

  4. Eat smart.

  5. Skip the bottled water.

  6. Think before you buy.

    • Go online to find new or gently used secondhand products. Whether you've just moved or are looking to redecorate, consider a service like craigslist or FreeSharing to track down furniture, appliances, and other items cheaply or for free.
    • Check out garage sales, thrift stores, and consignment shops for clothing and other everyday items.
    • When making purchases, make sure you know what's "Good Stuff" and what isn't.
    • Watch a video about what happens when you buy things. Your purchases have a real impact, for better or worse.

  7. Borrow instead of buying.

    • Borrow from libraries instead of buying personal books and movies. This saves money, not to mention the ink and paper that goes into printing new books.
    • Share power tools and other appliances. Get to know your neighbors while cutting down on the number of things cluttering your closet or garage.

  8. Buy smart.

    • Buy in bulk. Purchasing food from bulk bins can save money and packaging.
    • Wear clothes that don't need to be dry-cleaned. This saves money and cuts down on toxic chemical use.
    • Invest in high-quality, long-lasting products. You might pay more now, but you'll be happy when you don't have to replace items as frequently (and this means less waste!).

  9. Keep electronics out of the trash.

  10. Make your own cleaning supplies.

    Million Car Campaign

    Join the Million Car Carbon Campaign by purchasing your Earth-Aid kit today.

    • The big secret: you can make very effective, non-toxic cleaning products whenever you need them. All you need are a few simple ingredients like baking soda, vinegar, lemon, and soap.
    • Making your own cleaning products saves money, time, and packaging-not to mention your indoor air quality.

  11. Bonus Item!

CO2-Temperature



In the graph below from the Vostok ice core records, the temperature falls drastically for 10,000 years, while the carbon dioxide levels hold constant.


The carbon dioxide holds fairly constant for 15,000 years. Next, for about 5000 years, carbon dioxide levels begin to fall, but the temperature is falling even faster. Then the temperature rises (for 5000 years), while carbon dioxide continues to fall. Carbon dioxide is not causing the temperature to rise at any time: the reverse is happening. This is a plot of the last warm period and ice age 130,000 years ago. Note that the warm period lasts only a few thousand years, and then the temperature falls for the next 20,000 years.







In this plot, the present time is to the left, k = 1000 years, and Yr BP is years before present. The temperature drop is about 10 degrees centigrade. The Vostok ice cores show this effect three more times, at 100,000 year intervals (approx.).

130,000 years ago the carbon dioxide levels had zero effect on either warming or cooling. It didn’t stop the ice age. Can it save us from the next ice age, if carbon dioxide levels were to, say, double? Maybe, but remember, two times zero is still zero.

Another important fact is that, at about 135 K Yr BP, the temperature begins to rise hundreds of years before the carbon dioxide begins to rise. This fact can’t be detected in the plot above, but it can be read directly from the actual ice cores. This is another proof that temperature affects the levels of carbon dioxide, but carbon dioxide doesn’t affect the temperature.

In above plot the carbon dioxide is sustained at an elevated level for 20,000 years, reaching a maximum of 100 ppm. The only result was 20,000 years of global cooling. 100 ppm is also the amount of additional CO2 that humans have added to the atmosphere in recent times. Reach your own conclusion.

There is another proof that temperature change does not correlate with changes in carbon dioxide. This is a macro view of CO2 and temperature over the last 550 million years, where there is absolutely no correlation. This graph is taken from geocraft.com, a very fine Web site, which can also be found on the links page. View the graph here.

On January 31, ‘07 the National Geographic Channel presented a special on global climate change. The first half-hour was a good representation of paleoclimate variation. The program then devolved into a Al Goresk type anthropogenic global-warming tirade. With the Vostok ice core record presented graphically, it was claimed that the temperature curve follows carbon dioxide, despite the obvious fact that didn’t. Are these global warming advocates just ignorant, or are they purposefully perpetrating a multibillion-dollar hoax? (to further a Democratic party agenda, an anti-Bush agenda, or a psycho-socialist agenda, or a euro-psycho socialist agenda?).

It’s a shame, the excess carbon dioxide could contribute to creating a greener planet (and the gain in albedo might save us from the next ice age). In the distant past, for millions of years, CO2 levels were 12 times higher than today (4500 parts per million then, versus 380 parts per million today), and that was a time of ice age temperatures. We can say the world is carbon dioxide deprived today.

We are currently in a warm period, similar to the Medieval Warm Period, but there are other contrary signs. The stratosphere is cooling, and the Antarctic polar night vortex is increasing in size (it destroys ozone and brings the colder stratospheric air closer to the Earth’s surface). Central Antarctica is cooling. The Amazon is drying out, an ice age signal. These changes may be part of a short cycle, or it could be something more. Solar insolation in the southern hemisphere is about to precipitate a 11,000 year colder phase. The lower atmosphere is also cooling slightly. But yes, on the surface, in the United States, the urban heat island effect is still increasing.

The present warm period probably won’t be as warm as the Medieval Warm Period because the mean temperature is currently falling gradually (page 1, fig. 2). How cold will get and how fast? On page 1 we said the temperature will plummet. We can see that on the plot above. The temperature falls 10° C in 20,000 years. That’s one half a degree every thousand years. Not much. The danger is the shorter daily and yearly variations. The temperature might change 7° C in a few years and last for for hundreds of years or a thousand years. That’s what the world should prepare for, not global warming.




Human activity may have moderated the present warm spell:





On the right above is a plot of the temperature during the present warm period with present time to the left. On the left is the previous warm period. Note how the previous warm period was much hotter with a sharper peak. Three other recent warm periods also have sharp peaks. If we remove the sharp peak, however, and measure the time span at the Holocene temperatures, then both warm spells last about 10,000 years. It is possible human activity has cooled the Holocene warm period. The human activity would be land use: farming, the cutting and burning of forests, and modern civilization. Our temperatures have been fairly level, only slightly falling, but now, if we superimposed today’s temperature on the temperature from 130,000 years ago, we can see the temperatures are about to fall drastically again.

Remember, millions of people died during the Little Ice Age, mostly from starvation. The next little Ice Age may be colder than the last one, or it may be the start of the next ice age. Thinking people all over the world need to be planning what steps we can take to save ourselves: how to grow food, how do we prevent deserts from forming, as they did on the Great Plains; do we spread soot on the Arctic snows, build pipelines to heat snow and pump the water south to grow crops, or use barges to transport ice; what do we do? Green is good, CO2 is good in an ice age, because it makes the trees and crops grow green. Ice can be made into water to make more green. Methane is a good greenhouse gas, much better than CO2. Maybe we can use that to save ourselves. Maybe in 30 years time scientists will be able to predict better where we can grow crops during an ice age.

We are entering an historic period of dismally ignorant, inaccurate and corrupted scientific thought (in just one of our scientific disciplines, thankfully). This is happening in a time when it is necessary that science converse with the political sphere. 50 years ago I went to school for engineering. We didn’t have much respect for our fellow students studying geology. Now it turns out that geology, and it’s related subjects, are the most important careers to the future of mankind. Climate science has become so important to civilization that there has to be a connection to the political process. The media plays an important part. Unfortunately the mainstream media is a weak. There seems to be no investigative reporting anymore. The origins of the present fiasco seem to come from computer studies of the of the ice core records. The studies erroneously showed that the carbon dioxide records “correlate” with temperature records. These studies led to an orgy of wildly false predictions of global temperature rise caused by CO2. These studies made it to the press and were accepted as truth by ignorant politicians.

Now we are in dire straits. Even the president believes that global warming is man-made, and caused by CO2. American companies are voluntarily limiting CO2. The European Union is trading in CO2 credits. The UN thinks that the global temperatures are rising due to CO2. Al Gore, the inventor of the Internet and the savior of the Love Canal, now wants to be a hero and save the world from CO2. Gore recently said that all talk contrary to his opinion should be banned from television. Dr. Heidi Cullen, weather forecaster, wants to save the world from CO2 and fire anyone in her profession that disagrees with her. Dr. Richard Alley, climate scientist, in a recent National Geographic special, pointed to a chart of the Vostok ice core records and said that they prove that CO2 causes temperature to rise (which they certainly don’t prove). Dr. Michael Mann, et al, invented the famous hockey stick and magically eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Dr. James Hansen, NASA scientist, said recently that it’s hotter now than anytime in the last 12,000 years. That was a laughable statement. Just 5500 years ago it was so hot the Nile river dried up. An Egyptian wrote that you could wade across the Nile. His neighbors were killing and eating their children. The Mississippi River dried up. The Great Plains was a desert and the long-horned bison went extinct. Now the planet has just warmed up from the mini-ice age. The temperatures right now are back to normal, about average for recent times (say for the last 1000 years). Satellite measurements and weather balloon measurements show the temperature hasn’t changed significantly in the last 27 years.

The UNIPCC functions by reviewing scientific papers on climate. It assumes the papers are truthful and correct and makes no independent studies. It chose a few dubious papers that affirmed anthropogenic global warming and rejected the majority that showed no anthropogenic global warming. It published figures on CO2 forcing (the watts/square meter) with no scientific basis for them. Their actions prove that they are a political group intent on promoting a man-made global warming agenda.

In Al Gore’s book, page 64, he publishes a fraudulent temperature history of Northern Hemisphere climate for the past thousand years. This fraud is repeated in his movie. From 1000 A.D. to 1850 he uses smoothed data, then from 1850 onwards he uses unsmoothed data. This is designed to create sharp spikes in recent temperatures, but to suppress all the similar spikes that occurred before 1850. It is designed to create panic in the mind of the ignorant viewer. The smoothed curve from 1000 A.D. to 1850 is contrived to eliminate the medieval warm period and is not replicated by any other scientific paper, of which there are hundreds available (The spikes for the medieval warm period should be higher than for the present-day; it was hotter back then).

Al Gore’s book also makes the same mistake as Dr. Richard Alley mentioned previously (3 paragraphs up), that Vostok ice core temperature records correlate with CO2 records (they don’t, see the figure at the top of this page). His book also supports the discredited “hockey stick” version of recent temperatures.

It is the responsibility of the president of the United States to protect us from war and other dangers, which should also include protection from bogus CO2 tax plans costing trillions of dollars. It is time for the president to get informed and speak out.

We just recently learned from the ice cores that global temperatures can change drastically in short periods of time. Climate Science must tell us where the temperature is going next, so we can be prepared. There is no good evidence for any human caused global warming. The true climate scientists, now called climate skeptics for some reason, are still hard at work, thankfully.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)