I’m usually a pretty patient guy about marketing. Unlike some, I am not educated by it and, unlike others, I don’t look down on it. I know why it it exists and I appreciate its value but at some point in advocacy issues ( in this case the environment ) it invariably crosses a line from being funny to offensive and then it goes completely over the line into being the kind of junk science that needs to be ridiculed.

My latest gripe is the claim that low energy bulbs are a magic panacea for the environment and that they are wonderful in all respects. I don’t use them and there are a few compelling reasons why you should focus on other ways to save the environment also.

The main reason I don’t use them is because I am not smug enough.

You know what I am talking about. Who actually laughed at those Apple television ads where the smug, hipster guy is the Apple user and the buffoon uses a PC? It takes some true marketing incompetence to make Microsoft seem lovable but they did it. The only people who liked those ads were Apple users, who are already smug.

Now we have commercials where a hip CFL bulb guilt trips a traditional light bulb in the same condescending manner - and without about the same level of actual data behind it. It will sell some lightbulbs - and maybe make your cat insane, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s discuss light.

The whole point of light bulbs was to give us daylight at night - at first, anything was better than dark but we later discovered that the closer you can get to natural light, the better off you will be. Here is a chart showing the light spectrum, including daylight, incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

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Population science is more art than science so you can count on me to be a little skeptical. However, there are times when the numbers are just too alarming and we have to mobilize for action.

What is this looming population catastrophe? It’s Elvis impersonators. Even the Center for Disease Control has sounded the alarm about this issue.  If the CDC is worried about an issue, so am I.

When Elvis Presley died in 1977, there were an estimated 37 Elvis impersonators in the world. By 1993, there were 48,000 Elvis impersonators, an exponential increase. Extrapolating from this, by 2010 there will be 2.5 billion Elvis impersonators. The population of the world will be 7.5 billion by 2010. Every 3rd person will be an Elvis impersonator by 2010. - Source: Caen, H., San Francisco Chronicle; October 27, 1993

That’s right, people. 1 in 3. We don’t have a lot of time to act.

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End Global Warming By Stopping The Burning Man Festival

Sacred flaming temples, gas-guzzling RVs that converge for a week on the dry Black Rock Desert lakebed - The Exxon-Mobil National Convention, you are thinking?

Not at all. It’s the Burning Man Art Festival in Nevada and it causes global warming. For 21 years this ecological disaster has been using gas-powered generators, up to 37,000 of them, so that smelly hippies can gorge themselves on wasteful fossil-fuel consumption. San Francisco scientists are unsure how much this contributes to global warming but they intend to find out.

They created Cooling Man, an online calculator that determines how many tons of greenhouse gases each of the “burners” will produce with their art projects and community camps.

Once you know how much global warming you are causing, you can either trade for or buy ‘credits’ to offset your consumption. That’s right, so the richest, most wasteful companies can continue to wreak havoc on the environment, completely unchecked, by exploiting the “have-nots” at Burning Man.

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Want To Cure Global Warming? Make Really Big Sunglasses

Sometimes aging scientists get nostalgic for no good reason. Sometimes aging scientists get nostalgic for a very good reason. Environmentalism of the 1970s is a very good reason for scientists to get nostalgic.

You see, when I was a young scientist the big fear was a new Ice Age. Yes, the trend had been that in the 20th century to-date, even with all those big factories pumping out noxious gas and fumes, the earth was cooling. Pollution was the problem, they said. Too much sulfur was preventing the sun’s yummy rays from entering terra firma.

Now it turns out global warming is the problem. That means - you guessed it - we don’t have enough pollution preventing the sun’s yummy rays from entering our atmosphere.

Fear of a new Ice Age at least made sense. Throughout earth’s history, 90,000 of every 100,000 years has been Ice Age. And it’s been 12,000 years since the last one, which means we are overdue.

Global Warming doesn’t make as much sense. Most global warming doesn’t come from people or factories, it comes from plants. I don’t know about you, but I get tickled trying to think of ways environmentalists can blame Big Business for too many plants. Then again, TIME Magazine can write most anything with a straight face - they did a big cover story on global warming that had in its first paragraph, “Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.”

Maybe the guys at TIME are confused about what the words “suddenly” and “unexpectedly” actually mean. I can’t pick up a newspaper without reading about global warming. TIME goes on to say that we’re all going to Hell in a handbasket because of glacial ice sheets melting and a 20-foot rise in the oceans. It’s like WaterWorld, only with better actors.

Wait … Archimedes lived a long time ago and even he knew better. Those glacial ice sheets can melt all they want and it doesn’t make a bit of difference in the level of the oceans. Now, if all of Greenland melted, that would be a problem - but the temperature of Greenland itself isn’t rising at all.

Some scientists are no different from any other government pork-barrel recipients. They only think about funding. Like the saying goes, “No bucks - no Buck Rogers.” Since global warming is the cause celebre du jour, that is where some will go to get money.

So what are those scientists claiming is the answer to global warming? Make really big sunglasses. Or mess with the clouds to act more like our old friend pollution - the easiest answer of all is to inject more sulfur into the atmosphere, which is one of the proposals geo-engineers have out there.

Yes, you read it correctly. We spent trillions of dollars creating government regulations and re-tooling factories to halt the emission of sulfur into the atmosphere so now we will need to spend trillions to create a government agency to inject sulfur into the atmosphere. Sometimes I hate scientists. And I am one. And I hate irony!

Let’s not panic just yet. After all, global warming only became a problem when George Bush took office in 2001. Al Gore says we still have 10 years before catastrophe occurs. And 10 years just happens to be 2 years until the next election plus the 8 years to the end of his second term as President if he wins. So at least we know he has a plan.