We use air conditioners here at Weather Snob to cool the office and to sleep at night in the hot summer weather. Recently we acquired the Kill A Watt electricity usage monitor to see just how much we use in power for the air conditioners and the other gadgets around the office. Sometimes just seeing how much power an air conditioner uses makes your realize you could simply put on the fan and save the planet a little power. Get one of these if you really want to know and save on bills. After we got ours two months ago, we already are more aware of devices and things left on, and turn most stuff off we just aren't using saving us $100 bucks easily in just one month.
Writing about global warming and the possible effects is just heart breaking. Koalas are the latest possible causality of global warming, threatened by the rising level of carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere because which is sapping nutrients from the eucalyptus leaves they feed on. Researchers also found that the amount of toxicity in the leaves of eucalyptus saplings rose when the level of carbon dioxide within a greenhouse was increased.
LocalCooling App Fights Global Warming by Cooling Your Computer
More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we aren’t using them. If we could just improve the efficiency of how we use our PCs, the savings in energy costs would be over $3 billion dollars a year. LocalCooling is a 100% FREE power management tool, from Uniblue Research Labs, that allows users to optimize their energy savings in minutes and as a result reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
LocalCooling will:
Cut your energy bills
Reduce the amount of greenhouse gas CO2 emissions as a result of your reduced PC power consumption
Give you full control over your power mode settings Improve your overall efficiency and computing experience
Show you, in detail, how much you have saved since installing the software
The Most Polluted Cities in the US - Ozone Weather
The picture above shows the city of Houston bathed in ozone filled pollution. If you really want to see what effect pollution has on the weather, and the way it looks, you may want to visit some of the Most Polluted Cities in the US. Or not. We live in Boston, so the pollution here just doesn't make it into the top 20, and we're really glad. And it should be no surprise to anyone that Los Angeles is the most polluted with ozone. Click on through to see more shots of polluted cities and how they look.
Earth Hour 2008 - Save the Planet One Hour at a Time
It started with a question: How can we inspire people to take action on climate change?
On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. If the greenhouse reduction achieved in the Sydney CBD during Earth Hour was sustained for a year, it would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year.
With Sydney icons like the Harbour Bridge and Opera House turning their lights off, and unique events such as weddings by candlelight, the world took notice. Inspired by the collective effort of millions of Sydneysiders, many major global cities are joining Earth Hour in 2008, turning a symbolic event into a global movement.
It's cold here in the Northeast, and we're pretty sure the Day After Tomorrow is right around the corner. Okay - well maybe not, but if you want to see a movie that has both amazing weather and global warming all in one package - the The Day After Tomorrow is for you.
The movie centers on global warming triggering the onset of a new Ice Age. Tornadoes flatten Los Angeles, a tidal wave engulfs New York City and the entire Northern Hemisphere begins to freeze solid. Then, climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a small band of survivors must ride out the growing superstorm and stay alive in the face of an enemy more powerful and relentless than any they've ever encountered: Mother Nature!
Come on - admit it - it's a much watch for weather snobs.
With global warming up on us, we may want to retreat underground once the super storms take over. Envisioned by "visionary futurist" Dan Bloom—the first model polar underground city will begin construction in 2012 in Norway, with "volunteer testing occupancy" starting in 2015. Click on through to see the entire gallery of ideas for this super safe city of tomorrow.
The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
We think this book looks pretty good. Not only does the author tackle current weather issues, but he also goes back to see why the fossil fuel issue is such a big one.
From Publisher's Weekly:
Mammologist and paleontologist Flannery (The Eternal Frontier), who in recent years has become well known for his controversial ideas on conservation, the environment and population control, presents a straightforward and powerfully written look at the connection between climate change and global warming. It's destined to become required reading following Hurricane Katrina as the focus shifts to the natural forces that may have produced such a devastating event. Much of the book's success is rooted in Flannery's succinct and fascinating insights into related topics, such as the differences between the terms greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change, and how the El Niño cycle of extreme climatic events "had a profound re-organising effect on nature." But the heart of the book is Flannery's impassioned look at the earth's "colossal" carbon dioxide pollution problem and his argument for how we can shift from our current global reliance on fossil fuels [...]. Flannery consistently produces the hard goods related to his main message that our environmental behavior makes us all "weather makers" who "already possess all the tools required to avoid catastrophic climate change."
Yeah - it's Friday and June 1st, so we decided to start off June with a bit of a news bummer - 10 years until it's game over on the Global Warming front. In a article from abcnews.com, author Bill Blakemore brings to light NASA and Columbia University Earth Institute’s recently conducted study that verifiably asserts that “with just 10 more years of ‘business as usual,’ it becomes impractical to avoid disastrous effects.” In the article the disastrous effects sound like something out of the bible - floods, boiling water - you get the idea. Given this fact, I'm going to get a few more compact fluorescents this morning and perhaps a solar panel or two. And...where's that flood wall I needed to construct...
We're believers in global warming, but we also like to get the other side of the story. In this book, the two authors make the claim that global warming is just a 1500 year trend and we're seeing the end of it - or the middle if you like. Well - we don't buy it after seeing other evidence to the contrary - like the fact that in the past 10,000 years we didn't see the ice caps melt to the extent they are now EVER IN RECORDED history using ice cores, but what the hell. It's an interesting alternative if you want to put your head into the sand or ice and look away.
Weather the Heat - Monitor Your Power Usage
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