Danger! Common Sense Ahead!

And we’re applying it to social media.

Yeah. Exactly!

Yesterday’s big news of Margaret Thatcher’s death was not entirely unexpected given her recent health issues, and nor was the mixed response to her passing. Much like Marmite, you either loved her or you hated her, but is there (or was there) really no room for any middle ground?

This article from Willard Foxton in the Telegraph shows us that social media forced us to see other people’s opinions which might differ widely from our own and reminds us that any form of unerring adulation or hatred here is probably rather ill-conceived.

The nail is pretty much hit on the head with this:

Surveying yesterday’s social media hysteria, the conclusion I draw is this: anyone who loved Margaret Thatcher as the perfect PM and is unwilling to accept any criticism of her, or anyone who thinks she was pure evil, like a medieval peasant recalling a folk memory of a tyrant king, is either disingenuous, ill-informed or a bit thick.

And often all three.

This could be applied to many (any?) other individual, situation or event as well. And probably should be.

Speed Kills

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have returned to the Southern Suburbs Tatler.
And therein to the Letters Page.
That’s where I found this beautiful piece of writing. Although, having described it thus, I should point out that I do have a few issues with it, which I will share below:

Speed Kills
On Monday March 11, a teenager lost her pet cat, killed by a speeding car in Oak Avenue in Kenilworth.
The cat had provided comfort and affection, crawling under her sheets to feel the teen’s body heat. She was writing exams that week, but her pet did not crawl into her bed that night. Her pet was found the next morning on the side of the road.

Drivers do not consider the grief they cause to the owners of pets. Speeding in suburbs causes hazards like this and also unnecessary noise which wakes residents.
This is totally ignored for the sake of the feel of power under the bonnet and the throaty noise of the exhaust. Instead, they must realise that speed kills and will have consequences. In this case the driver did not feel a thing, but the teenager and her family have been grieving.
We all know the speed limits. Why can’t people with powerful cars accept their responsibility to the community?

Henk Egberink, Kenilworth.

Henk, first of all, I am so sorry for your loss. Assuming it is your loss, that is. You never actually mention whether the warm teen in question is in any way related to you.
To lose a pet in these circumstances is difficult. To lose one that was writing exams must be doubly difficult.
And, because of these difficulties, I hate to question you regarding this incident. But I am confused, and that is a situation I hate to find myself in.

You should know that I am familiar with Oak Avenue. It’s just around the corner from us and I regularly used its steep hill to warm my calf muscles before my dreadful accident, which, incidentally, didn’t involve power under anyone’s bonnet, nor the throaty noise of an exhaust.

But I digress. Often.

My initial question is this: How do you know that the car that killed this remarkable feline was speeding?

I thought at first that you witnessed the incident, perhaps while holding a SABS-approved radar gun, calibrated to SANAS standards, which you were fully trained in using by an officially recognised regulatory body, but then you mention that the animal was found the following morning. Surely only a sick, sick man could stand to leave an exam writing, probably dead cat to lie by the side of the road overnight.
Although that having been said, I doubt that it would have bothered the cat very much.

Thus, this is where my confusion arising. Were you there or were you not? You seem to be a caring man, Henk. Not one that would leave an injured or dying animal at the side of Oak Avenue. So I’m assuming that you weren’t actually there when the cat met the front bumper of speeding car (and vice versa).

And that assumption brings up another question.
Do you honestly expect a feline-positive outcome to a collision twixt cat and car?

The speed limit on Oak Avenue is 60kph. You could argue that a 60kph speed limit is too high for Oak Avenue (and indeed I may be inclined to agree with you), but that’s another argument completely and anyway, as you so rightly point out, “we all know the speed limits”.

Your assertion that “Speed Kills”, the title and indeed the gist of your beautifully emotive letter to the Tatler, does tend to suggest to me that you believe that whereas an average car travelling at less than 60kph would not have killed this cat, one exceeding the speed limit of Oak Avenue by travelling at – let’s say for argument’s sake – 61kph, would automatically result in its certain demise.

I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and I think you’re incorrect.

I think that the car would still have won this brief battle, even if it was travelling at 30kph. And that’s because it’s so much bigger and more solid than its squidgy, exam writing, organic opponent.

And I don’t want to have to wheel out the big guns to support my hypothesis, but suffice to say, Sir Isaac Newton told me so.

Yeah. Exactly.

Henk, I’m sorry your cat is no longer with us and I trust that you have made alternative arrangements for someone or something to continue with the exam writing, shitting on your neighbours’ lawns and yowling late into the night.

But making mistaken assumptions about our local speed demons isn’t going to bring your unnamed pet back. And while the driver may not have felt a thing at the time of the accident (I’m assuming you mean both physically and emotionally here), having to remove teeth, blood and fur from the front of one’s vehicle is never a pleasant task, especially if he, like you, only found about it the following day. I’d recommend Wash ‘n Wax, which as well as removing all traces of dead cat, will also give a long lasting shine to the bodywork. You can get it from Builders Warehouse, or some of the larger Pick n Pay outlets.

But look at me, forgetting that it wasn’t you that hit the cat, it was a car driven by an inconsiderate and irresponsible driver.
A speeding driver.

Possibly, anyway.

Still in the dark about Earth Hour?

Yes yes, I’ve been told that Earth Hour is all about “raising awareness” about “climate change”. I’ve also commented that I really don’t think it’s necessary to raise any more awareness about something we can’t get through a single Pistorius-free day without having rammed down our collective gullet.

In addition, I may also have mentioned that Earth Hour gives slacktivists the perfect opportunity to enjoy their favourite pastime, namely thinking that they’re making a difference without actually making a difference at all. In fact, as that article on Slate pointed out, lighting an inefficient candle (which most bunny-huggers and pseudo bunny-huggers will do this evening) is actually more harmful to our precious environment than using a fat incandescent light bulb for an hour (or, by extrapolation, any given period of time). But how much more harmful?

Well, I’ve found someone who has done some rudimentary calculations to find out exactly how much:

I know candles are nice and romantic – but you’re taking paraffin wax, in the form of a candle, and burning it, very inefficiently, at a low temperature. This stuff is pure hydrocarbon – it’s a heavy alkane fraction distilled straight off crude oil. This stuff is getting so scarce that nations are prepared to go to war just to secure it, remember?

A candle flame burns at a low temperature – so it’s a thermodynamically very inefficient source of energy – and most of the energy released in a candle is wasted as heat, anyway.

Even if 80% of your electricity comes from coal and fossil fuel fired power stations, as it does in Australia, burning candles is very polluting and certainly very greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions intensive, even more so than electric lighting.

Luke Weston then spoon feeds us through his calculations, just so that there can be no confusion as to how he reaches his conclusion. I’m not going to reproduce all those calculations here, but suffice to say that the results (standardised for the amount of light produced – apples with apples and all that) are as follows:

A incandescent bulb produces 1.11g CO2 for each hour that it is burned.
A candle produces 10.69g  for each hour that it is burned.

Therefore, for every candle that is burned to replace electric lighting during Earth Hour, greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the one hour are increased by 9.6 g of carbon dioxide.
If the light output from a 40 W light bulb was to be completely replaced by candles, this will lead to the emission of an extra 295 grams of carbon dioxide per over simply using the electric lights – if the equivalent of one thousand 40 W bulbs are replaced by candles, that’s an extra 295 kilograms of CO2 emitted.

I don’t know about you, but I can feel it getting warmer already.

Thus, if you really want to “make a difference” this evening (a positive difference, that is), you’ll be far better off sitting in the dark for an hour. And, if you want to DOUBLE the your contribution to saving the planet, you could do it for two.

But then we have to remember that there’s football and rugby in Cape Town tonight which you’ll want to watch on your dirty, still not ever so energy efficient flatscreen TV, dwarfing any potential benefits of switching off your lights and (not) firing up a candle.

Fortunately, this darkness and/or watching sport will (possibly) restrict the amount of “other activities” that some people have been suggesting might be an enjoyable and romantic by-product of an environment-destroying candlelit evening. I say “fortunately” because my wife is away this evening because each baby produced from those “other activities” will add so much to your household carbon footprint that you might as well stop washing out those Marmite jars and begin weeping right now:

Take, for example, a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.

So. Please spend your Earth Hour in the dark. No lights, no candles, certainly no TV and ABSOLUTELY NO HANKY PANKY!

And even then, please don’t pretend that you’re actually making a difference.

Slate: Earth Hour is all wrong

Ah yes. Another annual opportunity for slacktivism approaches. If you’re all done with clicking LIKE to cure some Indian child with a facial abscess and you’ve signed that online petition against whales (or Wales), you too can switch your lights off for an hour and save the planet.

Or… er… not:

If switching off the lights for one hour per year really were beneficial, why would we not do it for the other 8,759?
Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants around the world. But, even if everyone in the entire world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes.

Well worth it then? No.

As the United Kingdom’s National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterward.

But if you do still decide to continue with switching the lights off, then don’t even think about lighting a candle:

[They] are still fossil fuels—and almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs. Using one candle for each switched-off bulb cancels out even the theoretical CO2 reduction; using two candles means that you emit more CO2.

That won’t bother anyone taking part though, because they will feel that they are doing their bit, making a difference. And while a little bit of me wants to correct them on that fact, it’ll only upset them. And the only thing worse than a misinformed tree-hugger is a sad tree-hugger.

But, if you are one of those people who thinks that they can absolve themselves of all their environmental misdeeds simply by clicking a switch on Saturday, perhaps you should consider a better way of reducing your impact on the planet, because what you are planning is a complete waste of time – and electricity.