TV Network Tells Kids How Long Their Carbon Footprint Should Allow Them to Live

This is environmentalism jumping the shark:

Click image above to play the game

I don’t know where to begin, except to say that when we see things like this, we should complain loudly and incessantly. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has crossed a line beyond science, beyond decency, and beyond rational thought.

This is what you get after pressing “start”:

 

The screen above says: When you’re done, click on the (skull and crossbones) to find out what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!

Hat tip to CallonJim who writes:

This “kids” games at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Tell’s kids depending on their magical “carbon footprint” how long they should live?

The actual title is “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator - find out when you should die!”

The thing I find amazing is the average foot print is 24.6 tonnes of CO2, which calculates out to 9.3 years old! Where it tells the child “YOU SHOULD DIE AT THE AGE 9.3!” Guess what age this kids games is marketed to? That’s right, 9 year olds.

What is most disgusting about this is that ABC ignores their own published Code of Practice

In section 2.12 they talk about content for children:

2.12 Content for Children. In providing enjoyable and enriching content for children, the ABC does not wish to conceal the real world from them. It can be important for the media, especially television, to help children understand and deal with situations which may include violence and danger. Special care should be taken to ensure that content which children are likely to watch or access unsupervised should not be harmful or disturbing to them.

I venture that any child who takes this carbon footprint test “unsupervised” without mommy and daddy around, and who may be old enough to read, but not old enough to understand he/she is being brainwashed by an agenda, would be “disturbed” find they should die at age nine, since just clicking through with default choices gives you that age.

Here is where you can contact the ABC and give them an inbox full of your opinion. This kind of propaganda needs to be removed.

http://www.abc.net.au/contact/contactabc.htm

UPDATE: There is a row developing in the Austrailian press over this.

UPDATE2: The New York Post highlights this site on June 1st with the headline “Enviro Mental Institution“

I Think, therefore I drive

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a bunch of venture capitalists are now backing Norway’s Think electric-car company. Their plan is to bring the company’s Think City car to the U.S. in 2009 and build it here as well.

I drive a 2002 Ford Think electric car, the open frame model. I’m pretty happy with it, at 3 cents a mile, and I’ve put about 300 miles on it around town since buying it 3 weeks ago. It has gotten a lot of attention in my hometown of Chico, and people are constantly asking me how much it cost and where could they get one? The town is blessed with many alternate back routes, so I don’t have to travel the main congested roads.

The U.S. version is expected to travel 110 miles on a single charge and kind of resembles Smart’s ForTwo. The company expects the car to be priced under $25,000. It’s looking for a site in the U.S. to build U.S.-spec models because it’s cheaper to build an entire line here than it is to ship from Europe, thanks to the weak dollar. Maybe Michigan politicians should be making some calls to Oslo.

The Think City is already in production in Europe, and the company is rushing to produce 10,000 units this year for sale there. One of the people behind the VC funding says they could sell 30,000 to 50,000 Think City cars in the U.S. See Norway’s Think to Produce, Sell Small Electric Cars in U.S. (from WSJ.com)

There is another car that Think has in the pipeline, and it is pretty cool looking, see it below:

Lieberman-Warner Cap and Trade Bill Headed for Defeat

Looks like its support is splintering:

Without widespread corporate support, passage of the bill - already a long shot at best - becomes even more unlikely this year. President Bush remains opposed. House Democrats have been slow to act.

From CNN Money.

According to the WSJ even Hillary and McCain are likely to stay away from it. Voting to increase your local energy prices due to a flawed cap and trade carbon tax scheme which will create 5 new government bureaucracies is never a good thing for somebody trying to get elected.

Even with chances of passage dwindling, write your senator to tell them how you feel about it.

 

UAH Satellite data: Globally, 2008 significantly cooler than last year

One of the great things about our current state of technology is the nearly instant reporting we can get from remote sensing platforms. Thanks to  Dr. Roy Spencer & Dr. Danny Braswell, GHCC at the University of Alabama, Hunsville, we can watch global temperatures of the lower troposphere in near real-time at this page:

http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/

According to UAH: Daily averaged temperatures of the Earth are measured by the AMSU flying on the NOAA-15 satellite. The satellite passes over most points on the Earth twice per day, at about 7:30 am and 7:30 pm local time. The AMSU measures the average temperature of the atmosphere in different layers from the surface up to about 135,000 feet or 41 kilometers. During global warming, the atmosphere near the surface is supposed to warm at least as fast as the surface warms, while the upper layers are supposed to cool much faster than the surface warms.

But as I understand it, the lower troposphere is supposed to be closely coupled to CO2 induced forcings. As we’ve seen from comparison to surface data sets such as HadCRUT, the UAH MSU lower troposphere tracks fairly well with surface temps.

You can learn more about how the Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit on NOAA-15 works and what coverage it has here at my post on it the instrument.

According to the UAH data For 2008, we are averaging about .4 to .5 degrees C cooler than last year. See the graph and click it for a larger one: