Marijuana causes global warming, uses 1% of U.S. electricity

This is a national travesty! Californians and all the global warming nutcases are in a dilemma;protect the earth or give up growning marijuana. Decision, decision, decision! LOL

(BizJournals) People growing marijuana indoors use 1 percent of the U.S. electricity supply, and they create 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year (not counting the smoke exhaled) according to a report by Evan Mills, an energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

After medical pot use was made legal in California in 1996, Mills says, per-person residential electricity use in Humboldt County jumped 50 percent compared to other parts of the state.

In order to produce some 17,000 metric tons of marijuana this year, Mills estimates authorized growers will use $5 billion worth of energy. That works out to the output of seven big electric power plants.

Much of the carbon dioxide produced by the industry comes from transportation, though the need for lights “500-times greater than recommended for reading” also uses a lot of power and generates a lot of pollution. Air conditioning, ventilation and humidity control also contribute.

In California, some 400,000 authorized growers use about 3 percent of the state’s electricity for their business.

“This corresponds to the electricity use of 1 million average California homes, greenhouse-gas emissions equal to those from 1 million average cars, and energy expenditures of $3 billion a year,” Mills says. However, since California is such a green state, it only generates 20 percent of national carbon dioxide emissions from pot growing, while using 70 percent of nationwide energy for this industry.

“From the perspective of individual consumers, a single Cannabis cigarette represents 2 pounds of (carbon dioxide) emissions,” Mills says.

For this report, which he published independently, Mills says he didn’t count the energy used in producing fertilizer, water, equipment and building materials also used in indoor pot farms.

2010 Weather was Cold to Global Warming

Don't tell Al Gore about this. He would flip-out.......

(Washington Examiner)- This will come to no surprise to Midwesterners still digging out from the Great Blizzard of 2011, but an analysis of five different temperature databases showed no evidence of global warming in 2010.

“Contrary to press reports the evidence is that 2010 was a year no different from all of the years 2001-2009 with the exception of a moderate to strong El Nino that elevated temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere’s Spring, and a cooling La Nina later in the year,” writes David Whitehouse, of The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

“The standstill seen in global temperatures since 2001 continues.” Statistically, Whitehouse points out, there has been no change in the Earth’s temperature since 1998.

And even though 2010 had the strongest El Nino on record, overall it was still cooler than 1998.

Al Gore Cant Have It Both Ways Regarding Global Warming

Al, you can't have it both ways.

From Al Gore's Blog

An Answer for Bill February 1, 2011 : 11:43 AM

Last week on his show Bill O’Reilly asked, “Why has southern New York turned into the tundra?” and then said he had a call into me. I appreciate the question.

As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming:

“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”

“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.”

But in March of 2002, a debate calling for a climate change strategy because global warming was making the earth hotter and producing less snowfall each year.