Warmies: Damn The Greenhouse Gas, Rock On!

The Warmies are all excited: They're going to do what the Cause-Elite always does when things slow down a bit -- They're going to have a rock concert! Actually, a bunch of rock concerts!

A series of concerts "bigger than Live Aid" is being planned for July, in a bid to put the subject of climate change before an audience of a global audience of 2bn.

The event, scheduled for July 7, will feature co-ordinated film, music and television events in seven cities including London, Washington DC, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town and Kyoto, with major broadcasters and media owners aiming to extend the reach of public awareness of global warming.

It is understood that former US vice-president Al Gore, whose movie An Inconvenient Truth brought climate change to cinema audiences last year, will announce the event tomorrow in London.

The organisers hope to involve up to 2.5m people in events and link-ups at the cities involved, as well as other locations. They are promising a line-up of artists to "dwarf" that of the Live8 and Live Aid concerts, thought to be branded under the name "SOS". ...

One person close to the event said yesterday: "The talent involved is just exponentially bigger because the issue itself is bigger. Live Aid was about asking people to stump up money, this is about effecting systemic change.

"The aim is not just to drive awareness but to get people to take action." (source)

Perhaps the action they should take first is cancelling the rock concerts. Have you been to one lately? Seen the wrist-thick power cards snaking hither and yon, juicing up the instruments, the amps, the lights?

You know all those little jumping bars and dancing needles? They're not measuring sound; they're measuring electricity. The term decibel, dBm (for the milliwatt reference level) is a unit of electrical power. (Other types of decibels measure sound in other ways, but we're talking rock concerts here.) The sound meters are measuring that jumping electrical power.

Then there will be the television coverage, with electricity humming through the cameras, the mixers, the satelites (Just think of the greenhouse gasses emitted by a rocket launching a satelite!) and the millions of TVs we're supposed to turn on to get the message. (And our new HD televisions use much more power than our good ol' analog ones.)

And let's not forget the rock bands. They'll get dressed in the morning in all manner of oh, so hip garb, each piece requiring considerable power to make. then they'll hop into their jets, adding tens of thousands of pounds of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as the jet to their concert local. (And the various producers, flacks and hangers-on will do the same).

Then millions of people will take cars, trains, planes or their feet to the venue so they can be a part of this history, and they'll all jump up and down and yell, emitting CO2 by the bucketful all the while.

And for what? Well, quoting above, to get people to take action.

Do you think a Warmie scientist, between writing grant applications for his next study, will write an analysis of the net greenhouse gas output of all these concerts? Not a chance.

Related Tags: Global warming