“Put a little piece of tape over the hole in your soul that keeps you physiologically dependent on refreshing your social-media accounts every four minutes.” Vernon Chapman
Oh good grief. Sometimes i see a news account so egregiously stupid that i cannot stifle my outrage. Such is the case with this breathtakingly alarmist coverage of the impact of this August’s solar eclipse on California solar power generation. Click on the link and read it.
Now let’s think about it.
In paragraph 2 we read, “But the day of the eclipse, much of [our solar-generated] power will be turned off over a period of three hours.” Ummm, it will not be turned off, but merely reduced. And the duration of the eclipse is not three hours but rather two hours and thirty-nine minutes.
In paragraph 4 we read, “Skies will start to darken”. Well, actually, in LA the eclipse will reach a maximum of 62% for about two minutes, during which time the skies will be only slightly less bright, so little that looking directly at the sun then will still broil your retinas. At the beginning, the reduction in brightness will not be discernible to the human eye.
A few paragraphs later, we read, “As the state loses sunlight, people will be turning on lights as if it were night”. Oh no they won’t because it will never get dark, and at maximum there will be every bit as much light as on a hazy day.
This thing is obscenely alarmist, going on to envision such remote possibilities as the overblown problem being exacerbated by a brush fire taking out a transmission line. Oh please. And what if an earthquake strikes simultaneously!!!!
What we’re actually going to have is two hours and thirty-nine minutes of marginally reduced sunshine. The impact of a thunderstorm on solar generation would be much greater, but that’s not the kind of news that grabs viewers.
Meanwhile, here in sunny Petaluma, our alley murals are illuminated.
