...need it the least - and the entire output on the entire planet is not as large as the output of Redondo Beach Gas Fired Power Plant which one can bicycle past in 3 minutes or less.

In saying this, I don not mean to excuse the Redondo Beach gas fired power plant or to suggest that the plant is acceptable. It's not. Dangerous natural gas is not an acceptable form of energy because nobody knows how to deal with the waste for, um, eternity.

(No, Virginia, carbon dioxide does not have an intrinsic half-life.)

I oppose all dangerous fossil fuels and insist, yet again, that they all be phased out, the sooner the better.

But the Redondo Beach Dangerous Natural Gas Fueled Electricity plant has a capacity of 43,000 MWe. The average continuous power of all of the world's solar PV capacity is, by comparison, a paltry 2,100 MWe, rounding up to the nearest 100.

Yet the claim is that solar energy cannot be criticized without giving broad cultural offense, just as most religions claim that their myths cannot be criticized and must be accepted as true - even when they all conflict - and sancrosanct, even when adherents kill one another over their alternate "truths."

If someone says "solar energy" everyone must stand and cheer. Governments are all implored to give more money to this dubious business.

I'm going to make a confession. When I came to this website, I was a proponent of solar energy and whenever I praised my favorite form of energy - nuclear energy - someone would show up and mutter some trash talk about solar energy was the answer to all of humanity's needs.

I spend a lot of my free time reading the primary scientific literature. I use one of the best libraries in the world for my library research and I can find out almost anything about which I want to find out.

I am extremely priviledged.

Over the years, in response to some of the stuff I've heard around here and elsewhere, I've been inspired to check some of these claims about the "solar miracle."

Not everything in the scientific literature is correct, nor does publication in a scientific "peer reviewed" journal make a claim sacrosanct. Even Randell Mills gets to publish stuff, and frankly, he's out to lunch. Still over centuries of scientific enterprise, consensus evolves, in fits and starts and jerks backward and forward, and if one spends a lot of time reading this stuff, one can begin to discern truths.

As late as the end of the 19th century, not everyone believed in atomic theory, for instance, although there was a broad consensus that it was true and today, atomic theory is considered, um, irrefutable.

Note that atomic theory is a little more than two centuries old, whereas belief in Jesus is 2000 years old, but acceptance of atomic theory is now essentially a cultural universal whereas a belief in Jesus is held by a minority of the world's population. If one wants to build a power transformer, or start a car engine, or use a cell phone anywhere on earth, one has to tacitly acknowledge atomic theory, but one cannot produce power transformers by prayer.

Prayer.

Faith.

Sun Gods.

Here is the promised 1954 "solar will save us" ad from Bell Labs, where the photovoltaic cell was discovered. One may see similar ads by accessing this site: Bell System Memorial.

That was the golden age of American Industrial Science, the expansion of the universe was discovered in a corporate laboratory, and many corporations got rich from outgrowths of that discovery which helped inspire, among other things, the American Space Program.

Quoth the owner of this fine website:

In fact, my dream since the mid 1970's has been to live in a solar powered home and drive an electric car recharged from solar panels by the time I retire.

Well then...

It seems to be 2011.

This is just one of the 13,400,000 results that I get - as of this writing - when I type "solar energy" in the Google search bar and hit the "Enter" key.

Now for a back of the envelope calculation.

If a 2006 article on Google is correct, they run about 800,000 servers.

According to this link, a server, consumes about 450 watts on average. It follows that Google consumes - "back of the envelope" - about 360 MW of electricity in average continuous power, which, not counting even transmission losses, accounts for 17% of all the solar PV power produced on the entire earth.

None of this is meant to imply that people don't use Google at night, or when their roofs are covered by snow, or even ash from a burning forest or burning chapparal, or when its very cloudy or when a volcano erupts.

I've been using Google all week, and truth be told, for much of the week as I write my roof has been covered by snow. (It's going to snow again tonight.) I will bet that none of the inevitable critics of this diary stop whining and bitching about NNadir diaries when its dark, or when the roof is snow covered. I should be so lucky.

According to the website linked above, the server's power consumption is only part of the equation. Lots of servers generate lots of heat and it is said that the cooling power consumption requirement for the servers is equal to the consumption of the servers themselves.

But let's leave that aside for a moment.

The above concerns just the Google servers. Websites also have servers.

Of course, solar comments, solar websites, solar blogs, and even this blog post (a few million hits down the list) all turn up when you google "solar energy." Some of the servers containing these items may contain many hundreds, even thousands of references to solar energy. I searched stories and diaries on this blog, Daily Kos, and got 1,280 hits.

For comments containing the term, over the last six years, there were 3,410 hits.

Let us suppose that a diary takes on average, an hour to complete - I have written some that wasted considerably more time, but I've also written little throwaway diaries that I deliberately set to be finished in a half hour or less - free writing.

Let us also assume that the average computer requires 200 watts of average power with monitor - that figure seems consistent with my experience with one of those "Kill-O-Watt" meters.

Let us also assume that a typical diary gets one hundred reads - some get more, some get less but that seems like a decent average and it takes 10 minutes for each reader to read them.

Thus for diary writers, using these assumptions, we have 1280 diaries * 1 diary/hour * 200 watts = 25.6 kwh just to write the diaries on this website. One hundred reads per diary each lasting ten minutes similarly consumes 4260 kwh, meaning that on this site - which is nominally not designed to be a solar industry promotional site - about 4300 kwh = 4.3 MWh have been consumed to tell us - mostly I suspect - how wonderful solar energy is.

Thus writing about solar energy on just one website, this one, can be reasonably - albeit very crudely - estimated to have consumed 2 ten thousandths of a percent of all the solar energy produced on the planet. Of course this is a tiny number until one considers how many websites there are that mention the topic, as indicated in the Google count, measuring considerably more than 10 million.

Realistically, also, some of these sites took thousands of computer-man/woman hours to create, like say the website of one of the world's largest solar companies, BP ("Beyond Petroleum") solar.

Go ahead, give BP Solar's website some more hits.

Climate change is not a game. It's not something that's made up, or something that we can wish away through some new age positive thinking, or magical thinking exercise.

It's real. It's measurable.

Solar energy has been the subject of more than half a century of uncritical praise, cheering and hype and lots of unrealistic claims - tax subsidized in a world where education, arts, sciences, health care, parks, and yes, environmental protection efforts are all facing cuts.

So I ask about asking: "Is this a reasonable question?"

"Is it?"

In a world where financial and material resources are clearly diminishing, why is this question, the question of whether the solar miracle is, in fact, a miracle, one that cannot be asked?