Beyond ignorant to crazy

The following post was sent to me by my brother.  It makes the argument that too many PV solar cells will eventually do long-term damage to the SUN!  This is an idea so preposterous that there is probably a good chance that someone is engineering a hoax to determine how goofy one's claim can be and still be believed by the denialist crowd.  The original has pictures of Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin who are, it is possible, the sort who could believe based on other beliefs they have espoused over the years.

Update: Turns out this really WAS a hoax.  That did not stop it from making the rounds (sigh).  Thanks coby for the heads-up!

This is the sort of crackpot thesis that raises the question anew, Can these people even count?  I mean, even though the sun is the source of virtually all energy on earth, only about one Billionth of the sun's output even reaches us.  And of that tiny fraction, it cannot possibly make any difference whatsoever if that energy goes to warm the oceans or grow the crops or tan a sunbather.  The very idea that the sun would behave differently if a PV cell rather than a box of geraniums were placed in the path of its radiation assumes the sun would know the difference.  Anthropomorphism has always been a little batty, but...

Unfortunately, crazy beliefs like the one espoused here actually have a following and there are those who claim it impolite to even laugh at such such folks.  But when the very survival of the species is at stake, ridicule seems like the minimum response.

Solar Panels Drain the Sun’s Energy, Experts Say

This week, a scientific research facility in Wyoming made a startling discovery that is certain to change the way millions of Americans look at the environmentalism movement, after they found conclusive evidence that solar panels not only convert the sun’s energy into usable energy, but that they are also draining the sun of its own energy, possibly with catastrophic consequences far worse than global warming.

Scientists at the Wyoming Institute of Technology, a privately-owned think tank located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, discovered that energy radiated from the sun isn’t merely captured in solar panels, but that energy is directly physically drawn from the sun by those panels, in a process they refer to as “forced photovoltaic drainage.”

“Put into laymen’s terms, the solar panels capture the sun’s energy, but pull on the sun over time, forcing more energy to be released than the sun is actually producing,” WIT claims in a scientific white paper published on Wednesday. “Imagine a waterfall, dumping water. But you aren’t catching the water in buckets, but rather sucking it in with a vacuum cleaner. Eventually, you’re going to suck in so much water that you drain the river above that waterfall completely.”

WIT is adamant that there’s no immediate danger, however. “Currently, solar panels are an energy niche, and do not pose a serious risk to the sun. But if we converted our grids to solar energy in a big way, with panels on domestic homes and commercial businesses, and paving our parking lots with panels, we’d start seeing very serious problems over time. If every home in the world had solar panels on their roofs, global temperatures would drop by as much as thirty degrees over twenty years, and the sun could die out within three hundred to four hundred years.”

The study was commissioned in August 2011 by the Halliburton corporation, who wanted to learn if the energy giant should start manufacturing and selling solar panels domestically and internationally. Halliburton’s executives wanted to know more about the sustainability of solar energy and how photovoltaic technology might evolve over the next ten years. But based on the findings of WIT’s research in the field, Halliburton revealed on Friday that they will not be entering the solar energy market.

“Solar panels destroying the sun could potentially be the worst man-made climate disaster in the history of the world, and Halliburton will not be taking part in that,” the company stated in a press release issued Friday morning. “It’s obvious, based on the findings of this neutral scientific research group, that humans needs to become more dependent on fossil fuels like oil and coal, not less. Because these so-called `green technologies’ are far more dangerous to the Earth than any hydrofracking operation or deep-water drilling station. What good is clean air when our very sun is no longer functional?” more