27 thoughts on “Don’t they use candles any more?”

  1. He’d be much better off going to London for Darwin day and being lit up by the enlightened presentation by PCC(E)!! NOW THAT WOULD BE ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY.

  2. I very much doubt that the Pope had any say in the matter, or that he even was consulted. It was entirely and exclusively the organizers’s decision, in my opinion.

  3. Likely ulterior motive to show Trump the Pope can create a human wall to defeat his boarder wall. Either that or the Pope has a lot of stock in Apple and Samsung.

  6. Dumb, dumb move.
    Anyone care to take a bet on them not getting their full 19km? Even if they nominally have enough people, the people are far more likely to congregate at the easier-to-get-to locations, while any news-hound worth his salt (even if not spurred on by prompting from someone with a malicious agenda) will look for the gaps in the “wall of light” to suggest that there is a lack of support for the church / the pope/ the latest in-church dispute.

    1. Maybe the gaps of darkness represent dark energy, the sustainer of the Universe (fact), whereas the lights represent faith in the ground up being. I think Christ himself should just illuminate the path for Frank using stars; they pulled it off for the wise guys right?

      1. The wise guys who asked Herod for directions, and alerted him to potential competition?
        Smart move that. Herod had form for being a bit on the brutal side already.

        1. Yes, it was the first recorded bait-and-switch scam, which shortly thereafter led to Jesus and Barabbas selling their shell game on the streets of Jerusalem and in local desert oases. Naturally, following their convictions and subsequent crucifixions on the racketeering charges, the clergy of the Church took over for the original wise guys; and behold, organized crime was born.

          1. I think the Akkadians, Egyptians, Israelites, Philistine, Hittites, Carthagians, Romans and many others beat them into the organised crime game by millennia – plus.
            If you believe the recent Recent find of a slaughtered band of humans near Lake Turkana, they’ve got 8000 years on all of the above laundry list of peoples.

  7. Setting aside the overall silliness of mass worship of a man guilded in gold and wearing a funny hat and robes, I can accept this as a plausible way to pull off this sort of spectacle. How many candles would it take in a line of people that stretches 19 km? Are there enough candles in the region to do it? And lets’ not forget the fire hazard and the mundane problem of keeping them lit.
    Meanwhile everyone has cell phones, and many have the candle app.

    1. Not that many really, lots of cities do luminaries around christmas, even in a relatively small town this involves a lot more than 19km of candles. They burn pretty reliably in their paper bags and they don’t cause a fire hazard.

      Of course your first sentence still applies.

    2. The closest I’ve seen to this was a large Bob Dylan concert (1975-Philadelphia stadium) in which everyone had those glow-in-the-dark sticks (distributed free) which I think is environmentally the worst possible option of all.

      Pope F sits on a gold throne, but seems less ostentatious than his Sith Lord predator predessor.

      (You have an extremely common and widespread misspelling of “gilded”. If “guilded” were a verb, it would mean you had joined a labor association.)

      1. I wondered about ‘gilded’, but thought, ‘nah’.
        Not to mention the large amount of trash left from candles and matches, etc.

  8. Candles would probably be derived from fossil fuels (there are beeswax or tallow ones, but not common), and are very inefficient for lighting – phone lights (LED?) are bound to be more efficient, because they don’t get so hot they burn you.

    I once tried to convince someone their idea of spending Earth Hour in a candle-lit bath was far worse than just leaving an electric light on.

  9. Well, safer? No one worries about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over the cell-phone, and starting a fire. I went to a concert about eight years ago, for the first time in twenty years, and was amused to see that cell-phones have replaced lighters as the illumination of choice. Heck, you’ve got them anyway, why not use the multi-function?

  10. Whatever the wax, and we’ll assume most of the candles would be made of paraffin, we’re still talking about saturated hydrocarbons containing anywhere from 25 to 40 carbon atoms. That’s a lot of CO2 for a little light.

    Based on the math from this site:
    http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2014/03/the-chemistry-of-earth-hour-1-candle-x-1-hour-8-x-the-co2-from-1-lightbulb-x-1-hour.html

    Assuming a 25 carbon chain wax:

    C25H52 + 38O2 –> 25CO2 + 26H2O Mol.wt. of C25H52 = (25×12)+(52×1) = 352 Mol.wt. of CO2 = (1×12)+(2×16) = 44 So 352g of wax yeilds (25×44) = 1100g of CO2

    A household candle of 50g will burn for about 4 hours, so 1 hour will burn 12.5g of candle,and produce 12.5/352 x 1100 = 39g of CO2 per hour.

    Coal burning power stations produce from about 0.8g to 1.35g of CO2 per Watt hour of generated power.

    The site above compares a candle to a 5 watt nightlight, but in this case we’re talking about a cell phone light and since that wattage is so low, I’ll just use a standard smartphone with a 3000mah (3 amp hour) battery running at 3.7v for a total wattage of 11.1 which, if charged using coal power would, at the high side, generate 14.985g of CO2. So, a single candle for an hour generates about 2.6 times the amount of C02 as a hefty smart phone uses in an entire days charge. If we estimated an 6 hour charge per battery with the light on full blast, then a cell phone light running for an hour would equate to about 2.5g of CO2 being released into the atmosphere, or 15.6 times less CO2 than a candle running for the same amount of time.

    So, as silly as this event is, it is still more environmentally friendly than using candle light, which, if we assume there are barely enough people willing to do this to stretch shoulder to shoulder one person at a time, with an average shoulder width of 17 inches or around 43cm which would be a line of 44,186 people, each holding, I assume, a single candle. If the Pope-mobile then creeped along at about 11mph (approx 19km an hour) then that would be 44,186 candles burning for about an hour and releasing 1.725 metric tonnes of CO2 into the air versus the .11 metric tonnes released by the equivalent smart phone.

    There are, however, studies that show that the blue spectrum light emitted by cell phone LEDs can disrupt sleep patterns, so we could be looking at a public health hazard rather than an environmental one.

    And then there’s the thermal energy that would be leaked into the environment by so many candles versus the relatively nil amount of heat given off by a cell phone but I’ll leave that one alone.

  12. Burning candles are about as environmentally friendly as a revving diesel engine. Believing that they are is an instance of unintentional argumentum ad antiquitatem 🙂

  13. Candle maker shoots himself after over stocking candles in anticipation of Popular Francis visit!

  14. Given the very low power consumption of phone LED displays, and the fact that the crowd will all be using phones they already have, I can’t see how this would have any significant environmental impact.

    Far less so, in fact, than candles.

    cr

  15. Not that anyone would care but I was born and raised in Onley(pronounced Ownee) and attended near by Wellingborough Tech. If I had known PSC would have been in the area I would have directed him to some good places for food.

  17. Turn your phones on for the Pope!

    Now leave them on if you accept evolution from a common ancestor.

    Advancements in technology and engineering – yay!
    Advancements in biological understanding – not so fast!

  18. Faith in Jezeus is mythplaced.

    How come no one at the crucifiction rushes for a torch or cries out for one during the darkness ? How come Jesus’ halo didn’t light up the scene like a candle shining in the dark ?

    Luke 23v44 claims darkness covered the whole land, so dark it was as if the sun stopped shining. Yet everyone at the crucifiction carried on as if it was broad daylight. Luke 23v49 & Matt 27v55 has women watching from a distance. Mark 15v36 has a man running around finding a sponge, jug of wine & stick without the need of a torch to see by. John’s account doesn’t mention darkness at all & has Jesus mother & some other women standing near the cross instead of at a distance (contra Mark 15v40) There is also no mention of birds falling silent and then starting to sing again once the clouds part [ as has been observed during total solar eclipse ]. Maybe the cocks should have crowed the moment Jesus died and the sun broke through ? It is possible to argue from the gospels that the clouds parted half an hour before Jesus died.. How come no mention of people crying out for torches to see by if it was so dark ? No account of people gasping in horror or heading back into the walled city looking for a well lit place. No howling of jackals like what they often do at night fall. John 19v26- has Jesus able to see the people around him clearly enough to name them without calling out “Who is there?”. In Luke 23v47 the centurion is able to identify who said “Father into your hands i commit my spirit” in spite of the darkness.

    Maybe it was due to the great darkness that Jesus couldn’t see anyone & worried that everyone had gone away, cursed,” My God, why have you all forsaken me?” To which no doubt the observers shouted, “No we are still here” but it just wasn’t recorded or is just invented stories.

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