Most people are mistaken on the issue of climate change. Earth cycles are almost certainly NOT the cause of the past 100 years' or so worth of relatively consistent temperature increases. The cycles are both poorly-understood, as well as what is known shows them to be relatively slow.
Rather, the temperature increase is largely due to a different, man-made effect: the urban heat island. In short, as the area around weather stations have become more urbanized, the landscape became a cityscape, and hence got warmer, from human-made structures absorbing more heat than the trees and grasses they replaced, as well as the simple heat output from human energy usage, resulting in far warmer temperature readings.
As far as the mercury content, there is a small-ish quantity in any CFL (I've honestly not heard of mercury-free bulbs) but there are several advantages here at work compared to a mercury-free incandescent. Firstly, the mercury is inside the bulb itself; if facilities exist for their disposal, it needn't get into the environment at all. Secondly, their energy savings will work here; most people forget that there are OTHER pollutants produced that AREN'T carbon dioxide; and their impact on the environment is far-better demonstrated. That's right, burning things like coal releases mercury into the atmosphere... And coal is the #1 power source in America and the world at large. The amount of mercury emissions cut through energy savings actually more than makes up for the mercury content of a CFL.
Most environmentalists these days, it seems, can only talk of "global warming." A real shame that it casts green living in a bad light, given that it ignores all the far more direct and present-day issues with pollution. CO2 is invisible, but the far more visible pollutants are proven to be harmful to human health, and can ruin property values.
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