  This is a study of the global fluctuations in power dissipation and light
transmission through a liquid crystal just above the onset of
electroconvection.
  The source of the fluctuations is found to be the creation and annihilation
of defects. They are spatially uncorrelated and yet temporally correlated. The
temporal correlation is seen to persist for extremely long times. There seems
to be an especially close relation between defect creation/annihilat ion in
electroconvection and thermal plumes in Rayleigh-B\'enard convection.
