Earth Hour (March 27th 8:30) is an event I look forward to every year. It is the time where everyone huddles together in the dark, looking up in wonder at the sky as absent stars suddenly appear.
An hour of no lights to save energy and promote the environmental movement is really what we need, but wouldn’t it be great if we had a whole day or week when people would actually try to save energy? I realize that people these days have a hard time finding time to reduce their impact on the environment when our society demands so much of us constantly. And, everything gets so muddled when it comes to what one should do to lessen their footprint upon the earth. Conserving energy, waste output, and the general not-mauling-the-environment (anywhere from NOT burning the rainforest to NOT putting fertilizers on your lawn) are habits that should be indulged in, if not all the time, for at least a week. When, I don’t know. Maybe as an extension to earth day or earth hour.
That’s my propostion. In addition, I wish all of those reading a happy earth hour! (March 27th at 8:30 in case you didn’t know.) I won’t be able to join you this year, but I wish all the best!
In wake of private emails of scientists being illegally released by a hacker, there is much unearthed skepticism of the climate movement. The emails (as dictated here) are thousands upon thousands that represent years of communication between various scientists, snide comments included. If you search a database that big for negative remarks, there are bound to be thousands. For this reason alone, we should disregard the emails unless they are factual evidence.
I think that the main reasons people are skeptics to climate change are that they are misinformed, or that they don’t see it in their immediate environment. I can definitely identify with the second. I live in East Tennessee and sometimes it seems that the weather has a severe form of ADHD. One day it will be 80 degrees, the next, 30. One place that climate change can be seen in effect is in the Arctic and Antarctic. The only problem with that is not many of us live in the Arctic or can afford to go there, but the Extreme Ice Survey can. Headed by James Balog, it has tracked the movement of glaciers in North America, Greenland, and countless others elsewhere. The images taken are then placed in a time-lapse video. you can watch them on their website. James Balog did a speech for TED (ted.com) earlier this year talking about the project and showing some of the time-lapse video he has collected. http://www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_loss.html
Another way that we can see climate change without traveling to the far reaches of the earth would be to look at the graphs on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) website. The IPCC is an organization of climate scientists around the world (through the United Nations) who’s mission is to compile their data into graphs and technical papers for the world to see climate change through their work. Their site can be viewed at www.ipcc.ch.
If someone is misinformed of the facts, the only way to re-inform them correctly would be to spread the word in a logical way that is irrefutable. The IPCC reports do this, but they are much too large for one to read in less than a minute. This leaves people that are informed to tell those that are not the core facts of the matter. So, I give you this burning torch so that you may give it to others, the flame undiminished. Good luck.
On a request from Toofan (<-spammer, but even so…), I will elaborate more:
I don’t think I really said anything about what the flaming torch would be. In this case, I think my readers should spread the word that climate change is a very real aspect of the world around us. Humans have been pumping out CO2 into the atmosphere for centuries and we are at the height of our output, at roughly 22,829,463.2 thousand metric tonnes annually (Source: http://ow.ly/1lbjO) and it keeps climbing. China is in the middle of their industrial revolution, planning to build 562 new coal-fired power plants (Source: http://ow.ly/1lbtL).
One might say that CO2 is a weak gas, so therefore it is not doing much damage. Yes, it is a weak greenhouse gas (compared to others like methane, etc.), but the sheer amount being released into the air from fossil fuels that have not been around for tens of thousands of years is not allowing for the earth’s ecosystems to adjust to new amounts of this gas.
So, we, as humans, should invest in clean energy to replace that of coal and oil. In addition, the CO2 already in the atmosphere should be taken out (a very hard thing to do). It is an uphill battle.
