Earth Hour Lights Up Need to Be Green

Tonight, cities and towns around the world will go dim for an hour, in show of support for our planet. I remember last year, I was chilling in front of the television, flipping channels, when I came across The Weathernetwork, which was covering the event live.

Immediately I ran to my balcony – I live on the upper floors of a high rise in Toronto, Canada – and I witnessed an amazing thing.

The usual Toronto skyline, with the CN Tower, bank towers, and other tall structures which light the night’s sky were dark – all except their airplane warning lights. It was an eerie darkness, as all I could see was the occasional flash of red warning lights, where there usually are well lit buildings. If you stared long enough, you could make out the silhouettes of the buildings. In the dim moonlight, my eyes started to get sore from the strain.

I looked down closer to home, and the neighborhoods around me were also quite dim. You could see the bluish flicker of lights emanating from windows, as people were watching television, but all the other lights in their homes were off.

Earth Hour – an event organized by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) – takes place across the globe, from Canada and the United States, to across the pond in Europe and elsewhere.

Although chances are you won’t notice much of a drop in your electricity bill from shutting off your lights for the one hour event, as people across your area shut off their lights, you do see a difference.

Last year it was reminiscent of when I was a kid up at the cottage in Georgian Bay. Sure we had electrical lights, we weren’t that far removed from the benefits of modern life. But when I was a kid, spending much of my summers up north, I could see something you don’t often get to see in the big cities – stars.

I am lucky living in an area where I can still see the stars every so often. But up north, the whole night’s sky is ablaze with stars. Here in the city, generally I see just the brightest stars, such as the Big Dipper cluster, the North Star, and occasionally a handful of others. But up north, you’d swear you were seeing the entire galaxy.

During the Earth Hour event last year, I could see far more stars than I had ever seen in the city before. It was spectacular. Maybe it was our reward for turning off our lights.
Reducing energy by cutting our lights for Earth Hour won’t prevent global warming – but it isn’t a bad way to start.

The whole genesis of Earth Hour, according to the WWF is to show our support for energy reduction in the fight against global warming.

Global warming is just a natural part of our planet’s life. Throughout all of time on this blue-green dot in the Milky Way, the Earth has gone through regular climatic changes. Due to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, our planet is constantly either warming or cooling.

Our planet’s orbit around the Sun is elliptical, meaning some orbits bring us closer to our gas giant Sun, which causes the Earth to heat and warm, while other orbits take us further away, creating colder periods, often resulting in ice ages.

For the past decade, our orbit has been one of closer proximity to the Sun, which is why we’re experiencing a global warming.

However, we are not completely innocent either – thanks to our love affair with the car, with heated homes in winter and cooled ones in summer, thanks to well lit homes at night, and even thanks to beer fridges for keeping the suds chilled, our use of fossil fuels to heat, cool and power our lives has put more Carbon-based elements into the atmosphere.

Carbon-based elements, such as Carbon Dioxide, acts like a blanket, keeping the heat our planet receives from the Sun around us, which creates a greenhouse effect. A greenhouse traps hot air inside it, keeping the area warm.

This trapped heat is in addition to the increases of heat we receive from our closer orbit to the Sun. The effects are devastating – our polar ice caps at both ends of our globe are melting at an alarming rate. As these ice masses melt, sea levels around the world rise, causing flooding in low lying areas.

Water pressures on the Earth’s crust increase as ocean and sea levels rise. This added pressure builds, until it is too much, and it is released with such force, earthquakes and tsunamis are the result.

Earthquakes and tsunamis change the global landscape literally – look at the devastation from the recent earthquakes in Hati. Plants and animals are displaced when their natural habitats are uprooted. People die in buildings that collapse, and lives are disrupted when homes, workplaces, schools and other buildings are destroyed.

Turning off the lights for one hour won’t make much of a difference – but if we take the time to practice energy efficient practices year-round, we can all make a big difference.

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Canadian Politico Denies Global Warming, Says it is Nothing More than Alarmism

A former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister in one brief open letter to a Quebec-based newspaper has publicly discounted the entire environmental movement, saying it is nothing more than being politically correct, leading to alarmism.

Conservative federal Member of Parliament Maxime Bernier made the comments in a letter published in La Presse newspaper last Wednesday, arguing that there is no scientific consensus on global warming, and thanking his former boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper for not rushing into policies to cut greenhouse gases.

"The debate over climate change, stifled for years by political correctness, has finally broken out in the media," he wrote in his letter. "The numerous recent revelations on errors by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have supplemented the alternative theories put forward for many years.

"We can now see that it's possible to be a 'skeptic,' or in any case to keep an open mind, on just about all the main aspects of warming theory."

Bernier was dropped from the Prime Minister’s cabinet in 2008 after he admitted he had forgotten secret documents at a girlfriend’s house with links to criminal bikers. Since his dismissal from cabinet, he’s been considered a radical, outspoken backbencher.

Dismissing the entire green movement is certainly being outspoken. And linking that anti-green sediment to the Prime Minister’s lack of action on climate change is just sour grapes stemming from Bernier’s own ineptitude with classified materials – which ultimately cost him his job as a federal minister.

Sour grapes or not, Bernier is right in his observations about a lack of action on the part Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government when climate change, and other environmental initiatives are concerned.

In 2002, Prime Minister Harper referred to the Kyoto Climate Change Accord as “a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.” He continued his anti-environmental leanings by calling the scientific research supporting climate change as “tentative and contradictory.”

Canada – a country known for its vast hardwood forests, rugged snow-capped Rocky Mountains, and home to the world’s largest sources of fresh water – is being led by a man who in 2006 again expressed his denial of global warming: “We have difficulties in predicting the weather in one week, or even tomorrow. Imagine in a few decades,” said Prime Minister Harper.

Most recently, the Prime Minister has set his government’s target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, but the Canadian government has not taken any measures to begin that reduction.

Congratulating Prime Minister Harper on his slow environmental approach, Bernier wrote in his letter to La Presse: “It would certainly be irresponsible to spend billions of dollars and impose exaggeratedly severe regulations to solve a problem whose gravity we're still far from discerning."

There are two issues here – one a former employee saying nasty things about his former boss, the other far more serious – the denial by Canadian leaders of the existence of global warming.

Bernier is just a pompous fool using the environment to forward his own personal attacks on the Prime Minister and anyone that supports the Prime Minister.
People that publicly dump their current or past employer will soon find it hard to find work – would you want to hire someone who said something bad about their boss? Just imagine what that person might one day say about you?

Denying global warming on the other hand is a far more serious problem which both Bernier and our Prime Minister unfortunately appear to share.

Yes, there is much debate in the scientific community about global warming – but that’s what scientists do to scientifically prove the existence of anything. The debate is just part of the scientific method – it isn’t a debate as to whether or not global warming is or isn’t occurring.

Anyone denying the increase in our planet’s temperatures must be smoking something pretty strong, because those hard and fast facts have been well documented. Scientists have found that our planet has a history of periods of global warming and global cooling, due in large part to our rotation around the Sun.

The Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect circle, it is elliptical. So, there are periods when our orbit brings us closer to the sun, meaning more of the Sun’s light and heat reaches us so our global temperatures increase. Then, the orbit is slightly further away from the Sun, so our planet cools off.

This natural lifecycle of planet Earth continued for millions of years unchanged until the industrial revolution of the 1900’s, when we human beings started burning more and more fossil fuels to power our climate controlled lifestyles and create the creature comforts we enjoy today.

The burning of fossil fuels changed the carbon footprint of our planet, eventually leading to holes in the Ozone Layer which protect us from the Sun’s ultraviolet spectrum, creating thick layers of carbon-based smog, which allow the Sun’s heat to reach us, but like the clouds, trap that heat, warming our planet.

Naturally occurring cloud tops blow away in the winds, or dissipate as precipitation is released. But human-made smog’s chemical composition makes the “clouds” of smog too heavy to just blow away, often lasting days or weeks in a stinky and stagnant layer high above our heads. The rain which falls from these clouds of smog is so acidic, it kills off trees, creates acidic water bodies, and over time combines with the added heat and light from our Sun to artificially warm our planet.

Climate change is not a myth being debated in scientific circles. Climate change is the natural lifecycle of our home, planet Earth. The real debate is just how much of an impact we human beings have had on that natural lifecycle, and how to use human ingenuity to fix the natural lifecycle which we broke – if it isn’t too late.

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Mother Nature’s Way of Cleaning House – Or Global Warming?

A magnitude 7.6 earthquake rocked Indonesia today, killing hundreds, causing massive power outages, and cutting communications networks. The quake was recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey, near Padang, the capital city of Sumatra, with over 800,000 inhabitants.

Closer to home, forest fires caused by lightning strikes wipe out thousands of trees every year on the west coasts of Canada and the United States. People living in the areas often have to flee their homes, evacuating to emergency shelters, wondering if their homes will still be there when they return.

More powerful tornadoes run through the American Tornado Alley – an area which runs roughly from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian Mountains – destroying homes and property.

The power of Mother Nature’s wrath is urging ever stronger, as storm systems causing these weather related phenomenon get all the more powerful.

In many ways, it is the natural cycle of nature. With every flash flood, drought, hurricane, or forest fire brought on by a lightning strike, old growth is killed off, leaving room for new plants, trees, animals and other living things. It’s Mother Nature’s way of cleaning house – so-to-speak.

What is unusual is the increased power behind these already very powerful weather systems and this is because of global warming.

As the Earth’s temperatures increase, so to do the massive water bodies which compose most of the globe – our planet is 70% water.

Oceans, lakes, rivers and streams all warm, and this warm water is just the fuel needed to turn a simple summer storm into a killer storm.

Cloud formations blow across these warm waters, soaking up the warm moisture, which in turn creates storm clouds of immense power. The warmer the water absorbed into these clouds, the more viciously powerful the activity caused by that cloud becomes.

By the time these clouds hit land, they are bursting at the seams with a forceful fury – massive hurricane-gust winds, lightening, the ability to generate tornadoes, and other unruly things.

Earthquakes such as the one which occurred this morning in Indonesia, are also due to Global Warming.

Image via Wikipedia

The tectonic plates underneath all land masses on our planet are in a constant planetary ballet, scampering across the planet. These tectonic plates constantly collide with one another, and as is the case with the Indonesian earthquake, force massive amounts of the Earth’s crust up and out of the planet’s core in the form of volcanic eruptions.

A 40,000KM horseshoe-shaped area in the Pacific ocean, called The Ring of Fire, is where about 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes occur and about 80 percent of the world’s largest earthquakes take place there. Named because of the 452 volcanoes which line this region, global warming is having a grave impact on those who’s lives can change in an instant, when the Earth hiccups via a volcanic explosion.

As the Earth’s core temperature increases, pressure builds, which is eventually released during a volcanic eruption.

These eruptions can occur via volcanoes on land, or underwater. Either way, the escaping material is all that is needed to cause violent earthquakes, such as the one which was the cause of the earthquake in Indonesia today.

Volcanic eruptions in of themselves can cause much harm. From destroying entire towns and cities by covering them in thick layers of dust and ash, to molten lava flows which can wipe out entire civilizations, to the aftershocks, leading to tsunamis and other extremely dangerous phenomenon.

These things all did occur long before human beings walked on the planet – but since we’ve taken over the world’s ecosystem, they have become stronger, and more dangerous to us, and every other living thing on the planet.

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Global Warming and COOLER Temperatures?

Politicians love to talk green. The environment is one of the pet topics for lawmakers, as it should be.

Last summer was a washout in my neck of the woods – literally, as we had the wettest summer on record, where it rained so often, some may have forgotten what the sun actually looked like.

This summer, the sun is back, but there just isn’t the warmth associated with that summer’s sun. Temperatures are about two to three degrees cooler than normal temperatures for this time of year.

Not that I’m complaining all that much – I prefer the moderate summer conditions we are having, to the blistering heat we typically get in July and August in Canada’s largest city, Toronto.

But these cooler temperatures are bad news for those of us watching out for our home, planet Earth. Cooler temperatures in the summer, and warmer temperatures in the winter, are symptoms of global warming.

Wait a sec . . . global warming should increase temperatures, not cool them – right?

Not necessarily, all weather systems are part of the bigger picture, and although our climatic temperatures have increased over the years, we’ve seen other side effects caused by the changes to our world.

Image via Wikipedia

What really makes it warmer or cooler for us doesn’t actually happen on land, it happens out at sea. Imagine a large conveyor belt underneath the world’s oceans. This conveyor belt stretches from the Arctic Ocean in the north, all the way down to the Antarctic in the south. The Great Conveyor – as it is often called – flows through the Atlantic Ocean, bringing cold Arctic water from the north, mixing it with warmer waters as it flows south, and then carries that warm water back up north, as it flows on the other of the Atlantic, back up northwards.
Scientists call this the thermohaline circulation, which is powered by the different densities of fresh and saltwater. Tidal patterns, such as the Gulf Stream, create water-based waves. The saltier the water, the more dense, so it falls to the bottom, while the warmer water remains at the top. As the water flows through this great conveyor, water temperatures increase or decrease at different depths along the way, depending on the land masses encountered at the specific point in the conveyor.

And, to make a long story short, depending on where in the world

Image via Wikipedia

the conveyor happens to hit a land mass, the density of the water determines the temperature of the water left in that area, and that water temperature will affect the local temperatures on land.

Winds flowing over the water will warm or cool, depending on the temperatures of the water – resulting in either warmer or cooler surface winds on land.

Because of global warming, scientists have become ever more concerned with this great conveyor belt of global waters. As temperatures rise due to ozone depletion, allowing more of the sun’s rays into our world, the polar ice caps melt at an alarming rate. This sudden increase in cold water flows into the once balanced conveyor belt of oceanic patterns, lowering the temperatures of all the water systems it goes through, resulting in colder climates for everyone.

This is – as one theory goes – how an ice age may begin. As global temperatures increase from the sun, the ices at both ends of our Earth melt, decreasing the temperatures of our oceans, and eventually decreasing the temperatures of our planet.

It also may explain the increase in severe storms over the years, as surface temperatures cool, water temperatures usually rise, because all that cold air is being swept off the surface of the water via the wind. Storm systems get their energy as they are carried over warm bodies of water – the heat they pick up from the moist air increases their size and that increases their overall force.

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