Earth Hour – it’s about more than just one hour

This coming Saturday, March 26 at 8:30PM marks the fifth annual Earth Hour event where people and organization across the globe are encouraged to turn off their lights for one symbolic hour of unity and awareness about climate change and creating a sustainable future.

Earth Hour began in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million people and more than 2000 businesses took a unified stand against climate change by turning off their lights for one hour.

Does simply turning off your lights for an hour once a year really make a difference in combating climate change and creating a sustainable future? In and of itself, no, of course it doesn’t. But “just turning off your lights” isn’t the point. It about creating a sense of unity, that we are all in this together, and in that unity one person can make a difference.

Sure, that one individual act may seem infinitesimal in the face of the problem, but when combined with your neighbors it grows into a significant act. Just as Earth Hour has grown into a worldwide movement, the individual acts of millions – even billions – of people can and do make a difference.

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Turns out, a lot of people believe we’re punching holes in the ozone layer every time we launch a rocket.  And those holes are contributing to global warming.  This is actually not true, among a number of other public misconceptions.  Here is a roundup of those myths and a few other nifty eco tidbits.

Aerosol Causes Global Warming

False.  The CFC’s made famous in aerosol cans were banned decades ago.  Aerosol cans use safe(r) propellants now so feel free to spray all day!

We don’t trust weather forecasters or climatologists

Weather men and women are not exactly the most accurate.  At least most people feel that way.  So how can we possibly trust climate scientists to predict the weather of the future when we can’t predict the weather tomorrow?

Walmart Actually Goes Green

Well, slightly green anyway.  Walmart is acting on a promise to purchase more local produce and products and offer training to local farmers.  Now, if we can only cut down the size of those energy sucking stores from 100,000 square feet to 1,000.

Starbucks cuts down waste

They go through 3 billion cups per year.  They will not start offering special recycling containers for these cups.  Providing you finish your to-go cup in the store.

More learning to do

Only 45% of people in a new Yale poll understand that carbon dioxide traps heat from the earth’s surface.

Much more learning to do

Only 50% of people believe global warming is caused by human activities.

It’s not all bad news

An increasing number (63%) believe that global warming is happening.

Read more from the Yale Poll or check out more funky eco happenings over at Grist.org

It is now possible to see the effects of pollution and global warming by simply looking up.  Depending on where you live, the pollution and suspended particles in the air make it less and less spectacular to stargaze.

Where I live, in a rural area, the stars can be amazing.  Millions of flickering, bright stars.  However as you drive towards even small cities, stars become less visible and in some areas, disappear entirely.

Take this graphic for example.

It is sad that some people will never experience what it is like to look up and be awed and humbled by the magnitude of the universe around us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium points out that some children in New York, where he grew up, never knew there even were stars.  Perhaps that is a reflection of our educational priorities as much as the state of our environment.

Pollution (both chemical and light) are the reason astronomers do their work in telescopes in rural areas with low humidity and wind which tend to suspend particles in the air and blow them around in front of lenses.

Take Australia as an example.  An area with vast amounts of rural and undeveloped space as well as major metropolitan areas.  “Public lighting is the single largest source of local government’s greenhouse gas emissions, typically accounting for 30 to 50% of their emissions. There are 1.94 million public lights–one for every 10 Australians–that annually cost A$210 million, use 1,035 GWh of electricity and are responsible for 1.15 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.”

Source

Sitting within the comfort and convenience of home and waxing eloquent about the need to fight anthropogenic climate change was definitely not an option. Making the changes in day to day life to move toward a sustainable environmentally sound future, while absolutely necessary, was insufficient. Confronting a crisis of this magnitude requires traveling to the front lines.

So thought global adventurer extraordinaire Eric Larsen. In November of 2009 he launched an ambitious campaign called Save the Poles to raise awareness about how human actions impact the most remote regions of the planet. It is the world’s first expedition to the South Pole, North Pole and the summit of Mt. Everest in a continuous trip completed within a single year. Larsen seeks to document the drastic changes occurring on the front lines of global warming. “I’m trying to tell the story of the last great frozen places on earth, and the reality is that those places are disappearing,” says Larsen. Outside Magazine named him one of nine “Eco-All-Stars” in 2008.

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