Here’s a collection of thoughts, quotes, and of course the result of our WUWT poll on “what did you do for Earth Hour?
First, my own experience: Being keenly aware of it days ahead, even I forgot about it at the appointed time, having been distracted by normal family happenings, so I didn’t remember to turn on all my outdoor lights until 8:50PM. Given other news reports, it seems the novelty has worn off, and many many simply either forgot about it or don’t care.
Pointless symbolism isn’t what it used to be I suppose.
Here’s the newsbytes describing the (non)event worldwide (Thanks to Tom Nelson for many of them):
Toronto only sees 5 per cent power drop for Earth Hour
Is Toronto in the dark when it comes to Earth Hour?
Millions of people from 134 countries — from Delhi, India to Heidelberg, Germany — switched off their lights and televisions for the fifth annual Earth Hour on Saturday night to show their support for action on climate change.
But Toronto only saw a 5 per cent power drop during the event — half of the reduction achieved during Earth Hour in 2010.
The year before that, the city had a 15 per cent drop in megawatts being used.
“Honestly we still think it’s successful, we think it’s a great program,” said Jennifer Link, a spokeswoman for Toronto Hydro, who added that cool temperatures likely had many people using more heat than this time last year.
Earth Hour fans ‘disappointed’ to see so many lights still on
In Toronto, energy use fell by 115 megawatts between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., a drop of about 5 per cent, said Jennifer Link, a spokeswoman for Toronto Hydro.
Last year, the city’s Earth Hour efforts saved 296 megawatts; in 2009, it was 454 megawatts.
Meanwhile, Nova Scotia Power reported saving 10 megawatts of power, a significant drop from last year’s 18 megawatts.
Toledo pays little attention to Earth Hour
Locally, the Toledo Zoo participated in the event. Facebook responses included “this is so silly”, “there is no way I can close early to participate” “C’mon, on a freezing cold Saturday night?” and “I enjoyed the hour”.
h/t to reader Brad R for this one below:
“Utility provider Enmax reported no noticeable drop in power consumption between 8: 30 p.m. and 9: 30 p.m. Saturday, when residents were asked to participate in Earth Hour by shutting off all nonessential power.”
How Was Your Earth Hour? ~ Philippines
As we drove along Ortigas Avenue, I was freakishly disappointed. Why? Because lights were on and it was Earth Hour.
Inside the car, I thought I wanted to blame the relatively-poor marketing the Earth Hour guys had on this year (You haven’t really noticed the Earth Hour 2011 ads as well right? You know they were there but the campaign wasn’t convincing enough).
My Experience of Earth Hour | My Mind, Thoughts and Feelings
Unfortunately, where I was, it was only us who participated in this event.
My parents slept early and I was left with my two grandchildren, age 6 and 7. I had to explain to them what this was all about.
Being just kids, they were restless. They kept on asking me how long will this last and why was it our neighbors did not do the same thing. I told them that it will only last for one hour and they should be proud to be a part of this worldwide event, to take a stand against climate change.
While we were waiting for the hour to pass, I decided to say the rosary and let them join me.
…Kids have this way of asking questions that any mature person would not dare to ask.
…
Five minutes after the hour had passed, we turned on the lights. They kids were happy.
The Earth Hour has passed. In retrospect, I questioned myself if I can still go beyond.
Tonight, LAX pylons will go green — and then dark — to mark Earth Hour – chicagotribune.com
Earth Hour will come early to Los Angeles International Airport. The ring of 15 100-foot-tall towers near the airport’s entrance will light up a solid green at 7:30 p.m. — an hour before Earth Hour — and remain illuminated for 60 minutes. Then the lights will go out from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., an airport news release says.
[Yeah that’s just what I want from Earth Hour, screwing around with the electricity at one of the worlds busiest airports]
World switches off light as ‘Earth Hour’ begins
“We did hesitate a bit (about calling for Earth Hour in Japan) because there are many without electricity in disaster-hit areas,” said Naoyuki Yamagishi, climate change programme leader for WWF in Japan.
“We did hesitate a bit (about calling for Earth Hour in Japan) because there are many without electricity in disaster-hit areas,” said Naoyuki Yamagishi, climate change programme leader for WWF in Japan.
Leo Burnett Chicago Kicks Off the Next Generation of Earth Hour, Activates Global Social Media Campaign Reaching 128 Countries | NEWS.GNOM.ES
“Our goal for Earth Hour 2011 is to reach new, unprecedented heights of social engagement to fuel the single largest act of global participation the world has ever seen,” said Carey Isom, Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy at Arc Worldwide/Leo Burnett Worldwide. “As a HumanKind communications company dedicated to putting a brand’s purpose at the center of everything we do, we are honored to bring awareness and activation to this very special cause.”
…
Earth Hour is the largest mass participation event in human history and was organized by WWF—an election between Earth and global warming, organized the largest mass participation event in human history.Created by Leo Burnett Sydney in 2007 and carried on by Leo Burnett Chicago, Earth Hour was the first time people of all nationalities, race, ace, gender and religion were able to vote on the future of our planet as one global democracy. Now, just five years later, more than one billion people turned off their lights in celebration of Earth Hour.
[Hmm, more like a billion people don’t HAVE electricity:
1.6 billion people — a quarter of humanity — live without electricity:
Breaking that down further:
| Region | Millions without electricity |
|---|---|
| South Asia | 706 |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 547 |
| East Asia | 224 |
| Other | 101 |
Source: globalissues.org Poverty Facts and Stats]
Dubai, Sharjah Earth Hour saves 249000KW
Yeah but, how much more CO2 did they release organizing the celebration, getting people there, and putting that guy up in the helicopter/airplane/hotair balloon/whatever to get the shot?
To celebrate the worthy cause and encourage participation by residents and businesses in Earth Hour, Dewa, in partnership with Emirates Wildlife Society (EWS) in association with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Emaar and other government departments and local schools and universities and NGOs and private sectors and residents, marked the event with a traditional Arabic heritage village at Emaar’s Burj Plaza in the Downtown district adjacent to the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa.
Over 20 Arabian tents filled with arts and crafts, traditional cooking stations, El Arish hospitality, educational exhibitions, music and many local gifts and souvenirs were enjoyed by over 6,000 people who took part in the fun festivities and Earth Hour celebrations. A family occasion, children were also catered to with their own arts and crafts tents, face-painting, delightful entertainment and a conservation exhibition to educate and inspire their young minds.
Council’s ‘lights out’ weekend branded tokenism (From Oxford Mail)
THIS weekend Oxford City Council will turn off all “non-essential” lights in a bid to tackle global warming.
But Green campaigners say it begs the question: why are lights burning in the first place if they are not needed?
Especially as the authority employs a climate change officer at a cost of £44,000 a year.
THIS weekend Oxford City Council will turn off all “non-essential” lights in a bid to tackle global warming.
But Green campaigners say it begs the question: why are lights burning in the first place if they are not needed?
Especially as the authority employs a climate change officer at a cost of £44,000 a year.
Celebrate good times, climate realists: THIS is what winning looks like
Make no mistake: this is what winning looks like. Of course, most alarmists are never going to come right out and admit that on The Most Important Issue of All Time, they were wrong and we were right. What they’re going to do is just gradually quit talking about it.
YouTube – Earth Hour 2011 Official video
This Earth Hour 2011: 8.30pm, Saturday 26 March, celebrate your action for the planet with the people of world, and add more to your Earth Hour.
YouTube – Earth Hour 2010 Official video
Earth Hour 2010 is set to be the best yet
What Makes Earth Hour Fun? | Real Science
They know the lights will be back on in less than an hour. If they tried Earth Month instead, that would be the end of the global warming religion.
Here is the results of the WUWT poll, as of noon PST, March 27th:
It seems wildly popular to turn on lights, or ignore the whole idea, rather than turn them off, doesn’t it?
However, in one country, North Korea, Earth hour was once again a stunning success:
Night-time satellite photo of North and South Korea. Note the single light for “Dear Leader”. Image from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program
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I didn’t buy a car, I didn’t run my computer and I didn’t eat fruit delivered by airplane, same as I do every hour.
As far as I can tell, that puts my “carbon credit” ahead of 90% of the greenies on Earth.
I may have had Spanish wine with dinner, but I blame the missus.
I would rather have lit up extra bulbs
in protest at the coming ban on regular incandescent light bulbs 😉
– there is no energy shortage for electricity
justifying telling what paying consumers can use,
especially since the overall energy savings are less than 1%,
also from US Dept of Energy own statistics ( http://ceolas.net/#li171x )
.
Does this not sum up the mentality of these people completely? They get to feel all holier than thou and self righteous with such a completely pointless gesture. If they were serious they should go and live with the Amish community, not for an hour but for the rest of their lives. this would involve working like slaves from dawn to dusk with no modern medicine if they should fall ill. That is the reality of the lifestyle that they seem to be proposing.
I grew up in an old farm cottage and during winter the default setting was bloody cold. It had two large fire places and could be made reasonably cosy by lighting two huge coal fires and strategically distributing oil heaters. Now it has central heating, double glazing, better insulation and obviously uses considerably less energy to heat. Not quite sure what my point is apart from the fact that such improvements seem to be ignored by the green zealots.
Nobody told us about Earth Hour this year, there was no usual media coverage, it didn’t filter down by word of mouth. After the second major Earthquake (don’t you just love Mother Earth?) many of us had no electricity for days or weeks. The electricity company fast tracked a new overhead line across private land with all planning permission granted almost on the spot. You should have seen the frantic activity going on to try and connect the city with daily reports about the progress, percentages of connectivity, spokesmen trying to assure the public that they were doing all they could as fast as possible. I guess if you’d gone down to the unconnected suburbs and talked about Earth Hour you might have gotten a smack in the mouth.
How many CO2 is produced by burning that many candles starting at 0:12 in the video?
http://www.stubbornmule.net/2009/03/burning-candles/
here’s your answer..
David Menzies was interviewed on a local radio station here in Toronto about his Celebrate Human Achievement Hour. He stood outside at his barbeque and enjoyed many accolades from enlightened passers-by.
However, he also reported seeing during the hour around 40 vehicles driving by his place with only the riding lights on. He eventually stopped one to ask the driver why his headlights were off. Response: to take part in the spirit of Earth Hour since the driver was not at home to turn off his electrical lights and appliances!
For Earth Hour I celebrated by doing my usual Saturday night ordeal. Hours of reviewing Quantum Mechanics Lectures. (The pain will end soon – semester ends in 6 weeks – then I get my life back for the summer). This is complete with two computers running and every light I can find on so I don’t miss an i squared on a paper. It was a bit chilly too so I had some bread baking in the oven to warm the place up a bit.
What exactly do they mean by “earth hour saved xyz MegaWatts ?” I would think if oyu were trying to save energy, you would save MegaWatt hours and noit MegaWatts.
Oh I forgot; in the warmistas world, you can use any units you like; it really doesn’t matter whether you use the correct units or not.
British Columbia Hydro utilities is fostering eco delation:
http://www.el.bchydro.com/mediabulletins/bulletin/community/earthhour2011
Under the guise of community, the utilities is in fact fostering a mentality of delation, dressing people, neighborhoods, towns against each others in order to achieve their totalitarian goals. What’s next? Offering rebates to the “good” neighbors and taxing the “bad” guys? Get a WWF donation and get a rebate off your bill?
Actually, I spent the whole weekend, including earth hour driving backa nd forth to Fry’s to buy a new TV, and then to replace some missing, and broken cables, and then messed around trying to get some free TV on my rabbit ears. Why would I waste energy paying for cable TV, if I’m not going to be home all day simulating, like real climate scientists do ?
I discovered that not all digital TV sets actually have a “Tuner”. Many of the top brands, only have a “scanenr” so they scan the heavens for TV channels and you can onlu have the ones they can see, with the built in scanner.
Rmember that the idea behind a TV “Tuner” is to tune in the TV channels, and modern TVs know exactly where eacvh and every TV channel can be found in the frequency spectrum; but usually not exactly in terms of Photon energy from a particular TV station.
So if you can’t tune in the station with your “tuner”, how are you going to adjust your rabbit ears to locate the signal.
So I bought a new TV that actually does have a tuner.
So I’d say I used a darn side morte energy than on a normal weekend, so thans to those earth hour fans, for the extra energy in MegaWatt hours, because I use dup some of it.
I went out into my front and back yards and couldn’t see any dark houses. (And not because they were dark and couldn’t be seen, mind you.)
I didn’t want to be a light-turner-offer, but I also didn’t want to blend in with my neighbors. (Why be normal?) So on the spot I created Pre-Civilization Hour and an official chant:
I pulled all the breakers and went light-free, landline-free (electronic phone), furnace-free (electric thermostat), and refrigeration-free.
I put on a jacket (symbolic buffalo robe) in case the temperature dropped in the house (symbolic cave). I brought in my Siberian Huskies (fairly convincing symbolic primitive dogs) by bribing them with chicken jerky (symbolic wild-turkey jerky).
I laid down on the carpeted (symbolically hide-strewn) floor with my beasts intending to be fractionally normal by messing with my rooted Nook Color (symbolic painted rock?), but one of the dogs came over and licked my face for about 10 minutes. Then another started jealously woofing and barking and demanding her own personal attention.
When everydoggy settled down, I accidentally drifted off to sleep (non-symbolic after-dark, home-alone activity). I woke up at about 10:00, flipped on the breakers, and let the dogs out.
So that’s how I spent
EarthPre-Civilization Hour.[Ed, I added the missing f to “woofing.” I’m sure you appreciate that.☺ ~dbs, mod.]
In India, many cities have decided to celebrate earth hour every day. No, wait, that is incorrect. In India many cities have been celebrating earth hour for the last 40 years. The power companies of India are doing the world a huge favor by switching off the lights for 1 hour every day. Indian city bred elites have claimed that regular power cuts er.. regular “earth hour” celebrations are essential for stress relief.
In villages, earth hour is celebrated every day of the year. It is the most important event in the cultural calendar. People extinguish every light for miles at 7:00 PM in the evening and retire for the night. Millions of mega watts are saved. The ocean gets colder and the polar bears can frolic in the ice for much longer.
[Ed, I added the missing f to “woofing.” I’m sure you appreciate that.☺ ~dbs, mod.]
=//=//=//=//=
Hahaha! My bad. I used technical jargon without explaining the term.
In the scientific field that I just invented known as Cynolinguistics (where cyno- is a legitimate combining form related to Latin canis and English canine), woo is an informal, shortened version of woowoowoo or (especially among older researchers) woo-woo-woo.
Scientific consensus holds that woo was chosen as the representative sound over wah, wuh, and other Husky vocalizations such as barks and growls because it is the most common.
Frequency deniers, however, counter that the data are incomplete, poorly documented, and globally inconsistent. Instead, the skeptics say, woo was selected for its euphony. (It sounds nicer.)
Recorded examples can be found by searching YouTube with the terms husky and woo. Following are some of the shorter, more clear entries:
N.B. that there is not a one-to-one mapping between wooing dogs and Siberian Huskies. Other breeds can exhibit this vocalization, though not as frequently nor as consistently as Huskies. As well, not all Huskies woo.
Among those I have lived with, only 37.5% could definitively be classified as wooers. Another 12.5% was believed to have been observed wooing on one occasion.
Additionally, 12.5% growl when wooing behavior would be appropriate. (This is the dog that licked my face for 10 minutes, so the growling is not aggressive or defensive.) Another 12.5% enthusiastically barked instead of wooing; 12.5% gave a Siberian Stare on at least one occasion when wooing might have been employed; and a final 12.5% has no similar observations recorded.
(The numbers add up to exactly 100% because it is hard – though admittedly not impossible – to foul up the arithmetic when N=8.)
The dog mentioned in my previous post (“Then another started jealously wooing and barking and demanding her own personal attention.”) can be seen in this photo and in this album. A champion wooer that is no longer with me can be seen in this photo.
What I did for Earth Day was .. totally forgot it was Earth Day. I’ll try real hard to remember next year. (I think I may have said that last year?)
Earth Hour??? Did that happen already??? I need an app to remind me next time. Oh, wait, I would actually need a cell phone that can use said app, but that would require me to get rid of the cell phone that has served me well and continues to do so and that would add to the mess, oh the dilemma. Oh well, bring on Earth Day, can’t wait to see how much garbage will be created by those who proclaim to care about the Earth.
Dubai photo — what a depressing spooky image!
[snip wayyy off topic, this has nothing to do with Earth hour]
For one hour I changed the display timeout on my cell phone from 1 minute to 30 seconds. Unfortunately the substantial power savings of HUNDREDS of microwatt/hours wasn’t reflected on the grid until the next day when I put it on the charger. Curses. I done messed up again.
[Jennifer Link, a spokeswoman for Toronto Hydro, who added that cool temperatures likely had many people using more heat than this time last year.]
Um, well, yes, that kinda is what energy is good for, isn’t it?
“Robert of Ottawa says: March 25, 2011 at 6:31 pm
“…… two yeats ago, I happened to be in the house of remote aquaintences when …. they turned off the lights and lit candles.“
Reminds me of idiot Barry Penner, former environment minister of B.C., who thought that having a candlelight dinner with his wife was “energy free”. Hit the media because his poor cat caught its fur on fire from a candle. (The cat survived. Dunno that Penner would if on his own in the mystical wilderness.)
“This was, is and always will be a religious undertaking, because it was symbolic.”
Well put. Thankyou.