Does anyone know if anything is being done in Dawlish to celebrate Earth Hour on 31st March?
Earth Hour
Earth Hour is is an annual global event when people across the world turn off lights for one hour between 8.30 – 9.30 pm to celebrate the planet together and raise awareness of climate change. More than 5,200 cities and towns in 135 countries worldwide switched off their lights for Earth Hour 2011 alone, sending a powerful message for action on climate change. See http://www.earthhour.org/.
Dont be stupid Neil they all complain about the lights being off during the night now!!!
Like it !!!!! So we can promote Dawlish as leading the way ...... every night!! All we need to do now is harness the power of the brook to generate electricity, maybe reinstate the mill-wheel, and we're on the road to energy independence.
Makes absolute sense to me that this town and each town/city (thus the whole country) becomes as energy independent and food producing independent as they possibly can.
I was born after World War II (but born, just, when rationing was still on) so only know of, rather than experienced, food rationing. But as I recall didn't the Germans blockade the Atlantic and things like that so that supplies were difficult to reach us?
If that happened in WWII why not some similar event in the near future? After all it might only need a shift in the global geopolitical balance and we could be an island cut off from sources of both food and energy.
It's just not feasible for every town and city to become energy independent, that's why we have a national grid for electricity and gas, it's a shame that the same wasn't done for the water supply given that large parts of the country are now in trouble.
Gas has to be "transported". Electricity and water (to lesser extent) can both be produced/ processed locally. The national Electricity Grid was established to service old technologies - i.e. big carbon-fuel based power stations, when coal/oil/gas was especially plentiful and cheap . A grid is still a good idea to balance off production and demand but with modern techologies (and these are improving constantly) production can become more local. For example, the South West is the best region for Solar PV electricity production - theoretically every house could be a generator to cover its own needs and feed back into the grid. Yes the government is subsidising it at the moment but without that sort of seed-corn investment it probably wouldn't have got off the ground - the result is that we're already seeing Solar PV prices starting to drop.
45 MINUTES TO GO!! Dutch astronaut André Kuipers will keep watch over the planet from the space station's orbital perch 240 miles (386 kilometers) above the Earth's surface, according to officials at the European Space Agency (ESA).
I prefer activism to tokenism. Good luck.
No sign of Earth Hour in Dawlish so sorry Dawlish but went to TAAG centre in Teignmouth instead. Yes a little tokensim I agree but a little red wine and a fine blues band by lantern light made for a great evening.
After one of the warmest Marches in recent history it's salutary to look back to March 1891 when there was snow for almost the whole month - still 2-3 ft left on 29th March along Shepherds Lane (between Teignmouth and Bishops). Global warming or just normal climate fluctuation?
normal climate fluctuation for me
Thanks Brazilnut. What do others think?
Was I the only one scraping the frost from their car windscreen at 6.30 this morning? Global warming is about the long term climate, not short term fluctuations but have you not seen the weather forecast? I'm dreaming of a White Easter...
Please 