Earth Hour 2016: Lights go out worldwide in demonstration against increasing climate change
Geoffrey lean | The Independent | Mar 20, 2016, 09.20 AM IST
Earth Hour 2016: Lights go out worldwide in demonstration against increasing climate change
On
the evening of 19 March the lights went out not just all over Europe,
but throughout the world. But far from being a harbinger of doom - as in
Sir Edward Grey's celebrated observation on the eve of the First World
War - it was a sign that one of the world's most perilous, impending
problems might yet be solved.
Scores of millions of people in a
record 178 countries switched off at 8.30pm last night, to mark this
year's Earth Hour, participating in the world's biggest ever
demonstration to stop climate change escalating out of control.
But
for the first time in the event's 10-year history - and despite new
alarming evidence of warming last week - they were pushing at an opening
door. For last December the world reached an unexpectedly ambitious
agreement in Paris to address the problem.
Shanghai goes dark to mark this year's Earth Hour AFPSome
366 landmarks around the world - ranging from the Sydney Opera House to
Big Ben, from the Gherkin in London to the Colosseum in Rome, from
Salisbury Cathedral to the Empire State Building - went dark last night.
And so did Buckingham Palace, home to a remarkably green activist royal
family (even the Queen has quietly indicated her concern about climate
change).
Restaurants laid on special candle-lit dinners, the
Forestry Commission organised night-time explorations and WWF, the
event's organisers, issued a list of "60 things to do in the dark,
including going stargazing, wearing fluorescent fancy dress and telling
scary stories" - but not the activity that, perhaps, first springs to
mind.
One no-no, however, was to light candles - unless they were
"100 per cent beeswax or soy": normal ones, made of petroleum products,
could release more carbon pollution than keeping the lights on.
Studies
have shown that past Earth Hours have reduced electricity consumption
by four per cent. But it is designed to be symbolic action, rather than
an exercise in energy reduction. This year there is more to demonstrate
about than ever. Last month, it was revealed on 14 March, was not merely
the warmest February ever, but witnessed the biggest month-on-month
jump in temperatures ever recorded - and by a big margin. Normally
cautious climate scientists called it "jawdropping" "terrifying", and "a
true shocker".
This
combination picture shows the Houses of Parliament before and after the
lights were switched off for Earth Hour in London. (Reuters Photo)Worse,
the previous record rise occurred just the month before, in January.
This has been the warmest winter ever worldwide, and February was the
tenth successive record-breaking month.
Arctic sea ice - as
exclusively predicted in The Independent on Sunday last month - is at
its lowest ever winter maximum after what the blue-chip US National Snow
and Ice Data Centre calls a season of "unrelenting heat", while the
extreme weather is also contributing to record droughts in Africa and
Vietnam, and helped cause the biggest cyclone ever to hit Fiji, costing
the country a tenth of its GDP.
Scientists are already
predicting that 2016 will be the hottest on record, for the third year
running, finally exploding sceptics' claims that global warming has
stopped. Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of Germany's Potsdam Institute of
Climate Impact Research, says the world is in "a completely
unprecedented climate emergency", while Deke Arndt, of the US
government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, describes
it as moving to a "new and hotter neighbourhood".
A view of the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus before observing Earth Hour in Mumbai on Saturday. (PTI Photo) And
yet, Earth Hour had something to celebrate. Last week it was revealed
that, for the second successive year, carbon emissions failed to
increase in 2015 , even though the world economy grew - something that
had not happened, even once, in four decades. China's emissions actually
fell by 1.5 per cent, as the world's biggest polluter cut its use of
coal and increased renewables.
For years the world has been
investing more money in building power stations generating electricity
from renewable sources than in ones fired by fossil fuels. Last year
these provided a staggering 90 per cent of the world's new power.
And
in December in Paris the world's governments unexpectedly agreed to
phase out carbon emissions altogether by the second half of the century,
committing themselves to meet every five years to set ever more
ambitious intermediate targets, with the aim of holding the increase in
the earth's temperature since pre-industrial times to "well below" the
2C since pre-industrial times long regarded as the threshold for
dangerous climate change
Present
reduction plans fall well short of this, but there is now at least a
chance of averting disaster. And last week a paper by Michael Jacobs of
the Institute for Public Policy Research - who was at the heart of both
the Paris and failed Copenhagen summits - concluded that the agreement
was "the outcome of an unprecedented show of political power by a broad
and diverse coalition of forces from civil society".
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