Happy first full day of Fall Edmonton!

I've done my best to try and enjoy this day - lunch on a patio, ice cream with my hubby and BBQ with family to come. This is gorgeous weather, who knows how much longer it will last? Seize the Day!

A Matter of Offsetting

It took me a while to warm up to the idea of paying to offset carbon emissions that we create while taking trips. I'm not really sure why though, since we do everything we otherwise can to decrease our carbon footprint; I think my skepticism revolved around an unregulated market and the wide variety of companies claiming to provide this service. It is certainly Buyer Beware - and I was specifically interested in Canadian green energy investment or reforestation.

After some research I have found a company I am happy with - ZeroFootprint. They are a Canadian NFP (certified by ISO 14064-2) that helps sustain and support Canadian forests by planting trees and fighting deforestation, biodiversity loss, and watershed degradation. I found them via AirCanada who partners with them to offset air travel emissions and I recommend anyone considering offsetting check them out.

On the Razor’s Edge

I first became aware of increasing contrail activity by accident after I unwittingly stumbled across a web culture built on the premise that "the government" is using airplanes to slowly poison us all.

Chemtrails they call them, Aerosol Crimes, or even the "attempt to implement the New World Order," depending on how deep you look. There is some horrendously outrageous stuff on those webpages.

I easily dismissed this as a conspiracy theory and even laughed about how crazy it was.

But then, one day as I walked down the road noticing many contrails criss-crossed in the sky, I started to think about it. I realized that I honestly couldn't recall ever having seen contrails stay in the sky like they do today.

So I started to wonder if the conspiracy theorists were on to something - not that they were right, rather that they had simply noticed something out of the ordinary before I had. It’s been known to happen - once in a while.

Reading Discovery News today I have found that this is indeed a relatively new climate phenomenon that scientists known as "contrail researchers" at places like NASA study. Their research regarding these "contrail outbreaks" and "contrail clusters" has been published in a recent issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.

Apparently colder air combined with an increased humidity at higher altitudes is producing contrails that persist rather than just evaporate like they have in the past. These contrails eventually expand to form an artificial layer of cloud cover which the scientists study to determine if they play a role in global warming, or visa versa.

Sorry for taking away the mystery chemtrail freaks, but all other things being equal the simplest solution is usually the right answer.

What difference does one hour make?

My family and I observed Earth Hour yesterday evening, in a community that was also similarly darkened (including the business across the street). We ate our dinner by candle light and the played UNO together as we talked and caught up on each other's lives. We had so much fun we kept going - long after most of the lights in the neighbourhood had turned back on.

Critics, naysayers and unbelievers will claim we all wasted our time and that the collective efforts of millions of people around the globe mean nothing – they are wrong. It is true that only one hour is not enough to make a difference in the climate change issues facing us today, but 30 million individual people (up to 70% of Canadians according to a recent poll) across 25 countries coming together for one united cause can have an impact on anything.

Earth Hour – that saw many of the worlds famous landmarks go dark – was a gesture that was almost completely symbolic in its very nature… but symbolic of what?

The power of people to come together - the power to rally and organize those people to a common cause and raise awareness about a problem that is unique in the sense that we all face it (not equally, though, of course). One hour is the first and most simple step towards having an individual positive impact on our energy consumption and climate change issue. San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom said it best, "Energy efficiency is low-hanging fruit. Energy efficiency is the easiest thing we can do." One hour is just where it starts.

Buildings (homes/businesses/public) account for about one-third of the carbon emissions that could boost global average temperatures by as much as 4° Celsius - this century.

4° Celsius doesn't sound like much but it's more complicated than that. We live in, and depend on, a closed and complex eco-system for life. We don’t like to think of this interdependence, but the inescapable fact remains that a 4° rise in temperatures could be devastating to life on Earth.

The unbelievers should take a moment to consider how much energy they consume in their current lifestyle and how much of an impact rising demand and prices will have on them (I don’t just mean gas in the tank either, but housing costs, heating costs, food and transportation for commodities, for starters). Even if global warming is not an issue for you, I’m sure you’ll find conservation makes sense to your pocketbook and continued enjoyment of life.

Seriously though, whatever you believe the causes to be (or not be), every crop that is ruined because of weather, every water source that is depleted, every species (no matter how small) that becomes endangered, every country that is impacted negatively by climate change events will ultimately have a detrimental effect on all of us - on our ability to adapt and survive. After all we all live on the same planet.

And for those who would continue to question the value or impact of only one hour – ask yourself what a tipping point is. Look to Earth Hour on March 28, 2009 to be even bigger.