Earth Hour and the Irish
Well, another “Earth Hour” has come and gone, and I feel much better. How ‘bout you?
The WWF, formerly the “World Wildlife Fund,” invented the gimmick to get governments and ordinary people to symbolically buy into global warming “awareness” by extinguishing their “non-essential” electrical lights for an hour last night. As if turning off a few hundred thousand of the billions if not trillions of electric lights in cities and homes around the world would have any effect at all on changing the Earth’s orbit around the sun enough to reverse the natural cycle of warming and cooling the planet has experienced over the millennia.
The AP breathlessly reported that lights dimmed around the world “in cadence with the setting of the sun” … as the world turned. Thousands of people worldwide, seemingly, returned to the use of candles for an hour as the ceremony unfolded. In response to the phenomenon, Andy Ridley, WWF executive director of Earth Hour observed: “It really seems to have resonated.”
Ummm… never mind that a candle flame burns at around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit and that if more and more people start using candles, they will probably be doing more to melt the ice caps than the Earth’s fluctuating elliptical orbit which now brings us slightly closer to the sun and, in the process, results in more insolation and warming of the planet. Ah, but according to WWF, it’s the symbolism and “resonance” that counts.
Meanwhile, Ireland’s more than 7,000 pubs elected to not participate in the gimmick, partly because of the risk that Saturday night revelers could end up smashing glasses, falling down stairs, or setting themselves on fire with candles.
If you didn’t love the Irish before that one, you gotta love them now.