A Perfectly Futile Act

Earth Day has been going on for more than 30 years, and if you're not familiar with the concept that the eco-left is pushing that man is behind global warming and that if we don't act now, the Earth's climate will change, then you have had your head in the sand for far too long.

Tonight, cities around the globe will be holding Earth Hour, where key landmarks will turn off the lights for an hour to raise awareness. In the NYC metro area, that means that the billboards of Times Square, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building will all go dark for an hour.

It's all part of a symbolic effort to highlight global climate change. In nearly 4,000 cities in 84 countries, millions of light switches will be flipped off at 8:30 p.m. local time to observe the second worldwide "Earth Hour."

More than 2,000 New Jersey residents have signed up to participate, along with dozens of schools, organizations, businesses and municipalities. Lights will go down on local landmarks like Montclair's war memorial in Edgemont Park. The West Orange mayor will flip the switch on replicas of Edison's original light bulb at his former laboratory.

"How symbolic is that?" Mayor John McKeon said today. "It's an ongoing message that we have to focus on the release of greenhouse gases and global warming, we need to conserve."

Edison, he said, would be glad energy-savers have made his invention obsolete, and "would marvel at the genius of the compressed fluorescent bulb."

Since it was started in 2007, "Earth Hour" has been promoted on YouTube, by global corporations, nonprofit groups, schools, scientists and celebrities -- including Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was originally launched by the World Wildlife Fund in Sydney, Australia.

Last year, the lights-out movement went global, with about 400 cities in 30 countries participating, said WWF spokesman Steve Ertel. The search engine Yahoo! reported a 344 percent increase in "Earth Hour" searches this February and March compared with last year, he said.

This is a feel good measure by people who aren't going to change their lifestyles - or worse that demand others change theirs while continuing their own.

Gee, do you feel better "spreading awareness of global warming" even as Al Gore continues his jet setting ways and spewing more COx than any regular Joe will do in a lifetime? Hasn't Al Gore ever heard of telecommuting or teleconferencing in order to spread his message via the Internet he claimed to develop?

What all this fails to take into account is that there's a big ball of fire 90+ million miles from Earth that pumps out more energy in a few moments than all of mankind could put out in a year. Seemingly minor changes in the output can have drastic changes throughout the Solar System. COx may not even be a cause of warming seen (and which hasn't occurred over the last decade as temperatures have dropped off to their levels seen a decade earlier).

The science is far from settled, and yet the eco-left is treating it not only as fact, but as a crisis that must be addressed in the most severe and dire ways, including imposition of massive tax and spend programs to redistribute wealth from places like the US to others. That's what the UN has in mind, and the junk science is being used to justify a massive wealth transfer the likes of which have never been seen or attempted before (and should never be attempted for the damage it will do to the wellbeing of all people around the globe).

UPDATE 3/28/09:
I just came across last year's posting on the event, and I think it did a far better job skewering the subject matter.