Did you participate in Earth Hour this weekend? Yes? Great, cause now its time to take it to the next level. It’s time to actually make a difference.

Earth Hour has teamed up with Zerofootprint, a Canadian not-for-profit organisation, to provide two carbon calculators so that Earth Hour participants (and anyone else for that matter) to measure their carbon footprint and “make ongoing changes to their individual lifestyles in a bid to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

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Scandic, the Nordic hotel company, have decided to ban water on bottle on all of their 141 hotels this year.

Instead of bottled water their customers will be offered ordinary and carbonated water from water taps from the hotel. It is expected that this will save around 160 tons of carbon dioxide.

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These two quotes comes from Mark Lynas response to a controversial article on NewStatesman.com which argued global warming has stopped:

Every qualified scientific body in the world, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the Royal Society, agrees unequivocally that global warming is both a reality, and caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. But this doesn’t make them right, of course. Science, in the best Popperian definition, is only tentatively correct, until someone comes along who can disprove the prevailing theory. This leads to a frequent source of confusion, one which is repeated in the Whitehouse article – that because we don’t know everything, therefore we know nothing, and therefore we should do nothing. Using that logic we would close down every hospital in the land. Yes, every scientific fact is falsifiable – but that doesn’t make it wrong. On the contrary, the fact that it can be challenged (and hasn’t been successfully) is what makes it right.

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There have been some talks, especially on the Internet, that the global temperature this winter has increased less than it’s done the last fourteen years.

Climate deniers have, of course, been acting like crazy about this. But is it true? Are the climate deniers correct? Can we finally breathe out? Have the scientists been wrong all this time?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

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Thursday and Friday this week the top boys and girls of the European Union meet in Brussels. EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Europe’s commissioner for external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, have prepared a report on climate change and security risks in advance of the meeting. Today the conclusion of the report is being quoted in literally every media across the world. Here are a few samples.

BBC / EU warns of climate change threat.

An EU report says climate change will have a growing impact on global security, multiplying existing threats such as shortages of food and water.

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Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors is trying his best to downplay a comment regarding climate change he made a few weeks ago. In front of reporters in Texas Bob Lutz dismissed global warming as a “total crock of s—”.

He still foolishly tries to defend his comment by saying, in a blog entry titled Talk About a Crock, that his “thoughts on what has or hasn’t been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I [he] make to advance the cause of General Motors.”

Yeah. Right.

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These are some of the latest Green videos published this week, collected by the Ecolive.TV community.

Map reveals extent of human damage to oceans
Marine ecologist Ben Halpern shows us the map he unveiled at the AAAS meeting in Boston last week, which shows the impact of different human activities on oceans worldwide.

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We all know that the meat industry is a dangerous threat to our climate and overall a questionable industry. The cattle release CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. They also use a lot of land areas, around 25% of the earths total land area. And about one third of all farm areas are used to grow food for the cattle.

According to studies the meat industry is responsible for about one fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, in the world. That means they currently pollutes more than the whole transport sector. And by year 2050 the meat production is expected to increase with 50%.

And then I haven’t even mentioned the rather obvious animal suffering.

But maybe, if some “environmentally concerned scientists” get their way, the meat you’ll eat in the future will be produced inside a lab. Scientists from the In Vitro Meat Consortium are currently trying to produce meat from muscle tissue for human consumption.

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The following touching text is a letter written by a fireman, some months after the one thousand fires Greece endured last summer, and addresses to people all over the world.

“I would like to forget:
- Those 3-4 sheeps we didn’t make it to save and heard them terrified as the flames reached them.
- Those birds that didn’t make it to leave their trees as the flames circled them, and were falling all over us like leaves in autumn…
- The terrified faces of my colleges when we saw 50-metres-high all around us.
- The panicked voices of other firemen on the phone, telling people got burnt in their houses…

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Today the Swedish parliamentary climate commission failed to set up tough emissions reduction goals to combat climate change.

The Swedish climate commission was created to set up guidelines, emissions reduction goals and to create unanimity between all the major political parties in Sweden regarding climate change. Even though the opposition, as well as the currently ruling right-wing alliance government called for “tough” emission reduction targets the commission failed to create unanimity.

Hans Jonsson, chairman of the climate commission, said during a press conference today that “we are in agreement on 300 pages worth of text. There is a half-page left on which we cannot find agreement. It has to do with Sweden’s emissions targets for 2020.”

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