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National Blog Action Day on Climate Change |
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Joining over 8000 blogs nationwide today shining a spotlight on climate change...
Today is Blog Action Day and this year’s focus is Climate Change. Dogwood Alliance is joining over 8800 blogs around the world to shine a spotlight on climate change and invite our readers to stay informed and take action on this important issue. Last week we launched an exciting project called the Carbon Canopy to fight climate change by teaming up with some of our former foe to protect and restore Southern forests which you can read all about here. Today, we are going to highlight an important national movement and upcoming events people should look out for in their local communities.
This year the United Nations is hosting an international conference on climate change in Copenhagen. As we have seen more and more impacts of climate change around the globe from major glaciers melting, sea levels rising, further salination of fresh water and more intense weather patterns, this conference is bound to be interesting.
James Hansen, a NASA climate scientist has released a study explaining that 350 parts per million is the highest concentration of CO2 that the Earth’s atmosphere can maintain over a long period of time. Above this level, damage begins to occur, including the melting of ice caps and sea level rising. Currently we are at 387 parts per million.
On October 24, people from around the world will hold events to raise awareness on the need for immediate action to address climate change. You can view the map of events around the world and search for an event near you here.
Dogwood Alliance is doing our part and will be at our local in Asheville, NC. It will take place downtown in front of City Hall from 2-4 PM. There will also be a group picture taken that will be combined with all of the pictures worldwide to produce a collaborative image of support. We will be tabling at this event, so come out and support this cause and participate in the global petition! For more info on the Asheville event, visit here.
We thank your for being a reader of our blog and we hope you will take a few minutes to peruse various other blogs today writing about differing aspects on this important issue and type up and email or two to national and local leaders inviting them to take action on this critical issue that impacts every single person on the planet.
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Yesterday you and bloggers in 155 countries across six continents wrote about a single issue that impacts us all, and turned Blog Action Day 2009 into one of the largest social change events ever held on the web.
Your participation helped change the conversation and showed the power of the web to connect people across the world who despite their varied backgrounds have one shared desire: to make a difference. According to blogpulse, we increased the number of posts about climate change on a given day by 500%, and CNN wrote a great article covering the excitement and diversity of today's event across the web and around the world.
A full recap is up on our blog, and here are some highlights:
We hit 31,000 total trackable blog posts, and our current estimate is that together we reached at least 17.9 million people yesterday. We just exceeded 13,000 registered bloggers on the site and are working to get all of you who posted but haven't yet registered into the final count.
We had at least three major world governments as active participants in this year's event. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted the first Blog Action Day entry in Britain at the stroke of midnight on the 15th, which was followed by Foreign Minister David Milliband and many others from the UK stationed around the world. The PSOE governing party of Spain hosted a bloggers event focused on climate change and transformed their website for the day to promote Blog Action Day. And late in the day, President Barack Obama's White House blog joined in become part of the global movement of bloggers shaking the web.
Of course, well-known bloggers were a big presence yesterday as well:
The Official Google Blog gave a green tour of the company's campus;
Mashable asked what you're doing to reverse climate change;
The Unofficial Apple Weblog suggested "Five apps to help save the world";
Treehugger gave us two simple things that could, by themselves, stop climate change;
Global Voices posted a roundup of bloggers from around the world writing in many languages;
Gadling spent the whole day posting about green travel;
BlogHer covered the road to the next international climate negotations in Copehagen.
There are many more, and we encourage you to check out the Featured Posts on the blogactionday.org homepage for a longer list of some of the world's largest blogs.
Many of our nonprofit partners, leading organizations from around the world, were also actively involved in making the event a success:
TckTckTck released a beautiful and touching new video;
Greenpeace bloggers from around the world joined in;
World Wildlife Fund featured Blog Action Day on their international climate blog;
Oxfam helped emphasize the human side of the climate crisis;
1Sky wrote about the front lines of political activism in the US;
The Nature Conservancy helped us understand the science of climate change;
NRDC's Switchboard bloggers wrote informative posts all day;
Consequence wrote a whole series of posts on youth climate leadership.