Buy some pancakes save the world

Not much has happened in the last week, but I thought I would tell you all a bit about the climate conference we had at our school on Saturday.

Last week was Evironmemental focus week at our school. All week there were various things such as talks on alternative energy, bike fixing and litter art. However the climax of the week was on Saturday when we had a big conference all day.
We has speakers for most of the day talking about different topics:

Tim Helweg-Larsen: the science and politics of climate change.
Roger Martin: population reduction plans and the ethics of population management.
Leo Murray: how to become an effective activist.

They were all very interesting. I especially enjoyed Leo Murray, who has done some very cool stuff around cilmate change and was really inspiring.
He is an animator by education and has worked on differnt films including a short called 'wake-up freak out' which I have yet to see. And he worked on 'The Age of stupid' which I watched during my first week here and was absolutely amazing (and very scary).

It was all a bit depressing, seeing as we spend a large part of the day learning about how little time we have if we do not want terrible things to happen.
However we also learned about (and did) a bunch of stuff we can do!

1. First off we learned about Cop 15 (which is a huuuuge UN climate negotiation conference) which is happening in Copenhagen in December. And we learned about the campaign 350. This campaign is trying to lower the carbon in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm) from about 387. This is a crucial number to keeping our global temperature from rising 2 degrees. It is imparative that the governments of the world make real goals to meet this challenge in Copenhagen. So groups all over the world are taking photos of themselves in the shape of the number 350 and sending it to the UN. And so we did just that. We are sending our photos (joined with photos from all of the other UWCs) to the UN. There is tons and tons of other stuff that is happening through this organization. If you go to http://www.350.org/ and look at their map you can find out what is happening near you.
2. We learned about another campaign called 10:10. The goal is to reduce emissions by 10% by 2010. We are launching the campaign at our school next Saturday.
3. As well Leo talked about planestupid which targets the aviation industry because flying is the single worst thing an individual can do for the environment.
4. And then at our school we had a letter writing campaign to encourage global leaders to attend/ make real commitments at cop15. Most of the letters that were written were to Obama as he has stated that he may actually attend cop15, and a few were to senetors and some were to our lovely Prime minister. We managed to get 64 letters which is pretty good and we raised all our postage money by selling pancakes and chocolates.

Overall I thought the conference was really great. It was informative about why we must change but also gave us tons of options about what we can do. I know that many people don't think climate change is actually such a big issue and/or we can't do anything about it, but it is and we can. And if we don't do something now we will be remembered as the generation that could have saved the world, but chose not to.