Don't forget to join the world tonight and power down for an hour starting at 8:30PM. It's a good excuse to have a romantic dinner with candlelight or no light at all.
At 8:30pm today the luminous face of Big Ben will go dark. Next door, the houses of parliament will switch off all its lights too, along with thousands of landmarks, buildings and people around the world in a global gesture of solidarity in the fight against climate change.
From the international dateline, Earth Hour starts in New Zealand's Chatham Islands and will conclude in Honolulu. Passed like a baton around the planet, cities including Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Moscow, Istanbul, Dubai, Cape Town and Las Vegas will be darkened for an hour at 8:30pm local time to mark Earth Hour, the single biggest mass event to mark public concern over global warming.
More than 3,200 cities across 88 countries have signed up and the event has received support from international leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. Environment campaign group WWF, which is co-ordinating the global event, expects hundreds of millions of people around the world to take part in turning out their lights for an hour, in the hope of sending a direct message to world leaders that their voters want urgent action to save the planet from rising temperatures.
