As I write this, Blog Action Day 2009 is about to sunset over the Pacific, with the last part of the globe reaching 11:59pm on October 15th.  For the past day bloggers in 155 countries across six continents have written about a single issue that impacts us all, and turned BAD09 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 about 500%, and CNN wrote a great article covering the excitement and diversity of today’s event across the web and around the world.

There are too many updates to include in a single blog post, but here’s an overview of today’s highlights to get us started:

We are about to hit 27,000 32,000 total trackable blog posts, and our current estimate is that together we reached at least 17 million people today. We are also about to exceed 12,000 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 count at least three major world governments as active participants in this year’s event. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted the first Blog Action Day entry in Britain at the stroke of midnight this morning, 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 today as well. Check out the Featured Posts on the blogactionday.org homepage for an extensive list, which includes The Official Google Blog’s green tour of the company’s campus, Mashable’s post asking what you’re doing to reverse climate change, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s suggestions for “Five apps to help save the world.”

Many of our nonprofit partners, leading organizations from around the world, were actively involved in making the event a success. TckTckTck released a beautiful new video, Greenpeace and WWF bloggers from around the world added their voices, Oxfam helped emphasize the human side of the climate crisis, 1Sky wrote about the front lines of political activism in the US, and The Nature Conservancy helped us understand the science of climate change. We’ll provide an entire list of all nonprofit posts as soon as we gather all the links.

In addition to all of these great bloggers we’d particularly like to thank several blogs for devoting the whole day to  Blog Action Day. The travel blog Gadling posted a number of great pieces on green travel. The always-insightful bloggers at NRDC’s Switchboard wrote throughout the day. The World Resources Institute provided updates throughout the day with facts and information. Global Voices has posts from around the world in many languages. Co2nsequence wrote a whole series of posts on youth climate leadership.

Finally, we’d like to recognize the efforts of our partners at Current Green who have not only been posting, but also featuring the best writing and art from Blog Action Day bloggers everywhere.

We should all feel proud of this remarkable collective effort, and for many of you, we hope this serves as an entry point into the broader movement to address the issue of climate change. There are a number of ways and some amazing organizations through which you can continue to remain involved, many of which are listed in our Take Action section. We will continue providing updates and information about the success of today’s event and ongoing opportunities for involvement here in the coming days and weeks ahead, and hope you’ll stay with us.

judith meskill, executive editor at change.org, gives ‘iambic pentameter’ props to the blogs and nonprofits joining us for blog action day, 2009.

come blog with us, today’s blog action day,
for each of us can surely find a way,
to fix the climate, or the kids get it,
let’s show our children that we give a whit.

“i want to leave a safe and secure world,”
said gordon brown as his first blog unfurled,
we mow our lawns with goats, said google’s blog,
else we will need a beacon in the smog.

the clock is tcktcktck’ing, as we know,
and there are still so many ways to grow,
let’s green our rides, and our computers too,
while greening up our habits, through and through.

our chance to leave a legacy is now,
as thousands of green bloggers show us how!

by: judith meskill

So we are using a Google blog search to pull the feed for our homepage today. Unfortunately no system is perfect and some posts aren’t showing up. So we’re going to use this blog post to link out to anyone who’s post don’t get picked up on the homepage feed.

Is your post missing? Email easton@change.org and he can make sure we get your link up here.

Great posts Google missed:

Our friends over at Current Green are devoting all day tomorrow to Blog Action Day and they’ve offered to feature your posts! Check out the post they put up yesterday with instructions for how to get your writing or art featured on the site.

This is a great chance to show the world your Blog Action Day effort and we will of course also feature it here on blogactionday.org as part of our live stream tomorrow.

One great thing about Current’s participation is that they have two separate locations. www.current.com/green will feature news and opinion writing and the Current Green Blog will be reserved for featuring artistic and poetic contributions.

Thanks a lot to Current Green for this opportunity!

Blog Action Day is here! Do you know what you’re writing about?

If you need some help or inspiration we’ve put together the eight best sites to check out with some of the most interesting, inspiring, informative and intriguing climate change resources out there that can help you with your post.

Here we go:

1. Google has built a site where you “explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet Earth and find out about possible solutions for adaptation and mitigation, ahead of the UN’s climate conference in Copenhagen in December.” They’ve got a Google Earth mashup, a introductory video featuring Al Gore, and more. Visit: Climate change in Google Earth

2. Climate change is a human issue. It isn’t just about saving the planet and communities around the world face serious threats from the climate crisis. The TckTckTck campaign has created a great tool for learning the stories behind the human face of climate change. It’s called the Climate Orb and it is an animated interactive tool housing first-hand stories searchable by country, keyword and timeframe. Explore the Climate Orb.

3. There’s a lot more to solving the climate crisis than just sitting back and leaving it to world leaders and policy wonks to figure everything out. Need inspiration? Meet Alec Loorz, the creator of Kids vs. Global Warming. He describes it as “group of kids that educate other kids about the science of global warming and empower them to take action.” The site shows that everyone really can play a role in tackling climate change.

4. Just the facts, that’s what some people want—as long as there are lots of cool charts, graphs and clear explanations of course.  That’s what’s great about the Pew Center for Global Climate Change’s “Facts and Figures” site, it is filled with all the charts and graphs you need to get a much clearer picture of what causes climate change and what effects it has. If you want even more information you can also check out their entire Climate Change 101 series.

5. At this point you’ve probably heard of “carbon footprints” and you might have even used an online calculator to figure out what yours is (and thus what your impact is on climate change). The problem is that there are just so many calculators out there now it can be hard to figure out which one to use. Thankfully you can learn about your options from MNN’s 15 Best Carbon Calulators survey.

6. OK, but how will climate change affect you? What are the consquences that are mostly likely to impact your day-to-day life? Take a look at this list of The Top 100 Effects of Climate Change. From “Say Goodbye to Pinot Noir” to “More Bear Attacks” to “Malaria Spreading in South America” to “More Stray Kitties” it seems like climate change is going to have a lot of consequences, some big, some not so big.

7. On the other side of the coin, you might want to be a little more optimistic and review the science behind “10 Solutions for Climate Change” which details what we can actually do to solve these problems personally and as a larger society.

8. Finally, don’t forget that people all around the world are getting involved and taking action. Next week, on October 24, 350.org is organizing the International Day of Climate Action. You can visit their site and see what people all around the world are planning to do next week to demonstrate their commitment to stopping climate change.

This post is a place for you to help suggest ideas for what people can write about on Blog Action Day. Climate change has so many consequences and connects to nearly every imaginable topic. Here is a list of ten sample ideas we came up with. Add your own in the comments and help others get inspired!

1. A Business blog might write about how innovative companies might be able to help address the problem of climate change and which industries face the biggest business threats from global climate change.
2. A Technology blog could write about emerging clean technologies that are being developed to help us cope with and avoid climate change. Which ones are going to make a difference and which ones aren’t?
3. A Health blog might write about how climate change will affect our children’s health and the connections between climate change and the spread of disease.
4. A Nonprofit or Political blog might write about how climate change is deeply connected to many other issues — such as poverty, conflict, pollution, energy, and economic growth.
5. A Lifestyle blog might write about daily living and the which products we use and depend on have a climate impact.
6. A Design blog might write about new trends in eco-friendly or sustainable design from both a designer’s and a consumer’s perspective.
7. A Travel blog might write about the places you want to see now before climate change makes them difficult to access or, well, under the sea.
8. Local blogs can write about transit and transportation issues connected to climate change. How do people get around where you live?
9. Arts blogs can take a look at what people within the art and music world are doing to spread messages about the need for climate solutions.
10. And of course, blogs about blogging can write about the possibility and potential for blogs to make a real difference on issues like climate change.

What else? Add your ideas to the comments!

When a lot of people think about climate change, they think about cars, oil, lightbulbs, coal plants, and airplanes. And yes, all of those things are major players in the what-causes-climate-change game. But food too is another big factor that we need to consider in our efforts to confront the climate crisis.

I just saw this great TED talk about how food even gets to our plates in cities by Carolynn Steele in which she brings up a lot of the ways in which food itself influences how we live in an urban environment:

Overall agriculture around the world is responsible for nearly as much total greenhouse gas emissions as all forms of transportation put together so it shouldn’t actually be so surprising that the food choices we all make have a big impact one way or another.

To get a fuller picture, watch this video from Slow Food Nation on which covers nearly every aspect of how food and climate relate from the effect of organic farming to the threat of drought to how meat production fits into things. I think this might be one of the most comprehensive online resources for really learning about how our food choices have global impact:

There is almost no end the myriad of ways that food, agriculture and climate change are connected. That’s one reason I’m particularly excited to see how many food bloggers have already signed up to participate in Blog Action Day (45 by my count) this year and I for one am looking forward to seeing how these bloggers take on climate change.

Obviously the Blog Action Day team is very excited about the potential for using digital and social media to confront important issues and particularly, this year, climate change.

While we’re focused on blogging, people around the globe have been getting very creative and putting together some top-notch content using just about every media out there. As we get closer and closer to the Copenhagen climate negotiations more and more great video is popping up everywhere on climate change and what we can do about it.

From the informative, to the funny, to powerful, to the snarky, here are our picks for some of the “hottest” climate videos out there right now:

1. Check out the “Beds are Burning” remix just released by our friends and partners at the Tck Tck Tck campaign which says that the remix was “recorded by over 60 artists and celebrities, and re-written by Midnight Oil themselves to reflect the greatest humanitarian crisis facing humankind today – climate change.”

2. Comedian Bill Maher pokes fun, in his usual sarcastic style, at American political leaders who don’t want to see the world take action to stop climate change:

3. Not every great video has to be produces by big organizations or feature celebrities. This clever adaptation of MIA’s “Paper Planes” is a great example. Energy efficiency is a crucial part of reducing the carbon emissions causing climate change and this crew of students is racking up views on YouTube:

4. Some people, like the activists with Greenpeace in this video, go to extremes to send messages about the need to tackle climate change. This amazing video, which tells the stories of six activists in the UK highlights need for urgent action–even from those of us who aren’t going to climb a giant smokestack:

A Time Comes – the story of the Kingsnorth Six from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

5. Back to celebrities, the Prince’s Rainforest Project put out a series of videos helping to show the connection between climate change and protecting forests. This is a great example of picking one, somewhat abstract, idea and using the power of video and celebrity to make easy to understand:

6. Video can be a great way to illustrate the complicated science behind the threat of climate change. In this animated short film Leo Murray helps explain some of the feedback loops that make climate change so potentially frightening, but also encourages us to take action and avoid the worst consequences:

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

One question I’ve been getting a lot lately as I’ve been working to encourage bloggers to register for Blog Action Day is “what’s going on right now that makes blogging about climate change so important?”

I thought I’d take a moment and offer a bit of an answer. At the end of this year the United Nations is sponsoring a major summit on climate change where world leaders will gather and try to reach an international agreement on avoiding the worst consequences of the climate crisis.

The negotiations in Copenhagen will be the biggest and most important world gathering ever addressing climate change and is the culmination of a series of preparatory meetings over the past year held at locations around the world.

That’s why groups like the nonprofit organizations that have come together to form the (featured Blog Action Day partner) Tck Tck Tck campaign are pushing to express public support for an “ambitious, fair, and binding” agreement in Copenhagen.

Last week in New York world leaders spent one day at the United Nations General Assembly meeting talking about climate change and right now representatives are meeting in Bangkok trying to make progress on draft agreements and work out as many differences as possible before December.

Right now, as world leaders prepare for Copenhagen, is clearly a particularly important time for the people of the world to speak loudly about the need for lasting solutions to climate change. Of course, the bottom line is that when it comes to finding and implementing those solutions, the sooner the better.

So today I’d like to offer some links and resources where you can learn more about the upcoming negotiations in Copenhagen and events leading up to them as you get ready to post on October 15 for Blog Action Day 09:

• – Official UN climate change site
• – globalwarming.change.org the blog focusing on climate change from the folks running Blog Action Day
• – Tck Tck Tck campaign central site
• – Coverage from a civil society perspective on Grist of this week’s Bangkok climate negotiations
• – Recap of global action last week from avaaz.org members including a phone conversation with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about Copenhagen

This is a touch embarrassing, but I had to use Google yesterday to find out how many countries there actually are in the world. Turns out it is a slightly complicated question but there are 192 members of the United Nations and about 10 other less widely recognized states.

Great. And why did I take the time to find out?

Because yesterday, in just 24 hours, more than 800 bloggers from 75 countries signed up to participate in Blog Action Day!

I knew that BAD09 would be popular because I know that bloggers do a great job coming together to make a difference and because I know how big an issue climate change is right now. But I have to admit I was surprised to see how many countries were represented by the end of just the first day of registration.

It makes me optimistic. Climate change is an issue that demands international attention and international action. That’s why world leaders spent a whole day in New York dealing with climate change this week at the United Nations and why it is a big topic of conversation at the G20 meetings happing right now in Pittsburgh.

Now bloggers literally around the globe are getting involved. I hope everyone who has already registered keeps and eye on this number and remembers that we’re doing something on a global scale together. I also hope you will all continue to help spread the word and find bloggers everywhere who can sign up and take part.

We’ll be getting translations of the site up in a variety of languages over the coming week and you can check back for more examples of great climate and blog action opportunities.