Wednesday, 23 May 2007

Industrial Revelation

Carbon emissions increasing faster than expected, says new study

Remember climate change? It's still happening -- and faster than expected. From 2000 to 2004, global carbon dioxide emissions leapt from an average 1.1 percent annual growth rate to more than 3 percent annual growth, according to a new report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That means the globe's inhabitants spewed nearly 8 billion tons of carbon in 2005, up from 6 billion tons in 1995. "We're burning more carbon per dollar of wealth created," says lead author Mike Raupach, blaming the trend on intensive industrialization in developing countries like China, as well as a leveling off of energy efficiency in developed countries such as the U.S. and Australia. Emissions are accelerating at a rate eerily close to the worst-case-scenario projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted a consequence of a 7.2-degree surface-temperature rise by 2100. Good luck next time, Earthlings!

The Bronx Is Up and the Battery's Under the Hood

New York City will convert entire taxi fleet to hybrids

The big yellow taxis of the Big Apple will all be hybrids by 2012 under a plan announced yesterday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The city has been testing 375 hybrid cabs for 18 months, and will soon begin converting its 13,000-vehicle fleet. "It will be the largest, cleanest fleet of taxis anywhere on the planet," Bloomberg said, adding that the switch would be the equivalent of taking 30,000 individually owned, gasoline-powered vehicles off the streets. "These [cabs] just sit there in traffic sometimes, belching fumes," he said. "This does a lot less. It's a lot better for all of us." Louise Vetter, president of the American Lung Association of the City of New York, agreed: "New Yorkers are exposed to some of the dirtiest air in the nation. Putting more clean cabs on New York City streets is an important step in our fight to improve air quality." The move, hailed by the New York Federation of Taxi Drivers too, is part of Bloomberg's plan to cut the city's carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030.


Albedo sounds like a character from The Sopranos, but it's really a measure of reflectivity. And we like the planet to have plenty of it, because that's what keeps excess heat bouncing away from us. But with polar icecaps melting, a valuable source of (shiny, white) albedo is disappearing. So can humankind create artificial albedo in its place? A reader wonders whether white cars, white roofs, and even Styrofoam could do the trick, and advice maven Umbra Fisk geo-engineers an answer.

History Belongs to Those Who Dare to Rewrite It

Smithsonian allegedly revised exhibit to show climate "uncertainty"

In 2003, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History was accused of pandering to the Bush administration when a photography exhibit about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was relocated and downplayed. Now former museum administrator Robert Sullivan is charging that last year, the museum toned down an exhibit on climate changes in the Arctic by rewriting official text to inject uncertainty about human causation, omitting scientific interpretation of research, and altering graphs. "The obsession with getting the next allocation and appropriation was so intense that anything that might upset the Congress or the White House was being looked at very carefully," says Sullivan, who resigned in the fall when officials tried to reassign him. The museum claims that changes were made in the name of objectivity, not politics, but a federal climate scientist who consulted on the exhibit sees it differently: "They're not stupid. They don't want to upset the people who pay them."

Gurls R Dum

Oklahoma senator vows to block Rachel Carson centennial resolution

A resolution honoring this weekend's 100th birthday of the late Rachel Carson will be blocked if Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has his way. Why? Because the "now-debunked Silent Spring" was "the catalyst in the deadly worldwide stigmatization against insecticides, especially DDT," he says. Yes, damn her for pointing out that industrial society is killing itself with toxic chemicals it created. The resolution, sponsored by Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.), would honor Carson's "legacy of scientific rigor coupled with poetic sensibility." But Coburn, a doctor who advocates the use of DDT to combat malaria, terms her work "junk science." While there's no shortage of controversy over DDT, even fellow conservatives say slamming Carson is a little ... nuts. "A lot of people have used Carson to push their own agendas," said Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute. "We just have to be a little careful when you're talking about someone who died in 1964," just two years after her seminal book appeared.