How many trees are needed to make a given amount of paper?

According to the USDA, each year 20,000,000 (million) trees taking up 5,000,000 acres of "natural" forest is cut down to produce 27,000 tons of paper for the publishing industry. Also consider the loss in nature's ability to cleanse the air we breathe as well as its contribution to global climate.

Here are some of the hard facts; some alternative solutions to a thorny problem; and some simple, inexpensive and inspiring ways each of us can help. We’ll start with

THE BAD NEWS

• The most diverse forests in North America, which are in the Southern United States, contain the largest paper producing region in the world.
• 20 million trees, or 5 million acres of natural forest, are cut down to make 27,000 tons of wood pulp used for the production of paper.
• Of the global wood harvest, 42% goes to paper production.
• The global production of pulp, paper and publishing is expected to increase 77% by the year 2020.
• The United States is claimed to have 6 times the per capita consumption of paper over the world average.
• The paper industry is the third highest emitter of industrial greenhouse gases to the air in the world, and the fifth highest emitter of industrial toxic waste to water.
• The planet is exposed to 250,000 metric tons of toxic pollutants from paper manufacturers each year.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

1. Tree Farms

• Replacing natural forest with tree farms creates a relatively reliable source of wood pulp, but reduces by 90% the number of species contained in a natural forest.
• The conversion of forests to tree farms leads to a radical loss of freshwater, air quality, soil cohesion and animal, insect, bird and plant species.
• Rural communities in and around these tree farms and their paper mills tend to be degraded economically and socially.
• South American “paper forests,” as they are called, are expected to grow 70% by the year 2012.

2. Recycled Paper

Paul Hawken, co-founder of the Green Press Initiative has said that if all books were printed on recycled paper, the act of publishing and reading would begin to heal our forests and promote sustainable economic activity.

• Currently, recycled paper represents less than 8% of the entire printing and writing market, because publishers claim it is not cost effective. However, market pricing analysis shows that switching from virgin fibers to 100% post-consumer recycled paper would equal an increase of about 20 cents per book. Many readers polled claimed a willingness to spend an extra dollar for books printed on recycled paper.
• It takes an estimated one ton of recycled stock to make one ton of paper, while it takes an estimated two to three and half tons of virgin trees to make that same ton of paper.
• One ton of recycled paper can save the equivalent of 24 trees of 40 foot height, 6 to 8 inch diameter.
• One ton of recycled paper can save the equivalent of 7000 gallons of water; 60 pounds of air pollution; and 4100 killowatt hours of electricity.

3. Alternative, annual crops used for papermaking

Kenaf, which grows well in the Southeastern US, has a 3 to 5 times greater yield than the Southern pines which grow in the same region. Related to the hibiscus, it is originally an African plant which can grow up to 14 feet tall in under five months.

• Industrial hemp, related to, but not the same plant as, marijuana grows up to 16 feet tall in 4 months, producing an estimated 10 tons an acre. It is not (yet) legal in the US.
• Straw, the agricultural residue of a multitude of plants, goes underutilized every year in the US by an estimated 150 tons.
• Visit http://www.lucidskies.com/paper.html for more information.
  

How Can I Help?

SIMPLE WAYS TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

First of all, live your life as if everything was interconnected, everything was alive and everything was a miracle.

• Spend time in the woods.
• Support tree planting groups, like TreePeople; Trees for the Future; and American Forests
• Support paper recycling efforts: Green Press Initiative; Environmental Paper Network (a consortium of environmental groups)
• Learn about alternative fibers
• Make conscious lifestyle changes
• Plant a tree, either by donating to one of the tree-planting organizations, or in your own town.
  

About Carolyn North

Photo by Susan Wilson

Carolyn North is a writer, healer and social activist whose latest book, ECSTATIC RELATIONS, A Memoir of Love has prompted this action to collaborate with TreePeople to protect the forests that are sacrificed daily for the printing of her books, and all the books we all read.

Long an advocate of healthy forests, she has worked at the Manitou Forest Sanctuary in southern Vermont, and also built the first permitted load-bearing, rice strawbale house in this country, in Northern California.

To learn more about her work – including her 8 published books – visit her website at: http://www.healingimprovisations.net

About Tree People

TreePeople has planted over 2 million trees in the Los Angeles area since 1973 in its work to help nature heal our cities. Having one of the nation's largest environmental education programs, TreePeople offers sustainable solutions to urban ecosytem problems including water, air quality, energy conservation and flood prevention. Originally started by teenagers, it is one of the most innovative, comprehensive and people-friendly environmental groups in the United States.

Publishers, authors and readers are invited to join Carolyn North and TreePeople to mitigate the impact on the environment in the following ways:

A donation of $25 will plant a tree and provide a 1-year membership to TreePeople. $100 will plant a grove of 5 trees

DONATE ONLINE at http://treepeople.org/

Source: http://www.ecstaticrelations.com/booksintotrees/

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There is no simple answer to these questions, and all calculations can be no better than "ballpark estimates."

Many people have heard the statistic that "a ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees." The "17 trees" number was popularized by Conservatree when it was a paper distributor, based on a report to Congress in the 1970s. It was calculated for newsprint, which is made in a totally different papermaking process from office and printing papers. But it was the best number anyone had, so it became the number everyone used to calculate number of trees saved by recycled paper, or number of trees cut to make virgin paper, no matter what type of paper they were talking about.

Paper is made from a mix of types of trees. Some are hardwood, some are softwood. In addition, some are tall, some old, some wide, some young, some thin. Many of the "trees" used to make paper are just chips and sawdust.

So how can one talk about a "typical tree"? And do numbers calculated 30 years ago still apply to today's much more efficient paper industry?

We decided it was time to update these numbers, so Conservatree has tracked down some ways to make ballpark estimates more reliable than in the past.

CONSIDERATIONS IN CALCULATING TREES TO PAPER

What kind of paper are you talking about?

Paper made in a "mechanical" or "groundwood" process (e.g. newsprint, telephone directories, base sheet for low-cost coated magazine and catalog papers)

uses trees about twice as efficiently as

paper made in the "kraft" or "freesheet" process (e.g. office and printing papers, letterhead, business cards, copy paper, base sheet for higher-quality coated magazine and catalog papers, advertising papers, offset papers).

Is the paper "coated" or "uncoated"?

The fiber in a coated paper (most often used for magazines and catalogs, with a clay coating that may be glossy or matte, or other finishes) may be only a little more than 50% of the entire sheet, because the clay coating makes up so much of the weight of the paper.

As a ballpark estimate, you can use .64 as the fiber estimate for coated papers compared to the entire weight of the sheet. (Fiber estimate calculation by Alliance for Environmental Innovation)

So how many trees would make a ton of paper?

Claudia Thompson, in her book Recycled Papers: The Essential Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), reports on an estimate calculated by Tom Soder, then a graduate student in the Pulp and Paper Technology Program at the University of Maine. He calculated that, based on a mixture of softwoods and hardwoods 40 feet tall and 6-8 inches in diameter, it would take a rough average of 24 trees to produce a ton of printing and writing paper, using the kraft chemical (freesheet) pulping process.

If we assume that the groundwood process is about twice as efficient in using trees, then we can estimate that it takes about 12 trees to make a ton of groundwood and newsprint. (The number will vary somewhat because there often is more fiber in newsprint than in office paper, and there are several different ways of making this type of paper.)

SOME TYPICAL CALCULATIONS

1 ton of uncoated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees

1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees

A "pallet" of copier paper (20-lb. sheet weight, or 20#) contains 40 cartons and weighs 1 ton. Therefore,

1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses .6 trees

1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets

1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!)

1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines like National Geographic and many others) uses a little more than 15 trees (15.36)

1 ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper (used for newsmagazines and most catalogs) uses nearly 8 trees (7.68)

How do you calculate how many trees are saved by using recycled paper?

(1) Multiply the number of trees needed to make a ton of the kind of paper you're talking about (groundwood or freesheet), then

(2) multiply by the percent recycled content in the paper.

For example,

1 ton (40 cartons) of 30% postconsumer content copier paper saves 7.2 trees

1 ton of 50% postconsumer content copier paper saves 12 trees.

Source: http://www.conservatree.org/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml

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Number of trees for BOOKS:

U.S.: 30 million per year

Number of tress for NEWSPAPERS (and magazines):

U.S.: 90 million per year

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Number of trees per magazine:

"A standard sized tree, if there is such a thing (10-15m tall, 1-1.5 m circumference) can make enough pulp for 8000-13000 sheets of paper.

If your magazine has say, 100 sheets, that's 80-130 magazines per tree. Your magazine might take .0075-.0125 trees."

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Number of trees to produce PHONEBOOKS:

Did you know that up to 5 million trees are cut down each year to create the white pages phone book and that only 22% of recipients recycle when disposing of them which equates to 165,000 tons of waste in landfills? In addition, almost 75% of consumers are completely unaware of the environmental and financial impact in printing, delivering and recycling these books. Given that you likely use online directories, social networks and mobile phone applications to find the contact information you need, it simply does not make sense to have the white pages phone books forcefully delivered to us every year.

Source: http://www.banthephonebook.org/

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Green Press Initiative? Green Press Initiative (GPI) is a non-profit program which takes a collaborative approach towards working with publishers, printers, paper manufacturers and others in the book and newspaper industries to minimize social and environmental impacts, including impacts on endangered forests, impacts on climate change, and impacts on communities where paper fiber is sourced. When was GPI founded? GPI was founded in 2001. Initially the focus was entirely on the book industry, however, the program was expanded to include the newspaper industry in 2007. What are the impacts of the paper industry and books/newspapers? The entire paper industry, when accounting for forest carbon loss, emits nearly 750 million tons of C02 equivalent annually – nearly 10% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This is equivalent to the annual emissions of over 136 million cars. The U.S. book and newspaper industries combined require the harvest of 125 million trees each year and emit over 40 million metric tons of CO2 annually; equivalent to the annual CO2 emmissions of 7.3 million cars. Impacts on Endangered Forests: Each year the U.S book industry uses approximately 30 million trees, and the U.S. newspaper industry consumes 95 million trees. Many of these trees are from old growth and endangered forests, and the demand for paper is encouraging the practice of converting natural forests into single species tree plantations that support only a fraction of the biodiversity. Impacts on Climate Change The paper industry is the fourth largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and books and newspapers release greenhouse gases thought their lifecycles. Globally, scientist estimate that deforestation is responsible for 25% of human caused greenhouse gases. When trees are cut to make paper, not only do they cease to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, but greenhouse gases are released to the atmosphere when plant material not used makes paper decays or is burned as a source of power at the mill. As a result of these emissions and those associated with soil disturbances at the site of harvest, even trees are replanted, it can take up to 25 years for a newly planted forest to stop being a net emitter of greenhouse gases, and hundreds of years before they store the same amount of carbon as an undisturbed forest. GPI worked to complete the first ever Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts report for the U.S. book industry. It was the first comprehensive carbon footprint analysis of a publishing sector and is being used as a model in other paper sectors. This assessment found that the entire book industry, through all steps of production, retail, and publishing activities, emits a net 8.85 pounds per book. Impacts on Communities In Canada, Indonesia, Brazil and many other countries throughout the world, people who rely on forests for their livelihood have been severely impacted by the paper industry. From the destruction of forests needed to survive to some being forced from their land, the paper industry has disrupted the way of life for these communities. What is the Book Industry Treatise on Environmentally Responsible Publishing? The Book Industry Treatise on Environmentally Responsible Publishing is an industry-developed declaration of meaningful environmental goals and timelines for industry transformation. It spurred the adoption of environmental paper policies with nearly 200 publishers and printers, following the guidelines in the Treatise What are the benefits of recycled paper? Each ton of recycled fiber that replaces a ton of virgin fiber saves 17-24 mature trees and up to 7.5 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions. Also, recycling keeps paper out of landfills, which at current levels makes up 26% of landfills. The degradation produces methane a greenhouse gas with 23 times the heat trapping capacity of carbon dioxide and landfills are the source of 34% of methane releases—the single largest source in the U.S. What are the benefits of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified papers? Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper ensures that the fiber to make paper does not originate from Endangered Forests or areas of social conflict. They work to keep natural and biodiverse forests from being converted to single-species tree farms after harvest and integrate the concerns of indigenous and local communities into forest plans and assessments. What progress has been achieved in recent years? GPI’s consistent education and advocacy work have also spurred the development of environmental paper policies from over 180 book publishers – approximately 42% of market-share in the U.S. book sector. This has resulted in a six fold increase in recycled fiber use-- representative of a reduction of over approximately 1.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions (equivalent to over 250,000 cars/yr) and nearly 3 million trees per year We’ve helped to advance the development of nearly 30 new eco-paper grades, including recycled, postconsumer recycled and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) fiber content and supported a cut in price premiums by 50%, and there are now 31 U.S. and Canadian printers serving U.S. publishers are now stocking environmental grades in-house. Source: http://www.greenpressinitiative.org/about/faq.htm

Mass tree deaths prompt fears of Amazon 'climate tipping point'

Scientists fear billions of tree deaths caused by 2010 drought could see vast forest turn from carbon sink to carbon source

Aerial view of a drought-affected area within the Amazon basin in Manaus, Brazil. Photograph: Rodrigo Baleia/LatinContent/Getty Images

Billions of trees died in the record drought that struck the Amazon in 2010, raising fears that the vast forest is on the verge of a tipping point, where it will stop absorbing greenhouse gas emissions and instead increase them.

The dense forests of the Amazon soak up more than one-quarter of the world's atmospheric carbon, making it a critically important buffer against global warming. But if the Amazon switches from a carbon sink to a carbon source that prompts further droughts and mass tree deaths, such a feedback loop could cause runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences.

"Put starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest forest," said tropical forest expert Simon Lewis, at the University of Leeds, and who led the research published today in the journal Science. Lewis was careful to note that significant scientific uncertainties remain and that the 2010 and 2005 drought – thought then to be of once-a-century severity – might yet be explained by natural climate variation.

"We can't just wait and see because there is no going back," he said. "We won't know we have passed the point where the Amazon turns from a sink to a source until afterwards, when it will be too late."

Alex Bowen, from the London School of Economics and Political Science's Grantham research institute on climate change, said huge emissions of carbon from the Amazon would make it even harder to keep global greenhouse gases at a low enough level to avoid dangerous climate change. "It therefore makes it even more important for there to be strong and urgent reductions in man-made emissions."

The revelation of mass tree deaths in the Amazon is a major blow to efforts to reduce the destruction of the world's forests by loggers, one of the biggest sources of global carbon emissions. The use of satellite imagery by Brazilian law enforcement teams has drastically cut deforestation rates and replanting in Asia had slowed the net loss. Financial deals to protect forests were one of the few areas on which some progress was made at the 2010 UN climate talks in Cancún.

The 2010 Amazonian drought led to the declaration of states-of-emergencies and the lowest ever level of the major tributary, the Rio Negro. Lewis, with colleagues in Brazil, examined satellite-derived rainfall measurements and found that the 2010 drought was even worse than the very severe 2005 drought, affecting a 60% wider area and with an even harsher dry season.

On the ground, the researchers have 126 one-hectare plots spread across the Amazon, in which every single tree is tagged and monitored. After 2005, they counted how many trees had died and worked out how much carbon would be pumped into the atmosphere as the wood rotted. In addition, the reduced growth of the water-stressed trees means the forest failed to absorb the 1.5bn tonnes of carbon that it would in a normal year.

Applying the same principles to the 2010 drought, they estimated that 8 billion tonnes of CO₂ will be released - more than the entire 7.7bn tonnes emitted in 2009 by China, the biggest polluting nation in the world. This estimate does not include forest fires, which release carbon and increase in dry years.

"The Amazon is such a big area that even a small shift [in conditions] there can have a global impact," said Lewis.

Lewis said that two such severe droughts in the Amazon within five years was highly unusual, but that a natural variation in climate over decade-long periods cannot yet be ruled out. The driving factor of the annual weather patterns is the warmth of the sea in the Atlantic. He said increasing droughts in the Amazon are found in some climate models, including the sophisticated model used by the Hadley centre. This means the 2005 and 2010 droughts are consistent with the idea that global warming will cause more droughts in future, emit more carbon, and potentially lead to runaway climate change. "The greenhouse gases we have already emitted may mean there are several more droughts in the pipeline," he said.

Lewis said that the 2010 drought killed "in the low billions of trees", in addition to the roughly 4 billion trees that die on average in a normal year across the Amazon. The researchers are now trying to raise £500,000 in emergency funding to revisit the plots in the Amazon and gather further data.

Brazilian scientist Paulo Brando, from the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (Amazon Environmental Research Institute), and co-leader of the research said: "We will not know exactly how many trees were killed until we can complete forest measurements on the ground. It could be that many of the drought-susceptible trees were killed off in 2005. Or the first drought may have weakened a large number of trees so increasing the number dying in 2010."

Brando added: "Our results should be seen as an initial estimate. The emissions estimates do not include those from forest fires, which spread over extensive areas of the Amazon during hot and dry years and release large amounts of carbon."

Note: The original version of this article incorrectly reported the amount of carbon Lewis's team estimated would be released in 2010 as 8.5 billion tonnes of CO₂: the actual figure is 8bn.

Climate tipping points

Scientists know from the geological record that the Earth's climate can change rapidly. They have identified a number of potential tipping points where relatively small amounts of global warming caused by human activities could cause large changes in climate. Some tipping points, like the losses to the Amazon forests, involve positive feedback loops and could lead to runaway climate change.

Arctic ice cap: The white ice cap is good at reflecting the Sun's warming light back into space. But when it melts, the dark ocean uncovered absorbs this heat. This leads to more melting, and so on.

Tundra: The high north is warming particularly fast, melting the permafrost that has locked up vast amounts of carbon in soils for thousands of years. Bacteria digesting the unfrozen soils generate methane, a potent greenhouse gas, leading to more warming.

Gas hydrates: Also involving methane, this tipping point involves huge reservoirs of methane frozen on or just below the ocean floor. The methane-water crystals are close to their melting point and highly unstable. A huge release could be triggered by a little warming.

West Antarctic ice sheet: Some scientists think this enormous ice sheet, much of which is below sea level, is vulnerable to small amounts of warming. If it all eventually melted, sea level would rise by six metres.


• Amazon 'could shrink by 85% due to climate change'
• Rate of tree deaths in western US 'rising due to climate change'

Contact us

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  +44 (0)20 3353 2000

This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 19.00 GMT on Thursday 3 February 2011. A version appeared on p26 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Friday 4 February 2011. It was last modified at 18.33 GMT on Tuesday 8 February 2011.

No Yard? Here's How You Can Still Make and Use Compost No yard? No problem.

By Colleen Vanderlinden
Wed Jan 19, 2011 09:30

Reducing food waste is simple for those of us with a yard -- just toss any fruit and veggie scraps out on the compost pile, and repeat until, soon, there is enough rich, crumbly compost to toss onto our garden beds.

But what if you're an apartment dweller, with no yard, no balcony, no outdoor space to speak of to call your own?

Composting is still a great option for you apartment-dwellers out there. It will take a bit of creativity, but it's entirely possible that you can reduce your total food waste to nearly zero, depending on how many of these options you're willing to use and the size of your household.

Small Space Composting Option #1: Worm Bin

People are sometimes hesitant to get into vermicomposting because they worry about either A) the worms escaping and slithering all over their kitchen floor, or B) odors. Neither one are all that common, actually, and are unlikely to happen if you spend some time maintaining your worm bin. Worms will only try to escape if they're starving, too dry, drowning, or (rarely) if something nearby (such as a refrigerator or dishwasher) causes frequent vibrations, which can irritate them. If you keep them fed, and moist, you're unlikely to have any problems.

And worm bins don't have to be great big boxy affairs, either. You can vermicompost, right under your kitchen sink, in a five gallon bucket from the home center. Make sure you get one with a lid, and follow these tips for making a bucket worm bin.

Wondering what to add to your worm bin? Just about any non-meat, non-dairy, not-greasy food you have on hand. Fruit and vegetable peels, leftover cooked veggies, rice, or plain pasta, coffee grounds, tea bags -- all of it can go into your worm bin. While there are some foods worms aren't fond of, in general, they're not too picky.

You can order worms online. How many you'll need depends on how much food waste you have. One pound of worms can handle 1/2 pound of food scraps per day.

Small Space Composting Option #2: Bokashi

There are many items you really shouldn't put in a worm bin: meat, dairy, cooked foods with sauces and dressings -- but you can use Bokashi to compost these items. Bokashi is a popular composting method in Asia, and is seeing more popularity now in the U.S. and Canada. It is, essentially, a fermentation method. You add your food to a bucket (which fits perfectly under a sink or in a corner) cover it with Bokashi bran (a mix of grains and microbes that will cause the fermentation process) and repeat. Once your bucket is full, you set it aside for a few weeks, upon which it is fully fermented and no longer harbors any harmful pathogens. If you have a yard, you can simply add the fermented bucket contents to a compost pile, or bury it right in the garden. If you don't have a yard, see option #3, below.

Small Space Composting Option #3: Bokashi Plus a Worm Bin

If you're doing all of your composting indoors, there's good news: red wigglers (and other worms, but red wigglers are the most common vermicomposting worm) LOVE the fermented contents of Bokashi buckets. Once your Bokashi bucket is done sitting and fermenting, give your worms a bit of the mixture every day, and they will break it down in no time.

Using Finished Vermicompost

OK, so you've done all of this indoor vermicomposting, and now, you have rich, dark vermicompost and vermicastings. What do you do with it?

* Add a bit to the surface of your houseplants' potting soil. It is a very safe, natural fertilizer.
* Add vermicastings to potting soil or seed starting mixes.
* Add them to your community garden plot, if you have one.
* Donate them to a community garden, school garden, or garden club.
* Do some guerilla soil improvement -- add your vermicompost to public plantings to help them grow stronger.
* Offer them up on Craigslist. Chances are good that you won't have them for long.
* Sell them. Lots of people sell vermicompost on sites like eBay and Etsy.

If you're determined to reduce the amount of waste you produce, and turn food waste into something really useful, these ideas are definitely worth considering. Happy composting!

The EDV-1 From Daiwa: The Ultimate Post-Apocalyptic Expanding Container House

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 01.19.11

Design & Architecture (prefab)

Images Credit Daiwa

Cameron Sinclair is so going to want 10,000 of these amazing robotic shipping container sized instant houses. EDV stands for Emergency Disaster Vehicles, but it is really a pushbutton house that leaves Adam Kalkin in its wake. It is actually rather clever; the lower level has all the complicated plumbing and hardware, while the upper level slides up to provide open space.

In just four minutes, the stabilizer feet pop out and the top pops up, providing comfortable space above and a kitchen, bathroom, office below. Also includes 2 Kilowatts of photovoltaics on the roof, hydrogen fuel cells, water vapour condenser for water, and what appears to be a composting toilet.

Daiwa has some experience in the field; they built 14,772 units after an earthquake in 1995. Those units have since been shipped around the world.

Really, I don't understand Kate Stohr of Architecture for Humanity. She tells Wired that For emergency shelter in the first few days after a disaster, the tent is a proven solution." Clearly she has never seen this movie, particularly the first two minutes, sort of Roland Emmerich meets Cameron Sinclair, who orders his fleet of helicopters into action, screaming "faster, faster, they need us!" They put the pedal to the metal and faster than the speed of sound, housing is delivered to those in need. Amazing. Daiwa, via CrunchGear

More emergency housing:
Red+Housing Emergency Housing by OBRA Architects
Gimme Shelter: Designing for Disaster
Are Shipping Containers An Answer For Haiti Housing?

Shocking Mass Animal Deaths Around The World

Just a few weeks into 2011, and it's already a tough year for the animal kingdom: Mass deaths of blackbirds, spot fish, sardines, croakers, doves, and other creatures are going mostly unexplained in regions all over the world (as this helpful Google Map points out).

But these population injuries aren't entirely uncommon: From beached whales and dead penguins to massive fish kills and threatened manatees, 2010 had its share of bad news, too.

Often these events are blamed on temperature change, human activity, or natural causes, but in many of the cases we've included here, we may never know exactly what caused massive destruction on these fragile populations.

Image: Google Maps

Image: Inquistr

Birds Dying Around the World

Bird deaths have been getting most of the attention lately, as reports of thousands of birds dropping out of these sky have come in from the United States, Sweden, New Zealand, and other countries worldwide.

On New Year's Eve, 2,000 blackbirds died in Arkansas; similar deaths in Louisiana and Kentucky followed.

Sweden reported 50 dead birds a few days later, and 100 more dead blackbirds were found in New Zealand. Current thinking is that the birds were victims of physical trauma -- which could mean anything from a lightening strike or hail to fireworks that frightened the birds into colliding with each other.

Photo: hart_curt/Creative Commons

Whales in New Zealand

New Zealand is dangerous territory for the pilot whales that pass by the island during breeding season each year.

Last winter, 168 of the massive mammals were found stranded on beaches and couldn't be rescued (though conservation workers were able to save 76 other beached whales in the region).

In 2003, 160 whales died in the same region -- though biologists are still unable to say exactly why the area is so treacherous.

Photo: China Daily

Penguins in Brazil

It's not unusual for residents of Sao Paulo, Brazil, to find a few dead penguins on their beaches in the summer: It's migrating season for the Magellans, and there are always a few that don't survive the trip.

But last summer, officials found "an absurdly high number" of the birds dead on their beaches: nearly 500 (the usual annual count is around 10).

While many of the birds were found with empty stomachs, indicating starvation as a cause of death, the cause of the starvation remains a mystery.

Photo: elisfanclub/Creative Commons

Fish Near the Gulf of Mexico

The long-term effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are still coming to light, but two massive fish kills shortly after the spill in nearby regions put environmentalists on guard.

TreeHugger's Brian Merchant captured these images of dead catfish littering the beaches of Dauphin Island, Alabama, in May 2010; though he says that the fish wash up on those beaches for other reasons -- like disease, and fishing -- the numbers this year were higher than usual.

And in September, countless sea creatures of varying kinds -- including pogies, redfish, shrimp, eel, crabs, and more -- were found clogging a section of the Mississippi River in Louisiana.

Though initial reports pointed to the oil spill as the culprit, later research showed that the fish were the victims of a deadly combination of low tides and unseasonably warm waters.

Photo: Brian Merchant

Fish in Maryland and Massachusetts

Fish in the Atlantic can be just as susceptible to the warming waters as their fellow swimmers in the south, though -- as illustrated by two major fish kills in the northern U.S. that occurred within four months of each other.

In August, residents of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, called attention to thousands of Menhaden fish that were washing up on beaches; local marine fisheries explained that the Menhadens are especially "sensitive to environmental changes," and gave the cause of death as "lack of oxygen due to warmer waters."

Then, in early January, 2 million adult spot fish died in the Chesapeake Bay, where record lows of 36 degrees in December caused "cold-water stress" that the fish couldn't overcome. (The region had seen similar die-offs before: 15 million fish in 1976 and another in 1980.)

Photo: Baltimore Sun

Devil Crabs in England

Within the first week of 2011, officials in Kent, England, reported that devil crabs were washing up on the coastline in massive numbers.

While the crabs were the major invaders -- The Mirror estimated that 40,000 dead Devil Crabs made up the bulk of the influx -- they weren't alone.

Other sea life, including starfish, lobsters, anemones, and sponges, were spotted on the beaches, too. Here, though, experts blamed temperature change for the mass death, pinning it to "hypothermia after the UK's coldest December in 120 years."

Screenshot: BBC

Sardines in Brazil

On December 30, the fishing industry in Parana, Brazil, ground to a halt as more than 100 tons of dead sardine, croaker, and catfish began landing on its beaches.

Initial reports pointed to an "environmental imbalance" or to a chemical spill that could have affected the fish population -- and Planet Green points out that a naturally-occurring ocean event, like a toxic algae bloom, or the results of human activities (especially bottom trawling) could have the same end result.

Photo: rockyeda/Creative Commons

Manatees in Florida

Fish aren't the only creatures threatened by a change in water temperature: For a group of manatees in the Gulf of Mexico, unusually cold weather is a dangerous thing.

Last year, more than 100 manatees washed up on the shores of South Florida in the first three weeks of January alone -- officials blamed that death toll on chilly waters.

This year, the BBC reports that 300 manatees have fled the cool currents for the warmth of discharge canals at Big Bend Power Station in Tampa, Florida.

Photo: USFWS/Southeast/Creative Commons

Doves in Italy

Residents of Faenza, Italy, have been faced with the deaths of far more than two turtle doves: 1,000 of the birds have been found dead in the village in the last few days.

The birds were all found with blue stains on their beaks; scientists' current theory is that the birds stuffed themselves with sunflower seeds from an industrial site and "suffered from indigestion that led to their death." The blue stains, they say, are a result of a lack of oxygen that's a warning sign for altitude sickness.

More Weird Animal Phenomenons
Weird Ways Global Warming is Changing Animal Populations
Strange Animals that Glow in the Dark
Mass Animal Deaths Around the World

Photo: Mostly Dans/Creative Commons

Source:
TreeHugger.com
By Blythe Copeland, Great Neck, New York
on January 11, 2011
http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/2011/01/shocking-mass-animal-deaths-around-the-world.php?page=1

Temperature Rising: A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

Temperature Rising

A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning

Jonathan Kingston/Aurora Select, for The New York Times

KEEPING WATCH The Mauna Loa Observatory, at an altitude of 11,135 feet above sea level in Hawaii, has been continuously monitoring and collecting data related to climate change since the 1950s.

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Published: December 21, 2010
New York Times

They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly.

The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.

Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.

When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.

By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.

The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?

Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide traps heat at the surface of the planet. They cite growing evidence that the inexorable rise of the gas is altering the climate in ways that threaten human welfare.

Fossil fuel emissions, they say, are like a runaway train, hurtling the world’s citizens toward a stone wall — a carbon dioxide level that, over time, will cause profound changes.

The risks include melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and — perhaps most important — difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food. Many of these changes are taking place at a modest level already, the scientists say, but are expected to intensify.

Reacting to such warnings, President George Bush committed the United States in 1992 to limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Scores of other nations made the same pledge, in a treaty that was long on promises and short on specifics.

But in 1998, when it came time to commit to details in a document known as the Kyoto Protocol, Congress balked. Many countries did ratify the protocol, but it had only a limited effect, and the past decade has seen little additional progress in controlling emissions.

Many countries are reluctant to commit themselves to tough emission limits, fearing that doing so will hurt economic growth. International climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, this month ended with only modest progress. The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year.

Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny.

One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.”

But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase.

“I find it shocking,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. “We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.”

As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time.

“Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”

A Passion for Precision

Perhaps the biggest reason the world learned of the risk of global warming was the unusual personality of a single American scientist.

Charles David Keeling’s son Ralph remembers that when he was a child, his family bought a new home in Del Mar, Calif., north of San Diego. His father assigned him the task of edging the lawn. Dr. Keeling insisted that Ralph copy the habits of the previous owner, an Englishman who had taken pride in his garden, cutting a precise two-inch strip between the sidewalk and the grass.

“It took a lot of work to maintain this attractive gap,” Ralph Keeling recalled, but he said his father believed “that was just the right way to do it, and if you didn’t do that, you were cutting corners. It was a moral breach.”

Dr. Keeling was a punctilious man. It was by no means his defining trait — relatives and colleagues described a man who played a brilliant piano, loved hiking mountains and might settle a friendly argument at dinner by pulling an etymological dictionary off the shelf.

But the essence of his scientific legacy was his passion for doing things in a meticulous way. It explains why, even as challengers try to pick apart every other aspect of climate science, his half-century record of carbon dioxide measurements stands unchallenged.

By the 1950s, when Dr. Keeling was completing his scientific training, scientists had been observing the increasing use of fossil fuels and wondering whether carbon dioxide in the air was rising as a result. But nobody had been able to take accurate measurements of the gas.

As a young researcher, Dr. Keeling built instruments and developed techniques that allowed him to achieve great precision in making such measurements. Then he spent the rest of his life applying his approach.

In his earliest measurements of the air, taken in California and other parts of the West in the mid-1950s, he found that the background level for carbon dioxide was about 310 parts per million.

That discovery drew attention in Washington, and Dr. Keeling soon found himself enjoying government backing for his research. He joined the staff of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in the La Jolla section of San Diego, under the guidance of an esteemed scientist named Roger Revelle, and began laying plans to measure carbon dioxide around the world.

Some of the most important data came from an analyzer he placed in a government geophysical observatory that had been set up a few years earlier in a remote location: near the top of Mauna Loa, one of the volcanoes that loom over the Big Island of Hawaii.

He quickly made profound discoveries. One was that carbon dioxide oscillated slightly according to the seasons. Dr. Keeling realized the reason: most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere, and plants there were taking up carbon dioxide as they sprouted leaves and grew over the summer, then shedding it as the leaves died and decayed in the winter.

He had discovered that the earth itself was breathing.

A more ominous finding was that each year, the peak level was a little higher than the year before. Carbon dioxide was indeed rising, and quickly. That finding electrified the small community of scientists who understood its implications. Later chemical tests, by Dr. Keeling and others, proved that the increase was due to the combustion of fossil fuels.

The graph showing rising carbon dioxide levels came to be known as the Keeling Curve. Many Americans have never heard of it, but to climatologists, it is the most recognizable emblem of their science, engraved in bronze on a building at Mauna Loa and carved into a wall at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.

By the late 1960s, a decade after Dr. Keeling began his measurements, the trend of rising carbon dioxide was undeniable, and scientists began to warn of the potential for a big increase in the temperature of the earth.

Dr. Keeling’s mentor, Dr. Revelle, moved to Harvard, where he lectured about the problem. Among the students in the 1960s who first saw the Keeling Curve displayed in Dr. Revelle’s classroom was a senator’s son from Tennessee named Albert Arnold Gore Jr., who marveled at what it could mean for the future of the planet.

Throughout much of his career, Dr. Keeling was cautious about interpreting his own measurements. He left that to other people while he concentrated on creating a record that would withstand scrutiny.

John Chin, a retired technician in Hawaii who worked closely with Dr. Keeling, recently described the painstaking steps he took, at Dr. Keeling’s behest, to ensure accuracy. Many hours were required every week just to be certain that the instruments atop Mauna Loa had not drifted out of kilter.

The golden rule was “no hanky-panky,” Mr. Chin recalled in an interview in Hilo, Hawaii. Dr. Keeling and his aides scrutinized the records closely, and if workers in Hawaii fell down on the job, Mr. Chin said, they were likely to get a call or letter: “What did you do? What happened that day?”

In later years, as the scientific evidence about climate change grew, Dr. Keeling’s interpretations became bolder, and he began to issue warnings. In an essay in 1998, he replied to claims that global warming was a myth, declaring that the real myth was that “natural resources and the ability of the earth’s habitable regions to absorb the impacts of human activities are limitless.”

Still, by the time he died, global warming had not become a major political issue. That changed in 2006, when Mr. Gore’s movie and book, both titled “An Inconvenient Truth,” brought the issue to wider public attention. The Keeling Curve was featured in both.

In 2007, a body appointed by the United Nations declared that the scientific evidence that the earth was warming had become unequivocal, and it added that humans were almost certainly the main cause. Mr. Gore and the panel jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But as action began to seem more likely, the political debate intensified, with fossil-fuel industries mobilizing to fight emission-curbing measures. Climate-change contrarians increased their attack on the science, taking advantage of the Internet to distribute their views outside the usual scientific channels.

In an interview in La Jolla, Dr. Keeling’s widow, Louise, said that if her husband had lived to see the hardening of the political battle lines over climate change, he would have been dismayed.

“He was a registered Republican,” she said. “He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.”

The Numbers

Not long ago, standing on a black volcanic plain two miles above the Pacific Ocean, the director of the Mauna Loa Observatory, John E. Barnes, pointed toward a high metal tower.

Samples are taken by hoses that snake to the top of the tower to ensure that only clean air is analyzed, he explained. He described other measures intended to guarantee an accurate record. Then Dr. Barnes, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, displayed the hourly calculation from one of the analyzers.

It showed the amount of carbon dioxide that morning as 388 parts per million.

After Dr. Keeling had established the importance of carbon dioxide measurements, the government began making its own, in the early 1970s. Today, a NOAA monitoring program and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography program operate in parallel at Mauna Loa and other sites, with each record of measurements serving as a quality check on the other.

The Scripps program is now run by Ralph Keeling, who grew up to become a renowned atmospheric scientist in his own right and then joined the Scripps faculty. He took control of the measurement program after his father’s sudden death from a heart attack.

In an interview on the Scripps campus in La Jolla, Ralph Keeling calculated that the carbon dioxide level at Mauna Loa was likely to surpass 400 by May 2014, a sort of odometer moment in mankind’s alteration of the atmosphere.

“We’re going to race through 400 like we didn’t see it go by,” Dr. Keeling said.

What do these numbers mean?

The basic physics of the atmosphere, worked out more than a century ago, show that carbon dioxide plays a powerful role in maintaining the earth’s climate. Even though the amount in the air is tiny, the gas is so potent at trapping the sun’s heat that it effectively works as a one-way blanket, letting visible light in but stopping much of the resulting heat from escaping back to space.

Without any of the gas, the earth would most likely be a frozen wasteland — according to a recent study, its average temperature would be colder by roughly 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But scientists say humanity is now polluting the atmosphere with too much of a good thing.

In recent years, researchers have been able to put the Keeling measurements into a broader context. Bubbles of ancient air trapped by glaciers and ice sheets have been tested, and they show that over the past 800,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air oscillated between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Just before the Industrial Revolution, the level was about 280 parts per million and had been there for several thousand years.

That amount of the gas, in other words, produced the equable climate in which human civilization flourished.

Other studies, covering many millions of years, show a close association between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth. The gas seemingly played a major role in amplifying the effects of the ice ages, which were caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit.

The geologic record suggests that as the earth began cooling, the amount of carbon dioxide fell, probably because much of it got locked up in the ocean, and that fall amplified the initial cooling. Conversely, when the orbital wobble caused the earth to begin warming, a great deal of carbon dioxide escaped from the ocean, amplifying the warming.

Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, refers to carbon dioxide as the master control knob of the earth’s climate. He said that because the wobbles in the earth’s orbit were not, by themselves, big enough to cause the large changes of the ice ages, the situation made sense only when the amplification from carbon dioxide was factored in.

“What the ice ages tell us is that our physical understanding of CO2 explains what happened and nothing else does,” Dr. Alley said. “The ice ages are a very strong test of whether we’ve got it right.”

When people began burning substantial amounts of coal and oil in the 19th century, the carbon dioxide level began to rise. It is now about 40 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and humans have put half the extra gas into the air since just the late 1970s. Emissions are rising so rapidly that some experts fear that the amount of the gas could double or triple before emissions are brought under control.

The earth’s history offers no exact parallel to the human combustion of fossil fuels, so scientists have struggled to calculate the effect.

Their best estimate is that if the amount of carbon dioxide doubles, the temperature of the earth will rise about five or six degrees Fahrenheit. While that may sound small given the daily and seasonal variations in the weather, the number represents an annual global average, and therefore an immense addition of heat to the planet.

The warming would be higher over land, and it would be greatly amplified at the poles, where a considerable amount of ice might melt, raising sea levels. The deep ocean would also absorb a tremendous amount of heat.

Moreover, scientists say that an increase of five or six degrees is a mildly optimistic outlook. They cannot rule out an increase as high as 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet.

Climate-change contrarians do not accept these numbers.

The Internet has given rise to a vocal cadre of challengers who question every aspect of the science — even the physics, worked out in the 19th century, that shows that carbon dioxide traps heat. That is a point so elementary and well-established that demonstrations of it are routinely carried out by high school students.

However, the contrarians who have most influenced Congress are a handful of men trained in atmospheric physics. They generally accept the rising carbon dioxide numbers, they recognize that the increase is caused by human activity, and they acknowledge that the earth is warming in response.

But they doubt that it will warm nearly as much as mainstream scientists say, arguing that the increase is likely to be less than two degrees Fahrenheit, a change they characterize as manageable.

Among the most prominent of these contrarians is Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who contends that as the earth initially warms, cloud patterns will shift in a way that should help to limit the heat buildup. Most climate scientists contend that little evidence supports this view, but Dr. Lindzen is regularly consulted on Capitol Hill.

“I am quite willing to state,” Dr. Lindzen said in a speech this year, “that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon, though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.”

The Fuel of Civilization

While the world’s governments have largely accepted the science of climate change, their efforts to bring emissions under control are lagging.

The simple reason is that modern civilization is built on burning fossil fuels. Cars, trucks, power plants, steel mills, farms, planes, cement factories, home furnaces — virtually all of them spew carbon dioxide or lesser heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

Developed countries, especially the United States, are largely responsible for the buildup that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution. They have begun to make some headway on the problem, reducing the energy they use to produce a given amount of economic output, with some countries even managing to lower their total emissions.

But these modest efforts are being swamped by rising energy use in developing countries like China, India and Brazil. In those lands, economic growth is not simply desirable — it is a moral imperative, to lift more than a third of the human race out of poverty. A recent scientific paper referred to China’s surge as “the biggest transformation of human well-being the earth has ever seen.”

China’s citizens, on average, still use less than a third of the energy per person as Americans. But with 1.3 billion people, four times as many as the United States, China is so large and is growing so quickly that it has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest overall user of energy.

Barring some big breakthrough in clean-energy technology, this rapid growth in developing countries threatens to make the emissions problem unsolvable.

Emissions dropped sharply in Western nations in 2009, during the recession that followed the financial crisis, but that decrease was largely offset by continued growth in the East. And for 2010, global emissions are projected to return to the rapid growth of the past decade, rising more than 3 percent a year.

Many countries have, in principle, embraced the idea of trying to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, feeling that any greater warming would pose unacceptable risks. As best scientists can calculate, that means about one trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the gases released into the atmosphere before emissions need to fall to nearly zero.

“It took 250 years to burn the first half-trillion tons,” Myles R. Allen, a leading British climate scientist, said in a briefing. “On current trends, we’ll burn the next half-trillion in less than 40.”

Unless more serious efforts to convert to a new energy system begin soon, scientists argue, it will be impossible to hit the 3.6-degree target, and the risk will increase that global warming could spiral out of control by century’s end.

“We are quickly running out of time,” said Josep G. Canadell, an Australian scientist who tracks emissions

In many countries, the United States and China among them, a conversion of the energy system has begun, with wind turbines and solar panels sprouting across the landscape. But they generate only a tiny fraction of all power, with much of the world’s electricity still coming from the combustion of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

With the exception of European countries, few nations have been willing to raise the cost of fossil fuels or set emissions caps as a way to speed the transformation. In the United States, a particular fear has been that a carbon policy will hurt the country’s industries as they compete with companies abroad whose governments have adopted no such policy.

As he watches these difficulties, Ralph Keeling contemplates the unbending math of carbon dioxide emissions first documented by his father more than a half-century ago and wonders about the future effects of that increase.

“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “ ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”

On Dec. 11, another round of international climate negotiations, sponsored by the United Nations, concluded in Cancún. As they have for 18 years running, the gathered nations pledged renewed efforts. But they failed to agree on any binding emission targets.

Late at night, as the delegates were wrapping up in Mexico, the machines atop the volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean issued their own silent verdict on the world’s efforts.

At midnight Mauna Loa time, the carbon dioxide level hit 390 — and rising.

We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change

Op-Ed Contributor
by AL GORE
New York Times

Published: February 27, 2010

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

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Open, N.Y.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them.

And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act.

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution.

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

It’s important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy.

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy.

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.

CO2 Emissions (The Breathing Earth Simulations)

Click to view live numbers of global CO2 emissions, birth and death rates, etc.

http://www.breathingearth.net/

The Breathing Earth simulation

Welcome to Breathing Earth. This real-time simulation displays the CO2 emissions of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates.

Please remember that this real time simulation is just that: a simulation. Although the CO2 emission, birth rate and death rate data used in Breathing Earth comes from reputable sources, data that measures things on such a massive scale can never be 100% accurate. Please note however that the CO2 emission levels shown here are much more likely to be too low than they are to be too high.

The Environment and Climate Change

Global warming (aka climate change) is probably the most important issue to face our generation, and quite possibly any generation in history. The worldwide scientific community is virtually unanimous in its agreement that global warming is happening, that that it's our fault. If we let it get out of our control, the consequences - which will already begin occuring in most of our lifetimes - will be catastrophic. Just some of the consequences that can be reasonably expected are rising sea levels, more frequent and more severe natural disasters, large-scale food shortages, plagues, massive species extinctions, unprecendented numbers of refugees, intensified ethnic and political tensions, and a global economic depression the likes of which no one has ever seen.

The situation is still within our grasp, but we must act now, we must act strongly, and we must act together. Individuals, companies, and governments across the globe must each do what they can to reverse climate change. We will never get a second chance.

What can I do?

The good news is that there are plenty of things that we can do to reduce our carbon footprint. The key word is reduce. We can greatly lessen our impact on climate change by using the planet's resources more responsibly. There are many things we can reduce, and many ways we can reduce them, but three of the major ones are: reduce the amount of animal products you consume (meat, dairy, eggs, leather, etc.), reduce the amount of fuel you use (car, air travel, etc.), and reduce the amount of electricity you use. If you're interested, there are plenty of good resources on the net. I encourage you to so your own research, though you might find some of the links below to be useful.

More climate change info?

Footprint Network footprint calculator - Figure out your own ecological footprint.

wecansolveit.org - Join a global movement determined to help solve climate change.

Fight Climate Change with Diet Change - Find out why the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined.

Where does the data come from?

All data used on Breathing Earth is the latest available, as of December 2008.

Birth and death rates: 2008 estimates, from the CIA World Factbook

Population: Data is based on July 2008 estimates from the CIA World Factbook. When Breathing Earth is started, it uses each country's birth and death rates to calculate how much its population has changed since July 2008, and adjusts its population figure accordingly. To calculate the total world population, Breathing Earth adds up the population figures of all countries. It continues adjusting the various population figures as you watch it, each time a person is born or a person dies.

CO2 emission rates: 2004 figures from the United Nations Statistics Division. These are the most up-to-date figures as of December 2008. Collating CO2 emissions data for every country on Earth, representing the same time period, is undoubtedly a massive and very complex task that relies on the availability of many other sets of data. This probably explains why the most recent CO2 emissions data available is from 2004.

CO2 emission rates from two years earlier: When Breathing Earth was first built, it used 2002 figures, also from the United Nations Statistics Division. When you hover your mouse over a country, Breathing Earth compares the 2002 and 2004 figures and indicates whether that country's CO2 emissions have increased or decreased in that time, using the red or green arrow that appears near the bottom-left.

There was an unavailability of a portion of the data for a few of the tinier countries (eg. Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Lesotho). In such cases, I made estimates based on their population, economy, and the data of their relevant neighbours. In all such cases, the figures were so low that even had my estimates been wildly inaccurate, the effect on the simulation would have been negligible.

CO2 emissions: per country or per capita?

Some people ask why Breathing Earth focuses on the CO2 emissions per country, rather than per capita. After all, wouldn't the per capita rates give a better indication of who is being most wasteful? For example, the citizens of Australia, Kuwait and Luxembourg are among the world's worst polluters, yet their CO2 emissions aren't very prominent on Breathing Earth because of those countries' relatively low populations.

The fact of the matter, however, is that what is most important is how many c02 emissions there are from the perspective of Planet Earth. Although some countries are clearly much worse polluters than others, the problem is ultimately a global one that humans of various nationalities have caused, and that humans of various nationalities must work together to solve.

One thing must surely be obvious though: The problem is largely a Western one. It is the Western countries who are leading the way in CO2 emissions, and when non-Western countries have high CO2 emission rates themselves, it's usually because they are adopting Western habits. Since we, the West, have been a leading cause of the CO2 emissions problem, surely it is we who must step up and be the leaders in the solution.

The truth about Apple products...

http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/itox.html

Apple products - sleek looks, amazing design, meticulous attention to detail. So what's with the toxic chemicals inside, short life spans and allowing their products to be dumped in Asia?

None of this fits with Apple's iLife image, and none of this is making Apple a successful company. So why hasn't Steve improved Apple's design?

Well it seems Apple just doesn't prioritize environmental concerns. Sure, they have a nice Environment section on their website. But it's not linked from the front page, and it's hard to find unless you know where to look. Of course it says how great Apple's policies are. But if you look under the hood, Apple's policies are as ugly as a beige box circa 1989.

Here's where we want Apple to be:

Toxic chemicals:

Toxic chemicals in electronics are a big problem. More and more tech gadgets are produced and disposed of every year. This means more toxic pollution when they are produced and when they are thrown away.

That's the bad news. The good news is that alternatives do exist.

Apple can remove the worst chemicals from its products and production processes. But it's not even close to this goal.

What a good Apple looks like

Take the example of the toxic plastic Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC). Other companies have set a date to remove PVC from their products. Apple hasn't. Major new product lines like the iPod nano and MacBook still contain PVC.

We want all new Apple product ranges launched from 2007 onwards to be free of the worst toxic chemicals in the production process and products themselves. Now that would make us proud of Apple.

Product take back

A basic environmental principle is that if you make and sell a product you should be responsible for that product when it is no longer wanted. This is also a basic rule for children: you clean up your own mess.

Dell and Hewlett Packard (HP) both support this principle, which goes by the very grown-up name of Individual Producer Responsibility.

Alt-Apple-Escape

Apple does have some take back programs. In Europe and Japan, it must offer this service by law. Under pressure from the computertakeback campaign in the U.S., Apple has recently made some piecemeal concessions on its take-back policy. But these only apply in the U.S. and fall far short of a comprehensive global take back policy.

This would be a big step to preventing most Apple products from ending up dumped in the e-waste yards of Asia.

Kid stuff, really

You'd think that a company with headquarters at '1 Infinite Loop,' would understand the concept of recycling. If Apple is really so proud of its well-made products there shouldn't be any problem promoting a global take-back program for all of its products.

Product life span

We get angry when our iPod breaks just after the one-year warranty expires. We get annoyed when Apple says it's cheaper to buy a new one than fix the old one. We hate it when we are reduced to selling our old broken PowerBook keyboard on eBay for five bucks. These are common consumer woes resulting from Apple designing products with short life spans. If Apple had to take back its old products, you can bet it would start designing longer lasting products that are easier to reuse and recycle.

Apple has good taste, and we want that flavor to last.

See the difference

Imagine if the next iPod launch was an upgrade to the iPod you already have, with a new component you could just swap out, instead of replacing the entire thing? That would save you money, extend the lifespan of your iPod, and save the resources and energy required to make a new iPod.

Campaign history:

10/03

Greenpeace contacts Apple for information on their chemicals policy.

02/04

Follow-up reminder on Greenpeace request to Apple.

04/04

Greenpeace Chemical Home database launched; Apple graded red on their chemical policy.

06/04

Samsung is the first major electronics company to commit to phasing out all BFRs and PVC.

08/04

First meeting between Greenpeace and Apple – no movement from Apple on chemicals policy.

11/04

Second meeting between Greenpeace and Apple – still no commitment from Apple on strengthening its chemical policy.

11/04

Nokia commits to phasing out all BFRs and PVC.

04/05

Sony and Sony Ericsson commit to phasing out all BFRs and PVC.

09/05

Third meeting between Greenpeace and Apple – still no change in Apple’s chemical policy. Greenpeace gives Apple advance notice that Greenpeace will be ranking it on their chemical policy as well as their waste policy in 2006.

09/05

LG Electronics commits to phasing out all BFRs and PVC.

03/06

HP commits to phase out BFRs and PVC.

04/06

Fourth meeting between Greenpeace and Apple called by Apple to update Greenpeace on obstacles to phasing out PVC and BFRs.

06/06

Dell commits to a plan to phase out a list of hazardous chemicals with priority on BFR and PVC by 2009. Dell also announces takeback scheme for any Dell product, in US from September 2006 and globally from November 2006.

06/06

Two calls between Greenpeace and Apple initiated by Apple to discuss Apple’s draft ranking on Guide to Greener Electronics. No policy change forth coming from Apple.

08/06

Guide to Greener Electronics launched: Apple gets 2.7/10 and finds itself fourth from the bottom of the ranking.

09/06

First analysis of an Apple laptop: Independant sampling revealed that MacBook Pro contained PVC and BFRs.

09/06

Green my Apple campaign launched. No official response from Apple to date.

12/06

Due to positive moves from other companies Apple is bottom of the second version of the Guide to Greener Electronics.

12/06

Two environmental resolutions by Social Responsible Investment funds filed for the 2007 Apple Annual General Meeting (AGM).

12/06

Apple makes its first official comment on the greenmyapple campaign claiming that their existing policy of no longer selling CRT monitors and the eliminating RoHS chemicals (which all other companies like Dell/HP and Lenovo have already eliminated) is the clear example of their environmental record.

01/07

The Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld passes without any mention of environmental improvements from Apple.

01/07

Dell CEO Michael Dell challenges the electronics industry to take responsibility for its waste on a global level.

02/07

Rumours spread of a potential environmental announcement from Apple following a meeting between one Social Responsible Investment fund and Steve Jobs.

04/07

Greenpeace and 70 other US NGOs request that Al Gore (Apple Board Director) supports the environmental resolutions filed for the Apple AGM.

04/07

The third version of the Greenpeace Guide for Greener Electronics released, Apple is the only company that made no movement since the first version of the guide (Aug 06) and remains in last position.

04/07

The Apple Board of Directors states that it unanimously rejects the two environmental shareholder resolutions.

05/07

Good news! Steve responds with an open letter about Apple's environment policy. Good progress from Apple but not the end. We hope Steve's next statement will mark out Apple as a green leader.

Really PVC free?

Sure, Apple is proud to highlight that the iPod shuffle External Battery Pack and other minor accessories are PVC free, but that's not exactly a major high-volume product line is it?

Fringe Benefits

Many of the changes Apple takes environmental credit for (Flat screens replacing CRT monitors, wireless reducing cables, banning certain chemicals) are just side-effects of changes made for design considerations or required by new laws.

"Power has never been this much fun"

Back in April 2005, Steve Jobs publicly called environmentalists' concerns about Apple "bullshit". Come on Steve, we'd expect that kind of reaction from fat corporate CEOs who dump polychlorinated biphenyls into rivers, not from a cool, potentially eco-friendly titan of the information age.