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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are urging companies to broaden their carbon footprint calculations. They report that many U.S. companies in a variety of industries do not account for the entire supply chain that results in final goods and services--overlooking up to 75 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions involved. Most factories, it seems, assess only carbon dioxide released directly and not from materials processing or production of parts done by suppliers, which contributes significantly to the ultimate footprints. Similarly, most retailers analyze only their stores and not their merchandise supply lines. [More] News Scan Briefs: Sounds Like Thunder Take Two Pills and Don’t Call Me in the MorningUp to 58 percent of physicians in the U.S. regularly prescribe placebos, according to a survey of 679 rheumatologists and general internists conducted by Jon C. Tilburt of the National Institutes of Health and his colleagues. Even though placebos may contain no active ingredients, many ailments still respond positively to them [see “The Placebo Effect,” by Walter A. Brown; Scientific American, January 1998]. [More]

Tags: supply, placebo, footprint, chain, carbon

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are urging companies to broaden their carbon footprint calculations. They report that many U.S. companies in a variety of industries do not account for the entire supply chain that results in final goods and services--overlooking up to 75 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions involved. Most factories, it seems, assess only carbon dioxide released directly and not from materials processing or production of parts done by suppliers, which contributes significantly to the ultimate footprints. Similarly, most retailers analyze only their stores and not their merchandise supply lines. [More] News Scan Briefs: Sounds Like Thunder Take Two Pills and Don’t Call Me in the MorningUp to 58 percent of physicians in the U.S. regularly prescribe placebos, according to a survey of 679 rheumatologists and general internists conducted by Jon C. Tilburt of the National Institutes of Health and his colleagues. Even though placebos may contain no active ingredients, many ailments still respond positively to them [see “The Placebo Effect,” by Walter A. Brown; Scientific American, January 1998]. [More]

Tags: supply, placebo, footprint, chain, carbon

Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people. The key is new low-carbon technology, not simply energy efficiency. [More] Green Buildings May Be Cheapest Way to Slow Global Warming North American homes, offices and other buildings contribute an estimated 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year--more than one third of the continent's greenhouse gas pollution output. Simply constructing more energy-efficient buildings--and upgrading the insulation and windows in the existing ones--could save a whopping 1.7 billion tons annually, says a new report from the Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), an international organization established by Canada, Mexico and the U.S. under the North American Free Trade Agreement to address continent-wide environmental issues. [More]

Tags: carbon, energy, buildings, billion, environmental

If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More] Clean Cities and Dirty Coal Power--China's Energy Paradox CHONGQING--This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution. The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,” as it is known--a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region. [More]

Tags: carbon, china, coal, permits, air

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, for the seven days back dated to February 20th, 2008, because I actually filed on the evening of the February 21st, well, I'm Steve Mirsky by the way. If you have been breathlessly waiting for this ’s podcast I apologize, I was out of town at a couple of conferences and this week's episode features some highlights from one of them and that's the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS, which took place last week in the beginning of this current week in Boston. The other conference was inside baseball, was about the future of science journalism, which is going to be good, thankfully. So, this week on the podcast we'll hear from Nobel laureate David Baltimore about HIV research. We also have an interview with the director of the jet propulsion laboratory, Charles Elachi, and in a real coup, we actually managed to get Scientific American editor Mark Fischetti to come on board and make an appearance. First up, David Baltimore, he is the president of the AAAS and professor of biology at Caltech. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the reverse transcriptase. I attended his presidential address to the conference and he spent a few minutes reviewing the effort to create an HIV vaccine. Here's what he said. [More] Dark Side of Solar Cells Brightens It takes power to make power--even with a solar grand plan. From the mining of quartz sand to the coating with ethylene-vinyl acetate, manufacturing a photovoltaic (PV) solar cell requires energy--most often derived from the burning of fossil fuels. But a new analysis finds that even accounting for all the energy and waste involved, PV power would cut air pollution--including the greenhouse gases that cause climate change--by nearly 90 percent if it replaced fossil fuels. [More]

Tags: week, science, conference, solar, american

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, for the seven days back dated to February 20th, 2008, because I actually filed on the evening of the February 21st, well, I'm Steve Mirsky by the way. If you have been breathlessly waiting for this week’s podcast I apologize, I was out of town at a couple of conferences and this week's episode features some highlights from one of them and that's the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS, which took place last week in the beginning of this current week in Boston. The other conference was inside baseball, was about the future of science journalism, which is going to be good, thankfully. So, this week on the podcast we'll hear from Nobel laureate David Baltimore about HIV research. We also have an interview with the director of the jet propulsion laboratory, Charles Elachi, and in a real coup, we actually managed to get Scientific American editor Mark Fischetti to come on board and make an appearance. First up, David Baltimore, he is the president of the AAAS and professor of biology at Caltech. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the reverse transcriptase. I attended his presidential address to the conference and he spent a few minutes reviewing the effort to create an HIV vaccine. Here's what he said. [More] Dark Side of Solar Cells Brightens It takes power to make power--even with a solar grand plan. From the mining of quartz sand to the coating with ethylene-vinyl acetate, manufacturing a photovoltaic (PV) solar cell requires energy--most often derived from the burning of fossil fuels. But a new analysis finds that even accounting for all the energy and waste involved, PV power would cut air pollution--including the greenhouse gases that cause climate change--by nearly 90 percent if it replaced fossil fuels. [More]

Tags: week, science, conference, solar, american

If you tried to dump harmful waste on the property next door, your neighbor would either stop you or require you to pay a fee. But if you dump carbon dioxide into the air, no one charges you a penny because no one, as yet, owns the air. This free ride results in what economists call a market failure. The actual costs of polluting the atmosphere are enormous, but polluters don’t pay them. Instead future generations are stuck with the tab. A carbon tax, or a carbon cap-and-trade system, can fix this market failure, but because American politicians are loath to impose taxes, a cap is far more likely. Under a cap, government sets a limit on total carbon emissions and issues tradable permits up to the limit. Each year the number of permits declines, reducing emissions over time. Permits can be issued to companies that emit carbon dioxide or to those that supply it for burning--oil, coal and natural gas firms. Issuing permits to suppliers is easier to administer because no smokestacks need to be monitored. [More] Clean Cities and Dirty Coal Power--China's Energy Paradox CHONGQING--This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution. The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,” as it is known--a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region. [More]

Tags: carbon, china, coal, permits, air

The U.S. government--and major U.S. banks--seem to have lost their appetite for coal. After spending five years and approximately $50 million on preliminary studies as well as selecting a proposed site in Mattoon, Ill., the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has scuttled plans to build the so-called FutureGen power plant. The facility would have captured the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) that is emitted when coal is burned for electricity generation. Instead, the DOE hopes to help industry add carbon-capture-and-storage capability to advanced coal plants already in the works. "This restructured FutureGen approach is an all-around better investment for Americans," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a statement announcing the change. The DOE is asking Congress for $407 million to research how to burn coal most efficiently, along with $241 million to demonstrate such carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies--at least $900 million less than DOE said it would have cost to complete FutureGen. [More] Smog Can Make People Sick, Even Indoors Smog caused by ground-level ozone isn't just an outdoor air problem. A new study shows that when the irritant's level rises outside, the number of people inside suffering from so-called "sick building syndrome" also increases. (Ozone, an air-polluting oxygen molecule (O3), forms when sunlight strikes motor vehicle tailpipe emissions.) "We found that outdoor air pollution, ozone, is associated with symptoms of lower-respiratory and upper-respiratory stress that occur in buildings to workers," says environmental health scientist Michael Apte of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who analyzed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data gathered on office air quality across the country. "These symptoms are prevalent at fairly high levels throughout the U.S. and are similar in other parts of the world." [More]

Tags: coal, doe, air, million, futuregen

The U.S. government--and major U.S. banks--seem to have lost their appetite for coal. After spending five years and approximately $50 million on preliminary studies as well as selecting a proposed site in Mattoon, Ill., the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has scuttled plans to build the so-called FutureGen power plant. The facility would have captured the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) that is emitted when coal is burned for electricity generation. Instead, the DOE hopes to help industry add carbon-capture-and-storage capability to advanced coal plants already in the works. "This restructured FutureGen approach is an all-around better investment for Americans," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said in a statement announcing the change. The DOE is asking Congress for $407 million to research how to burn coal most efficiently, along with $241 million to demonstrate such carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies--at least $900 million less than DOE said it would have cost to complete FutureGen. [More] Smog Can Make People Sick, Even Indoors Smog caused by ground-level ozone isn't just an outdoor air problem. A new study shows that when the irritant's level rises outside, the number of people inside suffering from so-called "sick building syndrome" also increases. (Ozone, an air-polluting oxygen molecule (O3), forms when sunlight strikes motor vehicle tailpipe emissions.) "We found that outdoor air pollution, ozone, is associated with symptoms of lower-respiratory and upper-respiratory stress that occur in buildings to workers," says environmental health scientist Michael Apte of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who analyzed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data gathered on office air quality across the country. "These symptoms are prevalent at fairly high levels throughout the U.S. and are similar in other parts of the world." [More]

Tags: coal, doe, air, million, futuregen

CHONGQING--This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution. The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,” as it is known--a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region. [More] Can Nuclear Power Compete? On an August afternoon in Washington, D.C., typically miserable for its heat, humidity and stillness, reporters gathered at a downtown hotel not known for its air-conditioning. Stuffed inside a windowless conference room that was being heated still further by the television people’s lights, we waited for Michael J. Wallace, who had been trying, in fits and starts, to unveil nuclear power’s second act. On arrival, Wallace, a meticulous manager not known for ad-libbing, looked out over the sweating reporters and smiled. “It’s days like today that highlight the real need for new, emissions-free, baseload power,” he said. Unless we get started soon, he added, rolling blackouts could become the norm. [More]

Tags: china, power, air, coal, wallace

CHONGQING--This year china surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution. The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,” as it is known--a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region. [More] Can Nuclear Power Compete? On an August afternoon in Washington, D.C., typically miserable for its heat, humidity and stillness, reporters gathered at a downtown hotel not known for its air-conditioning. Stuffed inside a windowless conference room that was being heated still further by the television people’s lights, we waited for Michael J. Wallace, who had been trying, in fits and starts, to unveil nuclear power’s second act. On arrival, Wallace, a meticulous manager not known for ad-libbing, looked out over the sweating reporters and smiled. “It’s days like today that highlight the real need for new, emissions-free, baseload power,” he said. Unless we get started soon, he added, rolling blackouts could become the norm. [More]

Tags: china, power, air, coal, wallace

The ongoing disruption of the earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable. Under midrange projections for economic growth and technological change, the planet’s average surface temperature in 2050 will be about two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than its preindustrial value. The last time the earth was that warm was 130,000 years ago, and sea level was four to six meters higher than today. No one knows how long it will take sea level to “catch up” with such an increase; it could be several centuries, or it could be less. Even with uncertainties, there is reason to believe that tipping points into unmanageable changes will become much more probable for increases larger than two degrees C. To achieve a better-than-even chance of not exceeding that figure, human emissions must start to decline soon, falling to about half of today’s level by 2050 and further thereafter. [More] Deadly by the Dozen: 12 Diseases Climate Change May Worsen Bird flu, cholera, Ebola, plague and tuberculosis are just a few of the diseases likely to spread and get worse as a result of climate change, according to a report released yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). To prevent such ailments from becoming as destructive as the "black death" (which wiped out a third of Europe's population in the 14th century) or the flu pandemic of 1918 (which killed an estimated 20 million to 40 million people worldwide, including between 500,000 and 675,000 people in the U.S.), WCS suggests monitoring wildlife to detect signs of these pathogens before a major outbreak. [More]

Tags: change, climate, degrees, level, million

When David W. Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary in Alberta, gives lectures these days on geoengineering, he likes to point out how old the idea is. People have been talking about deliberately altering climate to counter global warming, he says, for as long as they have been worrying about global warming itself. As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels might cause “marked changes in climate” that “could be deleterious.” Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: “spreading very small reflective particles” over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space--“a wacky geoengineering solution,” Keith says, “that doesn’t even work.” In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe--they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream. [More] Future History: Climate Change Hits the Museum Circuit [Slide Show] One metric ton of coal is roughly human-size, maybe five feet (1.5 meters) tall and a few feet wide. Black as night, this enormous lump contains enough energy to power an average American home for two months--and release 2.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas implicated in climate change. [More]

Tags: climate, geoengineering, scientists, global, warming

The 38 countries that pledged to restrain their emissions of climate change–inducing greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are failing, according to new figures released today. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body charged with overseeing global emission reduction efforts, says that, overall, greenhouse emissions--measured in terms of the most ubiquitous: carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)--dropped by 894 million metric tons between 1990 and 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available). [More] Updating the Science of Global Warming: A Q&A with Marine Biologist Katherine Richardson When the world's governments gather in December 2009 in Copenhagen to negotiate a treaty to restrain global greenhouse gas emissions, the science on which they base their decision could be as much as four years out of date. The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered its synthesis of existing research in February 2007 and it was based on studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals only through 2005. [More]

Tags: emission, greenhouse, global, figures, change

Editor's Note: We are posting this article from our July 1959 issue to offer an historical perspective on some of the issues being discussed at the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, which began December 1 and runs through December 12. The theories that explain worldwide change are almost as varied as the weather. The more familiar ones attribute changes of climate to Olympian forces that range from geological upheavals and dust-belching volcanoes to long-term variations in the radiation of the sun and eccentricities in the orbit of the earth. Only the so-called carbon dioxide theory takes account of the possibility that human activities may have some effect on climate. This theory suggests that in the present century man is unwittingly raising the temperature of the earth by his industrial and agricultural activities. [More] From Bad to Worse: Latest Figures on Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions The 38 countries that pledged to restrain their emissions of climate change–inducing greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are failing, according to new figures released today. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body charged with overseeing global emission reduction efforts, says that, overall, greenhouse emissions--measured in terms of the most ubiquitous: carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)--dropped by 894 million metric tons between 1990 and 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available). [More]

Tags: climate, change, carbon, emission, dioxide

Emissions of a greenhouse gas that has 17,000 times the planet-warming capacity of carbon dioxide are at least four times higher than had been previously estimated. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is used mainly by the semiconductor industry to clean the chambers in which silicon chips are made. The industry had in the past estimated that most of the gas was expended during the cleaning process and only about 2 percent escaped into the air. But the first-ever measurements of nitrogen trifluoride levels in the atmosphere, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters show that emissions could be as high as 16 percent. [More] Warmer Antarctica Shows Climate Changing on Every Continent Humanity's impact on climate has been detected on every continent except Antarctica, or so said the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February 2007. No longer: scientists, comparing decades of records from 17 Antarctic weather stations with computer simulations of Earth's climate, found that human-induced global warming has been heating up the continent that is home to the South Pole, as well. [More]

Tags: climate, gas, industry, continent, show

Emissions of a greenhouse gas that has 17,000 times the planet-warming capacity of carbon dioxide are at least four times higher than had been previously estimated. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is used mainly by the semiconductor industry to clean the chambers in which silicon chips are made. The industry had in the past estimated that most of the gas was expended during the cleaning process and only about 2 percent escaped into the air. But the first-ever measurements of nitrogen trifluoride levels in the atmosphere, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters show that emissions could be as high as 16 percent. [More] Warmer Antarctica Shows Climate Changing on Every Continent Humanity's impact on has been detected on every continent except Antarctica, or so said the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February 2007. No longer: scientists, comparing decades of records from 17 Antarctic weather stations with computer simulations of Earth's climate, found that human-induced global warming has been heating up the continent that is home to the South Pole, as well. [More]

Tags: climate, gas, industry, continent, show

The U.S. Congress has long been a slow and irresolute institution, especially when it comes to science issues. Unfortunately, the Democratic majority that came to power in the 2006 midterm election has so far done little to change that reputation. Nearly a year after the Democrats took over the legislative branch, America continues to escalate its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are slowly roasting the globe. Furthermore, although Congress has proposed funding increases for many scientific agencies and national laboratories, researchers still have no reassurance that Uncle Sam will actually deliver its promised grants and budgets. Here are some highlights of how the 110th Congress has handled science measures over the past year. Energy. Promoting energy efficiency and renewable sources is vital to curbing greenhouse gases, but as of early November Congress’s much anticipated energy bill was stuck in legislative limbo. In June the Senate passed a promising measure that would raise the fuel economy of cars and light trucks from the current average of 26 miles per gallon to 35 mpg by 2020; in August the House approved a bill that would repeal subsidies for the oil and gas industry and require utilities to produce 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources such as wind power. Unfortunately, the House and Senate bills were wildly different, and the usual process for reconciling the measures--negotiations in a House-Senate conference committee--broke down. Claiming that Senate Republicans had blocked efforts to appoint committee members, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California announced in October that Democratic leaders in the House and Senate would hammer out a compromise. In the face of veto threats from President George W. Bush, will the tough efficiency proposals survive? The chances look dim. [More]

Tags: house, congress, senate, energy, bill

When the world's governments gather in December 2009 in Copenhagen to negotiate a treaty to restrain global greenhouse gas emissions, the science on which they base their decision could be as much as four years out of date. The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered its synthesis of existing research in February 2007 and it was based on studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals only through 2005. [More] Life at the Poles: Eight Polar Animals That Face the Promise and Peril of Climate Change Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there's more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth's polar environments host rich webs of plants and animals--and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime. [More]

Tags: polar, animals, climate, change, science

Editor's Note: We are posting this article from our July 1959 issue to offer an historical perspective on some of the issues being discussed at the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, which began December 1 and runs through December 12. The theories that explain worldwide climate change are almost as varied as the weather. The more familiar ones attribute changes of climate to Olympian forces that range from geological upheavals and dust-belching volcanoes to long-term variations in the radiation of the sun and eccentricities in the orbit of the earth. Only the so-called carbon dioxide theory takes account of the possibility that human activities may have some effect on climate. This theory suggests that in the present century man is unwittingly raising the temperature of the earth by his industrial and agricultural activities. [More] From Bad to Worse: Latest Figures on Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions The 38 countries that pledged to restrain their emissions of climate change–inducing greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are failing, according to new figures released today. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body charged with overseeing global emission reduction efforts, says that, overall, greenhouse emissions--measured in terms of the most ubiquitous: carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)--dropped by 894 million metric tons between 1990 and 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available). [More]

Tags: climate, change, carbon, emission, dioxide