Environmental Study: Recent Developments

Ke Ping (Ed.)

非洲谚语.. 2

The Happy Planet Index: An index of human well-being and environmental impact (October, 2007) 2

Traffic pollution can stunt lung development (January, 2007) 2

Alaska to get British-style temperatures (January, 2007) 3

Scientists say millions could flee rising seas (November, 2006) 4

Greenland ice sheet shrinking fast: NASA (October, 2006) 5

Power execs foresee carbon emission caps (October, 2006) 6

非洲谚语

地球不是成千成万的祖先为我们存留下来的资源，而是千秋万世的子孙托付我们让我们好自保存的财富。

（转引自杜维明“谈孟子的人文精神”.《南京大学报》2006年10月30日第三版）

The Happy Planet Index: An index of human well-being and environmental impact (October, 2007)

nef [New Economics Foundation]’s new global measure of progress, the ‘Happy Planet Index’, reveals for the first time that happiness doesn’t have to cost the Earth. It shows that people can live long, happy lives without using more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources. nef’s report, ‘The Happy Planet Index: An index of human well-being and environmental impact’, moves beyond crude ratings of nations according to national income, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to produce a more accurate picture of the progress of nations based on the amount of the Earth’s resources they use, and the length and happiness of people’s lives. The Happy Planet Index (HPI) strips the view of the economy back to its absolute basics: what we put in (resources), and what comes out (human lives of different length and happiness). The resulting Index of the 178 nations for which data is available, reveals that the world as a whole has a long way to go. In terms of delivering long and meaningful lives within the Earth’s environmental limits — all nations could do better. No country achieves an overall ‘high’ score on the Index, and no country does well on all three indicators.

(New Economics Foundation Publications. Retrieved October 7, 2007, from nef’s website: http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_publicationdetail.aspx?pid=225)

Traffic pollution can stunt lung development (January, 2007)

LONDON (Reuters) - Traffic pollution can prevent the lungs of children who live near busy roads from developing properly, making them more likely to suffer respiratory and heart problems later in life, U.S. researchers said on Friday. They found that children who had lived within 500 yards (500 meters) of a highway from the age of 10, had significantly less lung function by the time they reached 18 than youngsters exposed to less traffic pollution.

“Someone suffering a pollution-related deficit in lung function as a child will probably have less than healthy lungs all of his or her life,” said James Gauderman, of the University of Southern California. The lead author of the study, published online by The Lancet medical journal, said reduced lung function in later life was known to be a risk factor for respiratory and cardiovascular disease.

The researchers studied the effects of traffic pollution on 3,600 children living in southern California over an eight-year period.

(Reuters Science News [excerpt]. Jan 26, 2007. Retrieved Jan 26, 2007, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070126/sc_nm/lung_pollution_dc_3)

Alaska to get British-style temperatures (January, 2007)

LONDON (Reuters) - Parts of the world could heat up by over 10 degrees Celsius (18 Fahrenheit) this century with big areas becoming uninhabitable, according to a climate prediction experiment.

“We are very rapidly heading back toward the greenhouse world of the dinosaurs,” Bob Spicer, one of the scientists who mounted the joint BBC/Oxford University study, said on Friday. “Back then northern Alaska had mean annual temperatures of about the same level as we have in London — about 10 degrees (C).”

Most scientists agree average world temperatures will rise 2 to 6 degrees C this century, mainly because of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport, putting millions of lives at risk from flood and famine. A draft report by 2,500 scientists of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sees world temperatures rising 2.0-4.5 C (3.6-8.1 F) by 2100 unless greenhouse gas emissions from factories, cars and power plants are cut radically, informed sources told Reuters on Friday.

The British experiment used computer projections to plot the global climate from 1920 to 2080 — long enough for the results to be statistically significant. Initial results are on the www.bbc.co.uk/climatechange website. Projections for Britain will be released on Sunday and full results will be published later in science journal Nature.

Colored maps of the world results seen by Reuters show a splash of red, meaning rises of at least 10 C, across the whole Arctic region by 2050. By the 2070s this red stain has spread south into northern Siberia and Alaska. “While other places will become uninhabitable, these places will become more habitable,” Spicer said.

The IPCC’s report due out next month will include input from the Oxford team. The experiment’s details for Britain show average temperatures up 1.2 C from 1970s levels by the 2020s rising to 2.5 degrees by the 2050s and four degrees by the 2070s. “In the UK alone, by 2020 we will see the same sort of change that we have seen since the 1970s. The acceleration is massive,” Spicer said.

The European Union has said that even a 2 C rise would tip the world into “dangerous” climate change.

(Based on Jeremy Lovell [2007]. Reuters Science News. Jan 19, 2007. Retrieved Jan 20, 2007, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070119/sc_nm/climate_warming_britain_dc_2)

Scientists say millions could flee rising seas (November, 2006)

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Nations must make plans to help tens of millions of “sea level refugees” if climate change continues to ravage the world’s oceans, German researchers said on Thursday. Waters are rising and warming, increasing the destructive power of storms, they said, and seas are becoming more acidic, threatening to throw entire food chains into chaos.

“In the long run, sea level rises are going to be the most severe impact of global warming on human society,” said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, presenting a report by German scientists at a major United Nations climate change meeting.

Warming could melt ice sheets and raise water levels, and the report said nations should already be considering making a “managed retreat” from the most endangered areas, including low-lying island states, parts of Bangladesh or even the U.S. state of Florida.

A report by international scientists who advise the U.N. has predicted a sea level rise of up to 88 cm between 1990 and 2100.

The situation was worsened, the German team said on Thursday, by the increasing frequency of extreme storms whipped up by warming sea surface temperatures — meaning many would flee coastal areas hit by hurricanes.

Many of the world’s biggest cities, from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, are by the coast. Some rich nations might be able to build ever higher dikes, such as in the Netherlands, but poor nations were destined to be swamped.

The low-lying Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has already agreed a deal for New Zealand to take about half its 10,000 people to work in agriculture if it becomes swamped by rising sea levels.

HURRICANE ENERGY

Rahmstorf said their data did not conclusively prove warmer seas created more storms, but that there was a clear link between rising temperatures and hurricanes’ power. “Since 1980 we’ve seen a strong rise up to unprecedented levels of hurricane energy now in the Atlantic,” he said.

Some 189 nations are meeting in Kenya to explore options for a global deal to combat climate change, with most focusing on cutting the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the air by industry and modern lifestyles.

The report’s authors, the German Advisory Council on Global Change, said about a third of that CO2 was being absorbed by the world’s oceans, making them more acidic.

If not checked, it said, that would have profound effects on marine organisms — hindering everything from tiny shrimps to lobsters from forming their calcite shells — with disastrous results for ocean food chains, and on human communities depending on sea life to survive.

Coral reefs that attract fish and protect coasts from storms and erosion are also threatened by acidity, and CO2 emissions meant they could all be dead by 2065, Rahmstorf said.

(Based on Daniel Wallis [2006]. Scientists say millions could flee rising seas. Reuters Science News. Nov 9, 2006. Retrieved November 10, 2006, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061109/sc_nm/environment_climate_oceans_dc_1)

Greenland ice sheet shrinking fast: NASA (October, 2006)

Greenland’s low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice from excess melting and icebergs and its high-elevation interior gained 54 gigatons (14 cubic miles) from excess snowfall each year between 2003 and 2005, the scientists said in a statement.

This is a change from the 1990s, when ice gains approximately equaled losses, said Scott Luthcke of NASA’s Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory outside Washington. “That situation has now changed significantly, with an annual net loss of ice equal to nearly six years of average water flow from the Colorado River,” Luthcke said.

Luthcke and his team reported their findings in Science Express, the advance edition of the journal Science.

The ice mass loss in this study is less than half that reported in other recent research, NASA said in a statement, but it still shows that Greenland is losing 20 percent more mass than it gets in new snowfall each year.

The Greenland ice sheet is considered an early indicator of the consequences of global warming, so even a slower ice melt there raises concerns.

“This is a very large change in a very short time,” said Jay Zwally, a co-author of the study. “In the 1990s, the ice sheet was growing inland and shrinking significantly at the edges, which is what climate models predicted as a result of global warming. “Now the processes of mass loss are clearly beginning to dominate the inland growth, and we are only in the early stages of the climate warming predicted for this century,” Zwally said.

(Based on “Greenland ice sheet shrinking fast: NASA”. Reuters Science News. October 21, 2006. Retrieved October 22, 2006, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061021/ap_on_he_me/herbal_study_2)

Power execs foresee carbon emission caps (October, 2006)

The U.S. power industry accounts for almost 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Half the country’s electricity comes from burning coal — by far the largest industrial source of carbon dioxide — and the most promising technology for capturing these emissions and sequestering them underground is still in the experimental phase.

U.S. electricity demand is expected to rise by about 1.5 percent a year, resulting in a 50 percent increase from current levels by 2030. Factor in the anticipated industrialization of China, India and other developing nations, and the global rate of growth for electricity demand is even higher.

The Electric Power Research Institute, the industry’s main trade association, forecasts that, with today’s technology, global carbon dioxide emissions will more than double by 2050 to 80 billion metric tons a year. The U.S. already accounts for more than 7 billion tons a year.

Increasing energy efficiency standards and deploying “improved versions” of today’s power plants would substantially slow the rate of growth, according to EPRI, a non-profit that provides scientific and technical research on electricity. But in order to actually reduce annual global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, EPRI estimates that nearly half of the world’s electricity would need to come from carbon-free fuels, such as nuclear, wind and solar. Today, carbon-free fuels account for a third of global power generation.

This is one reason why some U.S. power executives vow to fight carbon limits unless the constraints are carried out worldwide. “The issue is global warming, not U.S. warming,” said Mike Morris, the chief executive of American Electric Power of Columbus, Ohio, the largest coal-burning utility in the country. Unless China, India and other developing nations also are forced to adopt costly alternatives to traditional fossil fuels, U.S. manufacturers — a major customer for AEP — will be at an unfair competitive disadvantage, Morris said.

But Morris has a pragmatic side as well, which is why AEP is part of a small group of companies that has voluntarily agreed to cap their carbon emissions in the United States as part of an experimental market that is based in Chicago.

Indeed, there is enough momentum at the state level that a critical mass of pragmatists say it would be foolish to ignore the writing on the wall in terms of eventual federal legislation.

• In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last month signed legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from utilities, refineries and manufacturing plants to 1990 levels by 2020.

• In the Northeast, a regional “cap and trade” system of buying and selling emissions allowances is being developed to cut greenhouse gases from Maine to Delaware.

• And more than 20 states require utilities to buy a share of their electricity from renewables such as wind, solar and geothermal energy.

It is against this backdrop of legislative activity at the state level — and with help from federal tax breaks included in last year’s energy bill — that some utilities are tweaking their long-term strategies.

David Crane, the head of Princeton, N.J.-based NRG Energy, said at a recent conference that the industry’s long-standing attitude of “see no carbon, hear no carbon, speak no carbon” is increasingly out of touch with mainstream American values.

Crane, who oversaw NRG’s July acquisition of wind-farm developer Padoma Wind Power, predicted that “companies and industries which deny the issue will be marginalized.”

The growing long-term appeal of carbon-free power in the U.S. is exemplified by the phenomenal growth of wind power, which has quadrupled since 2000 to more than 10,000 megawatts nationwide. That said, wind still represents less than 1 percent of all U.S. power capacity.

Perhaps more telling is the resurgence of interest in the U.S. for nuclear power, whose image was battered by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and bruised by the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Concerns about nuclear waste also run high.

But sensing that public resistance to nuclear will wane as concerns about global warming rise, more than a dozen companies, including Duke, NRG, Entergy Corp. and Exelon Corp., have notified the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they plan to apply for licenses to build new reactors.

Notifications began pouring in after Congress passed an energy bill last summer that included tax credits and other perks to encourage nuclear power, which is also seen as a way to become less reliant on high and volatile natural-gas prices.

If all goes smoothly, the first new reactor in the U.S. since the mid-1970s could be completed within ten years, analysts and industry officials said.

While nuclear presents a significant opportunity in the fight against carbon emissions, the country’s unbridled dependence on traditional coal is a major obstacle. More than 150 new coal plants have been proposed in the U.S., which has the world’s largest coal reserves. And while there is much optimism about the long-term potential for “clean coal” technology, it will only be used in about 10 percent of the plants currently on the drawing board.

Even these so-called coal gasification plants will not solve global warming overnight. While they are far more efficient than older coal plants, the real promise rests in their compatibility with emissions-capture equipment. Unfortunately, “a laundry list of technical challenges” could take a decade or more to resolve, according to Revis James, director of EPRI’s technology assessment division.

(Based on Brad Foss. (2006). “Power execs foresee carbon emission caps”. AP Business News. October 22, 2006. Retrieved October 22, 2006, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061022/ap_on_bi_ge/global_warming_business_power_5)