China releases 28 percent of global emissions while South Africa accounts for 10 percent.

Atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gas have set another new peak in a sign of the industrial rise of Asian economies led by China, a senior scientist said.
“The levels already in January are higher than last year,“ said Kim Holmen, research director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, during a visit to the Troll scientific research station in Antarctica by Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, Enn.com reported.
Holmen said measurements at a Norwegian station high in the Arctic showed levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, were around 394 parts per million, up about 1.5 parts per million from the previous records early in 2008.
The levels have risen by about a third since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, in tandem with more use of fossil fuels in power plants and factories, and defying recent international efforts to cut back.
The carbon levels usually peak just before the arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere, where most of the world’s industries, land masses and plants are found.
Levels then dip because plants soak up carbon dioxide as they grow.
Holmen said that the 2008 levels might still rise fractionally higher in coming weeks.
He said growing economies in Asia such as China and India were a reason for the rise in emissions, in line with a linked fall of industrial efficiency in the past two years or so--more carbon is being emitted per dollar of economic output in a reverse of a long improving trend.
“The affluent world wants to buy cheap stuff and we buy it...from the inefficient old-fashioned technology that we have got rid of,“ he said. He added that there were also signs the oceans had become less efficient at soaking up carbon dioxide.
The UN Climate Panel, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, says that world emissions of greenhouse gases will have to peak by 2015 to avert the worst effects of global warming ranging from more droughts and floods to rising sea levels.
It says that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher than for the past 650,000 years and says that it is more than 90 percent probable that humans are to blame for a related global
warming.
Separately, Norwegian researchers said there were new signs that polluting mercury was being blown to the Antarctic even though the icy continent is far from most industrial centers. Mercury has long been a pollutant in the Arctic.
“A preliminary analysis indicates a mercury level approximately 40 percent lower than in the Arctic,“ Chris Lunder of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research told Stoltenberg during his trip.
“This is a rather high number considering the fact that only a quarter of the emissions occur in the southern hemisphere,“ he said.
China releases 28 percent of global emissions while South Africa, the nearest nation to Troll, which is about 250 km inland in Antarctica, accounts for 10 percent, he said.
“The latter might be a direct and major contributor to the mercury pollution in Antarctica,“ he added.

With an increasing population, the earnest debate over the merit of biofuels and wind farms misses the point--it is the technologies we fear that will be our salvation
If there was ever an example of humankind being unable to bear too much reality, it is the current debate on climate change. No reasonable person any longer doubts that the world is heating up or that this change has been triggered by human activity. Aside from a dwindling band that rejects the clear findings of science, everyone accepts that we face an unprecedented challenge. At the same time, there is a pervasive belief that this is a crisis that can be solved by feel-good gestures such as eating organic foods and refusing to fly or installing a wind turbine on the roof, Guardian.co.uk reported.
When it comes to deciding what should be done, most people, including the majority of environmentalists, shrink from the discomfort that goes with realistic thinking. George W. Bush seems to have been persuaded that climate science is not a left-wing conspiracy to destroy the American economy. Along with the rest of our political leaders, however, he continues to insist there are no limits to growth. As long as we adopt new technologies that are supposedly environment-friendly, such as biofuels, economic expansion can go on as before.
At the other end of the spectrum, greens put their faith in sustainable growth and renewable energy. The root of the environmental crisis, they say--and here they agree with Bush--is our addiction to fossil fuels. If only we switch to wind, wave and solar power, all will be well.
In political terms, Bush and the greens could not be further apart, but they are as one in resisting the most fundamental fact about the environmental crisis, which is that it cannot be resolved without a major reduction in our impact on the Earth. This means curbing the production of greenhouse gases, but here fashionable policies can be self-defeating. The shift to biofuels, led by Bush but which is also underway in other parts of the world involves further destruction of rainforest, a key natural regulator of the climate. Reducing emissions while destroying the planet’s natural mechanisms for soaking them up is not a solution. It is a recipe for disaster.
Yet standard green prescriptions are not much better. Many renewables are not as efficient or as eco-friendly as they are made out to be. Unsightly and inefficient wind farms will not enable us to give up fossil fuels, while large-scale hydroelectric power has major environmental costs.
Moving over to organic methods of food production can have significant benefits in terms of animal welfare and reducing fuel costs, but it does nothing to stop the devastation of wilderness that goes with expanding farming to feed a swelling human population.
So conventional green nostrums are not all that different from Bush’s business-as-usual policies. In each case, the end-result can only be a planet gutted of biodiversity, with humanity exposed to an increasingly hostile environment.
To some extent, technology may be able to replace the biosphere that has been destroyed, but, like an obese patient hooked up to an artificial life-support system, we will be living on borrowed time. One day, the machine will stop.
The uncomfortable fact, which is ignored or denied by both ends of the environmental debate, is that an energy-intensive lifestyle of the kind enjoyed in the rich parts of the world cannot be extended to a human population of nine or 10 billion, the level forecast in UN studies for the middle of this century. In terms of resources, human numbers are already unsustainable. Global warming is the flipside of worldwide industrialization, a side-effect of the dash for growth, and the reserves of oil and natural gas on which industry depends are peaking at just the point when demand for them is rising fast.
Contrary to the greens, there is not the remotest prospect that the world will renounce the use of fossil fuels. Ask any competent energy economist and you will discover that no expansion of renewables can satisfy the demand for energy that is being generated in China and India. Anyway, does anyone really expect the countries getting rich from hydrocarbons to give them up? As long as there is enough demand, these countries will continue extracting fossil fuels.
The only way forward is to curb the need for fossil fuels, while at the same time, since there is no way of giving them up altogether, making them cleaner.
John Gray

Oil rig in UAE

If you filled your tank with gasoline today, or warmed your home with natural gas, there’s a decent chance you sent some money to Abu Dhabi. The capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is blessed with fossil fuels, including the fourth-biggest reserves of oil in the world.
Selling that petroleum at record prices has helped Abu Dhabi achieve the highest per-capita GDP in the world--wealth that’s visible in every luxury hotel rising from the desert or spotless Mercedes prowling the streets. All those fossil fuels also mean that Abu Dhabi citizens have among the biggest carbon footprints in the world, and the emirate’s exports are a big, if indirect, contribution to global climate change, Time.com reported.
So it might come as a surprise to learn that Abu Dhabi hosted the world’s first Future Energy Summit, a three-day gathering of more than 4,000 entrepreneurs, analysts and officials from the alternative energy world, including heavyweights like green designer William McDonough and Icelandic President Olafur Grimsson. (Also present was Prince Charles, who gave a speech via hologram.)
But if the idea of an Arab oil power like Abu Dhabi supporting fossil fuel alternatives sounds a bit like a heroin dealer trying to sell methadone, think again. Virtually alone among its Persian Gulf neighbors, Abu Dhabi has embarked on a serious program in alternative energy research, backed with oil money. In 2006 it launched the Masdar Initiative (the name means “source“ in Arabic), a multi-pronged scheme that includes a collaborative research institute with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, support for solar and other kinds of green power within the city itself and a clean energy investment fund worth $250 million. The idea behind Masdar--which organized the Future Energy Summit--is a radical one: prepare Abu Dhabi and the UAE to move beyond fossil fuels.
“The UAE wants to be more than just an oil-producing country,“ says Marc Stuart, the co-founder of the carbon-trading firm EcoSecurities.
That will take money, but thanks to record oil prices, money is one thing Abu Dhabi does not lack. At the summit’s opening conference, Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed Al Nahayan announced that the government would channel an additional $15 billion to the Masdar Initiative. Although the money comes with no time frame, and officials wouldn’t say exactly where the funding will go, Masdar also announced that it would join Rio Tinto and British Petroleum to build the world’s first hydrogen power plant, a 500-megawatt operation that would cost at least $2 billion.
These are bold plans--especially for a city that had little green experience until recently--but for Abu Dhabi, investing in alternative power is a way to remain a world energy center in the event that concerns over climate change cut into the demand for fossil fuels. “We have a long tradition as a global energy leader and we have the financial resources to develop new fields of energy,“ said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Masdar’s CEO.
Even more ambitious is Masdar’s plan to build a completely new city in the desert that will produce no carbon and no net waste, chiefly powered by solar energy. Designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster, a veteran in sustainability, Masdar City will eventually house 50,000 residents and more than 1,000 businesses, most of them in alternative power and sustainability. Groundbreaking is set for Feb. 9. Today the space that will be Masdar City, near the international airport, is still empty sand--save for 25 different solar panels being run in an 18-month experiment to see which kind of photovoltaic technology works best in Abu Dhabi’s punishing environment. (Extreme heat and dust--common in the desert--can reduce the efficiency of many solar panels.)
For Persian Gulf nations like the UAE, blessed with no shortage of sunlight, solar power could potentially be the oil of the future.
Still, standing by Sameer’s solar panels, Masdar City remains an imaginary place. For all the ambitious announcements and bold pledges made at the Future Energy Summit, too much is yet to come, while the climate crisis bears down on us with greater urgency every day. Walking through the summit’s exhibition hall, where companies from Spain to the US to Japan hawk wind turbines and eco-cars and thin-film solar, a technologically-driven optimism battles with a fear that all humankind’s best ideas, on display here, aren’t moving fast enough to save us.
As the summit’s hosts were only too eager to emphasize, when they weren’t announcing a new hydrogen plant, almost every projection of energy use over the next several decades says that fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere. Abu Dhabi will develop hundreds of megawatts of clean solar power, but it will export far more polluting power in oil--because the world will need it and there is nothing else feasible to replace it.