Saving Earth

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Tuesday signed a law requiring that Brazil cut greenhouse gas emissions by 39 percent by 2020, meeting a commitment made at the Copenhagen climate change summit.
The new law, however, is subject to several decrees setting out responsibilities and regulations for the farming, industrial, energy and environmental sectors.
Lula [...]

Copenhagen: UN climate talks avoided a total collapse on Saturday by skirting bitter opposition from several nations to a deal championed by the US President Barack Obama and five emerging economies including China.“Finally we sealed a deal,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “The ‘Copenhagen Accord’ may not be everything everyone had hoped for, but this [...]

A typical search through the online giant’s website is thought to generate about 7g of carbon dioxide. Boiling a kettle produces about 15g.

The emissions are caused both by the electricity required to power a user’s computer and send their request to servers around the world.

The discovery comes amid increasing warnings about the little-known environmental impact of computer and internet use.

According to Gartner, an American research firm, IT now causes about two per cent of global CO2 emissions and its carbon footprint exceeded that of the world’s aviation industry for the first time in 2007.

Dr Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard University who is leading research into the subject, has estimated that browsing a basic website generates about 0.02g of CO2 for every second it is viewed.

Websites with complex video can be responsible for up to 0.2 g per second, he believes.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Google on Thursday unveiled a tool that lets scientists and defenders of the environment use the Internet to keep an eye on what is left of the Earth’s forests.
“We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world’s rapidly-disappearing forests,” Rebecca Moore and Amy Luers of the US Internet [...]

The Copenhagen climate change summit kicks off today in what will be a two-week marathon set of negotiations involving 15,000 delegates from 192 nations. The run-up to the talks saw a series of announcements by several of the world’s largest polluters pledging all sorts of commitments to reducing carbon emissions, but it has been China [...]

DURING crunch talks in Copenhagen next week, Mexico will propose to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 so long as it receives international aid, officials have said.
The second-largest economy in Latin America after Brazil also aims to reduce emissions from the heat-trapping gases by six to seven per cent [...]

A rise of at least two meters in the world’s sea levels is now almost unstoppable, experts told a climate conference at Oxford University on Tuesday.
“The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at Germany’s [...]

No doubt human population growth is a major contributor to global warming, given that humans use fossil fuels to power their increasingly mechanized lifestyles. More people means more demand for oil, gas, coal and other fuels mined or drilled from below the Earth’s surface that, when burned, spew enough carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere [...]

In India, awareness in people at the grass root level and the higher echelons about the importance of the environment is almost negligible. With rising poverty, a booming population explosion, internal and external terror problems, health issues and unemployment taking priority; no political party actually finds environmental issues an adequate plan to gain votes. Countries [...]

It took all of one year for the member countries of the Framework Convention on Climate Change to decide that the Convention had to be augmented by an agreement with stricter demands for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The Convention took effect in 1994, and by 1995 governments had begun negotiations on a protocol — an international [...]