Can we start this thread and post all things related to our slowly but surely dying world, such at global warming, growing deserts etc....?

The other half of Ferial's editorial... :) It's definitely problematic, and it's quite alarming that we emit almost the same amount of CO2 as the UK does, even though the UK has an economy four times the size of ours...

Burn baby, burn

Virgin Airlines’s Richard Branson met airline owners in Britain this week to find ways of restricting travel because cheap flights are significantly fuelling global warming. Back home, SAA was launching Mango, a low-priced airline.

This week the UK government released a year-long study by an eminent economist which warns of the catastrophic costs of not trying to combat climate change. The message is clear: spend to fix the problem now or inherit economic consequences at least as dire as those of the Great Depression.

This turns the Bush argument, that the cost of complying with the Kyoto Protocol is too high, on its head. Many in the US believe we are already counting the cost of climate change, shown by the frequency and severity of hurricanes. In South Africa, insurers are settling claims arising from abnormal floods.

The World Wildlife Fund noted this week that South Africa makes a significant contribution to global warming. We emit almost as much carbon dioxide as Britain, which has an economy four times as large. Per capita we emit nearly three times that of China and nine times that of India.

Our government, to its credit, is putting new energy into planning a greener future. Where previously energy efficiency was Eskom’s responsibility, separate agencies have been set up under the Central Energy Fund to promote energy efficiency, including the use of renewables. The problem is that the R600-million earmarked for this purpose remains under Eskom’s control.

The treasury has produced a commendable report that seeks to align environmental and fiscal policy, but Trevor Manuel’s latest three-year planning provides no evidence that this is being implemented. Alec Erwin makes commitments to a nuclear future, with little or no transparency on costs. Consumers pay R600-million to promote energy conservation, but Eskom refuses to hand over the funds to the Central Energy Fund -- despite a ministerial directive.

But there is plenty to spend -- witness the pebble bed modular reactor, which has already received R3-billion in state funding and will get another R6-billion over the next three years towards a R16-billion development facility.

The jury is out on the mini-nukes; we should plough more into renewable energy.

Efforts to tackle global warming through politics are falling so pitifully short of what is needed that ideas dismissed just a few years ago as weird science are now getting a serious hearing.

Abandoned by the United States, the world's biggest single polluter, and with China, the No. 2 polluter, exempt from targeted emissions cuts, the UN's Kyoto Protocol in its present shape will not even dent the greenhouse-gas problem.

Years of denial, bickering and nit-picking by interest groups have so delayed and crimped the political response that schemes to stave off climate disaster which previously were written off as mad or dangerous are being give a closer look.

"They are becoming part of the debate, although the reservations about them remain very deep," says one of the world's most respected climatologists, Jean Jouzel of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Sunshade in space

One novel idea is for a gigantic sunshade in space.

It comes from Roger Angel, a professor at the University of Arizona and one of the world's top leading authority on optics.

His "solar shield" would comprise a spider's web of struts holding six tiltable mirrors that would deflect some of the Sun's rays away from Earth, reducing solar energy reaching our planet by two percent — enough to compensate, at least in part, for the warming effect caused by carbon emissions.

The web, measuring some 2000 kilometres across, would be placed at a permanent vantage point called the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange position, about 1.5 million kilometres from home.

Those who write off Angel as crazy should also tell NASA, whose Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) last month asked him to flesh out the basic proposal into something more detailed.

Angel estimates the cost at roughly $3-trillion, a sum that many would say is ludicrously beyond reach. He retorts that the bill is just one to two percent of the world's gross national product (GNP), which is surely a fair price when compared with the cost of global warming.

In 2001, for instance, the insurance giant Swiss Re, in a report commissioned by the United Nations, estimated that an increase in natural disasters as a result of global warming could cost the world over $300-billion annually by the year 2050.

Cooling the atmosphere

A simpler idea for planetary cooling is supported by Dutch 1995 Nobel chemistry prize laureate Paul Crutzen, famous for his work on the ozone hole.

Crutzen suggests releasing sulphur dioxide (SO2) particles in the upper atmosphere that would reflect sunlight (and thus heat) back into space.

After a few years, the dust would fall to the land or the sea, but while it is being borne around by the stratospheric winds, it would have a cooling effect — a precious respite to enable politicians getting their act together.

A spur for the particle idea was the discovery that after Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, so much volcanic ash was spewed out that over the next couple of years, Earth's surface cooled by up to 0.5 degrees Celsius — a perceptible but not excessive change.

Edouard Bard, a professor at the College de France in Paris, warns though that the Pinatubo phenomenon is complex and poorly understood.

The global average temperature drop after 1991 masked "very significant variations" regionally, with extreme falls in the northwestern Atlantic, in the Middle East and North Africa and paradoxically a prolonged warming in northern Europe, Bard notes.

Such big, quick swings can have a big localised impact on wildlife and the food chain, for instance by encouraging algae proliferation that can choke coral reefs.

Looking to the sea

Similar caution is reserved for scientists who believe that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas, can be sucked up by phytoplankton in the sea, whose growth could be stimulated by "sowing" the ocean with iron particles.

Small pilot tests have already been conducted in the Arctic Ocean, the equatorial Pacific and Northern Pacific, and showed that the plankton flourished with the food.

But of all the components that make up the climate-change model, the oceans, with their complex currents, huge volumes and vast array of life forms, are the least understood.

No-one knows whether this plankton will sink, as hoped, to the ocean bed, so that the CO2 stays there safely for hundreds or thousands of years.

Bard says there could be mechanisms by which the CO2, instead of being locked in the plankton on the seabed, is released back into the atmosphere or into the ocean, making some seas acidic and oxygen-starved.

In this latter scenario, nitrate-loving bacteria would proliferate, releasing nitrous oxide (N2O), "a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2," notes Bard. In other words, it would create a vicious circle, stoking the warming even further.

Talks on the future of the Kyoto Protocol take place in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi from November 6-17.