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Global update: US states bypass Bush on emissions
America’s north-eastern states are on the brink of a declaration of environmental independence, with the introduction of mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions of the kind rejected by the Bush administration.
In the first regional agreement of its kind in the US, nine states are expected to announce a plan to freeze carbon dioxide emissions from big power stations by 2009 and then reduce them by 10 per cent by 2020. The region stretches from New Jersey to Maine and generates roughly the same volume of emissions as Germany.
Pennsylvania and Maryland have signed on as observers to the regional initiative and are considering joining it at a later date. On the other side of the continent, California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico and Arizona are exploring similar agreements, representing a clear break between state governments and Washington over global warming.
The outline of the north-eastern states’ draft agreement was published recently in the New York Times, and its main features were confirmed by Dale Bryk, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defence Council, who has been monitoring progress of the regional initiative. The 2009 freeze and the 10 per cent reduction by 2020 were “a done deal”, Ms Bryk said. “They plan to have a memorandum of understanding by the end of September.
She added: “It’s huge. It’s a drumbeat, and more and more states and regions are heading down this road.”
Betting on a cooler world
Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet $10,000 that the planet will cool over the next decade.
The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan. The pair, based in Irkutsk, at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, believe that global temperatures are driven more by changes in the Sun’s activity than by the emission of greenhouse gases.
They say the Earth warms and cools in response to changes in the number and size of sunspots. Most mainstream scientists dismiss the idea, but as the Sun is expected to enter a less active phase over the next few decades the Russian duo are confident they will see a drop in global temperatures.
Dr Annan, who works on the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer, in Yokohama, said: “There isn’t much money in climate science and I’m still looking for that gold watch at retirement. A pay-off would be a nice top-up to my pension.”
To decide who wins the bet, the scientists have agreed to compare the average global surface temperature recorded by a US climate centre between 1998 and 2003, with temperatures they will record between 2012 and 2017. If the temperature drops Dr Annan will stump up the $10,000 in 2018. If the Earth continues to warm, the money will go the other way.
The bet is the latest in an increasingly popular field of scientific wagers, and comes after a string of sceptics have refused challenges to back their controversial ideas with cash.
Speed of light
Normally light travels at the same speed (300 metres per second), but now researchers have managed to make it slow down, or even speed up, using ordinary equipment at normal temperatures and pressures.
Writing in Applied Physics Letters, Luc Thevenaz and colleagues, from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, explain how they controlled the speed of light in a standard glass optical fibre, using two laser beams.
Scientists have manipulated light waves in special materials at extreme temperatures and pressures before, but this is the first time it has been done under ordinary conditions. For telecommunications and computing this could be a big step forward.
“It will provide scientists with a way to control the timing of signals in optical fibres, preventing the information from colliding,” says Thevenaz.
End of homeopathy?
Homeopathy, favoured medical remedy of the royal family for generations and hugely popular in the UK, has an effect but only in the mind, according to a major study published in a leading medical journal.
The conclusions of the Lancet analysis are a body blow for proponents of homeopathy, which has been around for 250 years and has attained cult-like status among its aficionados.
Swiss scientists compared the results of more than 100 trials of homeopathic medicines with the same number of trials of conventional medicines in a whole range of medical conditions, from respiratory infections to surgery. They found that homeopathy had no more than a placebo effect.
A hard-hitting editorial in the Lancet, entitled “The end of homeopathy”, demands that doctors recognize the absence of real curative powers in homeopathic medicine. Around 42 per cent of GPs in England will refer patients to a homeopath. In Scotland, where homeopathy has taken off to an even greater extent, 86 per cent are said to be in favour of it. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
Google launches new service
Watchers of Google Incorporated will now have something new to chat about — and with. Continuing its rapid expansion into new product categories, the internet search giant has launched an instant messaging program called Google Talk.
The new service followed by just a few days the introduction of Google Sidebar, which pulls news stories, photographs, weather updates, stock quotes and other features onto a user’s computer without opening a web browser.
With all the new services, Google now competes with internet portals such as Yahoo Incorporated, Microsoft Corporation and Time Warner Incorporated’s America Online squarely on their turf, even as those companies encroach onto Google’s with updated search engines.
Google has been playing catch-up with many products, such as e-mail, a personalized home page at Google.com and online maps. The goal is to get consumers to stay longer, rather than simply search for websites and then click away.
Compiling a list of buddies to chat with through instant messaging provides the kind of “stickiness” these firms covet. “Like any big company, they’ve got a brand name, and they’ve got to keep extending it,” said John Tinker, an analyst at Think Equity Partners who had not seen Google Talk. “Because the reality is, there’s not a whole lot of difference between their search (engine) and anyone else’s.”
According to a person who has seen the service, Google plans to let users chat using more than just their keyboards. Like similar programs from competitors, Google Talk also will let computer users with a headset have voice conversations with other computer users with headsets, this person said.
Google faces an uphill battle in persuading people to change instant messaging programs. These services are useful only if friends and family members also use it, and competing services from AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have been available for years. — Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times
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