Climate Watch

by Douglas Hunter

In the summer of 2007, U.S. farmers were expected to plant the largest corn crop since 1944 to cash in on the boom in ethanol as an alternative fuel for use in combatting global warming. Meanwhile, an unpublished report by Environment Canada scientists found no statistical difference between tailpipe emissions of vehicles burning regular unleaded gasoline and fuel blended with 10 percent ethanol, and the government of Uganda backed down from turning over about one-third of the Mabira Forest Reserve, some 7,000 hectares in all, to an Asian sugar-cane company. Western demands for ethanol have been blamed for large-scale eradication of rain forests throughout the world for cane production.

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Professors at the University of Minnesota Duluth found that the summer surface temperatures of Lake Superior have increased by about 4.5°F since 1979, even though the temperature of the local environment has risen by only 2.7°F in the same period. An article by an English academic, published in Science, reported that the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica had already become saturated with atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in the 1980s. A team from the BBC joined scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Ottawa in making the first research visit to the massive Ayles Ice Island, which broke away from the northern coast of Ellesmere Island in 2005 in an alarming episode of ice cover loss in the Canadian Arctic.

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The Ontario government approved a 40-megawatt “solar farm” for Sarnia. It will surpass in size the largest existing solar power plant in the world, which is in Germany. An innovative loan scheme led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has allowed 100,000 homes in rural India to convert from kerosene to solar power.

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The U.S. Supreme Court handed the Bush administration a stunning rebuke in ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the authority to regulate vehicle CO2 emissions. Twelve states and other interested parties had sued the EPA, which under White House direction had insisted that the Clean Air Act did not require the agency to treat CO2 and other heat-trapping gases as “pollutants.”