Carbon Dioxide Emissions by Country: Ranking

Global warming caused by emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other green house gases used to be a controversial topic with some scientists claiming that the world's climate is definitely getting warmer because of emission of carbon dioxide and other green house gases while others says it is a just a natural cycle of warming and cooling of the world's weather. Evidences are piling up to support those of the first opinion with polar ice, glaciers, mountain snow peaks melting (including that of the highest mountain in the world - Mount Everest), climate of countries changing, some say hurricanes getting more frequent and more ferocious, birds and animals migrating further north to warmer climate, etc.

One thing I know is my country is now hotter for I sleep topless and without fan or air conditioning. Anyway, many are hoping governments will do something about it, and for that it is good to know which country are emitting more carbon dioxide, the major green house gas. So here is an excel file ranking countries by its carbon emission. The figures are taken from Wikipedia - List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions by carbon dioxide emissions. You can scroll down the page to view the countries lower down the list by using the thin vertial scroll bar at the right:

Google search engine goes environmentally friendly?

My daughter forwarded this email to me, and I think more people should know about it. It referred to an article by Mark Ontkush. If you want to find the original article, you can always type or copy-paste "Mark Ontkush" and see if you can find the article. No link was given in the forward, but this is what the message says:

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When your screen is white - an empty word page, or the Google page, your computer consumes 74 watts, and when it is black it consumes only 59 watts. Mark Ontkush wrote an article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved. In a response to this article Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle, with the exact same functions as the white version, but with a lower energy consumption, check it out: Blackle. Use this site as your search engine and do your bit for the planet.

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I just paid that new (to me) search engine a visit and I saw "109,496.714 Watt hours saved" below the search box. I don't know if that is displayed real time or updated. I will visit the new search engine again and check.

OK, noticed a link About Blackle at the bottom which tells what Blacle is all about and found the article that gave Google? the inspiration to set up the new search engine (I put a ? because other than other than that Google trademarked icon, , I couldn't' see any connection to Google because the word "google" is not in the URL. I will try to contact Google and see if I can get confirmation that Blackle is really the new official environmentally friendly Google search engine.

The article referred to above is Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year

Update 24 July 2007: It's not a Google product, (note the copyright to Heap Media). Someone suggested that it is a Google Custom Search Engine. There are a lot of comments in the post that inspired Blackle. If I have time, I will highlight the pertinent ones. In the meantime, if you want to find out more about the impact of Blackle to the environment, do surf over to that article and read the comments. There is a long list of them.

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Environmentally friendly Internet

I am broke (cash), but I have assets. In any case, will writing is not that complicated a thing. I need to make a will. I decided to draft it myself. It is done. Only thing is, for added safety net, I was hoping for someone competent to vet it. I have a niece who is a practicing lawyer. I asked his father where she stays and was disappointed to learn that she stay 15km away from my home. But still, it will involve using a car, burning up depleting fossil fuel, contributing to the atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. In any case, I am retired and just don't like to leave the house.

Then a bulb lighted up in my little brain. Why not do it through the environmentally friendly Internet. I don't need to travel. I don't need to print a hard copy and used up paper. I just need to send the draft as an email attachment.

I did a search in me email Inbox and found her email address. I asked if she is willing to vet it. It will probably only takes a couple of minutes. She answered OK if it is a simple will. If it is anything complicated, she will ask me to get a professional to do it. Fair to me. I sent the email with the draft as an attachment and now waiting for her response.

Thank you environmentally friendly Internet.

BTW the link "global warming" leads to an interesting site BlurtIt where you can ask any question and get an answer. I am not only interested in answering questions, but also hope to use the site to increase environmental awareness which to us and our future generation is crucial. I want to find out if I answer a question related to the environment and put a link to a site relevant to the answer, I want to know if the link in the answer is clickable. Go to Can I put a clickable link in an answer in BlurtIt?. There is a link in the answer and it IS clickable, which in my opinion makes the site much more useful because sometimes a question need more than a couple of sentences to properly answer a question. If I am not wrong, the maximum number of word you can put in the answer is 100. Further, I don't think you can put images, especially screenshots in the answer which often helps greatly in making the answer much clearer. By answering questions and putting clickable links to environmental sites, one can help increase environmental awarenes

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Pill to help reduce green house gas release

Nearly everyone must have heard about green house gases (carbon dioxide, methane, etc.) and increase in concentration of green house gases lead to global warming. Many has tagged global warming as the biggest environmental challenge of the century.

One of the green house gases - methane, is released when cow feeding on grass burbs. This contribute 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists have estimated that the methane gas in the atmosphere has increased 600% over the past 50 years.

German scientist has recently announced the invention of a pill to reduce burping by cows which release methane. The pill, a fist sized tablet contain microbiotic substances which slowly dissolve in the cow's stomach over several months and uses the methane to produce glucose instead of burping it out. This would also helps the cow in producing more milk.

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Environmentally Friendly Sleeping

I live in a tropical country where the temperature many people find hot. I am also retired, so spend practically most of the time in the house, mainly on the computer. Many people in my country switch on fans, air conditioners, etc. to keep cool. Me, I just go around shirtless (but not bottomless), and I don't need a fan. Many people also sleep with the air conditioner on, and not only that, they have the temperature turned down so low they sleep covered with a blanket. I find it a sheer waste, waste extra electricity and contribute to CO2 emission and global warming. I have an air-conditioner in my bedroom. It came with the house I bought. For years, I have never used it. And sleeping? Me, I just sleep topless and I also don't need a fan. Do I qualify to use the nickname Enviroman on the Web?

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Global warming: Even Inuit (Eskimo) have to install air conditioners

Here are signs that global warming is real. Inuit people are better known for building igloos during hunts on the polar ice. With global warming speeding up, Inuit in the village of Kuujjuaq in Quebec, Canada, are installing 10 air conditioners for about 25 office workers. Temperatures in Kuujjuaq have hit 31 degree Celsius (88 degree Fahrenheit) in late July.

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No more white Christmas?

Noah Diffenbaugh, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University says: "Summer is likely to be more severely hot everywhere in the U.S. In the Southwest, if you imagine the hottest two and a half weeks of the year, you're looking at that becoming three months long. Phoenix [Arizona] will get three months of what is now the hottest two weeks of the year. Winter weather could be affected as well. You're looking at the coldest couple of weeks of the year not existing anymore in lot of places. Certainly winter as we know it likely will disappear in the Northeast."

These are his conclusions as a results of a study together with researchers at Purdue and the Abdus Salarn International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. The study was conducted with computer simulations using climate data and projections of greenhouse gas levels.

Higher temperatures has more dangerous consequences than just missing white Christmas. It can lead to unpredictable weather, drought in some places, floods in others, sea level will rise, some low lying islands will disappear from the surface of the earth, disease-carrying mosquitos will expand their range, some species will be pushed to extinction. According to many experts, some of these effects has already begun.

Enviroman says: "time to take climatic changes and global warming seriously."

What is Enviroman doing about it? For one, he is taking public transport whenever possible. See Enviroman on Transport.

What is Simon Oosterman doing about it? He and his gang went many steps further. They cycled NAKED!. See World Naked Bike Ride

No Winter by 2105? New Study Offers Grim Forecast for U.S.

Enviroman asks, "have the frequency and ferocity of hurricanes and typhoons increased due to global warming?"

Enviroman asks, "have the frequency and ferocity of hurricanes and typhoons increased due to global warming?"

It appear to be so. To spawn a hurricane, you only need an ocean temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit; a cool, wet atmosphere above and a warm, wet one near the surface; and a preexisting weather disturbance with a bit of spin to it far enough from the equator (at least 300 miles) so that the rotation of the Earth amplifies the rotation of the storm. The more intense the storm becomes, the more the temperature of its core climbs, accelerating the spin, exacerbating the storm, and leading to the meteorological violence we call a hurricane. And violent it can be: The heat released in an average hurricane can equal the electricity produced by the U.S. in a single year. Time


Now, scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, have analysed global tropical cyclone statistics since satellite records began. They found that there has been a sharp rise in the number of category 4 and 5 tropical cyclones - the most intense hurricanes that cause most of the damage on landfall - over this time period. (BBCNews.co.uk)

Between 1975 and 1989, there were 171 severe hurricanes but the number rose to 269 between 1990 and 2004. The author of the study, Dr Peter Webster, told the BBC News website: "What I think we can say is that the increase in intensity is probably accounted for by the increase in sea surface temperature and I think probably the sea surface temperature increase is a manifestation of global warming."

There were a lot of hurricanes last year. Japan had a record 10. We are getting hurrincane in the Atlantic where hurricane is not supposed to occur. From 1995 to 1999, a record 33 hurricanes struck the Atlantic basin, and that doesn’t include 1992’s horrific Hurricane Andrew, which clawed its way across south Florida in 1992, causing $27 billion dollars worth of damage. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that hurricane wind speeds have increased about 50% in the past 50 years. Hurricanes spawn tornadoes and there was an all-time record of 1,717 tornadoes in the United States last year.

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