China 'now top carbon polluter'

The new research suggests China's emissions were underestimated

China has already overtaken the US as the world's "biggest polluter", a report to be published next month says.

The research suggests the country's greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007.

The University of California team will report their work in the Journal of Environment Economics and Management.

They warn that unchecked future growth will dwarf any emissions cuts made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol.

The team admit there is some uncertainty over the date when China may have become the biggest emitter of CO2, as their analysis is based on 2004 data.

Until now it has been generally believed that the US remains "Polluter Number One".

Next month's University of California report warns that unless China radically changes its energy policies, its increases in greenhouse gases will be several times larger than the cuts in emissions being made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol.

The researchers say their figures are based on provincial-level data from the Chinese Environmental Protection Agency.

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Video showing the extent of China's smog problem

They say analysis of the 30 data points is more informative about likely future emissions than national figures in wider use because it allows errors to be tracked more closely.

They believe current computer models substantially underestimate future emissions growth in China.

We are awaiting a formal comment from the UK Chinese Embassy, but Dr Max Auffhammer, the lead researcher, said his projections had been presented widely and no-one had raised a serious complaint.

All those concerned about climate change agree that China's emissions are a problem - including China itself.

CARBON EMISSIONS Global carbon emissions statistics were last published in 2004. They show Chinese emissions began rising rapidly in 2002. University of California research suggests China overtook the US as the worst producer of carbon emissions in 2006

But China and many other developing countries struggling to tackle poverty are adamant that any negotiated emissions reductions should not be absolute, but relative to a "business-as-usual" scenario of projected growth.

That is why this study is of more than academic interest.

If it becomes widely accepted that China's future emissions are likely to be much higher than previously estimated, that will have to factored into any future global climate agreement if the Chinese are to be persuaded to take part.

In brief, although this study looks bad for China's reputation, it may be good for China's negotiating position.

The Chinese - and the UN - insist that rich countries with high per capita levels of pollution must cut emissions first, and help poorer countries to invest in clean technology.

America's per capita emissions are five to six times higher than China's, even though China has become the top manufacturing economy.

US emissions are still growing too, though much more slowly.

Dr Auffhammer told BBC News that his projections had made an assumption that the Chinese government's recent aggressive energy efficiency programme would fail, as the previous one had failed badly.

"Our figures for emissions growth are truly shocking," he said.

"But there is no sense pointing a finger at the Chinese. They are trying to pull people out of poverty and they clearly need help.

"The only solution is for a massive transfer of technology and wealth from the West."

He acknowledged that this eventuality was unlikely.

Those scientists aspiring to stabilise global emissions growth before 2020 to prevent what they believe may be irreversible damage to the climate may be wondering how this can possibly be achieved.

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Amazon tribe enlists Google in battle with illegal loggers

You may know it as Google, but in bamboo-and-thatch roundhouses deep in the Amazon rainforest the iconic brand goes by another name. The Surui people, one of the most remote on Earth, call it ragogmakan – "messenger" – and they're banking on the search engine to save them and their ancestral lands from extinction.

The tribe – whose first contact with the modern world was less than 40 years ago – are replacing their bows and arrows with hi-tech gadgets in their battle for survival. They have already begun using satnav on their traditional trails through the trees. And Google Earth has just agreed to provide high-resolution satellite images of their forest home.

The initiative is the brainchild of their chief, Almir Narayamoga Surui, who is leading their struggle against illegal loggers besieging their territory, an isolated 600,000-acre green oasis in Rondonia, in the wild Brazilian west. Last year the 34-year-old Almir visited Google near San Francisco to ask it to help monitor the loggers' incursions. He said he also hoped to be able to use the internet firm to "alert the world". He added: "We call Google ragogmakan because we hope it will help us get our message out."

For countless centuries the nomadic people – who call themselves Paiter, meaning simply "we ourselves" – lived far from the outside world, until the official "first contact" with Brazilian authorities on 7 September 1969, national Independence Day. "The date that Brazil became independent was the day our independence ended," Almir says. "Our people were very, very scared when they first saw white men." A warrior people (Surui, the name bestowed on them by outsiders, means "enemy"), they decided to fight.

"We thought we could beat them with bows and arrows," says Almir. "But it didn't work." The Surui were reduced from 5,000 to just 250 people by massacres and diseases such as chicken pox, measles, tuberculosis and flu, to which they had no immunity. "The survivors were so weak from disease that they did not have the strength to bury their dead. So we went to Plan B, a peace plan." Did that work? "In terms of absolute survival, yes. Other tribes in Rondonia completely disappeared."

They got medical help, but lost half their land, and only got the remainder protected after a prominent Surui drew an arrow on a leading Brazilian senator in his office and demanded official demarcation. The land is still under constant attack. Almir says that 300 sawmills, employing 4,000 people, surround it and other Indian reserves in the area. Eleven local chiefs have been killed trying to protect their land, and he himself has a £50,000 price on his head.

He cottoned on to cyberspace when first trying out Google Earth and – like almost everyone – immediately searched for where he lived. He saw clear signs of logging, and realised he could enlist an eye in the sky.

With the help of the US-based Amazon Conservation Team he has been training his people in IT. They use satnav not to find their way around the jungle they know so well, but to enable them to record the co-ordinates of any logging they find so that they can report it. And Almir envisages the Surui with solar-powered laptops using Google to download information and to tell the world how their forest is much more valuable if left standing.

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Suspending Life

If almost every species on Earth was killed some 250 million years ago, how did our ancient ancestors survive and evolve into us?

In the deep history of our planet, there have been at least five short intervals in which the majority of living species suddenly went extinct. Biologists are used to thinking about how environmental pressures slowly select the organisms most fit for survival through natural selection, shaping life on Earth like an artist sculpting clay. However, mass extinctions are drastic examples of natural selection at its most ruthless, killing off vast numbers of species at one time in a way that is hardly typical of evolution.

In the 1980s, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his son first hypothesized that the impact of comets or asteroids caused the mass extinctions of the past. Most scientists slowly came to accept this theory of extinction, and since then a great scar in the Earth--an impact crater--has been discovered off the coast of Mexico that dates to around the time the dinosaurs went extinct. An asteroid probably did kill off the dinosaurs, but the causes of the other four mass extinctions are still obscured beneath the accumulated weight of hundreds of millions of years, and no one has found any other credible evidence of impact craters.

But now, together with Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, I believe we have found a possible biochemical scar, present within living animals, that links Earth's greatest mass extinction to a single substance: hydrogen sulfide (H₂S). Hydrogen sulfide is a relatively simple molecule that gives rotten eggs their distinctive foul odor and is quite toxic--in high concentrations a single breath can kill. And it looks like that is what happened: Hundreds of millions of years ago, hydrogen sulfide probably saturated our oceans and atmosphere, poisoning nearly every creature on Earth.

Yet some creatures, like our very distant ancestors, must have somehow survived this toxic environment. What Roth has discovered is that H₂S, incredibly, also has the ability to preserve and save lives. In small doses the chemical puts many animals into a state of "suspended animation," a useful adaptation that would have allowed creatures to, in essence, hibernate through the catastrophe of mass extinction. If this idea is correct, our understanding of the deep past could lead to a dramatic medical revolution very soon.

Reptiles are pretty tough. It's much harder to kill a snake than a rat, and lizards can exist in extremes of temperature and oxygen that would kill most mammals. The key is their metabolism. We endothermic, or warm-blooded, mammals maintain our inner body temperatures while the ectothermic (cold-blooded) reptiles adapt to external temperatures. Paleontology still can't pinpoint when the first warm-blooded animals appeared, but a best guess is that some 260 million years ago, in the Permian Period, a branch of reptiles called the therapsids, or "mammal-like reptiles," evolved. Their metabolism must have given them an immediate Darwinian advantage because the group soon underwent a dramatic expansion in numbers, diversity, and disparity (diversity not of species, but of
separate morphologies). But why this great evolutionary change?

Probably because the world was so cold. At that time, the Earth had been in the grip of its longest-ever ice age, a global icebox that by the time of the therapsids' appearance was already tens of millions of years old. For the reptiles, until then the most complex creatures on the planet, the cold was a real problem. Getting started in the morning meant lying in the sun until internal temperatures rose to the point of allowing motion. Like a car on a subzero morning, the panting, white-breathed reptiles would have needed substantial amounts of time to warm up enough to commence hunting for food. The appearance of warm-blooded predators would have wreaked havoc on the ectothermic reptiles, and even warm-blooded prey had the advantage of being capable of rapid activity anytime, day or night. The endotherms soon dominated Earth's landscape, and did so for 10 million years.

There was a trade-off, of course, to being warm-blooded--all of this internal heat needed to be fueled. The new warm-bloods had to eat more, and more frequently. They also needed more oxygen than their cold-blooded ancestors to keep the internal fires burning. But the endotherms had no problem out-competing the reptiles while it was cold. Then the Earth started to warm. Far off in what would someday be Siberia, a very large volcanic area spilled enormous volumes of lava onto the Earth's surface, eventually covering an area larger than present-day Texas. It was not the lava that caused the temperature to rise, however; it was the large volumes of carbon dioxide and methane emitted into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide levels shot up from their Permian lows (the reason for the long ice age in the first place) of perhaps 100 ppm, to 3000 ppm or more.

By about 251 million years ago, the planet had lost all of its ice, and with the final glaciers melting away, there was no longer a sufficient heat difference between the tropics and poles to maintain the various ocean currents that had kept the waters both cold and oxygenated. Stagnation ensued as the currents slowed; the ocean bottoms lost their oxygen and sea animals died. With this shift in ocean chemistry and temperature, new microbes that thrive without oxygen bloomed into dominance and rapidly reproduced to ocean-filling numbers. Some of these microbes were relatively benign to the life on Earth that does depend on oxygen, but some produced toxins such as those found now in red tides. A few others produced something even worse--hydrogen sulfide.

The oceans became much like the modern Black Sea, with warm, deep, oxygen-less water masses covering the bottom and oxygenated regions at the surface. Slowly yet inexorably, the warming oceans began to bring oxygen-less bottom waters toward the surface. By the time this process was complete, the microbes producing hydrogen sulfide were able to live at every depth. Vast new suites of other microbes appeared, belonging to the purple and green sulfur bacteria groups that require both hydrogen sulfide in the water around them and sunlight to run their photosynthetic pathways. These microbes took over in the oxygen-free water, rich in poisonous H₂S and shallow enough to provide sufficient light for energy.

What I believe happened next still reverberates through life's history. The H₂S-producing microbes eventually grew to such numbers that the toxic byproduct of their metabolism could no longer be contained in seawater solution. Large oily bubbles of hydrogen sulfide came out of the purple-stained sea and entered the atmosphere, where the gas increased in concentration to levels that surely had destructive effects. Where the H₂S was concentrated at more than 200 ppm, it was toxic to both plants and animals. But more globally, H₂S began to break down the Earth's protective ozone layer, allowing harmful ultraviolet light to enter.

The fossil record shows us that at this point, the most catastrophic mass extinction in Earth's history occurred. Claims that this "great dying" was caused by the effects of an asteroid from space, just like what killed the dinosaurs, simply don't hold up. Almost everywhere we find biomarkers indicating that there existed an oxygen-free, toxic ocean--and that on land, almost all plants and animals quickly died out.

Hydrogen sulfide, directly or indirectly, probably killed almost every creature on Earth. Both groups of major land vertebrates, the endotherms and the ectotherms, were almost wiped out. But the reptiles, with their cold blood, would have enjoyed a slight advantage over the ectotherms because they could adapt to the changing temperatures faster. Recent experiments from the lab of Mark Roth have also shown that warm-blooded creatures had another disadvantage: They fare worse than reptiles in H₂S-rich environments. This finding certainly bolsters research, including my own paleontological work in South Africa, showing that more than 90 percent of the mammal-like reptiles disappeared in the great dying, leaving the world primarily to the reptiles. But there's more.

When the warmth and H₂S levels gradually receded after the volcanic episode, the biological life left behind was vastly different. The era would have been rough for the mammals that survived. And over the next 100 million years, this cycle leading to the anoxic ocean and H₂S venting into the sky that caused the "greenhouse" mass extinction, was repeated. Dinosaurs evolved slowly into dominance until a 10 km asteroid killed them off. Yet through it all, some proto-mammals did survive, and after the age of the dinosaurs, conditions once again began to favor these mammals and their warm-bloodedness.

We mammals, who evolved from the creatures that survived this inhospitable time, were marked by what happened. All animals bear the physiological scars left by the past greenhouse extinctions and hydrogen sulfide events, and we mammals are no exception. The difficulty is knowing where to look for the scars.

I believe the work of Mark Roth and his group may have finally uncovered the survival mechanism of our ancestors. While high levels of H₂S kill mammals, Roth's team has found that very low levels of the toxin can prolong their lives. H₂S reduces oxygen levels in the body, and though too much causes death by oxygen starvation, a bit less slows a creature's metabolism. This alone is an amazing finding. But Roth has gone further, inducing suspended animation in mammals. By exposing lab mice to small doses of H₂S, Roth and his team can put them into the deepest of sleeps--with very slow, or even no heartbeats--for several hours. In that time, the mice can be cooled to temperatures that would have killed them prior to the H₂S exposure.

Roth has already begun testing his work on other mammals. If he is correct, hydrogen sulfide may provide a way of saving lives so revolutionary that it will change trauma medicine forever. He is redefining what we thought we knew about death and dying. Death may not be as final as we think.

When we humans are cut or injured, our bodies naturally produce small quantities of hydrogen sulfide. In essence, the body may be trying to put itself into suspended animation to survive the injury, an instinct held over millions of years in our genes. Yet whenever one of us is dying, say from a heart attack, our first instinct is to give that person oxygen. The problem with this "life-saving" first response may be that the oxygenated red blood cells rush to the damaged cells and act like gasoline on a fire. Oxygen is one of the most chemically active substances on Earth, and though we need it to survive, it can ravage our bodies. The oxygen increases the reactions causing the heart attack in the first place; it tears up more cells and overwhelms the virtual suspended animation that the body-produced hydrogen sulfide created. Then it kills you.

Perhaps our first instinct in instances of a heart attack should be to cool the body and let hydrogen sulfide do its natural work. To save life, in other words, you may first have to effectively suspend it with hydrogen sulfide. This tactic may just be what got us so far in the first place.

There is no clear understanding yet of why our injured bodies are able to produce hydrogen sulfide or why H₂S puts some mammals into suspended animation. But I believe that Roth has found our body's own memory of the ancient events that nearly killed our distant ancestors. Some proto-mammals may have been exposed to H₂S, and instead of dying, they were placed into a state of suspended animation that allowed them to survive until the initial hydrogen sulfide levels subsided and they were reanimated. Some lucky evolutionary accident ensured the mammals' safety through a deep sleep, and that accident may still be dormant within us. That which allowed our ancestors to survive millions of years ago might also be a means of our survival now.

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