The UN Report

The title of this post links to the Summary for Policymakers of the recent report (Feb. 2007) on the science of climate change.

The full title of the summary is:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis

Summary for Policymakers

Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Working Group I deals with the physical science of climate change. In this Summary, the group says that human activities are responsible for climate change.

Doesn't it?

Looks pretty clear to me.

Meter reading

Meter reading has the same cadence as Train Spotting, but no one's made a movie about it yet that I know of.

I walked around and read the meters at the start of the year. Here's where we begin:

Van odometer - 311026km
Car odometer - 219540 km
Water meter - 3997
Gas meter - 0366
Electricity meter - 29015

The two odometers show exactly what they mean. If I drive one km, the meter goes up by one km.

All of the other meters use calibration constants. A lot of scientific instruments are like this. The meter goes up by one when you use some of the gas, or water, or electricity, but it isn't necessarily going up by one unit when you use exactly one unit.

There's nothing fishy going on, as long as you trust the utility companies to keep the instruments properly calibrated. We have no control over that. All we can do is take next month's reading, subtract the starting reading, and multiply the difference by the calibration constant. I can read the constant from my bill. When the bill comes I'll give a real-life example.

A reply from the David Suzuki Foundation on carbon offsets

Thanks to Paul Lingl of the David Suzuki Foundation who replied to me today on the question I had about buying carbon offsets. (See my earlier post, "I flew. Now what? George Monbiot vs. David Suzuki and the "carbon offsets" question"). Like Monbiot, it turns out that the Suzuki people also have concerns about carbon sequestration. They prefer other approaches to carbon offsets.

Their website has links to the carbon offsets the Suzuki people consider to be good. I infer that all carbon offsets are not created equal.

Further exploration of carbon offsets to follow. There is a lot of information on the Suzuki Foundation's website. I'm almost afraid to start using their free carbon calculators to see how bad I've been, but avoidance is no solution. It's not about what I have done in the past, it's about what I do now and in the future.