Climate Feedback

Mere exposure to green products can make people behave more altruistically, but purchasing those same products can have quite the opposite effect, suggests a new study in press at the journal Psychological Science.

Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto conducted three experiments to gauge how people’s interaction with green products affected their other social interactions. The first experiment involved 59 students, who were asked to rate green consumers against conventional consumers in terms of various positive attributes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the participants rated those who buy green products as being more cooperative, altruistic and ethical than those who purchase conventional products.

In a second experiment, each of 156 students was randomly assigned to shop at either a conventional or ‘green’ online store, in which they were either exposed to or offered to purchase items. The same students then participated in a game that involved sharing money with an unidentified person in a separate room. While those exposed to the green products shared more money than those exposed to the conventional products, participants who had actually bought green products shared less money.

Continue reading "The greedy side of green consumers " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 13, 2009
Categories: Olive Heffernan, Personal action, Society | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Today The Guardian is unveiling their new 10:10 campaign, which pledges individuals, businesses and organizations to shrink their carbon footprints 10% in 2010. I'm heading down to Tate Modern to tweet the launch - follow @annabarnett, #1010.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on September 01, 2009
Categories: In the News, Mitigation, Personal action | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Collaboration requires communication, and communication is always better in person, but should climate researchers travel less?

In an article reported on the Nature News website, Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research says the community should reflect more seriously on its jet-setting culture.

Stohl has detailed the carbon emissions of scientists and non-scientists at his institute in a paper recently published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. The emissions are certainly not jaw-dropping, but he raises a couple of interesting points.

For one, why is international collaboration between climate researchers—which usually requires some air travel— so strongly encouraged by funding agencies without an eye cast to how the hopping on planes might be minimised? And to what extent is it for the climate change community to set an example to the rest of science—and to professionals of all stripes?

Yes, most researchers in the field care passionately that their work informs policies that changes people’s behaviour. But only a quarter of attendees at the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry conference in September have sent back questionnaires about the fuel they burnt to get there. Without more completed questionnaires, the organisers are having a tough time calculating the total carbon emissions, and thus how much they are aiming to off-set.

We are all busy, but we should never be too busy to practise what we preach.

Anna Petherick, Research Highlights Editor, Nature

Posted by Olive Heffernan on November 24, 2008
Categories: Anna Petherick, Mitigation, Personal action | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hard to believe: The long-standing notion that old forests are carbon neutral – that is, that from a certain age forests cease to absorb and accumulate carbon – has its origin from a mere decade worth of data from one single site.

Although timidly questioned every so often, this apparently wrong postulate has prevailed for more than 30 years, leaving its mark in the Kyoto Protocol which excludes old-growth forests from national carbon budgets.

The finding, reported in this week’s Nature, that old forests do accumulate carbon, and apparently in vast amounts, is therefore anything but marginal. Tropical forests were excluded from the study, because there are too few monitoring sites. But primary forests in the boreal and temporary regions of the Northern Hemisphere alone capture some 1.3 gigatonnes of carbon a year, the meta-analysis of data from 519 plots of forests between 15 and 800 years of age has revealed. An editor's summary of the paper is here.

“Hence, 15 % of the global forest surface, which is currently not being considered for offsetting increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, is responsible for at least 10% of the global net ecosystem production,” the authors write.

Obviously, the carbon sequestered in old forest was previously accounted for elsewhere. Disturbingly, given that some offset profiteers praise tree planting as a panacea of sorts for climate change, young forests may actually be sources, rather than sinks, of CO2, if decomposition of soils and older vegetation preceded their creation.

Leaving intact and protecting old forests seems a far better option. This insight comes rather late, but better late than never. Oh, and it will really give climate negotiators something to think about.

My colleague Emma Marris has more in her news story here.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on September 11, 2008
Categories: Biosphere feedbacks, Deforestation, Mitigation, Personal action, Quirin Schiermeier | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Declan Butler has a feature (subscription required) in this week's Nature on the potential of green architecture for mitigating climate change. On his blog, he writes:

It’s been one of the most challenging articles I’ve had to write, as I had to leave out so much, but at the same time one of the most satisfying. This is a hugely important topic. Buildings account for up to half of all energy consumption, and are the biggest single contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Much attention is given to exotic future remedies, such as carbon sequestration and clean coal. But a way to slash emissions using existing technologies is sitting under our noses: simply rethinking how we design the buildings we live and work in, to use much less energy.

The arguments for building with energy needs met largely by marrying with the local environment and passive strategies are so compelling that the research for this article is persuading me to switch my own plans to buy a place in French Touraine, where I live, to instead build a zero-energy home — no small challenge, though, given that French builders are far behind their German, Swiss, and Austrian neighbours here.

Image: Low-income “passive” terrace houses in Lindas, Sweden; M. Wall

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 07, 2008
Categories: Declan Butler, In the News, Mitigation, Personal action | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Did you resolve to use less energy for your home appliances in 2008? In a study released yesterday, a lab within the the US Department of Energy found that lots of Americans (or at least lots of Pacific Northwesterners) want to do the same - and given more information, tools, and sophisticated market incentives, they'll actually do it. To the tune of 15% less peak power use and 10% lower household electric bills.

Continue reading "Technology lessens Americans' power hunger " »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 10, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Energy, Personal action, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Olive Heffernan

Apparently, an all white computer screen, such as an empty Word page, or the Google page, uses 74 watts to display, whereas a black screen consumes only 59 watts. So claimed Mark Ontkush in a post on the ecoIron blog in January. Doing a few back of the envelope calculations based on numbers of users per day and wattage for different coloured screen from EnergyStar, Ontkush figured that the energy saving would be 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google had a black screen.

And so, with the help of Heap Media, Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle.

The Wall Street Journal did some of their own calculations, which challenge the energy-saving claims of Blackle. In a blog post from May, they point out that the "savings are most likely to accrue from older CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitors, rather than the more modern, energy-efficient LCD (liquid crystal display) screens that dominate the market (representing three quarters of all monitors world-wide as of last year, by some estimates)." They did some tests using Blackle, Google and the New York Times on a CTD and LCD monitor and found the difference "so slight as to be within the margin of error for the power meter".

Since then, it's been blogged about here, here and here. Anyhow, check it out - it's certainly novel, whether or not it's especially efficient.

Olive Heffernan
News Editor
Nature Reports Climate Change

Posted by Olive Heffernan on July 26, 2007
Categories: In the News, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Personal action | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBacks (1)