| IOC: Beijing Air Quality Could Put Athletes at Risk
March 18, 2008 (ENS) - World record marathoner Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia has announced that he will not participate in the marathon at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Gebrselassie, who suffers from exercise-related asthma, has expressed fears that the air pollution in the Chinese capital will threaten his health.
A new assessment of Beijing air quality released Monday by the International Olympic Committee's Medical Commission acknowledges for the first time that athletes such as Gebrselassie might have something to worry about.
The commission says some athletes may be at risk if they compete in outdoor endurance events in Beijing where the Games are set to begin on August 8.
For outdoor endurance events that include minimum one hour continuous physical efforts at high level - urban road cycling, mountain bike, marathon, marathon swimming, triathlon and road walk - the IOC Medical Commission’s findings indicated that "there may be some risk."
Medical Commission Chairman Arne Ljungqvist said, "As with all Olympic Games, we want to ensure that air quality risks are mitigated and that measures are put into place to protect the health of the athletes. The health and safety of the competing athletes is of the utmost importance.
Ljungqvist said the IOC will be working together with the relevant international federations in order to put in place procedures which will allow a "plan B" to be activated for such events if necessary.
"The procedure will include daily monitoring of air quality and weather conditions at the venue, a reporting process from the Beijing Environment Protection Bureau to the IOC and relevant sports federation, and a joint IOC-sports federation decision to postpone the event if necessary," he said.
He said that air quality could reduce the potential for world records and peak performances in all sports
"It may be that some events will not be conducted under optimal conditions - which is the reality of sports competitions - and that we may not see records broken in Beijing. However, the Games are more about competing in the Olympic spirit, than about breaking records," said Ljungqvist.
Over the past weeks, the IOC Medical Commission has analyzed a set of data, including temperature, wind, humidity and concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, ground-level ozone and particulate matter, PM10 readings.
The data was gathered by the Beijing Environment Protection Bureau from August 8 to 29, 2007 and given to the International Olympic Committee, IOC. The data have been evaluated on the basis of the World Health Organization's 2005 interim target standards.
The findings indicate that, at Games time one year ago, "the health of athletes was largely not impaired," the Medical Commission said.
No health issues related to air quality were reported to the IOC by any of the team physicians who looked after athletes competing during the August 2007 test events. Nor were any such problems reported at the IAAF Junior World Championships that were held in August 2006.
Moreover, said the Commission, measures are continuously being taken by the Chinese authorities which can be expected to improve the air quality further when compared with 2006 and 2007.
But a study released last April by an international team of scientists says that controlling only local sources of air pollution in Beijing will not be sufficient to attain the air quality goal set for the Beijing Olympics.
Air quality in Beijing in the summer is dictated by meteorology and topography. Typically, the scientists explain in their report, temperatures are high, humidity is high, wind speeds are low, and the surrounding hills restrict venting of pollution. Regional pollutants like particulate matter and ozone build up over several days, usually until dispersed by wind or removed by rain.
"Our modeling suggests that emission sources far from Beijing exert a significant influence on Beijing’s air quality," the report concludes, adding, "There is an urgent need for regional air quality management studies and new emission control strategies to ensure that the air quality goals for 2008 are met."
Environmental Groups Sue Bush Administration to Force Polar Bear Protection
Faced with Overwhelming Scientific Evidence, Government Continues Delay on Endangered Species Act Listing Due to Global Warming
March 10, 2008 – Today the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace sued the Bush administration for missing the legal deadline to issue a final decision on whether to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act due to global warming.
“The Endangered Species Act is absolutely unambiguous: the Fish and Wildlife Service was required to make a final decision months ago. Now it’s up to a federal court to throw this incredible animal a lifeline,” said Andrew Wetzler, director of the Endangered Species Project at NRDC. “We need urgent action from this administration, to protect the polar bear and reduce greenhouse gas pollution, not continued delay.”
Polar bears live only in the Arctic and are totally dependent on the sea ice for all of their essential needs. The rapid warming of the Arctic and melting of the sea ice pose an overwhelming threat to the polar bear, which could become the first mammal to lose 100 percent of its habitat to global warming.
The groups filed their lawsuit today in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit seeks a court order compelling the administration to issue the final decision on polar bear protection immediately.
“The Bush administration seems intent on slamming shut the narrow window of opportunity we have to save polar bears,” said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, and lead author of the 2005 petition seeking the Endangered Species Act listing. “We simply will not sit back and passively allow the administration to condemn polar bears to extinction.”
The Endangered Species Act listing process for the polar bear due to global warming was initiated with a scientific petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, NRDC, and Greenpeace. In December, 2005, these groups sued the Bush administration for failing to respond to the petition. As a result of that first lawsuit, in February 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that protection of polar bears "may be warranted," and commenced a full status review of the species. A settlement agreement in that case committed the Service to make the second of three required findings in the listing process by December 27, 2007, at which time the Service announced the proposal to list the species as “threatened.” By law, the Service was required to make a final listing decision within one year of the proposal. The decision is now more than 2 months overdue.
Noting that the federal government initiated lease sales to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea earlier this month, Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace USA, said “Our lawsuit has forced the Bush administration’s hand on the issue of global warming like no other, even as it rubberstamps drilling rights for Big Oil in pristine polar bear habitat. If the federal government is really serious about protecting the polar bear, then its next steps will be to cancel lease sales in the Chukchi Sea and immediately implement a plan for deep cuts in U.S.
global warming pollution.”
Since the petition to protect polar bears under the Endangered Species Act was first filed in February 2005, new science paints a dim picture of the polar bear’s future. In September, the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population would likely be extinct by 2050, including all polar bears within the United States. Several leading scientists now predict the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer as early as 2012.
Global warming is worsening, with impacts in the Arctic outpacing predictions. September 2007 shattered all previous records for sea ice loss when the Arctic ice cap shrank to a record one million square miles – an equivalent of six times the size of California – below the average summer sea-ice extent of the past several decades, reaching levels not predicted to occur until mid-century.
Shrinking sea ice also drastically restricts polar bears’ ability to hunt their main prey, ice seals. In the spring of 2006, scientists located the bodies of several bears that had starved to death. Unprecedented instances of polar bear cannibalism have also been documented along the north coast of Alaska and Canada.Listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act guarantees federal agencies will be obligated to ensure that any action they authorize, fund, or carry out will not jeopardize the polar bears’ continued existence or adversely modify their critical habitat, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be required to prepare a recovery plan for the polar bear, specifying measures necessary for its protection.
To date, the government has received approximately 670,000 comments in support of protecting the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, including letters from eminent polar bear experts, climate scientists, and more than 60 members of Congress.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise in China
March 14, 2008 · China's carbon dioxide emissions are growing much faster than anticipated and are on pace to double during this decade. Forecasts of global warming don't take this growth into account, so scientists may be underestimating how fast the planet will heat up.
When scientists last tried to project China's contribution to global warming, it was the late 1990s. Asia was in a recession and China's emissions weren't growing particularly fast.
But Maximilian Auffhammer of the University of California, Berkeley, says things have changed radically since then. Since 2000, carbon dioxide emissions have been "off the charts," he says.
For example, in 2004, emissions from China grew by 14 percent — or the equivalent of an additional Germany or England.
Auffhammer and a colleague have used detailed information from within China to estimate what emissions will be like through the end of the decade. His forecast is being published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.
The average of all the scenarios predicts continued growth in emissions of about 10 percent to 11 percent a year. That is roughly what Auffhammer has observed over the last four years — and it would lead to a doubling of emission levels every decade.
By this reckoning, China overtook the United States as the leading emitter of carbon dioxide about a year ago. And its emissions are now increasing about 10 times faster than in the United States.
That also means that carbon dioxide is building up in the atmosphere a lot faster than the United Nations science panel, the IPCC, figured in a major report last year.
Gregg Marland works at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which compiles emissions figures from around the world. He says economists are now starting to update their forecasts, knowing that more rapid increases in emissions mean more rapid global warming.
But Marland says it's a mistake to look at China in isolation.
"A significant fraction of emissions from China are to produce goods that will be consumed in the United States. So it's wrong … to point fingers at individuals or individual countries. We have to recognize that we're all in this together," he says.
And China isn't just ignoring the issue. The country's economy is growing rapidly as it struggles to bring a large percentage of its population out of poverty.
But Deborah Seligsohn, who works for the World Resources Institute in Beijing, says in the past few years, China has instituted policies to slow emissions growth. So China might end the decade better than scientists are currently forecasting.
"What happens is a complex mix of business behavior, policy behavior, financial behavior," she says.
But Berkeley's Auffhammer says even if China does slow its emissions, the recent building boom in coal-fired power plants
— which can operate for 40 to 80 years — will have repercussions for decades to come.
"Any policy now is not going to tear down existing, costly, capital equipment in China. But we should really worry about what the next power plant they put in next week and the week after and the week after is going to be," he says. |
