Daily Briefing: Wed.

SMOKESTACK FRIGHTENING: Earth is on pace to play out the worst-case scenario for climate change that scientists have envisioned, researchers with the Global Carbon Project warned on Tuesday, with the planet poised for a 10.8-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures by the end of the century. This is thanks to steadily rising carbon dioxide emissions, which have increased 29 percent since 2000 alongside the rapid growth in coal-burning by developing nations, namely China. In fact, not even a worldwide economic downturn has been able to tamp down the rising greenhouse gas pollution — global CO2 emissions jumped 2 percent during 2008, even as heavy emitters like the United States and the European Union saw their emissions decline. "The growth in emissions since 2000 is almost entirely driven by the growth in China," the study's lead author tells the AP. "It's China and India and all the developing countries together." Of course, the United States still leads the world in per capita emissions with nearly 20 tons per person each year, which dwarfs China's 5.8 tons per person (the world average is 5.3). The study thus makes President Obama's recent visit to China all the more portentous, since he and Chinese President Hu Jintao made a tantalizing pledge: The United States is likely to offer specific emissions-reduction targets at next month's U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, as long as China offers targets of its own. (Sources: Associated Press, London Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, Washington Post)

 

OVERDUE BILL: Long rumored to be on the back burner, the U.S. Senate's climate bill is now officially on hold, Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday. The legislation will be picked back up "some time in the spring," according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (right), D-Nev., indicating an erosion of political will amid festering unemployment and other economic problems. The House passed its version of the bill in June, and it was originally intended to be finalized before the Copenhagen climate summit, which begins Dec. 7. "It's really big, really, really hard, and is going to make a lot of people mad," Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., tells the WSJ. The Obama administration will spend the next few months working with senators, says White House spokesman Ben LaBolt, in an effort to ease that difficulty and soothe those tempers. "This is an economic opportunity for the nation that will create millions of clean energy jobs while reducing our dangerous dependence on foreign oil," LaBolt says, "and it's an opportunity that other countries like China and India are racing to take advantage of." (Source: Wall Street Journal)

 

MOTOR SKILLS: Tuesday was a good day for the Ford Motor Co. The Ford Fusion hybrid was named Motor Trend's 2010 Car of the Year, billionaire investor George Soros announced that he's buying $53 million in Ford stock, and the company's stock price hit a two-year high of $9 before closing at $8.98. The Fusion beat 22 competitors for Motor Trend's prestigious annual award, including the Toyota Prius. The big day was a validation of sorts for the Detroit automaker, which was the only one of the Big Three U.S. car companies to decline a government bailout last year. "Ford has proven its resilience in these tough times by delivering to market a car with broad appeal to a broad range of consumers," said Angus MacKenzie, editor-in-chief of Motor Trend. The Fusion was first introduced in 2005, but the 2010 version has been upgraded with a new engine, new transmission and better fuel efficiency, among other tweaks. "It's really gratifying to see that everybody is appreciating the Ford plan and the progress we are making," Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally said during a celebration Tuesday at the company's world headquarters. (Sources: Detroit News, Detroit Free Press)

 

OFFSETS OFF THE TABLE: One of the first travel companies to offer carbon offsets has canceled its program, the NY Times reports, in a sign of growing distrust about the financial trick for supposedly countering CO2 emissions in one place by reducing them somewhere else. Not only do carbon offsets create an inflated sense of innocence about contributing to climate change, explain officials with Responsible Travel, but may even encourage some people to travel more, possibly taking unnecessary trips with a free conscience. "The carbon offset has become this magic pill, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card," Responsible Travel's managing director tells the Times. "It"s seductive to the consumer who says, 'It's $4 and I'm carbon-neutral, so I can fly all I want.'" Part of the problem is that there are no industrywide standards, and no transparency about how companies are keeping tabs on the success of their programs. Planting trees to counteract the CO2 emissions from an airplane flight is one common technique, but many trees don't start absorbing CO2 from the air until they're several years old. And in one unfortunate example, mango trees planted in India to offset a Coldplay concert tour were found to have died a few years later. (Source: New York Times)

 

VERY PARTICULAR: As early as this weekend, proton beams may begin flying through a 17-mile-long tunnel deep below the French-Swiss border, marking the next chapter for the chronically unlucky Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC was sidelined in 2008 following its much-hyped debut, when a faulty electrical connection damaged 53 superconducting magnets and released more than a ton of helium into the tunnel, which is buried 328 feet underground. Scientists later blamed the malfunction on the rushed deadline for that debut, since not all the equipment had been tested yet. They're taking a more cautious approach this time around, not offering any specific date or timeframe for the relaunch. The LHC is designed to simulate the conditions immediately after the Big Bang, and scientists hope it will let them observe the elusive Higgs boson, aka "God particle." The issue of whether this phantom particle exists has blockaded further understanding of how the universe works. (Sources: BBC News, AP)

 

SKATE OR DIE: A species of European skate could soon become the first ocean fish pushed to extinction by commercial overfishing, the AFP reports, and an 83-year-old classification mistake may be partly to blame. Scientists in the 19th century identified two European skate species — the flapper skate and the blue skate — but a 1926 study corrected them, arguing that the two fish are actually the same species. That opened the door for large industrial trawlers (right), especially French ones, to begin decimating all European skates indiscriminately. But now, new research has proven definitively that the original assessment was correct, meaning they're two different species after all, and the flapper skate has suffered dearly for the error. The blue skate is also being overfished, but the flapper is declining at an alarming rate, researchers warn, and may already be in an irreversible slide toward extinction. (Source: Agence France-Presse)

 

— Russell McLendon