Tiny Planet

The Japanese market is apparently embracing more eco-friendly hybrid vehicles at a much greater rate than the US, largely due to a more wide-ranging incentive scheme. The sale stats don’t lie, as we can see (I’m including the hyperlinks from the original article to make it easier to follow up on what’s going on):

In Japan, where hybrids are now tax-free and gas prices are 78 percent higher than in the U.S., a hybrid (Honda’s Insight) topped the charts for vehicle sales for the first time ever in April. And Toyota’s gen-3 Prius, which took the crown last month, is doing well enough that the company has reportedly brought back overtime and started recruiting workers from other Toyota factories to keep up with booming demand. Chief Prius engineer Akihiko Otsuka told the New York Times recently that he expects hybrid sales to “push up the entire car market.”

Yet a Honda executive has just announced that the company expects to miss its sales targets for the Insight by as much as 33 percent this year in the U.S. That’s partly because of relatively low gas prices — they’ve dropped as much as 35 percent in the last year. As J.D. Power and Associates powertrain analyst Mike Omotoso told us recently, “When gas is cheap we tend to buy large vehicles without too much concern for the environment.”

So very tired, but here we go:

A chaffinch map of Scotland: “The work looks deceptively simple, while in fact it is a cleverly multilayered combination of poetry, cartography, ornithology, linguistics, and maybe just a hint of Scottish nationalism”. I love the oddities of the internet.

Strip websites back to basics.

Like ice, penguins, clouds and atmospheric disturbances? Then you’ll love this selection.

I can sympathise with the Transformers. But Pokemon? Super-soakers? C’mon.

And if you haven’t had enough after that, try love, romance and other natural disasters.

Even Times Square is getting climate conscious.

Living in the shadow of past glory is not easy for some Egyptians.

Well that didn’t take long, did it, Blizzard?

Microwave an instant chocolate cake in a mug. Tiny Planet accepts no responsibility for things going wrong or it tasting like crap, though.

People are giving up their pets because of the credit crunch.

Blogger gets 20 years for posting a picture of Burma’s military leader.

Dirt + manure = energy.

Meanwhile, the Maldives is trying to buy land in case the islands are swamped by rising sea levels.

Why would you shock yourself for the sake of good posture?

This, which I took while out walking, is not near my home, but is still the kind of leafy sight that greets me in the mornings (minus the shell).

Damp leaves are piling up on the front lawn and I even see the occasional flicker of frost on parked cars and shaded patches of grass. It isn’t raining, but the air holds no warmth.

Winter is back, and I’m feeling the cold more than ever before. This from a man who hails from a country the Romans once dismissed as “icy Hibernia”, and where the people were driven to savagery by the constant cold.

I wonder how much Abu Dhabi changed my physiology: I acclimatised quite well, in fact better than I had expected, thanks in part to arriving in December and so being around as the temperature climbed. But although I grew to handle 42C and even higher, I feel the chill in the mornings here. Even when the temperature is about 13C – good for this time of year – it nips a touch too much; this is a new experience for me.

I’ve found myself buying and, more importantly, wearing jumpers and the like, which I wouldn’t normally do until the dead of December. As I walked to work the other day I realised my hands were turning purple from the cold – and it wasn’t as bad as it could be.

Can one re-acclimatise to one’s native environment? Is it psychological? Did I feel all this before but am only now, with the benefit of experiencing a different climate, able to appreciate and define it?

As I write this it is 36C in Abu Dhabi and 7C in Cork. Before my departure I would never have thought that 36C would be lovely weather.

Seems the next decade may be a touch nippier for Europe and North America, “thanks to natural North Atlantic variations that could temporarily mask the effects of human-driven, or anthropogenic, climate change”.

We shall see. Unfortunately, “our understanding of ocean fluctuations—and thus our ability to include them in climate models—is currently in its infancy”.

Hat tip to Catholicgauze.

Reuters have a Q&A with System of a Down/solo artist Serj Tankian. In it, he talks about his concerns for the Middle East’s environment after the war in Iraq, his hypocrisy at touring while advocating ecological causes and touches on his next musical project.

On Saturday, turn off your lights and other electricity bits and pieces for one hour. The Irish event runs from 8pm to 9pm. Read a book by candlelight or maybe go for a walk. Abu Dhabi isn’t involved but I’ve signed up anyway – join me here (even though the website’s font can’t used extended characters, so my name is totally FUBAR).

Hat tip to Emilie.

As reported by Bloomberg:

China, India and other developing countries probably won’t be required to take on legally binding commitments to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions under a new climate-change treaty, a United Nations official said today…

The U.S. has refused to join the 1997 Kyoto accord in part because China and other rapidly emerging economies aren’t required under the treaty to make the same pollution cuts as industrialized nations. The U.S. and China are the world’s largest emitters of global warming pollution.

China and other developing countries say they shouldn’t be required to meet the same standard as developed countries because they are in the early stages of trying to fuel economic growth to pull billions of people out of poverty. The European Union and environmentalists agree, though they say they want to see stronger efforts from the countries in a new climate accord.

You see the vicious circle? “We won’t do it because they won’t do it”. Somebody needs to take the lead. One EU negotiator has gone so far as to say China need not make carbon cut commitments, but rather improve energy efficiency. Shouldn’t the two go hand in hand? China is building a coal power plant per week — energy efficiency will not remove the harmful environmental effect of that much burning fossil fuel.

Am I being unfairly bitter, or do I have a point?

Australia has ratified the Kyoto Protocol, leaving the US the only major industrialised nation yet to agree to the climate treaty.

The endorsement was approved by the first executive council meeting of Australia’s new Labor government this morning, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in a statement on the Labor Party’s Web site. Australia will become a full member of the Kyoto Protocol by the end of March, he said.

Rudd promised to make climate change a priority for his government, and I’m delighted with the drive he’s shown so far.

Australia’s target under the Kyoto accord is to limit growth in greenhouse gas emissions to an 8 percent increase above 1990 levels over the 2008-2012 period. The country is “tracking within 1 percentage point” of meeting that target, then-environment minister Malcolm Turnbull said in May. Australia is one of only three industrialized nations signed up to the accord that are allowed to increase emissions from 1990 levels by 2008-2012.

The Labor government will do “everything in its power” to help the nation meet its Kyoto obligations, Rudd said. This will include setting a target to cut emissions by 60 percent on 2000 levels by 2050, starting a national emissions trading system by 2020 and setting a target for 20 percent of electricity to come from renewable sources such as the sun and wind by 2020, he said.

The timing couldn’t be better, as delegates from around the world are meeting in Bali to hammer out the successor to Kyoto, which expires in 2012. If it puts pressure on the US to sign up — though this might only happen under the next administration — so much the better. And the more major nations on board, the more likely developing countries such as China will join too.

An article on Scientific American lists 10 points that could you make a difference. Worth a read.