TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Earth s surface temperature has risen by about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century, with accelerated warming during the past two decades. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that if we carry on burning fossil fuels at present rates, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase by 50 percent within fifteen years risking catastrophic climate shifts.
2. A team of international climatologists, led by Paul Grutzen, whose work on the ozone hole won him the 1995 Nobel Prize for Science, identified the cloud. At the time of my visit, the monsoon in many parts of India and Southeast Asia either had not arrived or had been particularly severe. This terrifying story only made page 2 of the local media and disappeared completely after a couple of days. Hong Kong shrugged and went about its business.
3. Sarah Graham, Making Microchips Takes Mountain of Materials, Scientific American, November 6, 2002, available at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID= sa003&articleID=0000E57E-E47B-1DC6-AF71809EC588EEDF.
4. Producing a single chip the tiny wafer used for memory in personal computers requires at least 3.7 pounds of fossil fuel and chemical inputs. Each chip requires 3.5 pounds of fossil fuels, 0.16 pounds of chemicals, 70.5 pounds of water, and 1.5 pounds of elemental gases (mainly nitrogen). These estimates were reported in Environmental Science and Technology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world s largest scientific society. Eric Williams, Robert U. Ayres, and Miriam Heller,...
