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Meanwhile the science on climate change grows more dire. James Hansen, NASA's climate expert, reported in a recent paper that the world needed to stabilize carbon in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million (ppm) to avoid the worst effects of warming - a more stringent goal than earlier estimates, which had a target of 450 ppm. (The current concentration is 385 ppm and rising fast, up from a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm.) That would require action that is far more ambitious than currently seems possible - both in the U.S. and in the developing world, where the bulk...
...reasons curbing pollution can have so immediate an effect is that even a little dirt can do a lot of damage. A reduction of just 10 micrograms (10 millionths of a gram) of pollution per cubic meter of air - a degree of improvement many of the surveyed cities were able to attain during the two-decade-plus period - could extend human lifespans a full nine months. How small is 10 micrograms per cubic meter? Consider that simply by living with a cigarette smoker, you're exposed to a daily dose of 20 to 30. Pittsburgh, Pa., is one city...
...with the very lowest levels still saw health benefits from small improvements. The evidence isn't yet there to determine whether those benefits would continue growing until the fine-particle pollution got down to zero; one of the cities closest to that, Albuquerque, N.M., still hovers around 5 micrograms per cubic meter. But at this point, it doesn't seem that the benefits taper off. "If it continues to follow what we've observed, it appears that there are health benefits down to very low levels of exposure," says Pope. (See the Year in Health, from...
...been blanketing the media with warnings, but there are still about 8 million steadfastly analog households out there, according to Nielsen, and the government has already run through the entire $1.34 billion it had set aside for those converter-box coupons. (There's a limit of two per household, and they expire 90 days after they're issued.) The situation is bad enough that it has actually become a presidential transition issue: on Jan. 8, John Podesta, Obama's transition-team co-chair, sent a letter to Congress asking it to push back the date. So far, the Bush Administration...
...helped found the museum with the surviving members of the original Santa Cruz Surfing Club, which began in 1936. "People who come out of there, even nonsurfers, they come out with a big smile on their faces." And a cheap one, it turns out, only costing about $20,000 per year, money that's almost entirely used to pay two part-time employees. So the society contacted the city and found out that it would take $10,000 to keep the museum open until June 30, the end of the fiscal year. The Santa Cruz Surfing Club Preservation Society, which...