The other day, while listening to this podcast of the Australian radio programme, The Science Show, I heard about an intriguing project called Gondwana Link.

This project is an attempt to restore the ecology of a more than 25-million hectare swathe of land in Western Australia running from the arid red interior of the continent to the wet forests of the southwest coast, by converting the farmland that fragments it back to bush.

The swathe, with its mosaic of soil types, its semi-arid woodlands, karri forests, and mallee heath, its red-capped parrots and quokkas, abuts a huge area of farmland dedicated to monotonous hectares of wheat and sheep that has been progressively cleared over the past 60 years.

The belt of land lies mainly within one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. To give you some idea what that means, it's been estimated that the 329,000-hectare Fitzgerald River National Park that lies within the belt has as many plant species as all of Australia's rainforests combined.

The region's plants are a bit odd in that they have tended to evolve in small, isolated populations that have persisted for millions of years. Its animal species, on the other hand, are likely more dependent on continuous corridors of native vegetation for their long-term survival. So although ecologically-speaking the swathe of land is connected along 90% of its length, that probably isn't good enough.

As Keith Bradby, director of Gondwana Link, told me: "Climate change has lead to hotter more frequent fires, and wildlife need to be able to escape a fire front without running onto farmland. Land fragmentation doesn't work. All we are doing is implementing the bloody obvious."

Named for the geologically ancient southern supercontinent that was fragmented by shifting tectonic plates, Gondwana Link has now involved private donors, local farmers, big companies such as Shell, and a variety of non-governmental organisations, including The Nature Conservancy and The Wilderness Society.

The 10% of the swathe they plan to restore is still a huge chunk of real estate, so for now Gondwana Link is concentrating on two areas, where they are buying up strategically placed farms and replanting them with indigenous species.

Subscribing to the philosophy that perfection is an obstacle rather than a goal, when they can't buy a property they help farmers to restore any bush land they own.

When they do buy a property, sometimes they plant native peas and wattle in strips, which may not look particularly natural but does provide protection for certain rare species of wallaby. The next year, aromatic sandalwood trees are sown. Sandalwood is a native, but it can also be harvested, and profits used to fund future restoration.

One short-term goal is to restore some relatively small regions that were cleared only 30 years ago. In these parts, the diversity in the remaining pockets of bush land is still immensely rich, and hasn't yet suffered the full impact of invading species.

Securing such pockets of land for perpetuity could be Gondwana Link's most important contribution to plant conservation, according to Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, London, UK.

Meanwhile, Gondwana Link's long-term goal is to see this slice of southwest Australia function pretty much as it did a century ago, not least so that it is better able to adapt to climate change.

What really impressed me was not just the size of the undertaking, but the pragmatism and public-spiritedness of it all. It got me wondering if there are any similar projects in other countries.

Rachel Nowak, Australasian editor, New Scientist
(Image: Gondwana Link)

What do hurricanes and polar bears have in common? Two things. Both are used as poster children for climate change and both have been contested as such. I won't go into polar bears - you can read more here.

But the link between hurricanes and climate change is a massive can of worms. Today, another worm has been tossed into the can, as a group in the UK has provided yet more evidence that warmer sea surface temperatures are correlated with more frequent hurricanes.

The debate in the scientific community has been rather ugly. Scientists shifting allegiances and breaking ranks. In 2004, Chris Landsea of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Miami even gave up his duties at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a result of a dispute over the link.

Last year, hurricane experts from the world over locked themselves in a room for a few days with the aim of coming up with some sort of consensus. The result? Hurricanes activity is likely to increase as the climate warms, but there is no way to say for sure, they declared in a formal statement.

The latest study has been very careful to steer itself clear of the climate change debate. Mark Saunders and Adam Lea of University College of London in the UK studied the possible causes for a documented 40% to 70% increase in hurricane activity over the North Atlantic between 1965 and 2005.

Starting with data on sea surface temperature and wind speed collected during that time, they built a computer model which accurately simulated 75% to 80% of the hurricanes that did take place. From this they deduce that these two factors are key contributors to hurricane formation.

Sea surface temperature has been the big fish of the debate, partially because it can easily be linked to climate change. Warmer climate = warmer temperatures at the surface of the sea. So Saunders and Lea then went about calculating the share of responsibility of these temperatures.

For this, they simply stripped wind speed out of their model and looked at what proportion of hurricanes the model was then able to reproduce. They calculate that a 0.5 degree C increase in sea surface temperature is associated with a 40% increase in hurricane frequency and activity.

Cleverly, Saunders and Lea then eschew the matter of whether or not the rise in sea surface temperature is caused by climate change.

For Kerry Emmanuel of MIT, however, the interest of the latest study is not sea surface temperatures at all, but wind speed. Sea surface temperature, he seems to say, is so old school. Kerry first suggested this in 2007, and was pleased to see that Sanders' findings support it.

This is why: hurricanes are driven, not by how hot the surface of the sea is, but how hot it is relative to the atmosphere. High wind speeds mix it all up, and homogonise the temperatures. Low winds don't, and help create a relative difference. This promotes evaporation from the surface of the sea, which fuels the storm.

There's one more worm in the proverbial can, then.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Nuclear power is making a comeback round the world - rebranded as the new clean, green, low-carbon energy source for the 21st century.

It's in George Bush's latest state of the union address. After two decades, the Brits are all fired up to resume building. Canada, China, South Africa, Egypt, India, Italy, the Gulf states, and the Philippines all have plans.

Living in the UK, I don't have much choice but to get a fifth of my electricity from nukes – thanks to an old generation of nuclear plants nearing the ends of their working lives. Should that continue?

You wouldn't have caught me saying this even 5 years ago, but I am now so concerned about climate change that I suspect even nuclear energy has to be dragged out of the attic to help combat it.

But I have one big concern. What to do with nuclear waste, and especially the hot, highly radioactive stuff like spent fuel, which will stay dangerous for thousands of years?

Here the proponents of nuclear power are their own worst enemies. Scared, no doubt, by the greens, they have been putting off coming up with burial grounds.

In the US, the planned giant repository for spent reactor fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was supposed to open for business in 1998. But it is still at least 13 years from completion.

The situation in the UK is if anything even worse.

Many years ago, one of my big, early exclusives for New Scientist – 24 February 1983, since you asked – was a report on secret British plans to build a giant nuclear dump reached by a railway tunnel, probably beneath the sea close to Sellafield in Cumbria. An industry spokesman told me a planning application was only months away.

It made top story on the national evening news. But the plan was dropped soon after. And nothing has replaced it. The waste is still accumulating around the nuclear facilities of Britain.

Back in 1976, a Royal Commission said no new British nuclear power stations should be built until there was somewhere to put the waste. Last May, the chief scientist at the environment department, Howard Dalton, told me that rule still held. And with the government planning a nuclear revival, he said there would be announcement on waste before the end of 2007.

This was shortly before he retired – and before his sad death in recent days.

Yet January's government announcement about building new power stations came and went with no firm statement on waste. Frankly, it is pathetic. And dishonest.

If there are no plans, then it is nigh on criminal to starting pushing nukes. If there are secret plans, then it is dishonest not to reveal them and to try and win over a sceptical public.

And no, ministers cannot pretend that planning for waste disposal is a job for private industry. Not when thousands of years of safe keeping will be needed.

Not even George W Bush has tried to pull that one.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

This is an ice cap - or what is left of one. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have found that the ice caps on the northern plateau of Canada's Baffin Island have shrunk by more than half over the last 50 years. They say the caps could be entirely gone by mid-century.

"There's no question that even if the planet warms no more than today all those ice caps are disappearing," says researcher Gifford Miller.

Radiocarbon dating of the ancient vegetation that is being revealed by the shrinking ice caps showed that some of the ice caps have been around for 2000 years.

The irony is that there's a national park further south on Baffin Island called Auyuittuq, an Inuit term which means "land that never melts"...

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

What does it take to bring on a new geological age? According to members of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, one way of going about it would be to:

1. Change the atmosphere's composition, thus modifying plants
2. Change the distribution and diversity of species, thereby changing the future fossil record
3. Acidify the oceans, which will modify mineral deposits on the ocean floor

Sound familiar? Yes, you guessed it – maybe this is the new geological age.

The suggestion that the overtaking of planet Earth by one species – humans – kicked off a new age was first made by Paul Crutzen in 2002. Crutzen, a Nobel prize-winning chemist, said we should now consider that we are living in the Anthropocene, an age dominated by human activities.

Since then, his term has caught on. Stick it in Google and you get over 42,000 hits. It's got its own Wikipedia entry. Scientists are using it – the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme recently published a document with a chapter devoted to it. (Bill Gates hasn't caught on though – my spellchecker doesn't recognise it.)

In spite of all this, and the apparent logic behind it, declaring the advent of a new geological age is no small matter. So although we may all – and I include scientists in that "we" – be perfectly happy to talk about the evils and blessings of the Anthropocene, we will not officially be living in it until a group of scientists at the International Union of Geological Sciences puts their seal on the term.

And that won't happen – if indeed it does – for several more years.

To kick-start the process of formalising the term, Jan Zalasiewicz and his colleagues at the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London have laid down their case in favour. Their defence is featured on the cover of the February 2008 issue of GSA Today, published by the Geological Society of America.

To some, it may seem obvious that humans are massively changing the environment, but what Zalasiewicz had to do was show that 10, 100, 500 million years down the line, if you were to slice through a chunk of sediment you would be able to identify a distinct layer that corresponds to our reign on Earth.

The group says there is enough evidence around to suggest this will be the case. Ocean acidification, if it continues, could bring an end to corals which will change the nature of ocean rocks. Humans activities have triggered huge amounts of erosion, generating a new layer of sediment.

Widespread agriculture is replacing natural vegetation with large expanses of single crops. Cutting down forests, draining marshlands and peat bogs, transforming the prairies have pushed out the animal and plant species that live there and caused them to go extinct. All of the above will mean that one day, the fossil record of our time will look very different to the pre-Anthropocene record.

If indeed we are now in a new age, when did it begin? That's a bit tricky, seeing as it is too early to study the physical slice of sediment and find the bottom of that distinctive new layer in a form that can be recognised around the world. (I'm picturing the geologists of the future pulling out sediment cores looking for the layer of plastic debris that marks the Anthropocene.)

So Zalasiewicz says the date should be set to 1800, because that's when human population hit 1 billion and started to grow at an alarming rate and when a number of changes associated with industrialisation suddenly took off.

The team doesn't go so far as saying that we are in a new era – although they caution that a mass extinction brought about by humans would be an argument in favour of that. Instead, they are just arguing for a new epoch (a sub-division of an era). So bye bye Holocene, but the Quaternary stays.

I'm tempted to wonder how anyone could object to formalising the Anthropocene. Most scientists agree that human activities are driving widespread environmental changes that reach down to the bottom of the seas, high up into the atmosphere, and from pole to pole. But there will no doubt be objections, the main one amongst them being, possibly, that it is simply too soon to say.

After all, stratigraphy experts normally spend their time defining epochs that are long gone. New epochs haven't exactly been defined "live" before.

Besides, who knows – if the governments of the world get their acts together and we all start tightening those carbon purse strings, maybe, just maybe, we could manage to stay in the Holocene after all?

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

A paper caught my eye this week, thanks to its sheer provocativeness.

Marc Davidson of the philosophy department at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has decided to compare the rhetoric used by US climate "deniers" to that of early 19th century congressional debates on the abolition of slavery.

Davidson claims that historical hindsight shows how preposterous the claims made in favour of slavery were. He suggests they bear striking resemblance to claims made against taking any action on climate change by contemporary members of Congress.

The implication is that some years down the line, in a century or two perhaps, the comments of climate "deniers" will seem just as shocking as those of the slave owners of the 1800s.

What are the comments and how similar are they really? I'll let you judge for yourself. The full text of the paper is available here, though you may have to pay to access it.

Here is a sample:

On the uncertain benefits of the abolition of slavery:

"...the course of [the abolitionists] whose precipitate and ignorant zeal would overturn the fundamental institutions of society, uproar its peace and endanger its security, in pursuit of a distant and shadowy good, of which they themselves have formed no definite conception."
(in: Simms 1852, p 98)

Davidson compares this to the words of current US congressmen who mention the "inconclusive and often contradictory" nature of climate science.

On the cost of change:

"Their [the slaves'] value, at $400, average, (and they are now worth more than that,) would amount to upwards of 900 millions. The value of their annual increase, alone is 24 millions of dollars; so that to free them in 100 years, without the expense of taking them from the country, would require an annual appropriation of between 33 and 34 millions of dollars. The thing is physically impossible."
(James Henry Hammond, senator of South Carolina, 1836)

Davidson compares this to the often cited concerns that limiting greenhouse gas emissions will harm the US economy.

The crux of Davidson's argument is that the US economy now relies on oil in much the same way as the economy of the Southern States relied on slaves 200 years ago – as a key source of energy.

Although the quotes from the earlier congressmen are shocking, I'm not convinced the comparison is helpful. For starters, climate change and slavery cannot be compared. The former is a self-imposed "slavery" to a mineral source of energy; the latter an imposed slavery of one group of humans to another.

And although I agree there is also a moral imperative to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, just as there was a moral imperative to the abolition of slavery, I do not believe morals and ethics are what will win the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It is no coincidence that the Stern Review received far more press than the UN Development Programme's 2007 report "Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world". Political decisions are based on money, not morals.

That does not mean that morals should be ignored – just that the clever policymaker will make economic arguments to serve a moral purpose.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: climate change

I would never want to shoot a polar bear with anything more deadly than a tranquiliser dart. (The picture shows me cuddling up to a bear made comatose in just that way during research on the Canadian tundra near Churchill.) And yet I find myself on the side of Canadian Inuit in a stand-off with US greens on precisely that issue.

US environmentalists have been lobbying the Bush administration to declare the polar bear an endangered species. This is part of their campaign to shame Bush on climate change. But this week Inuit groups in Canada denounced the tactic. They said declaring the polar bear endangered will stop American hunters going north to bag a bear and then bringing the pelt home.

Now I have no brief for American hunters. But the fact is that they pay well to shed animal blood on the ice. And the isolated Inuit communities of the Canadian Arctic charge them $30,000 per bear for the privilege.

Is this a threat to the species? Not right now. The hunting is tightly controlled, and last year trophy hunters shot just 120 of the animals. The world bear population is about 25,000.

What it does do is help the Inuit to maintain their cultural traditions of tracking animals out on the tundra. A culture that, at other times, greens claim they want to defend.

The best way of protecting both the bears and Inuit culture is to enable the Inuit to profit from the (otherwise rather inconvenient) man-eating animals roaming their lands. In conservation jargon: "use it or lose it".

Tourism is one way to do this. Around Churchill, where I got to cuddle my comatose bears a few years back, tourism is the main economic activity these days. But, especially further north, hunting is another. Even those of us with no desire to go round the world killing things should recognise that it may be a sound conservation strategy.

It has always struck me that greens come in two kinds. Those motivated by animal rights and those determined that humans make sustainable use of natural resources. It's less romantic, but my instincts are with the latter group.

Big environment groups like Greenpeace and WWF are very good at creating a coalition between the two groups. And there is no shame in that. But we should not pretend that there are not occasions where the two motivations diverge. And hunting is one.

There may come a time when it is necessary to stop all hunting of the polar bear in order to save the species. But to do so would be to sacrifice part of the way of life of the Inuit. Human rights matter, too. So let us not do it lightly. Let us, at the least, not do it as part of a private war with George W Bush.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

News of a regular flight that will ferry scientists from Australia to Antarctica has peppered worldwide media over the weekend, but is the event that unusual? Well, not really.

On Friday, an Airbus A319 owned by the Australian government landed the Australian environment minister and former rock star Peter Garrett, along with a handful of scientists, onto Antarctica.

It set down on a truly renewable runway made of laser-levelled snow and ice. Total flight-time from Hobart, Australia: just over 4 hours. The flight will now happen once a week, and the Australian Antarctic Division says it expects each flight to carry 20 to 25 people, depending on the scientists' needs.



Sound crazy? It isn't really: the UK's British Antarctic Survey has five aircraft, one of which is a Dash-7 that carries out regular flights between the Falkland Islands, Chile, and Antarctica during the summer research season.

The US also have several aircraft and operate even more frequent flights. One of our reporters, Anil Ananthaswamy recently took one of their flights and has been sending us his news from way down under.

And even tourists can fly to Antarctica – although admittedly that activity remains the preserve of the ultra-rich. Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions is a private company with the expertise to take members of the public to the South Pole and its environs, and has a flight schedule that runs into 2009. It'll cost you up to $60,000 for a 60-day expedition. A week-long trip is a mere $20,000.

If you're a bit strapped for cash (but still have a few grand to spare) you can always fly over the continent without touching down. You might not see much from that middle seat, though...

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: Antarctica, flights

It may be the world's cheapest car, but is this the direction that India's promising engineering industry should be taking?

Tata Motors this week launched the Tata Nano, a compact, shoe-boxy sort of car, with four tiny wheels and one wing mirror.

Environmentalists are already crying murder, saying that this will just encourage more pollution and congestion in a nation that is already suffering severely from both. So I thought I would have a quick look at how things stack up.

The Tata Nano will meet European emissions standards on exhaust. If you want to see details, check out the Euro IV line in this table. Bear in mind that exhaust emissions standards regulate the particles that make up smog, not emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (which the EU does not currently regulate, although it's trying).

The numbers come out in favour of the Tata Nano. Euro IV standards are more stringent than those in place for the motorcycles and scooters, which make up a big chunk of India's motorised traffic.

For instance, according to the Indian Federation of Automobile Dealers Association and the Society for Indian Automobile Manufacturers, the 2005 standards for two-wheelers limited carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon, and NOx emissions to 1.5 g/km travelled – compare that to just 0.5 g/km (carbon monoxide) and 0.3 g/km (hydrocarbon and NOx) under Euro IV.

But look at fuel efficiency and the balance is flipped. Tata's Nano travels 21 km for every litre of fuel it is fed, compared to up to 80 km/l you could achieve with a two-wheeler. That means not only a larger bill for the owner, but also more CO₂ chucked into the atmosphere.

So, the Nano will bring less ground-level pollution but more greenhouse gases. Ideally, you would want to see less of both (which is for instance what the Vikram electric 3-wheeler, pictured left, offered).

Still, maybe this is the first of a new wave of ingenious new car models to be produced in India. Given the nation's considerable engineering workforce, and the growing demand for green transportation, it could be lucrative for Indian companies to start shifting their attentions to supplying the world with new environmentally friendly forms of transportation.

Tata is a massive company, but so far its only environmental line of business is a joint venture in solar energy with BP. Time for a change?

Catherine Brahic, online environment reproter

Last year we wrote about the polar bear cub called Knut, who was hand-reared by staff at Berlin Zoo after his mother rejected him. Largely because he was cute to the power of ten, Knut became an international celebrity and a major source of income for the zoo.

However, an animal rights activist named Frank Albrecht, together with experts from several German zoos, was quoted as saying that the zoo had been wrong to rear Knut in this way, as he would never become a 'normal' adult, and that he should have been put down after being rejected. This prompted a media storm, with the activist ultimately receiving death threats.

Now Nuremberg Zoo has found itself in a similar position. Two of their female polar bears, Vera and Vilma, gave birth a few weeks ago. In contrast to Berlin Zoo's approach, the zoo announced that, should they reject their cubs, no action would be taken to save them. Following an inspection of the bears' habitat on Monday, the zoo reported that Vilma has eaten her cubs - a common behaviour in polar bears if their offspring are ill. Yesterday it became clear that Vera was disturbed, and the zoo decided to remove her cub to hand-rear it after all.

Female polar bears like to rear their babies in seclusion, and often reject them if they are disturbed. Consequently, the zoo's staff avoided entering the cave where the mothers are living, and do not even know how many cubs were born. The zoo's deputy head, Helmut Maegdefrau, said earlier: "If we were to go in, we would disturb them and make it more likely that something goes wrong."

It may seem heartless, but the laissez-faire approach was actually a return to normal policy. For instance, in December 2006, Leipzig Zoo put down a rejected baby sloth. Frank Albrecht then brought a legal action against them, arguing that they had an obligation to keep the animal alive. The zoo won this case by arguing that hand-rearing the cub would be unnatural. It was this, says Albrecht, that prompted him to make his comments about Knut. He says he was not calling for Knut to be killed, but rather criticising Leipzig Zoo's decision. Unfortunately for Albrecht, his comments were apparently taken out of context.

For me, the story highlights how tricky it can be to breed animals, particularly wide-ranging carnivores like polar bears, in captivity. Hand-reared animals often don't display the behaviours they need to survive in the wild, and may be more susceptible to diseases if released. In that context, Nuremberg Zoo may have done the sensible thing by trying to ensure that the cubs are reared by a polar bear, rather than by a human. Surely, the best thing is for the cubs to be raised by their natural mother, who will teach them the correct repertoire of skills. But I must admit, I'd still struggle to let the cubs die - and it seems the zoo staff felt the same way.

Michael Marshall, online editorial assistant

Labels: endangered species

Last month, the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) smothered an attempt, put forward by the state of California and at least 15 other states, to limit their own carbon dioxide emissions. The EPA said there wasn't sufficient evidence that CO₂ was a threat to public health. California has now announced it will sue the EPA over its decision.

Now, new research from Stanford University shows that CO₂ emissions will kill an additional 1,000 US citizens every year for every 1 °C rise in temperature they cause. The deaths will be concentrated in urban areas, and because of its large population and number of big cities, 30% of the deaths will be in California.

Air pollutants are regulated federally, so in order to regulate their emissions, the states need a waiver from the EPA.

Why was the waiver denied? Allegedly because the states had failed to prove the "extraordinary and compelling conditions" that were required in order for the EPA to grant it. The EPA noted that, under the Clean Air Act, it has to be shown that a specific pollutant is likely to endanger public health for the agency to regulate it.

It appears the EPA does not feel there is sufficient scientific evidence that CO₂ will significantly endanger lives in the US.

In fairness, the immediate health effects of CO₂ and climate change are outside the US. Instead they will hit poor countries that have minimal public health services and are ill-equipped to deal with diseases such as AIDS and malaria that are already decimating their populations, let alone the seemingly distant concerns of more drought, reduced nutrition, and growing malarial zones – all predicted effects of rising global temperatures.

So it is no small wonder that Mark Jacobson, a researcher at the University of Stanford in California, is keen to get his latest findings out. He has calculated that for every 1 °C rise in temperature, an additional 1000 US citizens will die every year of diseases related to air pollution (at a global level, the estimate is 21,600 per year.)

These deaths are not caused directly by rising temperatures. They are over and above the number of people who are expected to die from causes such as heatstroke and other heat-related conditions.

In 2003, the World Health Organization estimated that 20,000 had died in the European heatwave that summer, while another study found that industrial CO₂ emissions had made such a heatwave at least twice as likely to occur that year (Nature, vol 432, p 610).

Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and their numbers are predicted to keep on rising. A researcher at Harvard University in the US has shown that this will lead to a higher death toll that will not be offset by fewer deaths during warmer winters. This is because most homes and offices have heating, but significantly fewer are equipped with air-conditioners.

But the EPA is not responsible for deaths from heat. What Jacobson has focused on are the people who will die from air pollution as a result of rising CO₂.

Using a new computer model which he has been fine tuning for 18 years and includes many finer details of atmospheric circulation that are not included in other models, Jacobson found that rising CO₂ causes ground-level ozone in urban areas to rise as well.

Ground-level ozone causes and worsens respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, emphysema and asthma. "[It] is a very corrosive gas, it erodes rubber and statues," says Jacobson. "It cracks tyres. So you can imagine what it does to your lungs in high enough concentrations."

It's back to the EPA, then. This, of course is the agency that was instructed by the Supreme Court last year to rethink its refusal to regulate CO₂ emissions…

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Greenhouse gas emissions may be going up but most of us, most of the time, are breathing cleaner air than we did 20 years ago. Why? Because cars are now fitted with catalytic converters to strip out a range of noxious nasties that once created acid smogs in our cities.

But up in the Arctic, they are feeling a nasty blowback from cleaning up our urban air.

Catalytic converters filter our pollutants from exhausts using two metals: palladium and platinum. World demand for both has soared as a result, with catalytic converters taking almost half of current product from mines.

Most of the palladium comes from Siberian mines and is refined at the world’s biggest, and most notoriously polluting, metals smelters at a godforsaken spot called Norilsk, a closed Russian city on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

The Norilsk smelters are the biggest concentrated source of sulphur dioxide pollution on the planet.

Sulphur dioxide makes acid rain. And for hundreds of kilometres round Norilsk, the trees of the tundra are dead because of the acid fallout. In effect we are destroying huge areas of Arctic tundra with acid rain, so the rest of the world can keep its city air clean.

The smelters are so spectacularly inefficient that they also release large amounts of palladium up the stacks. One recent study suggests the metals fallout onto the tundra is so great it may soon be worth mining the soils!

And what about the other metal essential for catalytic converters, platinum? Winning this from the Earth is not so environmentally damaging, but it takes a big toll in human lives.

Three-quarters of the world's platinum is mined in South Africa, where it is now a bigger business than gold mining. South Africa's mines have always been dangerous places. That is partly a result of their often great depth, as I discovered in a trip down a gold mine there last year.

But the death toll is now turning into a major scandal, as people wake up to the fact that the end of apartheid did little to make the mines safer places to work.

Miners went on strike in December in protest at a death toll that rose to over 200 last year. And the conglomerate Anglo Platinum recently shut down its biggest platinum mine, the world’s largest, and fired its CEO in an effort to address the problem.

My lungs, and yours, are cleaner and healthier as a result of all this. But I can’t say that it helps me breathe more easily.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint