Members of the US Olympic team came under fire earlier this week for embarrassing their Chinese hosts... by parading through Beijing airport with anti-smog masks covering their faces from ear to ear.

But with the Games' Opening Ceremonies less than a day away, the question remains whether such precautions are a good idea, or worthy of the apology the team members later made to Chinese officials.

One thing that is clear, however, is that the emergency anti-pollution measures enacted on 20 July - pulling half the cars off Beijing's streets, halting construction, shutting down factories - are having little to no effect on the city's pollution levels.

A frequently-updated chart of the city's Air Pollution Index (API), compiled by researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of Rhode Island in the US, has found no correlation between the emergency measures and the air quality. In fact, pollution levels nearly doubled in the first week following the 20th, before subsiding.

The reason, says Kenneth Rahn of the University of Rhode Island, has everything to do with wind, and little to do with local pollution prevention measures.

So long as the winds continue to blow out of the south - where the forest of coal-fired plants that powers Beijing is located - air quality in Beijing will continue to worsen, until northern winds out of Mongolia clear the skies. It's a pattern that repeats itself about every two weeks during the summer, and as the Games are about to begin, Beijing is one week into foul air buildup.

But just how bad are pollution levels in the city right now? It depends on who you ask. Most days the API has remained below 100, the magic safe number, as determined by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection.

Yet each country's measurement of API is a little different, making it hard to say just how foul things really are. BeijingAirblog does a good job of converting Beijing's figures to US and Hong Kong API measurements. It finds that the city's current air pollution would register as moderate in the US and, surprisingly, high in Hong Kong.

Walking through central Beijing on Monday afternoon - early in the current week-long pollution buildup - I found pea-soup skies and a sun that disappeared behind a thick haze at 5:30, nearly two hours before actual sunset.

If I were an athlete, I think I'd make whatever apologies were necessary, but give them through the best mask I could find on any days I didn't see blue skies overhead. Still, I wouldn't be pointing any fingers; I doubt the API of Los Angeles in 1984 was much better than today's Beijing.

Phil McKenna, Beijing

Labels: pollution

Caffeine, chocolate and alcohol - forget them. I might as well face it, I'm totally addicted to clothes and buying them gives me a real kick.

Of course, I've always known that this addiction doesn't help my bank balance (nor the tidiness of my flat) – but I'd never really thought about the environmental impact of clothes – until I met Rebecca Earley, a "green" clothes designer. Read my interview with her and you'll find out what makes many of the clothes we wear environmentally unfriendly, and what textile designers like Becky can do about it.

So what about my addiction to new clothes? To my delight, Becky told me of ways that I could acquire new clothes – without actually buying them. It's a boon for me, my boyfriend (who now has more wardrobe space), my bank manager – and, of course, the environment. And she also had lots of helpful tips for greening the wardrobe I already have.

How to get new clothes without buying them:

• Redesign the clothes you've already got. Cut into the neck line of that green top or cut off the sleeves of the yellow one. Cut the bottom off the long black skirt or pink trousers. Print over the T-shirt you haven’t worn since you were 12, dye those white trousers and that bridesmaid's dress. Add details to all – from buttons and badges to ribbons. (If you're totally sewing-illiterate, you could take your item to a seamstress/tailor.)
• Re-organise outfits. Put together items (including accessories) you've never worn together before. Layer clothes. Put them on back-to-front or upside-down or inside-out. In Becky's words, "buy less, and style more".
• Swap clothes. Invite friends and family round (making sure some of them are people whose clothes you like, and who are the same size) and exchange clothes over a few glasses of wine (OK, I lied – I have a slight addiction to alcohol too). Ply your best friend with alcohol until she gives you that top you've always wanted.
• Tidy up your wardrobe and underneath your desk at work. You never know what you might find lurking there – perhaps a pair of trousers you had forgotten all about.

And to minimise the impact of your existing clothes on the environment:

• Don't wash something just because you've worn it once – wait until you really need to wash it (your friends and colleagues will remind you). Think: can that little bit of ketchup be sponged off? Cut neckline or armpit holes lower.
• If you really do need to wash, do it at 30 °C.
• Don’t tumble dry. Use clothes racks and lines instead (this might even save you from having to iron them!).
• Rather than throwing something away because it's got an imperfection – like a tiny hole – try and repair it with a patch, or a needle and thread.

And if you really, really can't give up buying clothes then try to:

• Avoid whimsical buying – sleep on it instead. Your mood might be different tomorrow and you might not like it anymore.
• Only buy clothes that are going to last – not just the night, but the whole season and longer.
• Try to avoid patent leather and turquoise – they're both extremely polluting (real turquoise dyes contain copper that gets released in to the environment with the waste water).
• Buy polyester (it needs less laundering) or organic cotton. Plenty of brands are now using the latter – try American Apparel and Marks and Sparks.
• Buy secondhand clothes from charity shops or eBay.
• If all else fails, find something else to feed your addiction: perhaps exercise?

So, if you see someone walking down the street with a ketchup-slopped, BO-stained, back-to-front top and a pair of sawn-offs inside out... it might well be me. But at least my conscience will be clean. And who knows – after some practice – I may even look as glamorous as Becky Earley.

For more information on how to green your wardrobe, try Treehugger or the Pesticide Action Network. Here's a whole list of books that might be of interest; Tamsin Blanchard's Green is the New Black is particularly good.

Has anyone else got tips on how to dress "green"?

Lucy Middleton, New Scientist researcher

Labels: clothes, environment, fashion, pollution, recycle

Green books are the latest publishing craze. I have my own coming out in February, telling some of the stories behind this blog. It's called Confessions of an Eco Sinner, since you asked. But how "green" is the publication of all those green books?

In my last blog post, I came clean about the carbon footprint involved in researching the book. This week I went to see my British publisher, Random House, which publishes Eden Project Books, to firm up details about the environmental impact of the book's publication.

The good news is the book will have the logo of the Forest Stewardship Council on the back. The FSC is the leading certifier of sustainable timber. Some greens grumble about how rigorous it is. But I think this alliance of the timber trade and mainstream environment groups like WWF has a generally good track record in outlawing forest destruction and promoting replanting.

My book will also be printed on paper made from Russian FSC-certified wood at the Anajala mill in Finland, owned by local paper giant Stora Enso. And, far from being printed in the Far East, as many books are these days, it will hit the presses about 140 kilometres from London in Bungay in Suffolk, courtesy of the printing company Clays.

But what's the carbon footprint? No product seems to be complete without one, these days. I bought a packet of crisps the other day that had a label declaring that the carbon emissions from when the farmer planted the potato to when the packet was delivered to the supermarket were 75 grammes.

But books - even green books - haven't got that far yet. Random House in the UK told me it had a carbon footprint of slightly under 7000 tonnes a year.

More than half of that is down to gas and electricity in its offices. As regards the nitty-gritty of making and moving books, it only covers emissions from the time the company receives books from the printer to the time it delivers them to the warehouses of Amazon or Waterstones or whoever.

So Random House's corporate footprint is far less than the footprint of its books. Some might wonder about the legitimacy of that. But, in reality it is hard to know where corporate responsibility should begin and end.

And what about the role of the readers?

I have always assumed that buying a book via the Internet - from Amazon, say - would use less energy than going to a local bookstore. After all, you cut out all the energy used in lighting and heating the shop, not to mention fuel to travel to the bookstore and back.

But, in Japan at least, it seems that the opposite may be true. I recently spotted a paper by Eric Williams of the United Nations University in Tokyo on the green credentials of on-line book buying.

"E-commerce uses considerably more energy per book than conventional retail in dense urban areas," Williams concluded. Typically it used 5.6 megajoules per book, compared to 5.2 megajoules. Depending on your fuel, that might amount to a bit over 400 grams of CO₂.

The main reason for e-commerce's poor performance, says Williams, is the packaging. That and the fact that most people who buy books at bookstores do so as part of a bigger shopping expedition. So even driving to the bookshop may be responsible for fewer emissions than the courier van. Only in rural areas does e-commerce work out best.

Fred Pearce, senior environment reporter

Labels: earth, environment, freds-footprint, pollution, recycling

Several recent studies have drawn a link between sex, climate change and environmental pollution. Here's a round-up of these and a few more.

Polar bear penis bones are shrinking in Eastern Greenland, according to Christian Sonne of the University of Aarhus in Denmark and colleagues. They found that polar bears living in the Eastern Greenland are somewhat less well endowed than their cousins in Svalbard and the Canadian Arctic. They say this could be due to the high prevalence of pollutants such as PCBs and DDT in Eastern Greenland - pollutants which records show are less prevalent in Svalbard and the Canadian Arctic.

In 2004, Steven Fergusson of the University of Manitoba in Canada showed that carnivores living in snowy environments, close to the poles, tend to have longer penis bones to help them be more competitive.

So Sonne's group concludes that human pollution, combined with the difficulty of finding food in warming climates, may spell disaster for Eastern Greenland polar bears.

Male birds rule the roost

By and large there are one third more male birds out there than females, according to a new study by Paul Donald of the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This is despite the fact that as many hatchlings of each sex born. So the researchers conclude that unlike humans, female birds must have shorter life expectancies than males.

The finding is bad news for conservation efforts, which often estimate the size of populations by counting the number of males - it seems threatened birds might be even more thin on the ground than previously thought. Strikingly, the researchers also found that the sex ratio was even greater in threatened species.

Turtles go the distance

Female loggerhead turtles in Florida, US, increasingly rely on long-distance relationships with males in North Carolina, according to research our of the University of Exeter in the UK. That's because the sex of the loggerhead hatchlings is determined by the temperature at which the egg is incubated: warmer temperatures yield females, cooler ones yield males. So warming temperatures in the US mean that southern populations of loggerheads are increasingly dominated by females.

Bearded dragon sex switched by heat

Similarly, the sex Australian central bearded dragons can be "switched" by heat. A team of researchers led by Alex Quinn at Canberra University in Australia recently incubated eggs at relatively high temperatures – between 34°C and 37°C and found that the majority of embryos that had ZZ sex chromosomes (genetically male), went on to hatch as females. The team is worried that the lizards may not be able to adapt fast enough to warming temperatures, leading to males being wiped-out altogether.

Penguins and post-El Niño stress disorder

It seems that Galápagos penguin may suffer from post-El Niño stress disorder. After the strong El Niño events of 1982–83 and 1997–98 populations declined by more than 60%, according to F. Hernán Vargas of the University of Oxford and colleagues. They also looked at what this means for the future of the species and found a 30% chance it will disappear entirely within 100 years, if El Niño events keep happening with the same frequency. If, however, the frequency increases, as predicted by some climatologists, the risk becomes greater. A doubling of the strong events leads to an 80% of extinction within 100 years.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: climate change, environment, pollution, sex