Australia pulls plug on old bulbs

It's awesome to know this though I think it would be much better if Australia ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Also, there is an excellent website, Earth-Info. Take a look.

News comes from: BBC.

Australia has announced plans to ban incandescent light bulbs and replace them with more energy efficient fluorescent bulbs.

The environment minister said the move could cut the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 4 million tonnes by 2012.

"It's a little thing but it's a massive change," Malcolm Turnbull said.

The decision will make Australia the first country to ban the light bulbs, although the idea has also been proposed in the US state of California.

Fluorescent first

Mr Turnbull said that he hoped the rest of the world would follow Australia's lead in banning the traditional bulbs.

"If the whole world switches to these bulbs today, we would reduce our consumption of electricity by an amount equal to five times Australia's annual consumption of electricity," he said.

The incandescent light bulb, which wastes energy in heat dispersed while the light is switched on, is based on a design invented in the 19th century by engineers including Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan.

The bulbs will be completely phased out by 2010 and replaced with the more fuel efficient compact fluorescent models which use around 20% of the electricity to produce the same amount of light.

Matt Prescott of the UK-based Ban the Bulb campaign said he was delighted that Australia and California are moving forward on this issue, which he highlighted in an article for the BBC News website a year ago.

"I'm now hoping that Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Howard make firm commitments to support these proposals, explore other energy saving technologies which are already available and enable their economies to reduce their carbon emissions, save money and benefit from rapid innovation," he said.

Green campaigners and the opposition party in Australia picked up the same theme, suggesting that ratifying the Kyoto Protocol would be a more powerful way for the country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

"The major producers of emissions in this country are not individuals, they're governments and business," Peter Garrett, the opposition's environment spokesman, said.

The warmest January

This news comes from Yahoo!

Now we know the global warming is getting more and more serious. Every of us has the responsibility to care about the issue and do something to slow global warming down (and even stop it).

This is our only home. How and where could we survive without it?



Below shows the news from Yahoo!

The average global temperature last month was the highest for any January on record, according to NOAA, climbing to 55.13 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 1.53 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average.The global reading, an average of measurements taken over land and sea, beat out the previous record for a January, set in 2002 at 54.88 degrees.Land temperatures especially peaked at a record-high 3.40 degrees warmer than average.

Global Map of January Temperature Departures

The warm January was at least partly the result of an El Niño weather pattern that began last September and continued into January, combined with the continuing global warming trend, NOAA reported today. The most unusually warm temperatures were measured in the Northern Hemisphere, far from the equator. Large parts of Eastern Europe and Russia experienced temperatures more than 8 degrees above average, and temperatures more than 5 degrees above average occurred in much of Canada. The snow cover in January in Europe and Asia was the second lowest on record.

The warming was less pronounced in the 48 contiguous United States, where the average January temperature was just under 1 degree above the 20th century average.Scientists say no single weather event or warm month can be blamed on global warming, but that more extreme conditions are likely as the planet's climate changes and strings of warm months are indeed evidence of climate change.

Video: Goldilocks and the Greenhouse

An upper-level wind pattern brought warmer-than-average temperatures to the East and colder-than-average temperatures to the southern Plains states and much of the West. Hundreds of daily low temperature records were broken during a mid-January cold snap in Arizona and southern California.

Snowfall was below average in most of the Rockies, meaning that water supplies could plummet later this year. Drought is already occurring in 25 percent of the contiguous United States, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, at the end of January. Droughts are worst now in southern Texas, Wyoming, the western High Plains and northern Minnesota.

Last year was a record warm year in the United States. The past nine years are all among the 25 warmest on record for the contiguous United States, a streak unprecedented in records dating back to 1896. Scientists say 2007 could be the warmest yet globally.（Yahoo!）