Climate Change

Last week Chancellor Birgeneau announced that that the Berkeley campus has committed to reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2014 — six years earlier than the target set by California Assembly Bill 32, the Global Solutions Warming Act. The chancellor made the announcement at the campus's fourth annual Sustainability Summit to an enthusiastic audience that packed the Wells Fargo Room in the Haas School of Business.

While visiting Beijing this past spring, I found myself gazing up at the city's impressive high-rise landscape one morning and suddenly realizing that I had seen neither the sun nor the sky since arriving. The natural tendency is to explain such a vanishing act as due to inclement weather or some other unique atmospheric condition. The reality is, however, that the penumbra that hangs so persistently over most Chinese cities is man-made, caused by a combination of emissions from coal-fired factories and power plants (a new power plant is brought online somewhere in China each week); the rapidly growing number of private cars and commercial vehicles (China produced only 640,000 private cars in 2000, but by 2005 it was producing 3.1 million); and the dust and sand that blows down from the deserts of Xinjiang and the steppes of Mongolia, turning Beijing's all-too-few spring rain showers into mud baths.

By studying alpine lilies and sunflowers, Berkeley scientist John Harte has uncovered a serious flaw in climate change predictions.

Barriers to overcoming global warming are as much psychological as scientific.