Good effort, and some is better than none, but missing the point. Where are the stats about the perchlorate and particulate matter generated? Or about increases in both the days after such an event? 

Happy New Year, everyone! Thank you for reading Envirostats. May your year be full of good health, green joy and prosperity. [Envirostats author] 

The City of Sydney New Year’s Eve fireworks display is regarded as the largest and most technologically advanced annual fireworks display on the planet.

* The display draws larger crowds than in New York, London, Paris or Berlin, with more than a million people watching from the Sydney Harbour foreshore.

* Fifteen months of design, planning and preparation for the Bridge Effect.

* Approximately 11,000 shells, 10,000 shooting comets, and a total of 100,000 individual pyrotechnic effects will be incorporated into the display.

* 112 firing points on the Sydney Harbour Bridge itself

* More than 60,000 metres of wires and cables are required to interface with the computers to launch the display

* Fourteen 20 foot shipping containers full of pyrotechnic equating to 112,000kg of equipment.

* A pyrotechnic crew of 40.

* The fireworks on the Bridge and barges are fully digitally launched, requiring 12 computers that will shoot a total of 9,200 cues.

* The 9pm show will use four fireworks barges.

* There are seven barges for the midnight show, including the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

* Fireworks will be seen off eight city rooftops.

* The 2007 Bridge Effect, designed by Brian Thomson and bridge lighting display by Martin Kinnane, is approximately 36m x 36m and weighs more than 40 tonne. It is installed on the bridge in approximately 22 nights over a three month period.

* 9,000m of rope light will be used to construct the effect. It is attached to a panel and truss system which uses over 50,000 cable ties.

* Programming the effect takes a year of planning and five days on-site using over 300 individual circuits.

* More than 4km of power cable is required to power the effect which will use up to 25,000kw of green power from set up to dismantle.

* The fireworks display is designed by Sydney’s Foti International Fireworks. This is the sixth year in a row that the company has been involved in the event. The Fireworks Director for the midnight fireworks is Fortunato Foti and Tino Pangallo for the 9pm Family Fireworks.

The City is doing it’s best to ensure a greener Sydney New Year’s Eve as part of the City’s continuing commitment to a sustainable future by:

• Using GreenPower, which will save approximately 60 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year;
• Recovering and recycling 80 per cent of rubbish collected from the event;
• Using recycled water collected from the City’s rainwater tanks, recycling plants and pits for street cleaning after the event;
• Distributing personal ashtrays on the night to help reduce littering of cigarette butts;
• Nominating WWF-Australia as the official Charity of 2007 Sydney New Year’s Eve. Their vision is to save life on Earth and create a future in which humans live in harmony with nature.

New Year’s Eve is a time for everyone to think about our future and take action to fight global warming.

On the night, please consider the environment by placing your rubbish in the bins provided or taking it with you and disposing of your cigarette butts in the bin.

Please also leave the car at home and catch public transport, walk or cycle.

- City of Sydney, official PDF, Dec 23 2007

Methane (CH4) has the global warming potential of 21 compared to CO2, meaning a given mass of methane does 21-23 times the global warming damage to the atmosphere as the equivalent mass of CO2, or in another comparison, it’d take 21-23 times the mass of CO2 to do the same damage as a given mass of methane.

Animal flatulence, as well as human, deliver a significant amount of methane, and thus greenhouse gases, to world GHG emissions. The story was about scientists trying to get farm animal stomachs to work the same way as kangaroo stomachs and eliminate methane from those animals’ flatulence.  [Envirostats author]

- Athol Klieve, a senior research scientist with the Queensland state government, via Yahoo!, Dec 5 2007

Doomsday tourism, eh? Nice term. It’s a fine difference to eco-tourism, where you just want to see natural sites. Here, you want to see natural sites that is not predicted to remain for long. 

An interesting story about the eco-tourist boom of those rushing to see sites that are changing so fast they may disappear and never be seen as they were. Most of these are ice disappearing in one form or another, or sea levels rising. Let’s hope those who are rushing there are doing so responsibly so these sites are not gone sooner than would be otherwise without their presence!

Antarctica: the Müller ice shelf and the Larsen ice shelf are shrinking dramatically.

Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania: global warming is blamed for melting of the year-round snows at the summit of Africa’s highest mountain. They could be gone in 15 years.

The Arctic ice cap: the melting of icebergs and ice caps in the Arctic is blamed on global warming and threatens the habitats of species such as polar bears.

The Maldives: rising sea levels (3½in per year) could make these 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean uninhabitable within 100 years.

Venice: the Italian city is sinking into the Adriatic and rising sea levels could make things worse.

Alaska: American travel agents report thousands heading for the shrinking glaciers and melting permafrost.

Great Barrier Reef, Australia: it’s been predicted that rising water temperatures, which are bleaching the famously vivid reefs, will kill 95 per cent of the living coral by 2050.

Kitzbuhel, Austria: the home of the world’s most fearsome ski run is among low-lying Alpine ski resorts whose long-term futures are threatened by rising temperatures - on average the warmest they have been for 1,250 years.

Galapagos Islands: rising water temperatures are bleaching coral and causing the deaths of marine species.

Patagonia: South American glaciers are also retreating.

According to the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators, more than 37,000 tourists visited the continent last year - double the number five years ago. A third came from America, while the second largest contingent - one in seven visitors - travelled from Britain. “There definitely is a rush to see and explore the world before it changes,” said Matt Kareus, of Natural Habitat, which operates excursions to Antarctica.

Interesting. We Canadians flock to warmer weather. Going to Antartica isn’t exactly our style, though, mind you, I personally took a half day vacation last winter to photograph Halifax harbour freezing in -36C windchill. We’ve got the deepest ice free unfrozen natural harbour in the world, in case you didn’t know. Besides, we Canadians have got the North Pole so why go to the South Pole?

At least we’ve got the North Pole for now.

Merry Christmas again! [Envirostats author]

- Eco-tourism story via The Telegraph, Dec 23 2007

Office paper wastage is by no means solely an Australian problem. See Stats 0494, 0495 and 0496 for other similar office paper usage trends, although they are not exactly the same so a direct comparison can’t be done, but the gist of it is well seen. However, in North America, office paper recycling is about 32.5% by weight in Stat 0486, when all the recycled paper usage is averaged out. Perhaps that’s why the Paper-less campaign is on in Australia that was the source site from which these statistics were found.

Recycling one tonne of paper (in Australia) would save 17 trees, 31,000 litres of water and 4,100 kWh of electricity.
- Department of Environment and Conservation (NSW) 2007

I added the “in Australia” in the statistic above that I did not post as a headline statistic because I know making paper in different places require different amounts of resources due to a variety of factors, from transportation to climate for growing the trees to the types of trees grown and harvested for paper, etc. However, that statistic was pertinent to this headline statistic and post. [Envirostats author]

- Project Paper-less (Australia)

The source and source story is a study that ranked environmental performance based on climate change performances in 2006, which was a little complicated to try and explain in the headline statistic.

The countries were ranked based on the amount of emissions they produced over the past year, the amount of reductions they made to their emissions levels and the strength of their climate-change policies.

There was no real detail on how much things were weighed, but needless to say, per capita emissions had to be part of the calculations based on some small countries’ output.

The five lowest ranked countries, starting with the worst, were:

• Saudi Arabia
• The United States
• Australia
• Canada
• Luxembourg

That Saudi Arabia was worst is of no surprise to me. They have high overall emissions, never mind per capita. They haven’t done much about it, either. The US and Australia are no surprises, either, but that Canada is that low on the list was a small surprise. I knew we weren’t CO2 saints, but this is a new low for the country. Finally, little Luxembourg is a big surprise. Whatever they’re doing for CO2 emissions, and whatever they’re not doing to curb it, I haven’t heard anything about it, whether CO2 or ecological footprint or otherwise. Their presence is why I said per capita emissions had to be a part of the calculations.

The five best countries were:

• Sweden
• Germany
• Iceland
• Mexico
• India

I don’t know what to make of this list because for countries like Mexico and India, I know about many of their other environmental problems so they have a bad image, but may be quite good for CO2 emissions. Per capita emissions might have helped India be lowest on that list of 56 countries, but I still have a problem because they do have a very large population and much of their energy isn’t clean, either. But whatever. I posted this entry for the headline statistic but could not leave the rest of the story without a comment given some details that might have misled readers.

I’m not sure I’m convinced Germany is second only to Sweden, either, but that again could be based on my knowledge of other Scandanavian environmental situations rather than their CO2 emissions that is biasing my opinion. The source is also German, in part, so it does raise an eyebrow like Spock on Star Trek, but the European But I’ll leave those thoughts at that for your consideration. [Envirostats author]

Canada, with its overall ranking of 53rd out of 56 countries, has fallen from last year, when it was ranked 51st.

“The [Canadian] government is still not making a serious effort to cut greenhouse gas pollution, and that leaves Canada at the back of the pack,” Matthew Bramley of the Pembina Institute said in a news release.

The Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental organization, contributed to the study.

“The gap between the government’s rhetoric and its action to date severely weakens Canada’s credibility here in Bali,” Bramley said.

‘Hypocrisy in Canada’s approach’

Bramley, in an interview from Bali, said Canada is making unrealistic demands on other countries, considering the poor job it’s doing, according to the study.

Bramley said Canada could have boosted its ranking over last year by at least 20 positions, to the middle of the pack, if it had strengthened its government policies overseeing areas like industrial emissions.

“Minister Baird is taking some highly obstructive positions coming into these negotiations, particularly the kinds of demands that he’s making of developing countries,” Bramley said.

“When we see how poorly Canada is performing on climate change, it really points to a kind of hypocrisy in Canada’s approach.”

Baird and the Conservative government have pledged to reduce Canada’s overall emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels by 2020, but environmentalists and opposition members of parliament have attacked this plan because it fails to meet Canada’s Kyoto obligations.

Under Kyoto, which was signed by Canada under a Liberal government in 1998, Canada is expected to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by six per cent from 1990 levels by 2012.

Kyoto was ratified by 141 countries, with each having slightly different targets to meet in an effort to reduce overall global emissions by about five per cent from 1990 levels. 

- Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Dec 7 2007