Latest from US: We guzzle fuel, save the world!

Predictably, Indian officials at the Ministry of Environment and Forests seemed unaware of this new study even as they are putting finishing touches to the country’s strategy for the ongoing UN-sponsored Climate Change meeting at Buenos Aires. That, however, does not deter Nirmal Andrews, a senior official at the ministry, from confidently saying: “India is in a position to counter all scientific and political arguments put forward by the Americans at BuenosAires.”

But Uncle Sam’s latest claim will be somewhat hard to deflect because it isn’t like the usual pointer of accusation at other countries. All they are saying is that the US is like a holy saint soaking up all the global warming sins of others. The team from Princeton has presented new evidence that North America is a huge sponge that sops up a 1.7 penta grams of carbon every year, enough to suck up every single gram of carbon discharged annually by fossil fuel burning, not only in America but also in Canada.

This is the latest in what seems to have become a habit with the world’s most powerful nation. It is a well-known fact that over the last five years American negotiators have used, time and again, flimsy scientific data to deflect the criticism directed at the country for being one of the biggest assaulters of the globe’s climate. The last time climate change talks were held at Kyoto in Japan last December, a multi-lateral Clean Development Mechanism was set up after much acrimonious debate ofcourse. The idea was that in times to come countries could buy and sell “carbon credits” with dirty air becoming the hottest selling commodity. On this basis, experts say that the US needs to buy $ 7.5 billion worth of carbon credits over a five-year period to keep “business as usual for the American way of life”.

But, if the new study published in the reputed American magazine Science is to be believed, America may actually join the coveted sellers’ market! All this might hinge on the Princeton scientists’ findings that seem to show the world’s most industrialized country as a generous contributor to global cooling. As for global warming and American responsibilities, who ever heard that word? May sound bizarre but that is what some scientists from are claiming.

It has always been an uphill battle for the Indian scientists to counter each ruse thrown in by the American experts. First, it was the lowly Indian cow that was blamed by the overseas researchers, it belched out far too much marsh gas ormethane after chewing its cud. They said as cows eat a lot of plant matter and which ferments in its stomach leading to the production of methanea gas known to be many times more potent than carbon dioxide in causing global warming. Indian scientists were successfully able to deflect this false claim.

But hot on its heels came the next salvo. If it wasn’t the cow, then it must be the Indian paddy fields! They said that paddy fields also emit a lot of marsh gas because of the compost that decays in them. It took a fair amount of convincing on part of the Indian scientists to show that the Americans had gone all wrong in their arithmetic and that neither the sacred cow of India nor the paddy fields were to blame. In fact, there is little doubt now that the blame for a warmer globe squarely rests on the excesses of the developed world and its over-consumptive life styles, guzzling fossil fuels as they do.

For long, scientists have investigated the comings and goings of carbon in the atmosphere, an essentialaspect of understanding global climate change. They now suggest a possible location where the carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmospherewhich in the lexicon of scientists is called a carbonsinkin the Northern Hemisphere. In the last decade, a number of studies have compared emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the Northern Hemisphere with measurements of actual atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and come up short.

The experts believe that a portion of the carbon that has entered the atmosphere is thus being taken up somewhere else. Where and how exactly this is happening is a subject of active debate; researchers have proposed a variety of possibilities, including the oceans, forests, and soil. In the most recent study the authors compiled information from several sources such as measured carbon dioxide emissions, patterns of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from monitoring sites, and climate models. Their results suggest that North America may be a site for a major carbon sink, whichmay be at least partly due to regrowth of vegetation on abandoned farmland and previously logged forests.

Fortunately, for the developing world even as these controversial results have been released, fellow American scientists have already raised a flag of caution saying the methodology of the study is probably not right. — Pallava Bagla is India Correspondent for Science magazine.