Call to stop patio heaters sale

People are being told to wear jumpers instead of relying on patio heaters, in an attempt to cut carbon emissions.

The Energy Saving Trust has urged retailers to stop selling the heaters after a report suggesting their use will almost double over the next year.

It says the number of privately owned units in the UK will rise from 1.2 million to 2.3 million.

Each heater uses the same amount of energy in six months as a kitchen gas hob does in a year, the Trust said.

Chief executive Philip Sellwood said: "Why don't people just wear a jumper?"

After interviewing 1,192 UK households, researchers found that Yorkshire and Humberside had the highest rate of current or intended patio heater owners, on 18%.

'Responsible'

The lowest rate was in the East of England, on 3%.

Two-thirds of patio heater owners said they used theirs once or twice a week.

Half of owners switched theirs on during the hottest months of the year, July and August.

Mr Sellwood said: "We are calling for responsible retailers to reconsider the sale of patio heaters in light of the substantial amount of carbon emissions they produce."

It is thought that the recently imposed smoking ban in enclosed public places in England will lead to more outdoor smoking and an increase in commercial patio heaters.

Mr Sellwood said: "People are also influencing the larger, more damaging commercial sector, with a third of pub-goers choosing pubs where there is a patio heater.

"Landlords are helping to make patio heaters desirable - which they are not."

Some 31% of people who responded to the survey said they liked to sit outside pubs and would choose one with outdoor heating.

Last month, London Mayor Ken Livingstone called for a halt in the spread of "wasteful" patio heaters and urged retailers not to promote them.

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Plug-in hybrids seen as vehicles for change

The widespread use of plug-in hybrid vehicles — which could be driven up to 40 miles on electric power alone — would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States without overloading the nation's power grid, according to a new study.

The upbeat news for plug-ins, seen by many as the next big step in environmentally friendly automotive technology, came with two caveats. Achieving the maximum air quality improvements would require a significant cut in the pollution produced by electric utilities. It's also dependent on large-scale adoption of plug-in hybrids, which may not be in new-car showrooms for several years.

Even so, backers of plug-in technology were heartened by the latest findings, which could help defuse the claim that the vehicles simply would transfer the source of air pollution from vehicle tailpipes to power station smokestacks.

The study "finally gives an environmental stamp of approval" to plug-in hybrids, said Felix Kramer, founder of CalCars.org, an advocacy group in Palo Alto. "It shows that even with today's power grid, plug-in hybrids are a great idea."

The current generation of hybrid cars and SUVs reduce fuel consumption by switching between a gasoline engine and a battery-powered system that is recharged during braking.

Several major automakers, including General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co., are working on plug-ins. Barring a breakthrough in battery technology, however, most say it will be several years before the vehicles are available at dealers.

Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally, in Southern California last week to announce a plug-in hybrid pilot project with Southern California Edison, said a production model was five to 10 years away. GM has said it hopes to have the Volt, a plug-in electric car, in showrooms by 2010, but that date is contingent on "a technological breakthrough" on more powerful lithium-ion batteries, a spokesman said.

Cost is also an issue. Some experts estimate plug-in technology could add $10,000 to the sticker price. Even with gas selling for more than $3 a gallon and electricity costs for plug-ins pegged at the equivalent of less than $1 a gallon, that's a significant markup.

Converting a hybrid into a plug-in can cost even more. It also voids the car's warranty, a Toyota spokesman said.

A raft of proposals has been introduced in Congress that would provide incentives to manufacturers and buyers of plug-ins, as well as provide additional funding for battery development and mandate the use of plug-ins in government vehicle fleets.

"It's frustrating for a consumer," said Quyen Ton of Tustin, an electrical engineer who said he would buy a plug-in if one were available. "Even though you know it's valuable technology, you can't go out and actually buy one."

Hybrid versions of traditional cars can improve fuel economy by 40% or more. The Toyota Prius, the bestselling hybrid, gets 46 miles per gallon in combined city-highway driving, according to the latest government estimates. The average for all 2006 model cars sold in the U.S. was 24.6 mpg.

Plug-in hybrids use a more powerful array of lithium-ion batteries and are recharged using a standard home electric outlet. That enables the car to travel up to 40 miles, by some estimates, on electricity alone before the battery is depleted and the hybrid powertrain takes over.

That could allow the typical Southern California commuter to make it to work and back only on electrons, based on government estimates that the average commute in the region in 2005 was around 19 miles each way.

Priuses modified to run as plug-ins have achieved more than 100 mpg.

The study released Thursday was conducted by two nonprofit groups, the Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It measured how the nation's air quality would be affected under varying levels of plug-in hybrid use and pollution control at power plants.

According to the study, a marginal improvement in power plant emissions, coupled with ownership of plug-ins by 20% of U.S. drivers by 2050 — the report's worst-case scenario — would cut annual greenhouse gas emissions by 163 million tons.

Under a "middle case" scenario, which assumes plug-ins make up 62% of U.S. passenger vehicles by 2050 and utilities adopt more stringent pollution-control measures, emissions would be cut by 468 million tons a year.

That would be equal to removing 82.5 million vehicles, about a third of the light vehicles on the road today.

"The study clearly shows that the benefits from pluggable hybrids are greater if the power sector is cleaner," said Dan Lashof, science director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions would help combat global warming, and increasing the fuel efficiency of passenger vehicles would reduce the nation's dependence on petroleum, the nonprofit groups said.

The study estimated that a 60% market share for plug-in hybrids would tap only 7% to 8% of the electricity available nationwide in 2050. That finding jibes with a study released late last year by the Department of Energy that concluded that "the existing electric power system could generate most of the electricity consumed" by plug-ins. However, the DOE study noted that the power supply situation is tighter in California, a popular market for hybrids.

Although the study estimates that plug-ins would become available in 2010, the outlook for the vehicles is murky. That's mainly because of questions about lithium ion batteries, which have caused fires in laptop computers.

"We have no indication that lithium ion batteries are a practical application for automobiles yet," said Robert Faraday, publisher of the Truth About Cars website.
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Influence of global warming seen in changing rains

The pattern of rainfall around the world is being changed by greenhouse-gas emissions from human activities, researchers have shown for the first time.

Tropical regions north of the equator, including such areas as the Sahel in Africa which borders the Sahara desert, have already begun to get even drier and will continue to do so, the data show. Regions in the far north, including Canada, Northern Europe and Russia, will get wetter, as will the southern tropics.

Detecting the effects of climate change on rainfall patterns has proved much more elusive than temperature changes because of the much greater natural variability of precipitation.

The key was to take results from 92 computer simulations, using 14 different global circulation models, and to compare the average of these with actual rainfall data over wide bands of latitude around the world.

The results show a clear agreement with the observed trends in global rainfall data over the past century. In fact, although they agree in direction, the observed changes were much stronger than the predictions.

"Over the 20th century, we now detect the signal [in rainfall changes] that is predicted by climate models," says Francis Zwiers, one of the research team. "If you're able to reproduce the past, you also have greater confidence for predictions of the future."

Dry zone

Zwiers, of Environment Canada in Toronto, says that the pattern shows a substantial drying of the region from the equator up to 30° north. This band encompasses all of north Africa, as well as India, southeast Asia, Mexico and northern South America. Some of these regions, such as the Sahara and Sahel in Africa, are already among the world's driest.

Regions further to the south, including the rainforest regions of central Africa and South America, have begun to get increased rainfall and will continue to get wetter.

The findings are important, Zwiers says, because "as humans, our activities are much more constrained by limits of water than by temperature. In places where agriculture is marginal, it will become more marginal in the future".

Precipitation extremes

Richard Seager, a climatologist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, US, says this detection of 20th century rainfall changes seems "barely discernible from the noise right now", but he agrees that the projected trends for the coming century shown by the combined climate models are a highly convincing prediction.

Seager's own research has shown that, in addition to the trends shown by Zwiers' team, there will also be a significant drying of areas in the northern subtropics, including the US southwest and the Mediterranean.

But aside from the overall trends, Zwiers says an important message from the combined models is that they consistently show that, for all regions, there will be a significant increase in extremes of precipitation – both floods and droughts. Thus, even desert areas that will undergo serious drying could simultaneously suffer greater risks of flash flooding.

"More or less uniformly across all the models, these extreme events will become more intense just about everywhere," he says.

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England under water: scientists confirm global warming link to increased rain

It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.

More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established for the first time ­ an effect which has long been predicted but never before proved.

The study's findings will be all the more dramatic for being disclosed as Britain struggles to recover from the phenomenal drenching of the past few days, during which more than a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours in some places, and floods forced thousands from their homes.

The "major rainfall event" of last Friday ­ fully predicted as such by the Met Office ­ has given the country a quite exceptional battering, with the Thames still rising. In Gloucester water levels had reached 34 feet, just 12 inches below flood defences ­ the same level as during the flood of 1947 ­ although a police spokesman said last night that the River Severn had stopped rising.
Meteorologists agree that the miserably wet British summer of 2007 has generally been caused by a southward shift towards Britain of the jetstream, the high-level airflow that brings depressions eastwards across the Atlantic. This is fairly normal. But debate is going on about whether climate change may be responsible for the intensity of the two freak rainfall episodes, which have caused flooding the like of which has never been seen in many places.

This is because the computer models used to predict the future course of global warming all show heavier rainfall, and indeed, "extreme rainfall events", as one of its principal consequences.

The new study, carried out jointly by several national climate research institutes using their supercomputer climate models, including the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, does not prove that any one event, including the rain of the past few days in Britain, is climate-change related.

But it certainly supports the idea, by showing that in recent decades rainfall has increased over several areas of the world, including the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and linking this directly, for the first time, to global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

The study is being published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, and its details are under embargo and cannot be reported until then. But its main findings have caused a stir, and are being freely discussed by climate scientists in the Met Office, the Hadley Centre and the Department for Environment For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
One source familiar with the study's conclusions said: "What this does is establish for the first time that there is a distinct 'human fingerprint' in the changes in precipitation patterns ­ the increases in rainfall ­ observed in the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes, which includes Britain.

"That means, it is not just the climate's natural variability which has caused the increases, but there is a detectable human cause ­ climate change, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. The 'human fingerprint' has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall. So this is very significant.

"Some people would argue that you can't take a single event and pin that on climate change, but what happened in Britain last Friday fits quite easily with these conclusions. It does seem to have a certain resonance with what they're finding in this research."
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