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Sydney Morning Herald

Friday March 23, 2007

Aaaron Timms

Carbon sinks, bubbles and protocols ... Aaaron Timms ensures he is the star of his next dinner party with his grasp of the latest buzz words.

ALBEDO

A term that expresses the ratio of light from the sun that is reflected by Earth's surface to that absorbed by Earth's surface. Forests have a low albedo; snow-covered areas have a high albedo; and hip-hop artist Sean "Diddy" Combs has the highest albedo of all, thanks to a unique configuration of shiny suits, heavy gold jewellery and reflective acne cream.

BASKET OF GASES

The six most harmful greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride - first grouped into a basket by the Kyoto Protocol. Add a box of chocolates and a bottle of whole pepper-infused aged balsamic vinegar and you turn the basket of gases into a hamper.

BERLIN MANDATE

The source of all hard-balling in the world of climate-change negotiations. Originally drawn from a meeting in Berlin in the mid-1990s when it suddenly occurred to everyone that maybe, just maybe, fixing up the cans of Mortein and getting people to have a separate bin for unopened credit card bills wasn't going to be enough to solve this global-warming bogey. Can often be heard in conversation at climate change meetings: "Anyway, so the Americans were there, just grinning while they shot every one of the proposals down, so you know what I did? I hit them with the Berlin Mandate. Yep, I mandated them. Berlin-style."

BIODIVERSITY

A term used to describe the variety of life on Earth and a key indicator of the planet's biological health. If the world's biodiversity is equal to, say, the population of Sydney, we might say if things keep going the way they are, it will eventually be cut to the point where the world will end up looking more like Yass. Yes, it is that serious.

BUBBLE

An option, first introduced in the Kyoto Protocol, that allows groups of countries to meet emissions-reduction targets jointly by pooling their aggregate emissions. When the emissions pile up and a simple detergent is added to the mix, this creates what is known as a "bubble bath". The effect is visually appealing, if wholly useless.

CARBON OFFSETS

A system of goodwill credits designed to soothe the guilty consciences of the air-conditioning junkies, disposable-nappy wearers and chronic farters of the world. The idea is that individual emitters give money to organisations to offset their carbon emissions over a given period. The organisations then go and spend the money on environmentally progressive products and -initiatives such as -energy-saving light bulbs, trees or emails -imploring Al Gore to make another documentary. This, in turn, allows the individuals to indulge in their prelapsarian sins without guilt. "Flatulence without fear" has become the keystone of the carbon offsets regime.

CARBON SEQUESTRATION

The long-term storage of carbon dioxide in forests, soils, oceans or underground in depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Not to be confused with carbon equestrian, which is the use of dancing horses to take emitters' minds off global warming.

CARBON SINKS

The vessels into which carbon may be sequestered. Rarely suitable for use as a venue for carbon equestrian antics.

CARBON TAX

A tax on the burning of fossil fuels and one of many emissions taxes proposed by different governments over the past few years - the undisputed king of which was the so-called "flatulence tax", a levy targeting farm animals' emissions put forward (and hastily abandoned) by the New Zealand Government in 2003.

ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT

The total of an individual's use of energy, food, water and other consumables, expressed in "global hectares". Ecological footprints are usually used in the developed world to alert people to the unsustainability of their lifestyle. You never hear of, say, a Kalahari Bushman fretting over the fact that his ecological footprint "isn't big enough".

As a rule, Westerners find sitting in a stationary, air-conditioned monster truck with the motor running, wearing polyester slacks with a triple cheeseburger shoved down their gobs to be a good way of expediting the growth of their footprints. Sitting in an open field, naked, eating shoots and resisting the urge to pass wind, on the other hand, would be a good way of reining the footprint in.

EMISSIONS

When you're walking down the street, you emit. When you're talking, you emit. Reading this, you're emitting. You want to stop emitting, but you can't.

EMISSIONS TRADING

A practice by which emitters (countries, corporations, individuals) can buy emissions from, or sell emissions to, other emitters. Hence the following phrases: "I'll swap you half a tonne of carbon dioxide for a couple of grams of hydrofluorocarbon"; "Methane? You want to trade me some methane? Are you insane? This isn't 1987, man. People have moved on from gases like that. Take your Hypercolour T-shirt off first, then let's talk."

Geoengineering

The idea that we can engineer the environment to counteract the effects of global warming. Options canvassed in the past have included seeding the oceans with iron as a way of increasing the phyloplankton population, putting a big mirror in the sky in the hope that vanity will compel all those nasty gases to stay away, or getting everyone in the world to pour bottled water over each other and say: "See, I told you it was raining."

GLOBAL WARMING POTENTIAL

The University Admissions Index of greenhouse gases: used to compare warming effects of different gases. Hydrofluorocarbons have the kind of score that would get them into law at the University of NSW; methane would easily qualify for engineering at the University of Newcastle; and carbon dioxide would struggle to get into the bachelor of fish knife holding at the June Dally-Watkins School of Professional Development.

Glacier retreat

The process which irrefutably proves that after years of denial, combovers and hat-wearing, the planet is now stuck with one horribly receding hairline. It could be a mere matter of months -before we see Greg Matthews, Graham Gooch and Shane Warne on television with small -glaciers planted on their heads, spruiking the health benefits for humans of having large, long-lasting rivers of ice grafted onto their scalps. Advanced glaciair, yeah yeah.

GLOBAL WARMING SCEPTICS

A species in growing danger of extinction with each new stride made by global warming.

GREENHOUSE EFFECT

The meteorological phenomenon behind the calamitous rise in the number of giant arrow attacks on the planet. Arrows, usually red ones, leave the Earth's surface and rise up through the three primary levels of the atmosphere (the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, if you were wondering). They then hit a bank of thick clouds and shoot back to Earth, wreaking pointy havoc on defenceless humanity. Of course, things have not always been so. It used to be that arrows had no trouble whatsoever passing through into the next level of the atmosphere. But that was only because the clouds used to be a lot friendlier. Now, however, there are hostile clouds wherever you look. And they don't seem to like any of the arrows we're sending them. The take-home message out of climate change, then, is this: we must make peace with the clouds.

INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON -CLIMATE CHANGE

A multinational body of experts set up by the UN in 1988 to be the ultimate authority on climate change. The panel's main task is to produce -reports assessing the impact of humans on climate change. Beyond getting the science right, surely a mere trifle, the panel's work seems to consist -almost exclusively of working out which qualifier to add before the word "likely" in its reports. When used in the panel's reports, the word "likely" means something has a 66 per cent probability or greater of occurring; "very likely" means there is a more than 90 per cent probability; "extremely likely" means what it says; "like, totally likely" means you should really get out there and put some money on it; and "huh?" means the report writers made a mistake somewhere along the way.

KYOTO PROTOCOL

The 1997 agreement that set the latest wave of international climate-change reform in motion and simultaneously gave the Japanese city of Kyoto a name for something other than temples. Good luck trying to find a copy of the thing when you go to the city itself, though. Walk into the tourist office in central Kyoto and ask for directions to the Kyoto Protocol and you'll draw nothing but blank looks.

Methane to markets

An initiative that promotes "captured" methane as a clean energy source. Plans for a small, co-operative-run subsidiary of the initiative "methane to organic farmers' markets", by which methane would be sold to members of the public in rustic wooden crates by flamboyant, shaggy-haired stall holders, are yet to see the light of day.

RENEWABLE ENERGY

Biofuel, solar energy, hydro power and wind farms are all forms of renewable energy. Berocca, Powerade and the greasy breakfast of fried eggs and bacon are not.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Is there a way for us to keep on flying to Vanuatu every summer without drowning every one of its neighbours in the process? That is the question at the heart of the quest for sustainable development.

TIPPING POINT

The bit where we lose Greenland.

Vulnerability

The point at which society becomes unable to cope with the vagaries of climate change. When society becomes filled with people who spend their days at home, in pyjamas, in front of the TV, eating ice-cream, you know it is vulnerable beyond repair.

WEATHER

Weather, climate and meteorology are all different. Weather is when you're walking home without an umbrella and it suddenly buckets down on you. Climate is when this happens to you 20 times in the one month. And meteorology is when you should know better.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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