Global Warming Issues

Ever since Beijing was named in 2001 to host the 2008 Summer Games, Chinese officials have been promising a “blue-sky” Olympics. Now, a week before the Games begin, pollution is threatening to rival sports as the biggest story out of Beijing. If the skies don’t clear, watch for the haze over Bird’s Nest Stadium to be a signature image of the Games.

This is partly because some 20,000 journalists are descending on the Chinese capital and the first thing that hits them — literally — when they get off the plane is the pollution. Twenty of the globe’s 30 most polluted cities are in the Middle Kingdom, according to the World Bank. Another list puts the Chinese tally at 16 of the top 20. Some 70% of the country’s lakes and rivers are contaminated, according to Chinese environmental officials. Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese lack clean drinking water.

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Beijing made many promises to secure the 2008 Olympics - hostages to fortune, as it turned out, as the date approached. Some greater press and political freedoms, for instance, have clearly not been honoured: as Amnesty International pointed out yesterday, there has been more, not less, repression as the games approach. But other promises that may remain unfulfilled do not reflect bad faith so much as the scale of the task. When the world’s most polluted country promised a green Olympics, it was a commitment of truly daunting ambition. If the city falls short, it won’t be for want of trying.

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The population estimate was the result of more than 2,800 hours of field work by WCS scientists in the Southern Highlands and Udzungwa Mountains in Tanzania where the kipunji was discovered. The team found that the monkey’s range is restricted to just 6.82 square miles (17.69 square kilometers) of forest in two isolated regions.

The authors also discovered that much of the monkey’s remaining habitat is severely degraded by illegal logging and land conversion. In addition, the monkey itself is the target of poachers. Because of these combined threats, WCS proposes that the kipunji should be classified by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as “critically endangered” – which means it is threatened with extinction in the wild if immediate conservation action is not taken.

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The dusty documentation of the Anasazi Indians a thousand years ago, from their pit houses and kivas to the observatories from which they charted the heavens, lies thick in the ground near here at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

Or so archaeologists believe. Less than a fifth of the park has been surveyed for artifacts because of limited federal money.

Much more definite is that a giant new project to drill for carbon dioxide is gathering steam on the park’s eastern flank. Miles of green pipe snake along the roadways, as trucks ply the dirt roads from a big gas compressor station. About 80 percent of the monument’s 164,000 acres is leased for energy development.

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