"Global Warming" news and stories

PepsiCo, feeling the (ever warmer) winds of change ruffle its hair, has decided to be proactive in measuring its own carbon emissions. Its test case is orange juice - how much does a glass of Tropicana contribute to global warming?

The company hired experts to measure emissions in every part of the orange juice-making process: Fertilizing the field, transporting orange cartons, running the factory. Turns out, growing is the single biggest source of emissions, as the nitrogen fertilizer used on citrus groves needs a lot of natural gas to make, and turns into a greenhouse gas when spread on the fields.

The final number? About 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted for each half-gallon carton of orange juice.

While that statistic is fairly meaningless without any context, the fact that PepsiCo is calculating its carbon emissions means that other corporations are likely to follow in its footsteps. And as emissions numbers become more widely known, consumers will be able to choose to buy products from companies that make a concentrated effort to reduce their footprints.

Check out the original New York Times article for a slideshow on tracking the carbon footprint of the orange.

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If you were planning to break the records and live well into your 100's, you might want to rethink that plan. USA Today reports that there's a new doomsday study making waves from Science.

Basically, the study states that the Earth will keep warming to the point where our hottest seasons on record will become the norm, and thus drastically reduce crop yields -- meaning a "disastrous food shortage for billions of people by the end of this century."

The piece does include naysayers, but even they don't necessarily offer a future-full-o-food scenario. Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute says that the agriculture industry will adapt -- citing the US increase in crops as temperatures rose. And Linda Mearns, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it will be "less grim."

Less grim. How's that for a comforting thought?

Said to have aphrodisiac properties, this fragile species is suffering from drought on Southern European farms and will continue to suffer if predicted temperature increases come to fruition.

But as Southern farms are suffering, some Northern plantations are thriving from the increase in temperature (truffles are very sensitive to both frost and drought). But by the end of the century, scientists predict that in Toulose, France, temperatures will exceed 95 degrees F on 25-55 days out of the year (currently, it's only that hot about four days out of the year).

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We're in the thick of the maple syrup harvest season right now, but high fuel costs will likely lead to price increases of around 30 percent, according to an article in the Boston Globe.

Fuel prices - sugarmakers use fuel oil to boil the harvested sap into syrup - combined with already low syrup reserves from several poor harvest seasons are driving up retail prices. Warmer winters due to climate change have shortened the season, causing historically low output. Plus, there's an increased demand for maple syrup as consumers grow increasingly hip to its superiority over the faux corn syrup-based pancake syrups.

So get your whole grain pancakes with wild blueberry-maple syrup while the gettin's good.

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I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth yet, so I don't know if Al Gore covers this, but it looks like one of the biggest contributors to global warming is the food we eat and the processes that give us that food.

According to this press release from the Bon Appetit Management Company, "the average American creates 2.8 tons of CO2 emissions each year by eating - even more than the 2.2 tons each person generates by driving." The company is pushing a "Low Carbon Diet" and trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The first "Low Carbon Diet Day" will be held next April.

So the moral to the story? Just stop eating completely and drive your car more, you selfish jerks!