The daily news about Kopenhagn and the not so far climate crisis seems to be keeping everyone feeling guilty – should I sell my car, why do I still have these old light bulbs, etc. Burghard Strassmann from the weekly Die Zeit reports about his experiment to get rid of the bad feelings accompanied by being the average German (with a per capita CO2-emission of 10 tons per year – compared to 20 tons of US citizens and 5 of Chinese). Within 24 hours he tried to become an (almost) emission free „Climate-Hero“. His first action in the morning: he trashes his radio clock, because it adds 22,6 g CO2 per day (80 kg per year) to the atmosphere, Strassmann calculates. “A climate hero calculates a lot”, and it sounds like an excuse for the amount of computation that follows during the rest of the article. But even if it is kind of exhausting to read how even minor details of life add to our individual CO2-debts, Strassmann finds a way of keeping it fun to follow his experiment. Butter or margarine, meat or tofu, designer clothes or eco t-shirt, … in the end, Strassmann recognizes, that “the climate sin is an instrinsic part of life”.

But, thanks to atmosfair.de or myclimate.org, everyone can pay his indulgence for his climate sins. Strassmann closes with a politically incorrect (but in line with the radical involvement of all aspects of life of the experiment) hint to a website, where one can see pornographic movies for a fee, which helps protect the rain forest in Ecuador. We shouldn’t feel too guilty…

Also: “Climategate” typing in Germany:

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Christoph Schrader) writes about the stolen emails from scientist Phil Jones from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and Michael Mann, Pennsylvania University, where they discuss, how critics could be kept silent. Schrader states, that it is not a question anymore, whether the emails are a reason for conspiracy theories, but how the face of science might have been damaged.

“It his highly unusual, that science will have to rethink”, says Harmut Wewetzer in his comment about the “climategate” for the daily Tagesspiegel. “Climate change is real.” He says, that debates like this will get worse the more actions against climate change must be taken.

Die Welt prints a long, thoughtful article, written by the meteorologist Hans von Storch, head of the Institute for Coastal Research, Geesthacht. And he states, that the emails are proof of the existence of a powerful cartel, that tries to inhibit the publication of dissenting opinions, which is not a good way for science to go. “Both groups”, von Storch writes, “damage the independence of the social institution ‘science’, and both damage the democratic opinion forming process.”

- Sascha Karberg

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, German Language Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.