welcome

The fallout from the Copenhagen summit has continued to reverberate around the world after it emerged one of the leading players in China's negotiating team had been shifted to another department, prompting speculation he has been demoted over his role in the chaotic final phases of last month's talks.

According to a story from the state-backed Xinhua news agency, He Yafei has been moved from his position as vice foreign minister to a post at the United Nations.

He played a crucial role in China's negotiating team during the final two days of the summit, during which China was accused of consistently blocking efforts to deliver a more ambitious agreement featuring emission reduction targets for industrialised countries.

He also infuriated other world leaders and diplomats, accusing the senior US negotiator of 'lacking common sense' and prompting frustration from US president Barack Obama and German chancellor Angela Merkel as a result of his reluctance to take decisions and his refusal to allow rich nations to set long-term emission targets as part of any deal.

The Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao speculated that the new appointment represented a punishment for He, after China was roundly criticised by other nations for blocking a more ambitious deal.

China has publicly insisted that it helped to deliver a 'significant and positive' result at Copenhagen while protecting the country's interests. However, senior officials are reportedly furious at the fallout from the talks, which has seen a number of industrialised and developing countries accuse China of wrecking the negotiations.

He now appears to have emerged as the scapegoat for the debacle after a series of tense last-minute negotiations with world leaders that reportedly led president Obama to complain that 'it would be nice to negotiate with somebody who can make political decisions.'

He had been acting on behalf of premier Wen Jiabao, the most senior member of China's negotiating team, who refused to attend many of the last-ditch meetings with world leaders over fears that he would be press-ganged into signing up to commitments that would later be opposed by the Chinese government.

The removal of He may fuel optimism that the angry exchanges that dominated the final days of the summit can be overcome as negotiators now move towards delivering a legally binding deal at the UN's next major climate change summit in Mexico in December.

Meanwhile, Bolivian president Evo Morales, one of the most vocal opponents of the Copenhagen Accord, said yesterday that he would organise an alternative climate change conference following the failure of last month's meeting to deliver an ambitious deal.

The socialist president said the alternative summit, to be held on 20-22 April in Cochabamba, would include environmental groups, social movements, scientists and governments.

Bolivia was among a group of five countries to oppose the final version of the Copenhagen Accord, insisting that it was only noted by the summit, rather than formally adopted.

Some critics have claimed that the group, which also included Venezuela and Sudan, acted on behalf of China to weaken the agreement. However, Morales has maintained that rich nations were attempting to impose a deal that would do little to protect billions of the world's poor from climate change, while refusing to accept their historic responsibility to tackle global warming.

Morales said the alternative summit would address the 'climate debt' rich nations owe the developing world, and discuss proposals to improve clean technology transfer and set up an international court for environmental crimes.

C. H. Tung, the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997, offered me a three-sentence summary the other day of China’s modern economic history: “China was asleep during the Industrial Revolution. She was just waking during the Information Technology Revolution. She intends to participate fully in the Green Revolution.”

I’ll say. Being in China right now I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership clearly understands that the E.T. — Energy Technology — revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it.

We, by contrast, intend to fix Afghanistan. Have a nice day.

O.K., that was a cheap shot. But here’s one that isn’t: Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, liked to say that companies come to “strategic inflection points,” where the fundamentals of a business change and they either make the hard decision to invest in a down cycle and take a more promising trajectory or do nothing and wither. The same is true for countries.

The U.S. is at just such a strategic inflection point. We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China’s main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.

Is President Obama going to finish health care and then put aside the pending energy legislation — and carbon pricing — that Congress has already passed in order to get through the midterms without Republicans screaming “new taxes?” Or is he going to seize this moment before the midterms — possibly his last window to put together a majority in the Senate, including some Republicans, for a price on carbon — and put in place a real U.S. engine for clean energy innovation and energy security?

I’ve been stunned to learn about the sheer volume of wind, solar, mass transit, nuclear and more efficient coal-burning projects that have sprouted in China in just the last year.

Here’s e-mail from Bill Gross, who runs eSolar, a promising California solar-thermal start-up: On Saturday, in Beijing, said Gross, he announced “the biggest solar-thermal deal ever. It’s a 2 gigawatt, $5 billion deal to build plants in China using our California-based technology. China is being even more aggressive than the U.S. We applied for a [U.S. Department of Energy] loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico, and in less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review, China signs, approves, and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!”

Yes, climate change is a concern for Beijing, but more immediately China’s leaders know that their country is in the midst of the biggest migration of people from the countryside to urban centers in the history of mankind. This is creating a surge in energy demand, which China is determined to meet with cleaner, homegrown sources so that its future economy will be less vulnerable to supply shocks and so it doesn’t pollute itself to death.

In the last year alone, so many new solar panel makers emerged in China that the price of solar power has fallen from roughly 59 cents a kilowatt hour to 16 cents, according to The Times’s bureau chief here, Keith Bradsher. Meanwhile, China last week tested the fastest bullet train in the world — 217 miles per hour — from Wuhan to Guangzhou. As Bradsher noted, China “has nearly finished the construction of a high-speed rail route from Beijing to Shanghai at a cost of $23.5 billion. Trains will cover the 700-mile route in just five hours, compared with 12 hours today. By comparison, Amtrak trains require at least 18 hours to travel a similar distance from New York to Chicago.”

China is also engaged in the world’s most rapid expansion of nuclear power. It is expected to build some 50 new nuclear reactors by 2020; the rest of the world combined might build 15.

“By the end of this decade, China will be dominating global production of the whole range of power equipment,” said Andrew Brandler, the C.E.O. of the CLP Group, Hong Kong’s largest power utility.

In the process, China is going to make clean power technologies cheaper for itself and everyone else. But even Chinese experts will tell you that it will all happen faster and more effectively if China and America work together — with the U.S. specializing in energy research and innovation, at which China is still weak, as well as in venture investing and servicing of new clean technologies, and with China specializing in mass production.

This is a strategic inflection point. It is clear that if we, America, care about our energy security, economic strength and environmental quality we need to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation. We can’t afford to be asleep with an invigorated China wide awake.

Last week it was reported that China - which has a global monopoly on the production of rare-earth metals - is now threatening to cut off vital supplies to the West. A shortage would jeopardise the manufacturing and development of green technologies such as wind turbines and low-energy lightbulbs. RICHARD JONES is the first Western journalist to visit the rare-earth mines in Inner Mongolia to discover why China is unwilling to give up its precious elements...

It looks like a scene from an apocalyptic science-fiction movie. High on the frozen plains of Inner Mongolia, giant trucks rumble across the floor of a lunar-like crater so vast that it looks as if it might have been gouged out by a meteorite.

As we peer down at the eerie spectacle from the crater's edge, a security guard behind us barks out in Mandarin: 'Explosives! Move away!' Seconds later, a deafening crack rings out and part of a 660ft high rock face is brought crashing down.

Booming business: Explosives tear down yet more rock in the vast Baiyun Obo mine

When the dust settles, 170-ton dumper trucks close in to scoop up the rocks. They are taken to refineries where rare-earth metals - known in the mining industry as 'unobtainiums' because they are so scarce - will be extracted using boiling acid and other toxic chemicals.

This two-mile-wide crater in one of the most remote corners of China is the secretive Baiyun Obo mine. It's the world's biggest mine and the largest single source of rare-earths, the metallic elements that are driving the global revolution in green technology.

The rare-earths blasted out of rocks here feed more than 77 per cent of global demand for elements such as terbium, which power low-energy lightbulbs; neodymium, which powers wind turbines; and lanthanum, which powers the batteries of hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius.

They are also used in mobile phones, computers, iPods, LCD screens, washing machines, digital cameras and X-ray machines, as well as missile guidance systems and even space rockets. Industries reliant on the rare-earths are estimated to be worth an astonishing £3trillion, or five per cent of global GDP.

I was the first Western journalist to set foot inside the mine. What I saw at Baiyun Obo and the poisoned refineries it feeds raises disturbing questions about the future we are buying into - and who will control it.

A brave worker agreed to smuggle me past tight security and the police patrolling the perimeter in four-wheel-drive vehicles to show me around the site which is run by the state-controlled Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Company.

On the crater floor, Terex dumper trucks, the largest in China, towered over us as they shifted 168 tons of rare-earth rock. It's a 24-hour-a-day operation.

The rocks are full of rare-earth metals combined with iron ore, and the rare-earths are extracted as a supplementary process to the iron-ore extraction, making it the most productive source of rare-earths on the planet.

It is a source upon which the Western world has become dependent. In 2008, China supplied 139,000 tons worldwide, 97 per cent of the world's total rare-earth production.

The architect of modern China, Deng Xiaoping, realised the significance of the elements lurking in the arid wastes of Inner Mongolia almost 20 years ago when he said: 'There is oil in the Middle East but there is rare-earth in China.'

His pride is shared by mine worker Shang Liqing, who drove me to a vantage point overlooking the huge main mine.

'This isn't just the rare-earth home town of China but of the entire world,' he said.

Describing how the mining business has transformed the small town of Baiyun Obo, he explained: 'The roads here were dirt tracks only a few years ago and the workers used to live in shacks. Now they live in apartment buildings. There are no beggars in this town any more. Anyone can make money out of these rocks.'

That is why some farmers from the grasslands and plateaus surrounding the mines have given up working the land. In He Jiao, 30 miles south of Baiyun Obo, exfarmer Liu said he was earning far more money working at the mine.

'I can make much more money and easier money, too,' he boasted. 'I work nine months a year and I still make five times as much. Soon, we will leave this house and move to a new apartment I have bought.'

But the new-found wealth has come at an appalling environmental price, turning the town and the surrounding areas into a poisoned, arid wasteland littered with unregulated refineries where the rare-earths are extracted from rocks.

The crude refineries squat along the valleys north of the town, surrounded by partly frozen red-coloured 'tailing lakes' up to a square mile in size where rocks are kept before being processed.

The land is scarred with toxic runoffs from the refining process and pock-marked with craters and trenches left by the huge trucks that transport the rocks across ice and mud. Rusting machinery lies scattered along the valley floor, giving it the appearance of a war zone.

Around 100 miles south of Baiyun Obo, larger rare-earth refineries sit around the banks of the world's largest tailing lake, Baogang - seven square miles of evil-smelling toxic waste that shows the shocking extent of this industry's impact.

It is a scene that Chinese officials, and particularly those from Baotou Steel, do not want the world to see. Several villages close to the lake have already been relocated because of pollution and only minutes after we reached the lake, security guards hired by the mining company arrived to hustle us away.

At a remote processing plant called He Jiao Mu Qu, in nearby Guyan county, workers showed me around what must be one of the most toxic factory floors anywhere. They earn relatively high salaries - 1,600 yuan (£145) a month for removing rare-earth from rocks.

Inside the factory, boiling sulphuric acid flows in open trenches and boiling yellow lava spews out of kilns at the end of rotating steel pipes. The sulphur-filled air stings the eyes and burns the lungs. Workers' clothes were peppered with acid burns.

'We start out with uniforms but they soon get burnt away by the acid,' I was told by one worker whose trousers were a honeycomb of acid burns. 'They give us gloves and masks. But the masks don't do much. I have trouble breathing at the end of every 12-hour shift.'

Heavy duty: 170-ton trucks carry away the blasted rock from Baiyun Obo mine

Another worker, Guo Fu Qiang, said: 'The money is quite good. But our boss doesn't pay us anything extra for working in the summer heat or freezing winters, and none of us has accident insurance.'

A worker in an adjoining factory warehouse insisted he would never work on the factory floor, however much he was offered. 'It's suicide,' he said. 'If you work in there long enough, you will die of cancer.'

Ironically, as the environment surrounding the mines in Inner Mongolia becomes more poisoned, demand for green technology in the West is driving up demand for rare-earth metals. Worldwide consumption is expected to hit 200,000 tons a year.

China has a virtual monopoly on the market but has been cutting export quotas in each of the past three years, saying it needs rare-earths for its own increasingly hi-tech industrial output and that the West should begin to source its own.

John Kaiser, a California-based mining expert and rare-earths specialist, said: 'If the world gets really serious about green technology, it could result in a scale of demand that rare-earth suppliers would be unable to cope with.

'Low pricing from China has killed the rest of the world's ability to produce rare-earths. The mines could not compete on price. Health and safety laws [in the West] are very different, too. We know there's billions of dollars' worth in the ground outside China but it would take that much to get it out at the moment.'

China's decision to cut export quotas has already set alarm bells ringing. The United States imports all its rare-earths and more than a billion dollars' worth of goods consumed in America every year contain rare-earth elements.

'Industries are snooping all over the world for alternative supplies of rare-earths, but any new facility is going to take five to ten years to come online,' Kaiser said.

Only two new rare-earths mining projects are currently planned outside China - one in Mountain Pass, California, the other in Mount Wells, Australia. Neither, however, will be in production until at least 2014, and neither will be on the same scale as Baiyun Obo.

'The rest of the world needs to exploit their own resources,' Yu Jingxue, sales manager for the Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth International Trading Company, told us. 'China has already supplied the rest of the world with 90 per cent of its rare-earths. We need our rare-earths for ourselves.'

Although China says it needs the metals for its own developing industries, some experts believe Beijing is using the tactic of restricting supply to force manufacturers to bring their factories and technological secrets to China.

Dudley Kingsnorth, an independent rareearths marketing consultant, said: 'The Chinese will not deny the rest of the world rare-earths but the price will be that the West needs to move its manufacturing facilities to China in order to get access. Then it becomes a question of sovereign risk. Countries and manufacturers don't want to have 60 to 70 per cent of their manufacturing in one country.'

China has made clear its desire to shift from its traditional role as the 'world's workshop' with low-tech, labour-intensive factories, to more high-tech manufacturing. It may use its near-monopoly on rare-earths to make possible that leap forward.

'At the moment, China dominates rare-earths supply but only employs hundreds of workers to get it out of the ground,' Kingsnorth said. 'To refine it further, they employ thousands more workers.

'But to get real value added and produce the end products - the phones, the cars, and the hard disks - China can employ millions of people. And to support its economic growth China will need to supply 300 million jobs by 2020.'

Kaiser warned: 'It's the long term that manufacturers need to worry about. Toyota, for example, does not have a long-term guarantee of supply. If it wants to plan for the future and pump out millions of electric cars, it needs to invest in a guaranteed supply.'

It is a situation China already seems aware of. After a recent visit to Japan, where he met executives from electronics firms such as Panasonic-Si Hu, of the Baotou Rare-Earth High Tech Zone Committee, told the official China Weekly magazine that the Japanese were 'dying for rare-earths'.

In what sounded like a cruel taunt, he added: 'Without rare-earths they cannot survive. If they cannot get the raw material, they'll tear their face off.'

The supply situation may also have a more chilling aspect to it - it may allow China to exert influence over the production of missile and rocket systems in the West, says Kaiser.

'Dysprosium, for instance, allows systems to work under extreme conditions,' he explained. 'The US military doesn't want to buy it on the open market. They need a guaranteed supply and it's becoming a problem.

'If China was the only place in the world that rare-earths existed, there would be a war. There is no immediate crisis but a looming crisis that needs to be dealt with.'

That looming crisis is epitomised in the huge piles of rare-earths rocks littering the floor of the crater at the Baiyun Obo mine. 'We've got mountains of it stockpiled,' said Shang Liqing gleefully. 'There is more to come, too. Even my great-greatgrandchildren won't see the end of this mine.'

The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day, fuelling a global culture of excess that is emerging as the biggest threat to the planet, according to a report published today. In its annual report, Worldwatch Institute says the cult of consumption and greed could wipe out any gains from government action on climate change or a shift to a clean energy economy.

Erik Assadourian, the project director who led a team of 35 behind the report, said: "Until we recognise that our environmental problems, from climate change to deforestation to species loss, are driven by unsustainable habits, we will not be able to solve the ecological crises that threaten to wash over civilisation."

The world's population is burning through the planet's resources at a reckless rate, the US thinktank said. In the last decade, consumption of goods and services rose 28% to $30.5tn (£18.8tn).

The consumer culture is no longer a mostly American habit but is spreading across the planet. Over the last 50 years, excess has been adopted as a symbol of success in developing countries from Brazil to India to China, the report said. China this week overtook the US as the world's top car market. It is already the biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions.

Such trends were not a natural consequence of economic growth, the report said, but the result of deliberate efforts by businesses to win over consumers. Products such as the hamburger – dismissed as an unwholesome food for the poor at the beginning of the 20th century – and bottled water are now commonplace.

The average western family spends more on their pet than is spent by a human in Bangladesh.

The report did note encouraging signs of a shift away from the high spend culture. It said school meals programmes marked greater efforts to encourage healthier eating habits among children. The younger generation was also more aware of their impact on the environment.

There has to be a wholesale transformation of values and attitudes, the report said. At current rates of consumption, the world needs to erect 24 wind turbines an hour to produce enough energy to replace fossil fuel.

"We've seen some encouraging efforts to combat the world's climate crisis in the past few years," said Assadourian. "But making policy and technology changes while keeping cultures centred on consumerism and growth can only go so far.

"If we don't shift our very culture there will be new crises we have to face. Ultimately, consumerism is not going to be viable as the world population grows by 2bn and as more countries grow in economic power."

In the preface to the report, Worldwatch Institute's president, Christopher Flavin, writes: "As the world struggles to recover from the most serious global economic crisis since the Great Depression, we have an unprecedented opportunity to turn away from consumerism. In the end, the human instinct for survival must triumph over the urge to consume at any cost."

Qatar's West Bay financial district in Doha. The country has the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world. Photograph: Gavin Hellier / Alamy

Qatar made the news twice this week. First, the Manchester United squad flew out to the Gulf state for a few days to get in some training without the hassle of snow – hoping to revive their fortunes after a draw with Birmingham City . Second, it announced a "major environmental initiative" aimed at curbing the carbon emissions of its national airline through the use of biofuel.

They won't actually be cutting emissions any time soon, of course. Those are soaring, because, bucking the global recession, the airline expects to carry 11% more passengers in the current year.

But the airline is doing an analysis to see if it might one day start burning biofuels. Perhaps the biofuels will be grown on the huge chunk of farmland the state controversially wants to buy in Kenya.

Qataris have the highest carbon footprint on the planet. The country's per-capita emissions from burning fossil fuels are way ahead of any other nation, and almost three times those of everybody's poster bad boy, the US. This is all the more extraordinary since Qatar's electricity is mostly generated from burning natural gas, which has half the emissions of coal.

Those emissions have also risen almost fourfold since 1990. But, thanks to the vagaries of the Kyoto Protocol, the country is not penalised for this. Qatar is by some measures the second richest country in the world, but for the purposes of climate law, it is classified as a developing nation. And so it has no emissions targets.

How come Qatar's emissions are so high? The main reason is its soaring use of energy. By the end of next year Qatar will have six times the electricity-generating capacity it had as recently as 1995. One outlet for all this power is industry, based round its huge natural gas reserves. Just this week, the national gas company announced a deal with ExxonMobil for a new $6bn (£3.69bn) petrochemicals plant.

A lot of Qatar's gas is exported as liquefied natural gas – the country is the world's largest producer of the stuff. It's a fairly clean fuel at our end, but takes a lot of energy to liquefy in Qatar. So to that extent Qatar is taking a hit to allow Europe and North America to cut their emissions – handy for helping us meet the Kyoto Protocol, but not much good for the planet.

The Qatari government recently used this argument to downplay its emissions. In its recent Human Development Report, it called them "relatively modest".

But that is not the real story. Those Qatari emissions are so extraordinarily high for another reason. Qataris just don't seem to care.

Sure, there is the biofuels initiative from the state airline. Sure, a year ago Qatar held a conference to discuss how to cut its emissions without damaging the economy.

But if its rulers were serious about cutting emissions they might charge for their energy supplies. Yes, you read that right. Qatari households get their electricity free. So why would they cut down on how much they burn?

Oh, and they get their water free as well. And in Qatar, even more than most places in the Middle East, water is liquid electricity. Almost every drop coming out of the taps is produced from desalinating seawater. This is extremely expensive in energy – and therefore expensive in carbon emissions.

But because the water is free, Qataris waste it like, well, water. Despite being a desert state with virtually no rainfall, the country has among the highest per-capita water uses in the world. Use averages around 400 litres per head per day. According to Hassan Al-Mohannadi, a geographer at the University of Qatar, people in "big, often palatial houses" consume up to 35,000 litres per day.

Even here, they have a way of blaming foreigners. According to Hassan Al-Mohannadi, one reason water use is so high is that "the large number of foreign domestic servants, who come from water-rich countries, are not educated in water conservation".

Water consumption continues to rise, so Qatar is building more desalination plants. If Qatar was serious about cutting its carbon footprint it would do something about water demand. At the least, it might charge for the stuff.

Will Qatar's emissions carry on up? Looks Likely. Electricity demand is currently rising by about 7% a year. That is not as fast as the national economy, which is growing by 11% annually – the fastest boom on the planet.

But stopping this out-of-control carbon-emitting juggernaut will take more than an Airbus full of biofuels.

he first decade of the twenty-first century was the hottest since recordkeeping began in 1880. With an average global temperature of 14.52 degrees C (58.1 degrees F), this decade was 0.2 degrees C (0.36 degrees F) warmer than any previous decade. The year 2005 was the hottest on record, while 2007 and 2009 tied for second hottest. In fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade.

Temperature rise has accelerated in recent decades. The earth’s temperature is now 0.8 degrees C (1.4 degrees F) higher than it was in the first decade of the twentieth century, and two-thirds of that increase has taken place since 1970.

Even with these seemingly small increases in global temperature, natural systems are already starting to respond, as evidenced by melting ice sheets and glaciers, shifting weather patterns, and changes in the timing of seasonal events. If temperatures continue to rise on their current trajectory, by the end of the century they will have left the narrow range in which human civilization has developed and flourished.

Though temperatures are rising around the globe, some areas are warming faster than others, with the greatest warming taking place in the Arctic. Paleoclimate records from Arctic lakes, tree rings, and ice cores reveal that the past decade was the warmest of the past two millennia. Warming is amplified in the Arctic for a number of reasons, including the loss of the region’s extensive snow and ice cover: as temperatures rise and light-reflecting ice melts, it is replaced by darker water, which absorbs more energy from the sun, thereby accelerating warming. In parts of the Arctic, average annual temperatures have increased by as much as 2–3 degrees C (3.6–5.4 degrees F) since the 1950s. In 2007, Arctic summer sea ice shrank to its lowest extent on record, leaving the Northwest Passage completely ice-free for the first time in human memory. Then 2008 and 2009 brought the second and third lowest extent of Arctic summer ice on record.

The earth’s temperature is determined by a number of factors. One major influence is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This cycle, which involves large shifts in atmospheric and ocean temperatures over the tropical Pacific, has two phases: El Niño, which typically raises average global temperature, and La Niña, which lowers it. Year-to-year temperature variations are also influenced by the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun: increases in solar activity tend to raise global temperatures, while decreases in solar activity lower them.

These natural cycles alone, however, fail to explain the temperature patterns of the last decade. While the strongest El Niño of the century pushed 1998 temperatures up to their then-record high, temperatures in the hottest year (2005) did not receive a boost from El Niño. And 2007 was tied for second hottest year on record, despite the development of a cooling La Niña. Furthermore, while global temperatures have been climbing to record heights, incoming solar energy has in fact been declining since the beginning of the decade. In early 2009, solar activity reached its lowest level in a century.

Rather than ENSO cycles or variations in solar irradiance, human-induced warming from heat-trapping greenhouse gases has become the dominant climate influence. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen rapidly since the start of the Industrial Revolution, climbing from 280 parts per million (ppm) in the late eighteenth century to 387 ppm today. Researchers recently reported that the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were this high was roughly 15 million years ago, when sea level was 25–40 meters (80 to 130 feet) higher, and temperatures were approximately 3–6 degrees Celsius warmer.

The risks posed by rising global temperature are widespread. As the atmosphere warms, mountain glaciers that provide water to over a billion people are melting. Melting ice sheets and thermal expansion of oceans raise sea levels, threatening coastal populations. Increasing temperatures bring decreasing crop yields, putting world food supplies at risk. And ecosystems worldwide are irrevocably altered, placing large numbers of species at risk of extinction.

Higher global temperatures also bring with them more frequent and severe extreme weather events. Over the past few decades, scientists have noted an increase in hot extremes and a decrease in cold extremes across the globe. As temperatures rise further, heat waves will become more frequent and intense. Longer and more severe droughts will take place over wider areas; an upsurge in global drought since the 1970s, associated with higher temperatures, has already been observed.  At the same time, as temperatures rise, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases, leading to more intense storms and flooding in areas that are already wet.

The past decade saw many record-breaking extreme weather events, providing examples of the kinds of incidents expected to become more frequent with global warming. In the summer of 2003, Europe experienced an intense heat wave that led to over 52,000 deaths. In the United States, where daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last 10 years, persistent drought plagued parts of the South and West for much of the second half of the decade. A 2006 heat wave affecting the West and Midwest was blamed for 140 deaths in California.

The combination of high temperatures and drought makes a dangerous recipe for wildfire; indeed, 2006 and 2007 saw the worst fire seasons on record in the United States. A similar combination led to disaster in southeastern Australia in early 2009: on what is now known as Black Saturday, intense, rapidly spreading bushfires killed 173 people and burned over a million acres.

Other areas have experienced unusually heavy rains and flooding over the past decade. Record flooding hit Central Europe in 2002, causing over 100 deaths and forcing 450,000 people to evacuate. In summer 2007, the worst flooding in 60 years in England and Wales killed nine people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage; that May to July period was the wettest in the region since recordkeeping began in 1766. In 2008, extensive flooding occurred in several parts of the African continent; Algeria saw its worst floods in a century, while Zimbabwe’s floods were its worst on record.

As temperatures rise, warmer oceans provide more energy to feed tropical storms. The past few decades have seen an increase in the frequency of the most severe hurricanes, and researchers have identified rising sea surface temperatures as the primary cause. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the worst on record, with 27 named storms, 15 of which were classified as hurricanes—including Hurricane Katrina, which caused over 1,300 deaths and $125 billion in financial losses.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of over 2,500 scientists, released its Fourth Assessment Report, in which it called the recent warming of the globe “unequivocal.” The report projected a rise in average global temperature of 1.1–6.4 degrees C (2–11 degrees F) by the end of the century. Based on the most recent scientific assessments, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at their current pace, the temperature rise by the end of the century will likely reach or exceed the upper end of these projections. Already, effects of increasing temperatures such as accelerating ice melt and sea level rise are outpacing the IPCC’s predictions of just three years ago.  Without significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperature will rise dramatically by the end of the century, creating a world that looks vastly different from the one we know today.

The following is a Plan B Update by my colleague Janet Larsen, the Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute, about the connection between the increase of wildfires and rising temperature.

Future firefighters have their work cut out for them. Perhaps nowhere does this hit home harder than in Australia, where in early 2009, a persistent drought, high winds, and record high temperatures set the stage for the worst wildfire in the country’s history. On Feb. 9, now known as “Black Saturday,” the mercury in Melbourne topped 115 degrees F as fires burned over 1 million acres in the state of Victoria—destroying more than 2,000 homes and killing more than 170 people, tens of thousands of cattle and sheep, and 1 million native animals.

Even as more people move into fire-prone wildlands around the world, the intense droughts and higher temperatures that come with global warming are likely to make fires more frequent and severe in many areas (see table of regional observations and predictions). For southeastern Australia, home to much of the country’s population, climate change could triple the number of extreme fire risk days by 2050.

Although fires typically make the news only when they grow large and put lives or property at risk, on any given day thousands of wildfires burn worldwide. Fire is a natural and important process in many ecosystems, clearing the land and recycling organic matter into the soil. Some 40 percent of the earth’s land is covered with fire-prone vegetation. A number of plants—such as giant Sequoia trees and certain prairie grasses—need fire to propagate or to create the right conditions for them to flourish.

Fire patterns have changed over time as human populations have grown and altered landscapes by clearing forests, allowing pasture animals to overgraze grasslands, and importing new plant species. Across parts of the western United States, for example, cheatgrass, an invasive annual adapted to frequent burns, has supplanted native brush, desert shrub, and perennial grasses that typically experience longer intervals between fires. In other areas, mixed-age and mixed-species forests have been replaced by single-species plantations where flames can jump easily from tree to tree. The result, instead of a low-intensity restorative fire, is a fire so hot that it can cause lasting harm to soils.

Humans have also altered fire patterns through deliberate suppression. After 1910, when a severe wildfire charred more than 3 million acres of western U.S. forest in just two days, the strong desire to protect timber resources gave life to a policy of quickly extinguishing fires. For decades, firefighters proved remarkably successful in this endeavor, but the upshot was that forests became so loaded with fuel that a blaze that evaded control could quickly grow into a dangerous megafire.

Now policies are shifting in many places to let some fires proceed naturally or through preventative controlled burns; yet by warming the planet, we may be relinquishing even more control than we bargained for. Higher average global temperatures mean extremes are in store: even as climate change brings more flooding in some areas, other places will be plagued by droughts and extended heat waves. As the temperature rose between the 1970s and early 2000s, for instance, the share of total global land area experiencing very dry conditions doubled from less than 15 percent to close to 30 percent. A hotter, drier world burns more readily. Global warming could be pushing us into a new regime of larger, longer-burning, more intense fires as well as fires in places that historically have been hard to ignite, like moist tropical forests.

Already there is evidence of the connection between higher temperatures and wildfire. Anthony Westerling of Scripps Institution and colleagues found a marked uptick in forest fires in the western United States since the mid-1980s, with the wildfire season lengthening by 78 days over the last 15 years compared with the preceding 15 years. The fire season length and the duration of each fire rose in concert with regional spring and summer temperatures, which were an average 0.87 degrees C (1.56 degrees F) higher in the later period. Higher temperatures are melting mountain snow cover earlier in the spring, leaving less moisture for the summer and giving fires a better chance to spread. And while human land use certainly has had a direct effect on wildfire patterns throughout the West, the biggest increase in U.S. wildfire frequency has actually occurred in the largely untouched mid-elevation Northern Rockies forests, implicating climate change.

Farther north, Alaska’s and Canada’s boreal forests recently have experienced more-frequent fires, releasing enough carbon to transform them in some years from net absorbers to net emitters. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the total area burned more than doubled.  Higher temperatures have extended the range of the tree-damaging spruce budworm into new territory and allowed spruce beetles, no longer delayed by cold winters, to complete their typical two-year life cycle in just a single year. Drought has limited the efficacy of the trees’ defenses. Together the insects and the drought are leaving millions of acres of dead wood in their wake, providing fuel for wildfires. Overall, a warmer climate is predicted to double the area burned in northern Canada by 2100; in Alaska, the area could double by as early as 2050.

In other parts of the world fire regimes are changing and are projected to change even more as the planet heats up. Over much of Europe fire frequency decreased during most of the twentieth century, and expanding forests soaked up carbon. Now, however, some areas may be starting to see more fires. Between 2000 and 2006, some 50,000 fires burned each year in the Mediterranean region, compared with 30,000 a year in the 1980s, though the total area burned did not increase, in part because of more vigilant firefighting.

During Europe’s record 2003 heat wave, which killed over 50,000 people, an estimated 650,000 hectares (about 1.6 million acres) of forest burned continent-wide. Although the number of fires during this warm and dry year was not particularly high, the area burned was a record. More than 5 percent of Portugal’s forest area burned, four times the 1980–2004 annual average, resulting in economic damages exceeding 1 billion euros. If future warming is not kept in check, hot and dry summers like 2003 could happen as frequently as every other year, dramatically increasing wildfire risk.

For Southeast Asia, the extreme 1997–98 El Niño brought a major drought to the region, allowing some of the most severe fires in recent history to burn in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Laos. Fires set to clear land jumped from grasslands and shrublands to logged forests and peat swamps, where they burned underground. For months, Southeast Asian skies were hazy from smoke. Nearly 10 million hectares (about 25 million acres) burned in Indonesia alone, affecting 23 of 27 provinces and costing more than $9 billion.

During that same El Niño, more than 20 million hectares (about 50 million acres) burned in Latin America, wreaking damages of up to $15 billion. In 2001 the following El Niño brought more drought and put a frightening one third of Amazon forests at risk of burning. With a temperature rise of more than 3 degrees C (5 degrees F)—well within the range projected for this century barring rapid and dramatic action to curb carbon emissions—much of South America is likely to see more frequent wildfires.

Just as a weakened immune system leaves a person vulnerable to otherwise innocuous germs, the combination of logging, road construction, and intentional burning to clear forests for cattle ranches, farms, and plantations has fragmented the world’s tropical forests, increasing their vulnerability to fire. Piling higher temperatures on top of such stresses could completely undermine forests’ resilience. For the massive Amazon rainforest, we risk reaching a tipping point where recurrent droughts dry out the landscape enough so that small fires can turn into devastating conflagrations.

We all rely on trees to soak up greenhouse gases and store carbon. If large swaths of forest go up in flames, it could set into motion a vicious cycle, where more wildfires in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere. Stabilizing climate, and doing so quickly, takes on a new urgency when it means averting an inferno on earth.

Dazzling diversity under threat: a woman sells peppers in a Central Asian bazaar. Most Turks live on the water’s edge in the far western reaches of their vast country. But many of the spices that perfume the air in Turkey’s famous urban bazaars come from the nation’s southeastern farming areas of Sanliurfa and Kahramanmaras. In fact, spices from this region rank among the most highly prized condiments and herbs you can find in any spice emporium anywhere.

As I wandered through the Misir Carsisi Spice Bazaar in Istanbul, and the Kemeralti Bazaar at the western terminus of the Silk Road in Izmir, I could see the chile powders, pastes and dried fruits from Sanliurfa and Kahramanmaras proudly and prominently displayed.

Urfa and Maras peppers from Turkey have the same international fame that Aleppo (Halaby) peppers do from Syria, Tabascos do from Louisiana, or Habaneros do from the Yucatan. But their prices are soaring and supplies are becoming scarce—not merely because of international demand, but because of drought and agricultural water scarcity triggered by global climate change.

The same climate-driven pressures are affecting the survival of the Halaby pepper and its traditional farmers near Aleppo, Syria. In the past three years, 160 Syrian farming villages have been abandoned near Aleppo as crop failures have forced over 200,000 rural Syrians to leave for the cities. This news is distressing enough, but when put into a long-term perspective, its implications are staggering: many of these villages have been continuously farmed for 8000 years. As one expert puts it, this may be the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.

One of Turkey’s gifts to the globe’s cuisine: ground Maras pepper at the celebrated Misir Carsisi bazaar in IstanbulThe thousands of tourists and residents who purchase Urfa and Maras chiles in Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar may not yet realize it, but their access to these world class spices is being disrupted by climate change. Since 2007, rains in some forty Turkish provinces, northern Syria and eastern Iraq have been 30 percent to 40 percent of their normal levels. The drought in southeastern Anatolia has reduced harvests by 80 percent. In Syria, 60 percent of the agricultural lands have been affected by these droughts.

In Iraq, 2 million rural residents have been left without water. Many irrigation canals remain dry, as the only water reaching rivers like the Euphrates is being usurped by cities upstream. Downstream on the Tigris-Euphrates delta, saltwater intrusion is making domestic water unpotable. Between the three countries, perhaps five million people have been directly affected.

Peppers are perhaps the most widely-used spice, condiment and vegetable in the world, but the devil is in the details. Many folks cannot tolerate the heat of a Bhut Jolokia or Habanero, but prefer the milder, smokier aroma of a Urfa or Chilpotle. And yet, we can no longer take unrestricted globalized access to such culinary treasures for granted. Our own patterns of consumption and proliferation of greenhouse gases are endangering the very things that give us pleasure.

Think about it. The loss of farmers from Saliurfa, Kahramanmaras and Aleppo—far away places you may have never heard of before—is our own plight. Our food security and access to treasures of world food culture are linked to their water and land security. One heirloom chile pepper blinking out may not be all that great of a loss, but the cumulative loss of food biodiversity driven by climate change will touch us all.

BAGHDAD—From his mud brick home on the edge of the Garden of Eden, Awda Khasaf has twice seen his country’s lifeblood seep away. The waters that once spread from his doorstep across a 20 percent slab of Iraq known as the Marshlands first disappeared in 1991, when Saddam Hussein diverted them east to punish the rebellious Marsh Arabs. The wetlands have been crucial to Iraq since the earliest days of civilization—sustaining the lives of up to half a million people who live in and around the area, while providing water for almost two million more.

The waters vanished after the First Gulf War due to a dictator’s wrath; over the next 16 years, they ebbed and flowed, but slowly started to return to their pre-Saddam levels. By 2007, with no more sabotage and average rains, almost 70 percent of the lost water had been recovered. Now it’s gone again. This time because of a crisis far more endemic: a devastating drought and the water policies of neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria. These three nations have effectively stopped most of the headwaters of the three rivers—the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karoon—that feed these marshes.

“Once in a generation was bad enough,” says Awda, a tribal head and local sheikh in the al-Akeryah Marshlands, who also advises the Nasiriyah governorate on water issues. “Twice could well be God’s vengeance.”

In a land where fundamental interpretations of monotheistic scripts often determine the tone of public discourse, particular attention is now being paid to the biblical Book of Revelation, in which the Euphrates River drying up was prophesized as a harbinger for the end of the world. It is not doomsday yet in Iraq, but the water shortage here has not been worse for at least the last two centuries—and possibly for several millennia more. Government estimates suggest close to two million Iraqis face severe drinking water shortages and extremely limited hydropower-generated electricity in a part of the country where most households get by on no more than eight hours of supplied power per day, in the best of times.

The flow of the Euphrates that reaches Iraq is down, according to scientific estimates, by 50 to 70 percent and falling further by the week. From his frugal office in Baghdad’s National Center for Water Management, engineer Zuhair Hassan Ahmed has for the past decade plotted the water levels of the Euphrates and the Tigris, the latter of which bisects the Iraqi capital. The hand-etched ink graphs show a black line that marks an average “water year,” from October to May, superimposed over a green line, which shows the actual flow through the two rivers over the same time. The green line had been markedly lower than the benchmark for much of the past decade. But in 2007—the start of a serious drought—it dipped sharply and has continued to fall.

In Baghdad, the lack of water has been an inconvenience, an eyesore, and a health hazard. Raw sewage and refuse pumped into the Tigris is not flushed downstream as rapidly as it once was. The Tigris is Baghdad’s main artery, but it is also still a working river, long traversed by small commuter ferries, industrial barges, and, in the city’s halcyon days, even pleasure boats. Giant mud islands now protrude from the once wide, blue expanse of the river, making it unnavigable for larger vessels. Further downstream, and especially along the Euphrates—which runs roughly on a parallel track west though Iraq’s bread basket—the effects of the shortage are far worse.

Between two rivers

Here, in the land between the two rivers that was once the heartland of ancient Mesopotamia, the water crisis has ravaged agriculture, an industry still struggling to regain its footing after three decades of deprivation and war. This was the second mooted site (the other was the Marshlands themselves) of the fabled Garden of Eden—a land so rich in soil and water that it would quench the needs of its dwellers throughout eternity. It doesn’t look quite like that now. Crops of grain, barley, mint, and dates have failed almost en masse. Further west, in Anbar province, a prized rice variety that was once sold at a premium throughout Iraq and in the markets of neighboring countries has just been harvested. Like almost all other crops, this year’s yield is a disaster.

“We blame the Turks for this,” says Hatem al-Ansari, a local Anbar rice grower who claims to have lost half his family’s life savings since January 2009 due to a lack of water to irrigate his rice. “We have been digging wells nearby, and so has the government, but it is not enough. Not even close.” Shielding his face with a black scarf from a sandstorm blowing in on an acetylene desert wind, Hatem points in the direction of the Euphrates’ upper reaches. “If you go down to the bank, you will see where the water was last year and last week,” he says. “Our water pumps can no longer reach it. It’s true it hasn’t been raining, but it’s just as true that even 30 percent of normal rainfall does not cripple a mighty river like this.” He had to be taken on his word. The swirling sand and dust were starting to turn the sky an ochre-orange haze and was steadily closing like a shroud on us all, making an inspection of the river bank impossible.

Sandstorms have long been a fixture of Iraqi summers—on average, there are about eight to ten each hot season. But this year they became a pandemic. Close to 40 sandstorms blew in during the five months from May to early October. Some lasted three days at a time, sheeting farms with suffocating silt, closing airports, and adding another layer of misery to a society that has been through hell.

Lack of water for irrigation, especially in Anbar, is a key problem. Iraq’s water minister, Dr. Abdul Rashid Latif, says that the government dug an extra 1,000 wells over the past two years, taking advantage of a relatively high groundwater table. But drawing on a diminishing resource during a time of drought has proved costly. “We now have only around 20 percent of our original reserves left,” he says. “And the thing about this water is that not much of it is being replenished.”

“The scent of a dying ecosystem”

Iraq’s water numbers make for disturbing reading across the board. Government estimates put total reservoir storage at around 9 percent of nationwide capacity on the leading edge of a wet season that is not forecast to bring much relief. For the past two years, rainfall was some 70 percent lower than usual in most of Iraq’s 18 provinces.

The snow melt that usually feeds the Tigris system from the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdish north was equally deficient. There are now seven dams on the adjoining Euphrates system, most in Turkey and Syria, with plans for at least one more. And then there are the rampant inefficiencies built into Iraq’s antiquated 8,000 miles of canals and drains, which send countless millions of gallons gushing into parts of the country that have little use for the water, and no means to harness it even if they did.

Some have looked to the heavens to explain the lack of rain. Society here is deeply superstitious. Many Iraqis, from the Sunni Arabs of Anbar to the tribes of the Marshlands, believe the natural deficiencies are God-ordained—and possibly a punishment for the sectarian ravages that have torn the country apart over the last three years.

“Droughts have happened before and will plague us again,” says Awda as he surveys the vast expanse of hard-baked and cracked brown mud in front of him that used to be the Marshlands. “But not even in ‘91 was the water like this. Now there is nothing.” The only water left in the maze of feeder streams that empty into this giant basin are pools of lime-colored stagnant ooze. Nothing flows. Ducks and geese sit listlessly on creek banks that have not been exposed in decades—if ever—to direct sunlight. Infestations of flies circle like Saturn’s rings around giant, steel barrels of drinking water, imported from the nearby city of Nasiriyah, that line village roads. Reeds that were once the staple of the agrarian peoples who worked this waterway through the ages jut starkly from the banks, nearly all of them yellow and hardened, looking more like medieval weapons of war than crops.

Earlier this fall, the major tributaries of the Euphrates were flowing at around 30 percent of their normal levels. “Look at that mark on the bank,” says Awda, pointing to a stain on a corrugated iron beam at the base of the bridge. Not long ago, he notes, this had been a high-water mark. The waterline is now at least nine feet lower. The pungent murk of the riverbed lingers in the air. “Take a deep breath,” says Awda. “That smell is the scent of a dying ecosystem.”

Two fishermen, who had launched themselves into what remained of the waterway in a bid to net carp, return to the banks with their haul—12 fish, none bigger than 10 inches. The catch is not enough to feed their families, let alone take to market. Two years ago, the fish were fat and bountiful.

“Fishing is our staple here,” explains one local man, Sheikh Hameed from Abart village, further north of the Marshlands. “That, and hunting water birds. But they’ve all flown away. I had a stall here for many years,” he recalls, pointing to an abandoned roadside hut, where he used to sell his catch.

The white polystyrene crates that used to hold the fish on ice are now home to street cats and sand drifts. A giant water buffalo, which once spent the best part of the summer immersed in the water, is now making do with what remains. He stands motionless, buried to the midriff in a festering, black mud. The caked soil cast offers at least some respite from the heat, but with the temperature expected to hover between 118 and 124 degrees F for the following week, he doesn’t have long left to wallow.

“We are digging wells for our own survival,” says Sheikh Hameed. “And this in the most water-rich area of the country. This is not God’s wrath. This is the work of people.”

Tweaking the tap

Over the past six chaotic years, new reservoirs have been built into the Euphrates system on both the Syrian and Turkish sides of the border. Iraq, as a downstream country, would have likely suffered from serious water depletion even if it had a government strong enough to assert its authority against two powerful neighbors. But with a political class struggling to win legitimacy amid a sectarian war that has torn the country apart along ancient societal fault lines, there has been little time to tend even to the bare basics of survival. Delivery of services has been close to non-existent, from the national government down to village mayors. Now, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claiming to run a credible sovereign state, work has begun in earnest on talking to the neighbors about many issues of Iraqi sovereignty, including border integrity, that have remained sidelined throughout the post-war turmoil.

“They should realize that we are an important neighbor and share many things in life,” says Dr. Rashid, who has three times led Iraqi delegations to Istanbul and Damascus to beg for more water. He has returned with promises, but little fruit for his labors. With no treaties or agreements signed with either state, however, he has little leverage. “Our neighboring countries need to get the message that it is our right to get our share of water from these two international rivers and that we should have a say in their operational procedures because we are downstream. In our discussions they have never connected the water issues with any other issues.”

There is trouble, too, from Iran, whose government earlier this year ordered the diversion back into Iranian territory of a key tributary of the Tigris—the Karoon River, which enters Iraq just north of the southern city of Basra. Until early this year, the Karoon had sent regularly a vital flush of freshwater down the Tigris and into the Shatt al-Arab waterway at the northwestern end of the Persian Gulf. The freshwater pushed back the tidal effect and allowed tens of thousands of Iraqis from the southern Marshlands to make their livelihood through fishing and farming. “There were 13 billion cubic meters of freshwater [annually] feeding into the Shatt al-Arab,” says Dr. Rashid. “Now that has gone. We have asked them to sit down and talk but they won’t even answer our requests.”

In late October 2009, Iraqi technicians finally met with their Iranian counterparts. “They were told about the effect on the people in the south who are exclusively Shias—their people,” says Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. “They were very embarrassed by this and promised to look into it.” Today, the saltwater of the relentless tides around Basra is still winning the push-me, pull-you game and, like a rampaging army, has pushed farther north up the waterway than ever before. As a result, some 30,000 locals have left their land, some of which has now been heavily salinated, leaving it of marginal agricultural value at best.

Across Iraq, entire ecosystems are under threat. So far, redress from the Turks and the Syrians has consisted only of sympathetic words, followed by the occasional tweak of the tap. “We need 500 cubic meters per second,” Dr. Rashid said in August. “We have been getting 350 meters on some days, but 150 meters on average. They have promised us more, but we have yet to see it.” In the months that followed, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey three times announced a boost in the headwater flow from the Euphrates. But by late autumn, the downstream effect had been negligible.

The giant power station in the city of Nasiriyah was still using only two of its four turbines that are normally powered by the flow of the Euphrates. One had broken down, but could not have been used anyway because, along with a second turbine, there was not enough moving water to power it. Nasiriyah was getting by on about six to eight hours of power a day—roughly the same as the rest of the country.

Throughout the summer and fall, engineers at the power station were desperately hoping the river would not fall another eight inches, to a level that would have left Iraq’s fourth largest city without any electricity whatsoever. “We saw it rise a centimeter or two, roughly two days after every announcement from the Turks, but it would soon drop away,” says an engineer at the power station. “The figures we were being promised were not translating into tangibles.”

The rains cometh not

Both Turkey and Syria have been suffering from the same rainfall deficiency as Iraq. The winter storm fronts that once formed regularly near Cyprus and swept east through Syria, Jordan, and Iraq have been rare over the past three years, as have the low-pressure systems that could usually be counted on to dip south into Turkey from the Balkans and the Russian steppe. Cloud seeding and the contentious science of rain-making have been considered in all four countries.

Jordanians, in particular, remember the 1991 winter season, when seeding was attempted near Cyprus. That year, six separate snow-bearing storm fronts swept through the country, leaving yard-deep snow drifts on the streets of the capital, Amman, for many weeks. Heavy snow also fell across the Iraqi desert plains and the Zagros Mountains. The snow melt that autumn saw the Tigris burst its banks in Baghdad. Upstream in Turkey, there is still enough reliable winter rainfall to keep the dams brimming and make cloud seeding unnecessary. Downstream in Iraq, where the water is needed most, there is neither money nor interest for such an experiment.

Even the ancient ways are starting to fail. From June to August of this year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conducted research into the status of ancient, natural subterranean aqueducts used both for human settlement and irrigation in the Kurdish north. The UNESCO results painted a bleak picture of water resources in northern Iraq, which had for centuries boasted relatively bountiful supplies, even during harsh times. The UNESCO study found that 70 percent of the aqueducts, known as karez, that were producing water in 2005 had since dried up and been abandoned. Of the 683 karez surveyed, most were not functioning, due largely to excessive use and ongoing drought—only 116 still delivered water. The study claimed that 36,000 people were at risk of being displaced, while tens of thousands more had already left their lands.

Figures in Iraq are always open to a degree of conjecture, but one reality is now clear: the water crisis is leading to mass migrations of people and a renewed displacement at both ends of the country, just as some order was starting to replace the bedlam of the invasion and civil war. Iraqis have been returning to their homes in mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, but now rural people, fleeing in droves from the increasingly arid provinces, are also showing up in urban centers.

The Marsh Arabs have left their lands in large numbers, according to Nasiriyah’s governor, Qusey al-Ebadi, who has yet to find ways to accommodate them. “They are nomadic people and move around during difficult times,” says al-Ebadi, “but I have never seen them coming into the cities with their animals like this.” The men of the Marshlands—now far from their ancestral lands—mill around in small groups on street corners in Nasiriyah, many searching for laboring work, looking incongruous and desperate.

The people from the Shatt al-Arab area of the southern Marshlands also need accommodating. Government estimates suggest as many as 30,000 have left their lands, all but abandoning their agrarian livelihoods. Thousands more have been pushed to the brink of survival. If the Tigris and the Karoon do not flow again toward the Shatt al-Arab, the ecosystem they have relied on is all but finished.

The water crisis could not have come at a worse time for Prime Minister al-Maliki, who has spent much of his time and energy as leader attempting to win enough authority to assert his will. His formula had been security first and stability second, followed by delivery of services. So far, he has achieved qualified approval on the first two, but abject failure on the third.

Iraq’s energy sector is in a desperate state of disrepair. In late October, a rare thunder and lightning storm that brought the first rains to Baghdad in seven months caused power to crash citywide for eight hours. Even without rain, or other disturbances such as dust or wind, most residents of the capital are getting by on no more than a half-day of regular electricity, the vast bulk supplied by coal-burning energy plants that generate power channeled by substations resembling museum pieces. What little electricity supply exists is frequently targeted by militias who boast of their intent to return the society (literally) to the dark ages. Sewer lines have only been dug in the most affluent areas and city roads are, at best, rudimentary.

With a national election looming in early March, al-Maliki knows that his current base of support across Iraq’s religious and ethnic divides is fragile. Failure to give Iraqis the essential services they have long craved—especially electricity, water, and sewerage—will likely spell his doom. Twice this fall, he has traveled to the Shia bastion of Basra to assess the plight of the Shatt al-Arab and to persuade locals that all is not lost. It is a hard sell for the people of the south, who collectively still see themselves as being as deeply deprived today as they were under Saddam.

For the prime minister to blame his nation’s neighbors for water woes is unlikely to fly. Beyond the troubles over the water supply, al-Maliki has pointedly accused Syria of destabilizing Iraq by sheltering former Baathists, who, he claims, funded two bombing campaigns that targeted three government ministries and the Baghdad municipal government headquarters in August and October. All four buildings were annihilated, with almost 300 people killed and more than 1,000 maimed. While wagging his finger at Damascus, al-Maliki has also been constantly promising patronage to the southern tribes and an entrée to state coffers if they fall in behind him. Months before a definitive election and amid an unparalleled ecological crisis, the tribes are, at best, restless. And water is near the top of their worry list.

Enough Blame to Go Around

“The government didn’t do this directly, it’s true,” says tribesman Maher al-Zubaidi, as he surveys the shrinking Euphrates in Nasiriyah. “But they tell us they are strong now and yet they can’t stand up to the Turks. Wars have started in this region for a lot less. Also, Iraq constantly cries poor, yet we read about the trade minister taking a cut from every kilo of imported grain and see enormous revenues from oil. The time has long past for them to deliver.”

The Turks, though sympathetic to the plight of their downstream neighbors, lay much of the blame at the feet of Iraqi bureaucrats who have done next to nothing to protect an already precious natural resource from atrocious water management practices. It is not uncommon to see burst water-mains spouting geysers through Baghdad’s parched suburbs or across village roads, quickly mixing with refuse and oil, turning into giant molasses-like pools. Almost all public taps invariably leak, and environmental awareness is close to nonexistent.

Publicly, Turkey will say nothing on the subject of its water dispute with Iraq, other than that it is working with both Syria and Iran to remedy the situation and has agreed to share daily technical data with both sides on flows. After recent floods near Istanbul, a limited extra release was allowed into the Euphrates system. It was soon stopped. The saga was symptomatic of Iraq’s dilemma and its lack of means to do much about it. Again, Baghdad had to make do with what its neighbors could spare on a good day. Iraq is yet to press its case for water rights under international law and, with its hand weakened by so many ongoing woes, the government does not currently hold much sway in the region.

The torpor is of no comfort to Iraq’s downstream dwellers. Back in al-Akeryah Marshlands, Awda Khasaf kicks a splintering skiff that used to ply the lowland waterways. The last six months, he says, have changed everything. “If the Turks release all the water that used to come down the Euphrates, then the Marshes will fill up again within two months and we will recover. But that is not going to happen. They caught the government off guard while it was obsessed with the war and now they have a chokehold on us. This has had a revolutionary effect. The Turks have the upper-hand and until we are strong enough to stand up for ourselves, all we can do is pray for a flood. Look at them. They are not serious about helping us. They are trying to build another dam [the Ilus hydroelectric plant planned for southeastern Turkey, on the northern reaches of the Tigris]. Only when we can stand up can we address this. For now ... ” He leaves the last thought hanging, possibly conjuring up the same apocalyptic vision that started our conversation: only the good Lord can save us.

In the short term, it would appear that divine intervention is Iraq’s best hope. The means to address water management effectively seem decades away. Much of the country’s infrastructure belongs in scrap yards or exhibits of nineteenth-century industrial artifacts. Re-laying water pipes nationwide for urban water delivery would likely take the better part of a generation. Desalination has been considered during cabinet meetings and projects have been offered by investors from the cash-rich Gulf states, which rely heavily, if not exclusively, on desalinated water. But Iraqi officials have so far described the costs as prohibitive. “It might work out for a small state like Abu Dhabi that doesn’t need tens of thousands of kilometers of pipeline,” says one minister. “But for us, it is a non-starter for now.”

Globalization woes

The crisis of 2009 has revealed some domestic inefficiencies that Iraq’s farmers will struggle to reverse. Wholesalers have been able to import and distribute fresh produce at market rates that compete successfully with what domestic consumers would have paid for locally grown produce. Hundreds of tons of bananas have been flown in from Somalia, watermelons from Iran, rice from the Far East, and bottled water from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

Water woes are playing a big part in turning Iraq into a net food importer. But so are the cost-efficient alternatives introduced to the Iraqi market by companies in both developing states and Western nations, all of which are clamoring to service some 20 million people who, for the most part, have always relied on homegrown produce.

Apart from small pockets that can still harness water from the Euphrates, much of Iraq’s politically and strategically critical Anbar province is now a dust bowl. So, too, is Diyala province, north of Baghdad, which boasts some of the most fertile alluvial soil in the land. Both areas were ground zero for the Sunni militancy—Anbar the so-called triangle of death, Diyala the declared heartland of a new Islamic caliphate in 2006. The al-Maliki government had hoped to appease insurgents with the promise of prosperity. But as 2009 draws to a close, the notion seems fanciful. Family incomes are down substantially in many areas. The violence, successfully quelled throughout the past two years, is again on the rise, especially in Anbar.

Iraq’s provinces and some of its most dangerous towns have been the focus of work throughout the past five years by American reconstruction teams, especially the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which in October wound up its mission. The engineers left, claiming that 21.2 million Iraqis now had access to potable drinking water, up from just over 5 million people immediately after the invasion. Last year, in the giant Sadr City slum in Baghdad’s northeast, the Army Corps built a treatment plant which draws and purifies water from the Tigris. The net effect, the Army claims, has been an increase from 46 to 200 in the per capita liters of water per day for Sadr City residents. The bill for the project was $65 million.

In all, the engineers completed 25 large water distribution projects across the country as well as 800 smaller water sector projects that delivered potable water to many Iraqis who had no such luxury before Saddam fell. But now the engineers are gone. Gone with them is the bulk of America’s capacity to do more good works before the White House orders the last troops out late next year.

Water distribution at the micro level is undoubtedly better than it was. But in a macro sense, the efforts amount to a small splash in a large pond. Iraq has giant subterranean lakes of another precious resource—oil—under the soil at both ends of the country and appears to be betting its future on turning anticipated revenues into purchasing power and regional clout today.

Oil is Iraq’s meal ticket—a buffer against both drought and geopolitical impotence. The cabinet has been absorbed over the past six months with finding a formula that offers foreign investors enough financial incentives to bring their expertise to the badlands, while at the same time retaining control of the oil sector and the billions of petro-dollars it is likely to produce. But while the promise of future riches and power may see the waters flow again one day, on the barren plains of Iraq’s south a simpler business plan is taking shape.

Alongside the highway between Baghdad and Basra—a giant, Saddam-era, four-lane road built to move tanks and troops—a rare agricultural success story is emerging. To travel this road in 2005-06 was to almost guarantee a run-in with a militia group, or an angry burst of bullets fired from a nearby sand berm. It remained a no-go zone to most non-Iraqis until the middle of 2008. By then, scorched wrecks of tankers lined the highway along with the charred chassis of the occasional American Hummer or private security company four-wheel-drive vehicle, conspicuous by its blackened, rusting bulk.

Even today, giant scabs of charred bitumen are missing along the entire stretch to Basra, legacies of improvised bombs and aerial strikes that turned Iraq’s main arterial highway into a Mad Max-like wasteland. But now, dozens of salt farms line both sides of the road. There had always been a small salt industry, especially in the center of Iraq, near the cities of Babylon and Najaf, but with rapid water depletion turning lakes into shallow, salinated pools, dozens of small enterprises have now sprung up. Salt, piled in pyramid-style heaps, pockmarks the horizon of a barren landscape once covered in year-round sheets of water. One farmer sold his flock of goats to concentrate on salt. “I have around 190 kilos here,” he says, pointing at his pile. “It’s much more [profit] than I will get this year from dates.”

The salt is then taken to market in Baghdad, where a small export industry is tipped to develop this year. Until the oil money kicks in or its neighbors turn on the taps again, success in the salt pans is likely to be a rare high-water mark for Iraq. In the short term, it would appear that divine intervention is Iraq’s best hope. The means to address water management effectively seems decades away.

Sustainable building is becoming more appealing to both builders and buyers as more government incentives for energy efficiency are offered.

"Green building has been a bright spot in an otherwise lackluster year [in the building industry],"said Sean Penrith, executive director of Portland, Ore.-based Earth Advantage Institute.

Recently a memorandum of understanding was signed between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which established parameters to design and deliver energy performance labeling for buildings. The Energy Performance Score (EPS) for buildings is comparable to the miles-per-gallon sticker on many cars and can be used to deliver incentives to builders, homeowners or businesses.

"I think that many state and local governments are going to be charged with either implementing their own version of the DOE-sanctioned label or implementing a DOE-approved label nationwide," said Penrith in an interview with Government Technology.

The EPS, developed by the Energy Trust of Oregon, is a publicly available number that is associated with a new or existing building. This means that property buyers can compare energy performance on similar buildings.

Energy performance labeling is just one of the green building trends for 2010, according to Earth Advantage Institute. Here's what else made it onto the top 10 list for 2010:

• The smart grid and connected home. While utilities will continue to make upgrades to the grid for more effective generation, storage and distribution of power, the big news is in the home. The development of custom and Web-based display panels that show real-time home energy use, and even real-time energy use broken out by individual appliance, will go a long way toward helping change homeowners' energy behavior and will drive energy conservation.
• Energy labeling for homes and office buildings. The advent of more accurate energy rating systems for homes and office spaces -- similar to the mpg sticker on your car -- has caught the attention of energy agencies and legislators around the country. Not only can it make a building-to-building or home-to-home comparison easier, but a publicly available score on the multiple listing service could galvanize owners to make needed energy improvements while adding value to their building.
• Building information modeling (BIM) software. The continued evolution of CAD software for building design has produced new add-on tools with increasingly accurate algorithms for energy modeling as well as embedded energy properties for many materials and features. This will prove instrumental in predicting building performance. BIM developers will soon offer more affordable packages aimed at smaller firms and individual builders.
• Financial community buy-in to green building. Lenders and insurers have come to see green homes and buildings as better for their bottom line and are working to get new reduced-rate loan products, insurance packages and metrics into place. Lenders and insurers are realizing green home and building owners are more responsible, place higher value on maintenance and lower operating costs, and are less likely to default.
• "Rightsizing" of homes. A larger home no longer translates into greater equity. Given that the forecast for home valuation remains conservative, that energy prices are expected to rise over time, and the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates mid-year, homeowners will likely feel more comfortable building smaller homes and smaller add-ons.
• Eco-districts. A number of cities are already on the bandwagon with this one, encouraging the creation of greener communities where residents have access to most services and supplies within walking or biking distance. The creation of walkable, low-impact communities in the suburban setting is also gaining steam.
• Water conservation. Because indoor and outdoor residential water use accounts for more than half of the publicly supplied water in the United States,
he EPA finalized the voluntary WaterSense specification for new homes in December 2009, which reduces water use by about 20 percent compared to a conventional new home. Water will be the essential resource in the next decade.
• Carbon Calculation. With buildings contributing roughly half the carbon emissions in the environment, the progressive elements in the building industry are looking at ways to document, measure and reduce greenhouse gas creation in building materials and processes. This effort will be heightened once a federal cap-and-trade mechanism is launched in this country.
• Net Zero Buildings. A net zero building is one that generates more energy than it uses over the course of a year, as a result of relatively small size, extreme efficiencies and onsite renewable energy sources. While the Architecture 2030 Challenge sets forth net zero as the goal for all new buildings by 2030, we are already within striking distance on energy efficiency know-how.
• Sustainable building education. The continued demand for greener buildings, especially in progressive cities, will supply new learning opportunities, not just for designers and builders but also for the entire chain of professionals involved in the building industry, from real estate to finance and insurance.

All right, it appears the world has moved past the "is global warming happening" stage and has now moved onto, "how screwed are we?"

But what is interesting is just how wide-ranging the effects will be, far beyond the normal "it will get really hot" and "the hippies will be really smug" we all have been expecting. Here are some of the effects you probably never saw coming...

For most of us, the best part of our day is spending time with loved ones. For the rest, it's drowning reality in a pool of sweet, brain-clouding liquors. Unfortunately, reality doesn't want to be drowned and global warming is looking to make it harder to accomplish that goal in the future, as it's predicted higher temperatures are going to lead to either outright shortages, or at least pricier, lower quality booze.

Once again, Billy Carter proves to be ahead of his time.

The problem for beer is malting barley. As climates become drier in areas where barley is grown, it could cause a disruption in beer production as crops either have to be moved to more hospitable grounds or brewers have to adapt to different varieties of barley which could lead to dreaded ass-flavored beer (as in, there's a reason those other varieties aren't used now).

For those who like to get a fancier drunk on, the wine industry also faces some changes thanks to global warming, as many wines are region specific and as the climate changes, so too do the way grapes grow and ripen. Some climatologists predict that by 2050 it will be almost impossible to grow grapes throughout large portions of Italy, Australia, California and France. Those last two would be known as "the places where most of the good wine comes from."

A desperate world will have to turn to the Red Sox for quality wine.

The effect on wine tastings and assorted douchebaggery could be devastating, forcing countless people who wear berets and eat room temperature cheese to wander aimlessly from art gallery to art gallery completely sober. Instead, they may be driven to...

If you were hoping there was an upside to global warming then you're in for a treat. Unless you don't want to develop a crippling addiction to heroin, in which case this may be another downside.

According to the USDA, who spend their days ankle-deep in opium dens, rising CO2 levels are making opium poppies more potent. Apparently back in the day grandpa was just coasting on the weak shit. Poppies grown today produce twice as many narcotic compounds as those from 1950.

The prediction is for levels to triple by 2050 and by 4.5 times more potent by 2090. This obviously has a huge impact on the world's rock stars, whose lifestyle depends on the substance. Either rock stars will face extinction by 2100, or else natural selection will give us an entirely new species of heroin-resistant musicians.

She's a hardy breed.

Curiously, the opposite effect happens in tobacco plants, that lose nicotine and other compounds with the increase of CO2, which we assume means cigarette companies are going to have to supplement smokes with heroin in the future. That makes sense, right?

Las Vegas is a great place to ruin your life with debt or VD and people flock to do just that each and every year. Unfortunately, this utopia of despair is facing a silent threat most people beyond city planners never stopped to consider: Las Vegas is in the desert.

"You know what would really bring this place together? Casinos and whores."

When the desert gets warmer, water becomes more scarce and officially Vegas is in a sticky spot as water levels in Lake Mead continue to drop with each passing year. And legally, the city will be required to find an alternative water source if water levels drop another 17 feet as that will drop the level below the existing intake pipes.

And the sign will get all dusty and no one wants that.

The city spent $800 million to build a new pipeline deeper into the lake but if levels keep dropping that won't help; some predictions have Lake Mead disappearing by 2021. The effect spreads much further than Vegas (up to 36 million people would be affected) but Vegas is in an extra precarious position since, you know, the desert thing. If the worst case scenario plays out (and it's looking likely) not even all the tears shed in Vegas by bankrupt fathers and exploited showgirls will be able to keep lawns green.

LIFI plasma lamps and LEDs are changing the landscape of theatrical and broadcast

by Michael S. Eddy

I initially saw the LIFI Solid-State Plasma lamp from Luxim Corp at Lightfair in 2008 when Luxim was showing it for projector applications. The product is now crossing over to the entertainment market through some alliances with entertainment lighting manufacturers.

Many people encountered the LIFI when SeaChanger launched its Nemo color-changing ellipsoidal with the LIFI plasma lamp at last year’s LDI tradeshow. Recently, the automated lighting manufacturer Robe introduced the Robin 300 Plasma Spot, a moving head spot luminaire that uses the LIFI technology. These are just the tip of the iceberg and I think that you will be seeing a lot more products using this pretty remarkable light engine. You will definitely be hearing a lot more about this lamp in the weeks and months to come if you haven’t already.

LIFI is a solid-state light source that is not a light emitting diode (LED) and has no electrodes like a metal halide or discharge lamp. It is a high-intensity light source that brings energy efficiency, long useful life, full spectrum light and is dimmable from 20 to 100%.

This tiny light source—the lamp itself is about the size of a Tic Tac—has a nominal power draw of 266W, yet outputs up to 17,800 lumens with a color-rendering index (CRI) of 94 (out of 100) and a rated average life of 10,000 hours. The lumen output will be reduced once the lamp is inside the lighting fixture; typically the final lumen output is at 10,000 lumens.

“The LIFI-ENT-31-02 allows fixture manufacturers to replace short- and medium-arc-length HID lamps in 400 to 575W categories,” explains Apurba Pradhan, senior technical marketing engineer with Luxim. “In this wattage category, we are engaged with several manufacturers that typically use HTI or MSD lamps.” Since heat is directly related to the wattage, the LIFI plasma lamp produces about the same heat per watt as standard discharge lamps, however since it is using less wattage per lumen it does run cooler to achieve the same lumen output. There are fins on the emitter housing to help shed the heat away from the electronics.”

When you look at the efficacy of a fixture, you want to see what the Lumens per Watt (LPW) are for the fixture and lamp as a whole system. To get LPW, you take the System Lumen Output and divide it by the Input Wattage. Most discharge lamps that are currently used in automated lights have an overall efficacy of 15 to 30 LPW. The LIFI plasma source raises this important number to 30 to 45 LPW. You get similar light output with less wattage drawn. “Let’s take the 400W medium arc HID lamp which runs at 440W due to ballast inefficiency for example,” says Pradhan. “The LIFI-ENT-31-02 outputs equal fixture lumens but at 290W.”

Ten thousand hours lamp life is a big improvement over the currently typical 750 to 1,000 hours. To put 10,000 hours in perspective, if you used the light for four hours a day, seven days a week for 52 weeks, the LIFI lamp would last close to seven years. When you do need a replacement lamp the cost would be approximately $150. This would be to replace the emitter consisting of the bulb, puck and heat sink. The emitter rated life is 10,000 hours; however the driver is rated for 60,000 hours. Therefore, in most cases you would never need to replace the driver.

Real World Applications
The good news is that there is a cool, cutting-edge light source out there; the great news is that there are already two manufacturers that have integrated the LIFI source into their products.

SeaChanger Nemo
SeaChanger, best known for its CYMG color changer for ETC Source Four Ellipsoidals, produces the Nemo, a color-changing ellipsoidal that uses the LIFI solid-state plasma source. The Nemo produces 10,000 lumens with a draw of 300W, which means that it outputs 33 LPW. It comes equipped with SeaChanger's own Extreme Green wheel that extends the CMY color gamut to create more dramatic, vibrant colors. The SeaChanger Nemo uses an existing ETC Source Four front-end barrel as well as an assortment of ETC lens tubes.

Because of its lamp life, Nemo is the perfect solution for hard-to-reach installations like domes, atria and high ceilings. “It bridges the gap between incandescent and LED lighting at a price that's within reach,” says Beth Weinstein, marketing director for SeaChanger. The first Nemo prototype was shown at LDI 2008 in Las Vegas; the final product was shown at Lightfair 2009, where it was awarded the LFI Innovation Award in the Specialty Lamps category. It is currently being specified and the production units are scheduled to ship early this summer. SeaChanger has development plans for the Nemo—on deck now are the standard fixture, which can be used in theatrical and architectural installations, and an outdoor fixture that will have all of the same functionality, but with a housing that can withstand hard rain.

“The response to the Nemo fixture has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Weinstein. “We have a ‘green’ alternative to incandescent lighting that can provide the seamless, silent, swipe-free color transition that people have come to expect from SeaChanger.” The list price for the Nemo is $3,800.

Robe Robin 300 Plasma Spot
Robe’s Robin 300 Spot uses the LIFI solid-state plasma light source and combines it with the company’s moving light technology to offer an optical system with a beam angle of 10° to 40° and a pan of 540° and a tilt of 280°. The Robin 300 has an output of 10,000 lumens with a 266W power supply for 37.5 LPW.

“We have designed a new color-mixing system that, combined with the plasma lamp technology, delivers outstanding color-rendering and superior color-mixing features,” says David Srba, CEO of Robe Lighting Inc. “I would say the colors are really the strongest feature of our new Robin 300 Plasma Spot. With the extremely flat and even beam, we see this product to be ideal for applications in theatres and houses of worship amongst others. If we add the life span and stability of the plasma lamp to the reliability of our products, Robin 300 delivers a great value product that will require very little maintenance and last for a very long time.” Another feature to note is that the LIFI lamp has a semi-hot restrike function—less than 120 seconds for full lamp brightness after shutting it off.

The Robin 3 series, which offers the LIFI lamp or a version of the unit with the Philips MSD Gold 300/2 MiniFastFit lamp, was introduced in April at the Prolight+Sound show in Frankfurt and the products went into production this June. “The response was extremely pleasant,” says Srba. “People are excited about the new technology.” Robe plans more products with the LIFI plasma lamp. At press time, the estimated US list price for the Robin 300 plasma spot is $9,500.

How it works
So now you know the LIFI exists and even where you can use it, but if you want to really get into how this new technology works read on. The official product name is LIFI Entertainment 31-02. The system consists of four primary sub-assemblies—bulb; radio frequency (RF) power amplifier circuit (PA); printed circuit board (PCB); and an enclosure. The PCB controls the electrical inputs and outputs of the lamp and houses the microcontroller used to manage different lamp functions. An RF signal is generated by the solid-state PA and is guided into an electric field about the bulb. The high concentration of energy in the electric field vaporizes the contents of the bulb to a plasma state at the bulb’s center; this controlled plasma generates an intense source of light. All of these subassemblies are contained in an aluminum enclosure.

The core of the LIFI system is the bulb sub-assembly, where a sealed bulb is embedded in a dielectric material. This design is more reliable than conventional light sources that insert degradable electrodes into the bulb. No electrodes also mean a cleaner beam and optics. The dielectric material serves two purposes; it’s a waveguide for the RF energy transmitted by the PA and it acts as an electric field concentrator to focus energy in the bulb. The energy from the electric field rapidly heats the material in
the bulb to a plasma state that emits light of high intensity and full spectrum.

The ENT-31-02 is the first of a series of products they are going to introduce into the entertainment technology market; Luxim is looking to broaden its products in this market. The company is in talks with manufacturers of film and studio lighting for daylight (5,600K) fixture options where the HMI lamp is dominant. The next product will be targeted at replacing the 700W HID lamp and then the company will target the 1,200W category.

“As the lighting industry is looking to save energy and reduce costs, LIFI is the most compelling solution for the next generation of spot, beam, and directed light applications,” concludes Pradhan. “We are excited for the future of the industry and hope to be the standard for long life, energy-efficient and true color light sources.” It may be cliché but the future really does look bright for this new technology.