Euan Nisbet, a University of London earth sciences professor who has traveled the world testing the air for greenhouse-gas pollution, makes his way to a rocky outcropping on the eastern coast of Hong Kong Island on a sunny November afternoon. He takes out a battery-operated pump connected to a thin tube and a plastic bag to capture traces of the wind. "This is a good day for collecting samples," says Nisbet, 61, looking out to sea. "There´s a good, strong breeze blowing in from the mainland. It´s the breath of China." Hooking up his air-sucking device, Nisbet says the world puts too much faith in government estimates of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases blamed for climate change, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue. That´s because companies and countries base emissions calculations on the raw materials that go into a factory or power plant; they don´t check the pollution that comes out. "It´s like going on a diet without weighing yourself," explains Ray Weiss, a geochemistry professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, whose article with Nisbet in the June issue of Science argues for measuring the atmosphere.
Source: Bloomberg
