welcome

The German people, and the whole world alongside them, are today celebrating a landmark date in history: the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Not many events can claim their place in the collective memory as a watershed that divides two distinct periods. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall — that stark, concrete symbol of a world divided into hostile camps — is such an event. It brought incredible hope and opportunity to people everywhere, and provided the 1980s with a truly jubilant finale. That is something to think about as this decade draws to a close, and the chance for humanity to take another momentous leap forward appears to be slipping away.

The road to the end of the Cold War was certainly not easy, or universally welcomed at the time, but it is for just this reason that its lessons remain relevant. In the 1980s the world was at an historic crossroad. The arms race had created an explosive situation. Nuclear deterrents could have failed at any moment. We were heading for disaster, spending billions on an arms race, rather than investing in creativity and people.

Today another planetary threat has emerged. The climate crisis is the new wall that divides us from our future, and today’s leaders are vastly underestimating the urgency, and potentially catastrophic scale, of the emergency.

People used to joke that we will struggle for peace until there is nothing left on the planet; the threat of climate change makes this prophecy more literal than ever. Comparisons with the period immediately before the Berlin Wall came down are striking.

Like 20 years ago, we face a threat to global security and our very future existence that no one nation can deal with alone. And, again, it is the people who are calling for change. Just as the German people declared their will for unity, world citizens are today demanding that action is taken to tackle climate change and redress the deep injustices that surround it. Twenty years ago key world leaders demonstrated resolve, faced up to opposition and immense pressure, and the Wall came down. It remains to be seen whether today’s leaders will do the same.

Addressing climate change demands a paradigm shift on a scale akin to that required to end the Cold War. But we need a “circuit-breaker” to escape from the business-as-usual that currently dominates the political agenda. It was the transformation brought about by perestroika and glasnost that provided the quantum leap for freedom for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and opened the way for the democratic revolution that saved history. Climate change is complex and closely entwined with a host of other challenges, but a similar breakthrough in our values and priorities is needed.

There is not just one wall to topple, but many. There is the wall between those states which are already industrialised, and those developing countries which do not want to be held back. There is the wall between those who cause climate change, and those who suffer the consequences. There is the wall between those who heed the scientific evidence, and those who pander to vested interests. And there is the wall between the citizens who are changing their own behaviour and want strong global action, and the leaders who are so far letting them down.

In 1989, incredible changes that were deemed impossible just a few years earlier were implemented. But this was no accident. The changes resonated the hopes of the time and leaders responded. We brought down the wall in the belief that future generations would be able to solve challenges together. Today, looking at the cavernous gulf between rich and poor, the irresponsibility that caused the global financial crisis, and the weak and divided responses to climate change, I feel bitter. The opportunity to build a safer, fairer and more united world has been largely squandered.

To echo the demand made of me by my late friend and sparring partner President Reagan: Mr Obama, Mr Hu, Mr Singh, Mr Brown and, back in Berlin, Ms Merkel and her European counterparts: “Tear down this wall!”

For this is Your Wall, your defining moment. You cannot dodge the call of history. I appeal to heads of state and government to personally come to the climate change conference in Copenhagen this December and dismantle the wall. The people of the world expect you to deliver; do not fail them.

Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union, was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. He is the Founding President of Green Cross International and is heading an international Climate Change Task Force

PARIS—Leaders from nine major faiths meet at Windsor Castle on Tuesday in an exceptional initiative that supporters predict will harness the power of religion in the fight against climate change.

The ecumenical gathering at the home of Queen Elizabeth II, 22 miles west of London, is being co-staged by the United Nations and Prince Philip’s Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC).

Representatives from Baha’ism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, Sikhism, and Taoism will unveil programs that “could motivate the largest civil society movement the world has ever seen,” said U.N. Assistant Secretary General Olav Kjorven.

U.N. Chief Ban Ki-moon will launch the event under the banner “Faith Commitments for a Living Planet.”

“We expect to send a strong signal from religion to governments that we are extremely committed. It’s about religions mobilizing their followers to act against climate change,” Kjorven told AFP in an interview.

Eighty-five percent of humanity follow a religion, a figure that shows the power of faith to move billions, he pointed out.

In addition, faith-based groups own nearly 8 percent of habitable land on Earth, operate dozens of media groups and more than half the world’s schools, and control 7 percent of financial investments worth trillions, according to ARC.

“But the problem is deeper than economics and money, it’s much more about the moral idea [of] ‘Nature is God’s Nature, so we have to be kind to it,’” said Victoria Finlay, ARC’s director of communication.

“Global warming and its impacts cannot be looked at just as a material problem. The root causes are spiritual,” agreed Stuart Scott, whose Interfaith Declaration on Climate Change—calling for the “stewardship and reverence for creation”—has been endorsed by dozens of major religious organizations.

In July, some 200 Muslim leaders gathered in Istanbul to forge a seven-year climate change action plan.

One of the measures adopted was the creation of a “Muslim eco-label” for goods and services ranging from printings of the Koran to organized pilgrimages.

“We don’t want to distance ourselves from governments, we are all in the same boat,” said Mahmoud Akef, who led the initiative. “If we devastate the planet, we’ll have no place else to live.”

Sikhs who feed some 30 million people in need every day in their temples in India are poised to revamp their kitchens to make them “eco-friendly,” and China’s Taoist temples are going solar.

“Religions cross boundaries and don’t have to deal with issues of finance, of sovereignty, of intellectual property on technology”—all issues bedeviling U.N. climate talks, said Jessica Haller, director of the Jewish Climate Campaign.

American environmentalist Bill McKibben, the founder of grassroots climate group 350.org, has identified two wellsprings for the worldwide tsunami of support for his web-based cause: educated youth and faith-based groups.

350.org organized a day of “global action” on Saturday, Oct. 24 of more than 5,000 mainly small-scale climate-awareness events around the world.

“If Earth is in some way a museum of divine intent, it’s pretty horrible to be defacing all that creation,” McKibben, an author who is active in the Methodist Church, said.

“And if, in Christianity and other faiths, we are called upon above all else to love God and love our neighbors, drowning your neighbor in Bangladesh is a pretty bad way to go about it,” he added.

Scientists warn that unabated global warming will likely cause ocean levels to rise at least 3.25 feet by century’s end, enough to wreak havoc in high-populated low-lying deltas, especially in South, Southeast and East Asia.

For Peter Newell, a professor at the University of East Anglia in England who had tracked climate activism for more than a decade, religion has the traction to haul a truly global movement.

“It would be a huge mobilizing force if people started to frame the issue of climate change in religious terms,” noted Newell.

Bureaucratic detail should be the last thing that prevents an agreement to save the planet from climate change. After all, the outline of the issue is simple: every government in the world now accepts that the amount of carbon dioxide being emitted from human sources will lead to a disastrous overheating of the atmosphere, if it is not checked.

But argument over bureaucratic detail may yet prevent a new global climate deal being struck in Copenhagen next month: the nature of the agreement itself is still subject to sharply variant views among the 192 countries who are coming together to negotiate it.

For even if the imperative is clear, and recognised by all, national self-interest guides a different response to it in different nations, and the great trick to pull off in the Danish capital will be for all countries to put aside just enough self-interest to agree.

The problem they face – in bureaucratic terms – is how exactly a new climate treaty should be structured, and the issue in everyone's minds, so far unresolved, is how it should relate to the present treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, and due to run out (if it is not renewed) on 31 December 2012.

Kyoto has great strengths and great weaknesses. Its strengths are that it commits the rich industrialised countries to quantified cuts in their carbon emissions by a given date, and that it is legally binding in international terms.

Its weaknesses are that these cuts are nowhere near big enough to get a hold on the expected warming, that the developing countries, led by China and India, are not required under Kyoto to cut their own now-burgeoning emissions, and that the United States, the world's leading carbon emitter until China recently overtook it, is no longer part of the protocol. George Bush withdrew the US from Kyoto in 2001, because his administration considered it gave an unfair advantage to China and other US economic competitors.

These weaknesses are enough to ensure that Kyoto now represents an inadequate response to the heightened climate threat which was made clear in the fourth report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in the spring of 2007.

The IPCC report said that warming of the atmosphere was now "unequivocal" and that there was a better than nine of out 10 chance that human actions were causing it; if it continued, the report said, the global average temperature could rise by as much as 4C (or even in the extreme case, 6C) by 2100, which would, in effect, make human life on Earth impossible.

The response to this warning was hugely significant. First, it was accepted by the Americans; even the Bush administration, for so long climate sceptics supreme, felt unable to deny the science any longer, and formally endorsed the report (at Valencia, in November 2007). Second, the world community as a whole realised that a new beginning had to be made, and this was done in the subsequent UN climate conference held in December 2007 in Bali, Indonesia.

The Bali conference agreed to negotiate a renewal of the Kyoto Protocol when it ran out, providing a "second commitment period" for member states to undertake emissions cuts, from 2013. But also, in response to Kyoto's obvious weaknesses, it agreed to work towards a wholly new climate treaty, which would a) involve the US; b) oblige China, India and the other developing countries to cut their own emissions; c) compensate the developing countries for doing this; and d) set a very ambitious level of new medium-term targets for the rich countries, in an attempt to hold the warming to below the danger threshold of C above the pre-industrial level.

The IPCC told the conference that the medium-term targets should be cuts in CO2 of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and although this was not written into the Bali declaration, it is generally accepted as the "ballpark" figure of the cuts that the rich countries need to make.

For the past two years, these two aims – a renewed version of the Kyoto Protocol, and a wholly new agreement involving the US, developing country cuts, developing country compensation and tough new targets – have been negotiated, side by side, in separate but parallel streams of talks, with the work for the new treaty generally known as the Bali Action Plan, or the Bali Road Map.

The issue is, what happens now? What is next month's Copenhagen agreement to consist of? A new version of Kyoto, plus something else? The dropping of Kyoto, but the incorporation of its best features into a new, Bali-road-map climate treaty? Or a new climate treaty without any reference to Kyoto whatsoever?

Mind-numbingly abstract as these three choices might seem to any of us going about our daily lives, the argument over them is very real, and its resolution is key to the success of a Copenhagen climate deal. The developing countries, collectively known as the G77+China, are insistent that the Kyoto Protocol be renewed, and its rich country member states sign up for new emissions cuts from 2013 onwards.

They like it because it is legally-binding internationally, with compliance mechanisms which mean errant states can be forced back in line, and with internationally agreed ways of counting carbon (for example, how much carbon is in an acre of forest?). They feel it will stop rich countries backsliding from their commitments.

The EU states, including Britain, want to move on from Kyoto to a new treaty based on the Bali action plan, which would keep Kyoto's essence, that is, it would be legally binding internationally, with a compliance mechanism and international rules for carbon accounting.

The USA wants nothing to do with Kyoto or its architecture. It has put forward a wholly new model for a climate deal in which countries would set out what they are going to do without being bound by international compliance regimes, or international carbon accounting. The US was never going to come back into Kyoto after President Bush withdrew from it – such a move would not be accepted by the US Congress – but it is now clear it wants nothing even vaguely resembling the protocol. The US, we may remember, has always had an aversion to subjecting itself to international law.

So what is the Copenhagen deal to consist of? Who is to give way? When the last session of negotiations before the Danish summit closed on Friday evening in Barcelona, and the last delegate had eaten his last tapas and drunk his last glass of rioja, the question remained unresolved.

There are a number of other potential deal-breakers looming for the meeting which begins on 7 December. As we indicated last week, the gap on financial help for climate change, between what the developing world wants and the rich world is prepared to give, is enormous. And President Obama's willingness to commit the US to an ambitious mid-term target for CO2 is crucial.

But if the bureaucratic part of it all, the boring old bureaucracy, cannot be resolved, the Copenhagen deal is going nowhere.

If you think the partisan divide over healthcare reform is ugly, take a look at the animus in the Senate as debate continues on a key climate change bill. So wide is the gulf that long-held Senate traditions on decorum are breaking down. And as Washington fiddles, the Earth burns.

The Senate version of a House bill aimed at capping greenhouse gas emissions was stalled last week by Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who boycotted the discussion, demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency agree to do a more thorough study of the bill's economic impact. It was an ugly and highly unusual tactic aimed at delaying a bill that has already been thoroughly vetted by the EPA, leaving Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the committee chair, little choice but to resort to extremes herself. She put the bill, S. 1733, up for a vote Thursday without a single Republican present. That angered Republicans but was even more frustrating for Democrats -- several wanted to amend the bill, but with no one from the minority party present, no amendments were allowed. The bill passed, 11-1.

This doesn't bode well. Wiser heads are working to salvage the legislation, with John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) announcing plans to craft a bill that can attract the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. But Democrats from Southern and coal-producing states are reluctant to sign on, and attracting any GOP votes will be a challenge; many believe the chances are slim that the bill, which sets a cap on emissions while allowing polluters to trade carbon credits, will be approved this year.

Such a failure would be disastrous in more ways than one. With no commitment to cut greenhouse gases in the U.S., it would be next to impossible to get other big polluter nations on board in Copenhagen in December for a global agreement on fighting climate change. Another year's delay will make future efforts more expensive and less effective. With a third of all Senate seats up for election in 2010, it will become even harder to pass controversial legislation.

Climate skeptics would celebrate all this as a victory. They are not swayed by the dire forecasts of the International Panel on Climate Change, nor the endorsements of those findings by the national academies of science of the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and Brazil. Confronted by a crisis whose most terrible repercussions will come after they're dead, they'd rather stick their children with the bill.

Like many in Washington, I spent Saturday night at home watching C-SPAN as the House debated and ultimately passed a major healthcare reform bill. It was about as exciting as the legislative process gets: a special weekend session, with heated debate over a controversial amendment, impassioned statements from virtually every House heavyweight, and a vote that came down to a thin margin, with a single crossover.

This banner moment marks the closest that the United States has ever come to overhauling its woefully expensive, inefficient, and incomplete healthcare system -- and it felt like a victory. But it marks just one step in what promises to be a long and detailed legislative process. Now, the Senate votes on its healthcare bill, then the two bills are merged, and then both chambers vote again. The remaining process will be highly prone to filibusters from Republicans (and, sigh, Joe Lieberman), and will require extensive negotiation. And this comes after months of wrangling in the Senate and House committees.

While healthcare reform takes its time to pass, two other big bills wait on the sidelines, and governments across the globe wait with them. Indeed, the Senate is, in effect, filibustering the world. 

The first back-burnered issue is immigration reform. During his campaign, Obama promised that he would enact comprehensive legislation during his first year in office. It was a heady pledge -- President George W. Bush tried to pass reform during his final term in office, and failed. But it won Obama the support of organizations like the National Council of La Raza and plaudits from governments in Central America, Mexico, and Canada. Then, earlier this year, Obama ingloriously shelved it, laying down a big-bill priority rank with immigration reform taking the bronze. Congress hasn't even started to tackle the issue -- no bills, cosigners, or committee votes yet -- spurring disappointment across the United States' borders and further afield.

The second and vastly more important issue is cap and trade. The House bill passed in June, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushing it onto the floor as soon as she had the votes. But leaders in the White House and Congress decided to cool it to preserve votes for healthcare, and Congress won't make law until sometime early next year.

This delay means that the United States will be something of a weak actor at next month's U.N. Copenhagen conference on climate change. Global leaders will hash out the details of a worldwide plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to attempt to stave off anthropogenic climate disaster. Obama will not be one of them because of, well, Congress.

The United States has said any climate change agreements it makes must comport with U.S. law, and U.S. law isn't ready yet. So, Obama has said he will not attend. In the meantime, the United States has actually attempted to weaken many of the most important measures. Washington, under Obama as under Bush, remains the most recalcitrant major player on climate change, even more so than big-emitter Beijing.

European governments, as well as many others, are bewildered if not piqued. During her address to both chambers of Congress last week, for instance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implored lawmakers to tackle climate change "without delay." It was a futile plea, and half of the lawmakers didn't bother to clap.

This isn't to say that Washington should have different legislative priorities, or should have put climate change or immigration reform before healthcare. It isn't to say that Obama should have stepped out on those issues before Congress enacted law. It isn't even to say that Congress should move faster, though I often wish it would.

It is simply to note that the United States is used to waiting for its legislative process to work. The rest of the world isn't. On climate change, especially, the Senate is not just holding up U.S. legislation, but global action. And it remains unclear what that means for foreign policy.

It sure seems that America is out of touch with the rest of the world regarding global warming, and that the world is slapping us in the face to awaken us from our stupor.

Delegates at last week's Barcelona climate talks were frustrated that U.S. negotiators came to the table unable to commit to concrete steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to our seized legislative engine. Since we only have a month until the U.N. global climate summit that starts December 7 in Copenhagen, Barcelona negotiators vented their frustration by setting high expectations that the U.S. would come to Copenhagen with a plan in hand.

"We expect the United States to be able to deliver on one of the major challenges of our century," said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark's minister for Climate and Energy.

"Copenhagen needs to provide clarity … I do not think that the international community will accept an instrument that lacks clarity on what the U.S. will do to reduce its emissions," said Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The notion that the U.S. is out of touch also was borne out by the Pew Research Center survey that was widely reported on in the past few weeks. Pew found that fewer Americans (57 percent) believe that the earth's atmosphere is warming versus two years ago (77 percent).

That statistic for many validates the view that we are in denial. But there was another statistic in that study that may suggest WHY the U.S. may be so out of touch. Pew also found that a majority of Americans -- 55 percent -- have heard nothing at all about the proposed cap-and-trade policy to establish limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

Come AGAIN?

That's right, 55 percent of U.S. citizens have heard NOTHING AT ALL about cap and trade. With a jaw-dropping statistic like that we must ask ourselves this question: Is the U.S. news media adequately doing its job as regards global warming?

But what is the news media's job? At the most basic level, the news media's job is to mediate news; to convey to us the information it deems to be worthy of our attention. This involves judging which concerns to keep at the forefront of our minds, and which to put on the backburner. And it uses several devices to exercise that judgment.

One such device is the control of the frequency with which it covers certain topics. Another device is the extent to which it covers them. Yet another device is control of the content and emotional tone of that coverage. And it occasionally goes so far as to institutionalize coverage of certain topics that are deemed to be integrally important to our lives; topics that we should want to be reported on each day. For example, newspapers institutionalize coverage of the business world by creating business sections.

The news media exercises those devices in such a way that it can mobilize the mass of people to take dramatic action when we face, or believe we face, a potentially calamitous threat.

Remember Y2K? News reporting about Y2K often has been criticized as manic, yet it had an amazing effect. And how did the public react to that reporting? Remember how people were anticipating the complete breakdown of civil society? Remember the reports about people who were stockpiling water and food, avoiding air travel, and packing heat for self-protection.

A memorable icon of the power of the US news media to mobilize us during the Y2K hysteria was a photo that appeared in a Denver newspaper of a young woman standing in a shooting range, wearing goggles and ear protectors, learning to use a handgun. The implied image -- the one that was conjured in the deep recesses of the mind when viewing the photo -- was of this woman barricaded in her house, with gun holes cut into the boards covering the windows, to protect herself against the marauders wandering the wasted American landscape in the aftermath of Y2K, raping and pillaging whomever they chanced upon.

Obviously, Y2K news coverage exhibited an extreme, and many feel unjustified, frequency and tone of reporting. However, the more general point here is that, whether or not that coverage was appropriate, it exemplifies the power of the news media to mobilize the population by manipulating the above-mentioned levers of news coverage.

So what about climate change?

At a time when climate science is urgently screaming to the American news media to mediate coverage of climate change in a way that will mobilize society, at a time when it's telling us that we just have a few short years to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions or we seriously threaten the planet with chaos, misery, death and extinction, at a time when climate science warrants that we create an atmosphere of grave threat and crisis, and at a time when it tells us that, in the words of Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, "…we need emergency action all around the world to curb (greenhouse gas) emissions" -- our delegates in Barcelona couldn't commit to any kind of plan just a month before Copenhagen, and the Pew Center has found that only 57 percent of Americans, down from 77 percent, believe that global warming is occurring, and that 55 percent have never heard anything about cap and trade. This suggests that the news media is not doing what it could and should be doing to keep us focused with the clarity and urgency that global warming requires, and that our global neighbors demand of themselves. 

Many are acknowledging that the media has cooled on global warming in the past year or more. A common refrain echoed recently is that the recession and healthcare reform have crowded out coverage of global warming.

For example, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Center said on NPR's October 27 episode of "Talk of the Nation" that "…there is a top of the mind aspect to this … what the news organizations do is they cover the issues of the day and what is happening. So when a lot is happening about … climate change you're going to see much more coverage."

Juliet Eilperin, who covers the environment for the Washington Post, in her September 17 appearance on The Diane Rehm Show's "Preparing for Copenhagen" segment, said "… in the immediate past we've seen such a focus on healthcare you haven't seen as much altitude to those (climate change) stories."

But we should be seeing serious altitude on climate change stories. The lives of our children, and our children's children, are threatened. We can't wait until healthcare and the economy have become memories to return to climate change; we know that we have a few short years to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Regardless of what other issues enter and exit our realm of concern, global warming must remain the dominant central issue. Therefore, the U.S. News media should step up and mobilize the nation to take dramatic action on global warming. To that end the media should do the following:

1. Dramatically increase the frequency and extent of coverage of climate change; fill the papers, websites, airwaves and television with lots and lots of coverage of climate change every single day;
2. Fill the content of that coverage with current climate facts, suggest the future implications of those facts, including their social and economic consequences, and illustrate how those consequences will impact us at a personal level;
3. Deliver that content with a grave tone of crisis and emergency;
4. Institutionalize coverage of climate change by creating standard, daily news sections and departments in our print, radio, television, Internet and other media.

Yes, the world is frustrated with our bewildering dissociation from the issue of climate change. And we have an obligation to respond.  The news media can be a tremendously powerful and effective force of change. And if the news media doesn't rise to the occasion -- and do so soon -- the world could forgo its face slap and deliver a knock-out punch.

I'll admit to entering the halls of Greenbuild -- the mammoth green building conference and expo, held last week in Phoenix -- with a cynical theory: Greenbuild would be filled with greenwash. I assumed that with nearly 1,100 exhibitors, up 25 percent from the previous year amid a horrid economy, the U.S. Green Building Council, the event's organizers, had lowered its standards, accepting anyone that had a green story to tell. It would be, I surmised, a case study in what happens when green goes mainstream: that good intentions and high standards give way to the lowest common denominator of the mass market. We'd seen it before with organic foods, where just about any fat-laden, additive-intensive food could be deemed "organic." I assumed history would repeat itself here.

I'm happy to report that I was wrong.

Greenbuild was by no means a hype-free zone, but as I walked the miles of aisles, looking for examples that would prove my theory, I was profoundly disappointed -- and duly impressed. Green building has matured from the exception to the rule, with the market rising to the occasion, producing an increasingly gushing pipeline of products and services that, increasingly, are reducing the environmental toll of the built environment.

As my colleague Rob Watson -- executive editor of GreenerBuildings.com and one of the founders of the green building movement, in particular, the LEED green building rating system -- found in the recent Green Building Market & Impact Report, the potential to reduce those impacts is enormous. LEED in 2009 is estimated to grow by over 40 percent compared to 2008, for a cumulative total of over 7 billion square feet worldwide since the standard was launched in 2000. The free report details the energy, water, land, and employee commuting savings of LEED.

Given this success, it's no surprise that everyone is rushing into the green-building market. And with green building's rise has come a new wave of big companies. It's all reminiscent of the world of energy, where, as I noted more than three years ago, just about every big company seems to now be in the energy business.

So, too, with buildings. The expo floor at Greenbuild has become populated with billion-dollar companies. Many of these you'd expect to see -- large construction companies (DPR, Turner), building automation and controls manufacturers (Honeywell, Johnson Controls), office furniture makers (Herman Miller, Steelcase), architecture firms (Gensler, HOK), flooring manufacturers (Interface, Shaw), and others. But there were some unexpected ones, too.

Firestone, for example. What was the venerable tire company (since 1988 owned by the Japanese conglomerate Bridgestone) doing at a green building show? Seems that the company has migrated from roadways to rooftops, and nearly everywhere in between. It offers an "Enviroready Roofing System," a rubber membrane married to a layer of insulation and other materials, that can accommodate everything from solar panels to vegetable gardens (both of which Firestone also sells). The company also offers permeable asphalt, zero-discharge stormwater collection systems that minimize toxic runoff into sewers and streams, and a range of metal products, from wall panels to sunscreens.

There were others. BASF, the chemical giant, offered a similarly bewildering array of environmental construction solutions -- adhesives, solar panels, wall coatings, waterproofing, concrete, insulation, sealants, gypsum board, even termite control -- each with its own green story.

(Therein lies one of green building's dirty secrets: To make buildings resource-efficient and less-polluting requires a host of not-always-friendly chemicals and materials, which is why BASF was joined by Dow, Dupont, and other old-line chemical companies at Greenbuild. As always, there are trade-offs: Constructing energy-efficient buildings requires using more synthetic materials derived from oil.)

There were a few pleasant surprises. Like Sanyo, offering a "synergetic hybrid bicycle," a two-wheeler that seemed to borrow the best of the Prius, featuring regenerative braking and seamless transition between electric drive and manual pedaling modes.

 

And there was more than a little hype -- for example, the aforementioned Sanyo ("Think GAIA"), Steel ("The New Green"), Cold Spring Granite ("Releasing Rock's Full Potential"), and Armstrong, the flooring company, with a "Greenstock" hippie theme, including tie-dyed t-shirts and a VW bus. (What were they smoking?) There were green nails, green asphalt, green plumbing, green ceilings, green floors, and -- for good measure -- green artificial turf.

But I'll overlook a little irrational corporate exuberance in favor of the greater, greener good.

There's good reason for this exuberance: Green building is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal building market. Consider Turner Construction, one of the world's largest construction companies, with $10 billion or so in annual revenue. This year, fully half of its projects will be built to LEED standards, a 20 percent growth from 2009 -- a year when the company's overall revenue dropped. Put another way, green is propping up the building market.

Which is to say: Green building is no longer mere marketing hype -- it's become nothing less than the status quo.

Environment Minister Peter Garrett has declared a new national scheme will be put in place to improve the energy efficiency of commercial office buildings, with all Australian governments agreeing to the program. It will mean all relevant parties—including building owners and potential buyers or tenants—will have access to consistent information about a building’s energy efficiency, helping them make better informed decisions.

Starting in the second half of 2010, building owners will need to provide up-to-date energy efficiency information when they sell or lease office space covering more than 2,000 square metres.

The scheme is part of a plan to make all homes and businesses more efficient by improving base standards and star ratings for appliances, equipment and buildings, and by phasing out inefficient technologies.

Garrett told attendants at an Energy Efficiency Council conference in Melbourne yesterday that the scheme, "will help drive demand for greener offices that are not only more comfortable to work in, but can also deliver more motivated and productive workers and support cleaner energy jobs”.

“Greener offices can boost productivity, bring down sick leave, support green building industry jobs and have the potential to deliver savings of 20-40% on energy bills.”

The scheme should provide a market incentive for building owners to improve the attractiveness of their properties by investing in cost-effective energy efficient upgrades.

Building owners – including the Australian Government in many instances - will need to disclose a valid Building Energy Efficiency Certificate, which will include a National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) Energy base building star rating. Owners who don’t comply will risk a fine, possibly up to $100,000, or prosecution.

The Green Building Council of Australia was unable to provide any comment on its views of the new scheme before press time.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded last month that, with proven and commercially available technologies, the energy consumption in both new and old buildings could be cut by an estimated 30-50% without significantly increasing investment costs.

But this potential is not yet reflected in international priorities. As of April 2009, only 12 of the 4,500 projects in the Clean Development Mechanism pipeline were seeking to reduce energy demand in buildings.

The members of the World Green Building Council are currently undertaking a number of initiatives to highlight the effectiveness of green building policies and the use of green building tools in reducing emissions.
These include:

 

• Promotion, support and training for new green building councils in 40 countries, including the adoption or development of building rating tools appropriate to their country;

 

• Development of common carbon metrics between the leading green building rating tools to enable consistent measurement of carbon savings from green buildings;

 

• Evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of government policies and regulations to support the sustainable transformation of the property and building industries;

 

• Development of a comprehensive range of case studies on successful green buildings and green building policies.

Announcing the opening of the tender process in Queanbeyan, Environment Minister Peter Garrett said: “Smart grids provide greater ability to incorporate and distribute renewable energy, save money through cutting-edge ‘self-healing’ technologies and reduced demand and empower consumers to manage their energy use.

“From the power plant to the power point, smart grids enable a two-way flow of information between energy suppliers and consumers. Like an ‘energy internet’, smart grids enable energy to be delivered where and when it is required, improving reliability and reducing losses; the potential economic and environmental benefits are staggering.

“Early estimates show that, if smart grid applications are adopted around Australia, they could deliver significant economic and environmental benefits to the Australian economy, including an estimated minimum reduction of 3.5 mega-tonnes of carbon emissions per annum.”

Energy Minister Martin Ferguson added: “This program is a good opportunity to test the costs and benefits of smart grid and smart meter applications before a wider regulated rollout of smart meters in certain jurisdictions in coming years.”

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, said the Smart Grid, Smart City initiative will help Australia lead a global transformation as energy networks deploy broadband-enabled solutions to drive efficiency: “The National Broadband Network is intended to enable a whole range of efficiency and productivity gains across the economy, including in the energy sector. This smart grid project is an important start point as we move to ensure Australia gains maximum value from our broadband investments.”

Garrett said he expected to receive quality bids for the funding, with strong interest being shown from the energy and communications sectors: “We have consulted with industry and community extensively, since the government announced the initiative in July, and it will be exciting to see what their proposals are for Australia's first smart grid.”

The successful consortium will be led by an electricity distributor and membership likely to include a mix of electricity retailers, product and service suppliers, governments, academic bodies, consumer interest groups and other non-government organisations.

Consortia have until late January 2010 to submit their bids.

NSW Premier Nathan Rees yesterday announced a gross Feed-in Tariff that will see households with solar panels paid for every single kilowatt hour of energy they generate, instead of just the surplus the supply to the grid, from January 1, 2010. He claims the state’s Solar Bonus Scheme will deliver the nation’s highest payments to families that support renewable energy generation.

As of August 2009 there were 10,476 PV systems installed within NSW, providing a total generation capacity of just over 13MW. Of these about 80% are connected to the electricity grid.

“Creating certainty in the feed-in-tariff scheme is one way we can encourage families to invest in solar technology and support the clean energy industry,” said Premier Rees.

Households will be paid $0.60 per kW hour they produce from their solar panels. An average household system would generate around 2,500kWh annually.

The scheme will therefore see a family with an average solar system paid around $1,496 a year. That is a 62% increase compared to the previous scheme, and will allow households to pay off their investment in solar panels in around eight years.

The NSW scheme will have a cap on the size of home solar systems of 10kW. A system this size would generate around 16,700kWh and pay almost $10,000 a year.

“This scheme is in the similar vein as the ACT solar feed in tariff,” said Adam Tesoriero, the director of SolarSwitch, a Sydney company that claims to have installed some 20% of household solar power systems in NSW over the last four months.

“What this [scheme] really means is that the average person will know exactly what returns they will get from their solar system, and people will be encouraged to invest in solar panels,” he told Environmental Management News.

While the Greens party highlighted the 10kW cut off as a problem for the NSW scheme, Tesoriero agreed that limit is more than enough, as “the normal household would only need roughly 3-4kW, from a residential point of view”.

On top of now being paid for the renewable energy they produce, Tesoriero points out “an energy efficient home could [also] save up to $1,000 per year on their electricity bill if they installed a 1.5kW solar system”.

“People will get an excellent return in terms of investment and will be encouraged to install larger solar panels, so it’s a win-win scenario for businesses and households.”

The Clean Energy Council also said the NSW government has taken an important step forward, with CEO Matthew Warren pointing out, “SA and WA are currently reviewing their solar schemes and we encourage both of these governments to consider the NSW approach during this process”.

But the job is not done yet, said Warren, and governments need to focus on driving industrial-scale renewable energy projects across wind, bioenergy, solar and hydro projects or they would “all face a bleak 2010”.

As previously reported, there are concerns that – despite the expanded 20% by 2020 Renewable Energy Target - large-scale clean energy projects are struggling to get off the ground because of a sustained weak price for Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), due mostly to the flood of RECs from household hot water upgrades.

“The RET was a good start, but most of the industry is at a standstill because of a weak market for RECs, the unintended result of a range of government programs,” said Warren.

“Expanding the RET has created a new market that needs some fine tuning. This is crucial if it is to do its job of developing a world class clean energy industry in Australia that will help smooth the transition to a decarbonised energy industry.”

In other criticisms of the NSW scheme, the Greens argued it should run for 20 years, instead of the seven years the Rees Government has proposed.

A column in a leading British newspaper which accuses New Zealanders of unjustifiably trading off their "clean, green 100 per cent pure" imagery doesn't make for nice reading, Green Party co-leader Russel Norman says.

"But while it may be harsh, there's a lot of truth in it," Mr Norman said.

"It looks like the rest of the world is catching on to New Zealand's dirty little secret."

Fred Pearce, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper gave "the prize for the most shameless two fingers to the global community to New Zealand, a country that sells itself round the world as `clean and green', but had increased greenhouse gas emissions by a whopping 22 per cent since signing up to reduce them at Kyoto".

Mr Pearce was outraged New Zealand had a reputation for global leadership in tackling climate change, when the country's minister in charge of climate negotiations, Tim Groser, had said the Government would not try to be "leaders" in climate change.

Dr Norman – a vocal critic of issues such as "dirty dairying" said that on many international issues New Zealand punched above its weight, but not on climate change.

This was a risk, because dairy exports and international tourism both depended on the integrity of "Brand New Zealand".

Climate Change Minister Nick Smith said the report said Labour's policies were not credible and New Zealand could not live up to the high expectations.

"The rhetoric of New Zealand being a world leader on climate change has been at odds with a trebling in coal-generated electricity, record felling of trees, and large increases in our gross emissions over the past decade," he said.

"We have had to give New Zealand's climate change policy a reality check. We are not claiming New Zealand can be a world leader in emissions cuts or the first carbon-neutral country in the world. Our policy is for New Zealand to do its fair share and this will be challenging given our unique emission profile dominated by agriculture.

Mr Pearce said New Zealand had a "generous" initial Kyoto target of keeping its emissions to the same level as 1990, but its emissions were now 60 per cent higher than those of Britain, per head of population.

"Among industrialised nations, they are only exceeded by Canada, the US, Australia and Luxembourg.

"With more cows than people, the country's increasingly intensive agricultural sector is responsible for approaching half the greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

And the country had only promised a measly 50 per cent in emissions by 2050 – something even the US could trump.

The Government hoped to pass its legislation by Christmas and introduce a carbon price by July next year.

Mr Pearce said that the "commercial greenwash" was being used to promote both tourism and dairy exports, and that the national marketing strategy was underpinned by a survey showing that tourism would be reduced by 68 per cent if the country lost its prized "clean, green image", and even international purchases of its dairy products could halve.

However Victoria University Professor of Public Policy Jonathan Boston said Mr Pearce had not taken into account that New Zealand had a change of government and National was not committed to the former Labour government's pledge to go carbon neutral.

In spite of this, he said New Zealand was being held to high standards because it promoted a clean, green image and also because of the stance Labour had taken.

But the argument still stood up based on the fact that New Zealand's track record on environmental issues such as per capita greenhouse gas emissions as well as water and air quality, did not stack up.

"We perform well below where we should, worse than many countries that we would probably wish to compare ourselves favourably with," he said.

"While we are not despoiling the environment as badly as some countries, we cannot in my view consistently call ourselves 100 percent pure and lean and green and so on, given the robust data that challenges that."

He said even under Labour, we were not on track to achieve our carbon-neutral ambitions.

He did not agree that New Zealand's original target was soft, as Mr Pearce claimed, but agreed emissions growth had been high.

This was due to a population growth, faster than anticipated economic growth and a political failure to address the problem.

"In effect for most of the last two decades, government has failed to take measures of an effective nature to reduce the growth of emissions and we're still in the midst of a serious problem in achieving that objective."

He said the changes to the emissions trading laws such as the removal of a cap on emissions levels and a free allocation of a large number of emissions units would render the law "almost ineffective".

It would also place more of a burden on taxpayers, he said.

Tourism New Zealand spokeswoman Cas Carter said it was satisfied New Zealand was living up to the expectations of tourist and it's "100 percent Pure" campaign.

The Guardian article was balanced by the recent positive press abroad, including Whale Watch Kaikoura scooping the supreme prize at the Virgin Holidays Responsible Tourism Awards. Ms Carter said she did not think it's impact on perceptions of New Zealand would be too severe.

In many ways, choosing a sex toy is not unlike buying a car. Walk into most adult shops, and the new-car smell is undeniable. Salespeople tout motor speed and durability. And then there are emissions to consider.

That's carbon emissions, of course. As the green movement makes its way into the bedroom, low lighting is a must--to conserve electricity--but so are vegan condoms, organic lubricants and hand-cranked vibrators. (See five eco-friendly sex accessories.)

Another big enviro-sex trend: birth control that's au naturel. Like all good Catholics, my husband and I had to attend church-run marriage prep before we tied the knot last year. I was surprised, however, during the hard sell on natural family-planning (NFP), that this updated version of the rhythm method was being advertised not only as morally correct but also as "organic" and "green." I was even more surprised when I found out that some of the most popular instructors of NFP--known in secular circles as the Fertility Awareness Method--are non-Catholics who praise it as a means of avoiding both ingesting chemicals and excreting them into rivers and streams.

Nikki Walker, 35, an actress in New York City, stopped taking the Pill because of concerns about the effects of excess estrogen on her body and the environment. "I do yoga every day and eat vegetarian," she says. "Why wouldn't I go green in this area of my life?"

Walker recently attended her first Tupperware-style pleasure party, thrown by Oregon-based Earth Erotics, where the goods for sale included organic massage oils and whips made of recycled inner tubes. At a time when Americans are just getting used to prime-time ads for Trojan and K-Y, eco-consumers are learning that most of the personal lubricants in the U.S.--drugstores sold $82 million worth of them last year--contain chemicals found in oven cleaner and antifreeze.

"Our taboos prevent us from having the same consumer-safety conversations that are commonplace when you're making a toothbrush, sneaker or baby bottle," says Ethan Imboden, founder of Jimmyjane, a luxury adult-toy maker based in San Francisco. This bashfulness is not helped by the fact that the adult-novelty industry is largely unregulated. "Manufacturers can use whatever they want," says Imboden. "And they do."

Case in point: that new-car smell. It may connote nice and clean, but the odor comes from phthalates, which are used to soften plastics in many products, including some sex toys. Like bisphenol A, these compounds are endocrine inhibitors that some studies have linked to premature puberty in girls and low sperm production in boys. Europe and California have already banned certain phthalates.

The search for phthalate-free alternatives helps explain the increase in sales of sex toys made of such materials as stainless steel, mahogany--yes, you read that correctly--and glass. Babeland, a sex shop with locations in Seattle and New York City, saw sales of a stainless-steel toy triple from 2007 to 2008. Sales of glass models rose 85% in the same period. Says Babeland co-founder Claire Cavanah: "People want high-quality, renewable materials that they know will last." (And in the case of Pyrex toys, that they know can be safely warmed in the microwave.)

How simple calculations can be a matter of life and death

Computers might struggle to exhibit intelligent behaviour, but blindly performing arithmetic calculations is surely their forte. Or is it?

The failure of Google's online calculator and Excel's apparent inability to give correct answers to simple calculations are both well-known problems among programmers, but these aren't really bugs in the normal sense of the word. Instead they're just a consequence of the fact that computers suck at maths.

Computers perform calculations in quite a different way from the methods that humans use to do arithmetic – and that means that they habitually come up with the wrong answer. Here we investigate some of the shocking consequences of this revelation before delving into the reason why computers suck at maths.

• 10 computing conspiracy theories examined

Close isn't close enough

For anyone still to be convinced that computers can't get simple arithmetic right, let's start off with a few examples that you can try out yourself.

First up, Google's calculator. If you've never tried it out before, to get a feel for how it works, surf to www.google.co.uk, type 5*9+(sqrt 9)^3 into the search box and click on 'Search'. You'll find that it comes back with the correct answer: '5 * 9 + (sqrt 9) ^3 = 72'.

Now let's try another calculation. Type in 599,999,999,999,999 - 599,999,999,999,998. Quite clearly, this should give an answer of 1. Unbelievably, however, Google responds with this: '599,999,999,999,999 – 599,999,999,999,998 = 0'. Just a rare and unfortunate example, perhaps?

OK then, let's try another simple calculation. Type =850*77.1 into cell A1 of an Excel 2007 workbook (it doesn't work – or should that be it does work – in earlier versions of Excel). A bit of mental arithmetic suggests that the answer ought to be in the region of 60,000; in fact the correct answer is 65,535.

Excel has other ideas. It will tell you that the result of this multiplication is 100,000, which is out by a massive 34,465. And to prove that this is no flash in the pan, how about using a selection of online calculators to work out 1.0 - 0.9 - 0.1?

You'll probably find at least half of them will come up with an answer of -2.77555756 E-17 – scientific notation for -0.0000000000000000277555756. (If all the ones you try give the right answer, take a look at www.calculator.net.)

 

BAD MATHS: Since 1.0 - 0.9 - 0.1 equals 0, why are so many online calculators convinced that this value is the answer instead?

OK, this answer might not be far removed from the correct answer of 0, but why can't the calculator come up with the right answer – an answer that's blatantly obvious to anyone who is conversant with simple arithmetic?

How computers do maths

Although computers can handle integers (whole numbers), for general-purpose arithmetic they store numbers in floating point format because it's so much more efficient in memory use.

Let's take the double precision floating point representation as an example. It uses 64 bits to store each number and permits values from about -10308 to 10308 (minus and plus 1 followed by 308 zeros, respectively) to be stored. Furthermore, fractional values as small as plus or minus 10-308 (that's a decimal point followed by 307 zeros and then a 1) can be stored.

By way of contrast, if the same 64 bits were used to store integers, the range would be −9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to +9,223,372,036,854,775,807, and fractional values couldn't be represented.

The secret to this apparently amazing efficiency is approximation. Of those 64 bits, one represents the sign (so whether the value is positive or negative), 52 bits represent the mantissa (that's the actual numbers) and the remaining 11 bits represent the exponent (how many zeros there are or where the decimal point is).

So although a much greater range of numbers can be stored using floating point notation, the precision is actually less than can be achieved in integer format, since only 52 bits are available. In fact, 52 bits of binary information represents a 16-bit decimal number, so any values that differ only in their 17th decimal point will actually be seen as identical.

The situation with Google thinking that 599,999,999,999,999 - 599,999,999,999,998 equals 0 is similar, although it's evident that Google's calculator actually uses less than the normal 52 bits for the mantissa. That some calculators give a non-zero result to the calculation 1.0 - 0.9 - 0.1 might seem different since we appear to be nowhere close to the limit of 64-bit floating point arithmetic.

But that's forgetting one important fact – that computers work in binary. And although 0.1 might have only one significant digit in decimal, in binary notation the mantissa is a repeating sequence. This means that 0.1 can never be represented accurately in binary, no matter how many bits you use.

The discrepancy between the computed answer and the correct answer is often minute, and you might be inclined to dismiss this sort of error as insignificant. However, such errors can add up, and the consequences can be serious.

On 25 February 1991, three days before the end of the first Gulf War, an Iraqi Scud missile hit a US airfield in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. 28 American soldiers were killed and more than 100 others were injured.

At the time, sensitive targets were supposed to be protected by the Patriot surface-to-air defence system, and one battery of Patriot missiles was assigned to the Dhahran facility – so it's pertinent to ask what exactly went wrong.

The answer is the system's tracking software, and the problem is not unrelated to our online calculator error. In order to avoid potentially costly false alarms, the Patriot's sophisticated radar must first detect an object that has the characteristics of a Scud missile and then detect it a second time in a position calculated by the system on the assumption that the first fix was genuinely a Scud. Only when this second fix provides a confirmation is a missile launched to intercept it.

The calculation of where to look for confirmation of an incoming missile requires knowledge of the system time, which is stored as the number of 0.1-second ticks since the system was started up. Unfortunately, 0.1 seconds cannot be expressed accurately as a binary number, so when it's shoehorned into a 24-bit register – as used in the Patriot system – it's out by a tiny amount. But all these tiny amounts add up.

At the time of the missile attack, the system had been running for about 100 hours, or 3,600,000 ticks to be more specific. Multiplying this count by the tiny error led to a total error of 0.3433 seconds, during which time the Scud missile would cover 687m.

The radar looked in the wrong place to receive a confirmation and saw no target. Accordingly no missile was launched to intercept the incoming Scud – and 28 people paid with their lives.

The processor that couldn't divide

Launched in March 1993, the Pentium was Intel's fifth generation of x86 processor. Unlike previous generations, in which at least some family members could only carry out arithmetic on whole numbers, all Pentiums had a floating point unit (FPU).

An FPU is a piece of built-in hardware for calculating floating point arithmetic. This gave the Pentium a massive speed advantage, since computers without an FPU-enabled processor had to carry out this sort of calculation using software routines that involved lots of integer operations. Unfortunately, it was a poisoned chalice for Intel.

In June 1994, shortly after taking delivery of a Pentium-based PC, Thomas Nicely – then Professor of Mathematics at Lynchburg College, Virginia – noticed that a program he had written was giving inconsistent results.

By running the same program on several machines, Professor Nicely tracked down the problem to the his new PC's Pentium processor and, in particular, to its FDIV (floating point division) instruction. Although it affected just a tiny proportion of floating point divisions, at its worst the error was really quite significant.

Dividing 4,195,835 by 3,145,727 gave an answer of 1.3337 – which represents an error in the fourth decimal place since the correct answer is actually 1.3338. The Pentium's FPU used something called the SRT algorithm to carry out floating point divisions.

Although there are simpler and more obvious ways of dividing one floating point number by another, the SRT algorithm gave a significant speed advantage over previous algorithms.

If you're not a mathematician you'll find a description of how SRT works totally impenetrable. However, let's just say that instead of working everything out using 'pure maths', it involved the use of a look-up table. The table contained 1,000 or so values, but due to a production error five of these values were missing.

Despite the fact that Intel's CEO Andy Grove reckoned that the average user would only see the problem every 27,000 years, IBM's estimate was once every 24 days – and as a result the company stopped shipping Pentium-based PCs. Intel eventually agreed to swap defective Pentiums for good ones.

Most people didn't take up the offer, but the delay caused technically minded users to make Intel the butt of their jokes. The following is typical. Q: How many Pentium designers does it take to change a light bulb? A: 1.99904274017, but that's close enough for non-technical people.

The errors we've seen so far have concerned floating point numbers where accuracy is lost if there's not enough bits to store the mantissa. OK, those errors can add up, but essentially they're just rounding errors, and the likelihood of not having enough bits to store the exponent is comparatively small given that the maximum values they can store are absolutely huge.

When integers are involved, the effect can actually be far more serious. A 64-bit integer can store a maximum positive value of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. If you try adding 1 to an integer variable that already equals this maximum value, you don't just lose that extra value. Instead, the integer overflows.

In other words, as far as a computer working in 64-bit integer arithmetic is concerned, 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 + 1 = -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (note the minus sign). Something very similar happened on-board the European Space Agency's Ariane V rocket on its maiden flight.

EXPENSIVE MISTAKE: Programmers call it an overflow; in reality it was bad maths that caused this $370million spacecraft to explode

In fact, the arithmetic operation in question – if you can call it that – was even simpler than adding 1. Instead, it just involved copying one number that had been stored in floating point format to another location that was defined as an integer – and a 16-bit integer at that (maximum positive value of 32,767).

Unfortunately, the number was already too large to fit in the integer location, and as a result it overflowed. The exact sequence of events that followed is pretty complex but, to cut a long story short, the end result was that the Ariane V became one of the most expensive fireworks in history.

Guarding against cock-ups

This run-through of some of computing's most astonishing mathematical cock-ups may have come as something of an eye-opener to you. If so, you're probably wondering whether tomorrow's computers can avoid making such elementary mistakes.

Surprisingly, perhaps – and with the exception of the Pentium floating point error, which was caused by a hardware glitch – all of the errors we've mentioned here could have been prevented. In that sense, they can all be thought of as software errors.

As an example, let's take that integer overflow on the Ariane V rocket. That an integer can overflow isn't an error on the part of the processor because it's the way it's supposed to work. But whenever an integer does overflow, the processor sets something called a flag that the program can interrogate.

In the case of the Ariane software, the program didn't check for an overflow; if it had done, corrective action could have been taken. Of course, there will always be a limit to how large an integer can be and how much precision a floating point number can have – and this depends on the processor. But all of today's computers are universal computing machines, which means that they can solve any problem involving logic and maths.

So if a processor's internal instructions can't operate on large enough integers or on floating point numbers with sufficient precision, it's always possible for the programmer to implement arithmetic routines that will.

There will be a trade off against speed, though, which is why this isn't usually done. However clever the software or however much memory you use to store a floating point number, the result of some divisions will never be accurate.

We've seen how 1 divided by 10 is an infinite string in binary, and, in the general case, a move to decimal arithmetic wouldn't help either: 1 divided by 10 can be stored accurately in decimal, but 1 divided by 3 equals 0.3333333… ad infinitum.

The bottom line is that whatever number base you choose, some divisions will produce results that can never be stored accurately as a finite number of digits. Even this isn't a show-stopper, though.

Remember how 1.0 - 0.9 - 0.1 often yields an inaccurate answer because of rounding errors even though we know, immediately, that the answer is 0? Well, it's quite possible to write software to store the result of a division as a rational number.

In other words, you don't actually do the division – you just store the two numbers. In subsequent arithmetic operations you handle the values as fractions, just as you were taught in school, and the result will be exact.

So computers might suck at maths, but there's always a solution available to circumvent their inherent weaknesses. And in that case, it's probably more accurate to say that computer programmers suck at maths – or at least some of them do.