WHICH is the biggest climate villain: cars, planes, ships or trains? Overall, road vehicles cause the most warming 鈥� in recent years, at least.
Jan Fuglestvedt of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO) in Norway, and colleagues, inventoried the various types of emissions that were generated by transportation in 2000. They then calculated how each one-year 鈥減ulse鈥� of emissions will warm the globe this century.
The car and truck emissions caused the most warming: the first 20 years of warming caused by these emissions in 2000 is seven times as great as that generated by all the planes that criss-crossed the globe that year (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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鈥淭he study is very useful, valid, and necessary,鈥� says Alice Bows of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK. However, she underlines that the transportation mix is changing. For example, aviation is on the rise and is almost certainly contributing more to warming than it did in 2000.
