Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Matthew Kahn's book Climatopolis .

Los Angeles is a hedonist’s paradise. At night, you can cruise the Sunset Strip. Although The Doors no longer play there, you may run into Paris Hilton or Britney Spears before seeing Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at a red-carpet event. During the winter, you might venture downtown to watch Kobe Bryant and the Lakers play. Every day of the year you can sit outside at Starbucks and try to identify professional basketball players looking for a latte in West Los Angeles. In spring 2009 I spotted Baron Davis of the Los Angeles Clippers at a Westwood Starbucks (but he didn’t seem to recognize me). In fall 2009 I spotted Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys as he strolled in Little Holmby Park (he didn’t give me a knowing nod or wink either). I saw Vin Diesel jog past my house not long ago (again, no seeming recognition on his part). Even the dignified former secretary of state, Warren Christopher, didn’t recognize me as he got out of his car while parking on my block. These cases suggest that I’m not a VIP, but a player such as you will have the option of ending the night at a party at the Playboy Mansion near UCLA.

Editor's Note: Students from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their seventh blog post for Scientific American.

The rooster in the room next to us crowed loudly at sunrise, and we despondently got out of bed with the goal of finding Fundi [see photo at left] , the town of Kalinzi's elusive stove maker. We found him farming and arranged to meet with him after work at the seventh hour of the Swahili clock, 1 p.m. international time (Swahili time starts with the first hour of sunlight and is therefore six hours behind). [More]















Tanzania - Swahili language - Engineering - Dartmouth College - Thayer School of Engineering

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report from the group working on global warming's impacts contained at least one error. "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate," the report notes. [More]















Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Climate change - Global warming - Environment - Climate Change: The Ipcc Response Strategies

Mimicking volcanoes by throwing particles high into the sky. Maintaining a floating armada of mirrors in space . Burning plant and other organic waste to make charcoal and burying it --or burning it as fuel and burying the CO2 emissions . Even replanting trees . All have been mooted as potential methods of " geoengineering "--"deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment," as the U.K.'s Royal Society puts it. [More]















Geoengineering - Royal Society - Charcoal - Current sea level rise - Climate change

A New York City postal processing facility that was contaminated during the 2001 anthrax attacks is now the site of the largest " green roof " in Manhattan. [More]















Green Roof - Manhattan - 2001 anthrax attacks - Construction and Maintenance - Sustainable Architecture

[ Listen to the brief audio clip from an interview with Jay Ingram, host of Daily Planet . [More]















Daily Planet - Jay Ingram - Organizations - Lois Lane - Smallville

Planning for Earth Peter H. Gleick’s “ Freshwater Use ” [Solutions to Environmental Threats] neglected to mention one obvious water-conservation measure: meter all freshwater and charge for it. Why should some--most notably agribusiness--receive this valuable resource for free? It is already the policy in some countries to assume that all freshwater is the property of the federal government, owned by all citizens equally. If we were to adopt such a policy in the U.S., we could use the money so collected to install free low-flow toilets, showerheads, and so on in all public housing. It could also be used to partially underwrite farmers converting to drip irrigation and soil-moisture sensors, perhaps in exchange for a promise not to raise food prices as a result of increased irrigation costs. Making everyone pay for what they actually use is always good policy: the profit motive encourages conservation. [More]















Soil - Freshwater - Drip irrigation - Water conservation - Business