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The funny little a with its tail circling back around it is probably one of the most commonly used symbols today. So it is truly amazing to learn that there is no official, universal name for it. The most accepted term, even in many other languages, is to call it the at sign. But there are dozens of different words used to describe it. A lot of languages use words that associate the shape of the symbol with some type of animal.
Here are a few examples of the many exotic terms associated with the @ symbol:
- apestaart - Dutch for "monkey's tail"
- snabel - Danish for "elephant's trunk"
- kissanhnta - Finnish for "cat's tail"
- klammeraffe - German for "hanging monkey"
- kukac - Hungarian for "worm"
- dalphaengi - Korean for "snail"
- grisehale - Norwegian for "pig's tail"
- sobachka - Russian for "little dog"
Before it became the standard symbol for e-mail, the @ symbol was typically used to indicate the cost or weight of something. For example, if you bought five oranges for $1.25 each, you might write it as 5 oranges @ $1.25 ea. It is still used in this manner on a variety of forms and invoices around the world.
The actual origin of the symbol is uncertain. It was used by monks making copies of books before the invention of the printing press. Since every word had to be painstakingly transcribed by hand for each copy of a book, the monks that performed the copying duties looked for ways to reduce the number of individual strokes per word for common words. So, the word at became a single stroke of the pen as @ instead of three strokes. While it doesn't seem like much today, it made a huge difference to the men who spent their lives copying manuscripts!
Another origin tale states that the @ symbol was used as an abbreviation for the word amphora, which was the unit of measurement used to determine the amount held by the large terra cotta jars that were used to ship grain, spices and wine. Giorgio Stabile, an Italian scholar, discovered this use of the @ symbol in a letter written in 1536 by a Florentine trader named Francesco Lapi. It seems likely that some industrious trader saw the @ symbol in a book transcribed by monks using the symbol and appropriated it for use as the amphora abbreviation. This would also explain why it became common to use the symbol in relation to quantities of something.
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It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy %u2014 the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.
But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere %u2014 as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.
But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel%u2019s scientists %u2014 acting in good faith on the best information then available to them %u2014 probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere %u2014 thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it%u2019s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.
Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants %u2014 especially carbon dioxide %u2014 have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting %u2014 and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.
Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing %u2014 much less reduce them.
And in spite of President Obama%u2019s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to %u201Ctake note%u201D of an intention to act.
Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the author of %u201COur Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.%u201D As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Opinion (4 of 32) A version of this article appeared in print on February 28, 2010, on page WK11 of the New York edition.
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%u201CDo I need to P.I.A. Facebook?%u201D said the perplexed bureaucrat squished into a narrow basement hotel conference room in Washington DC.
P.I.A. stands for Privacy Impact Assessment, a procedure that federal agencies must go through every time they create a new computer system. It was one of many questions about how the government can use the tools of Web 2.0 raised in a session of a privacy conference last week.
Organizations of all sorts have been trying to figure out how they can adapt social networks, blogs, wiki%u2019s and other Web tools to their traditional operating methods in order to connect to customers and partners.
But it is tough. %u201CWe have a Facebook page,%u201D said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. %u201CBut we don%u2019t allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre.%u201D
There are many other procedures at government agencies that aren%u2019t just tradition, they are the law.
For example, the mostly harmless feature of Facebook that allows users to specify their religious and political views, may run afoul of the Privacy Act. That law prevents the government from using the site because a provision in the Privacy Act bans it from keeping records related to how people exercise their first amendment rights.
%u201CWe are stodgier%u201D than the private sector, said Alex Joel, the civil liberties protection officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who moderated the session at the annual meeting of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, the trade group for corporate and government privacy officers. %u201CWe have our own way of doing things.%u201D
Speaking of the First Amendment, one person asked, does the government have the right to remove offensive comments on a blog or social network page? And if it does, must it keep copies of the deleted material under the Federal Records Act and provide them to people making Freedom of Information Act Requests? Yes, it can remove comments that violate posted policies about decency and so on, and yes, it must keep them for a specified time, other participants said.
Private companies are considering whether they should look at someone%u2019s Facebook and MySpace profiles before deciding whether to hire them. Some government participants wondered if doing so would require that the government file a notice under a provision of the Privacy Act that requires it to disclose all of the %u201Csystems of records%u201D it uses to keep track of information about people.
Peter Swire, a former government privacy official who now teaches law at Ohio State University, raised another question: anti-corruption law prevents federal officials from receiving gifts of goods and services. Does that prevent an agency from using software or services available free on the Web?
Mr. Swire also pointed to legal pitfalls: federal computer systems must be made accessible to the disabled. For example, they must have captions on videos. Many commercial sites don%u2019t meet these standards. Moreover, the government generally isn%u2019t allowed to endorse commercial products. Mr. Swire said this could be interpreted to mean it can%u2019t use any sites that include advertising.
So far, these issues have not prevented at least some agencies from experimenting with many forms of social media, although some have had to ask sites to modify their formats. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, does not allow advertising on its YouTube channel. (Craig Newmark, founder of CraigsList, wrote Tuesday about government officials organizing to use social media.)
The Central Intelligence Agency uses Facebook to recruit employees. The State Department uses it as part of its %u201Cpublic diplomacy%u201D efforts, such as a page for the embassy in Jakarta.
But there are at least as many pages created on Facebook that are about the agencies that are not officially sanctioned. %u201CFor every Facebook page that represents itself as an official State Department page, there is another unofficial page,%u201D one participant said. The government already maintains a list of all federal blogs, and some wondered if it should do the same for social networking pages.
Officials at the session said they feel urgent pressure to get hip to social networks, Wikis and such because of the open government agenda of the Obama administration. But clearly there are a lot of rules and regulations that need to be adjusted for this to work.
The sharp change of direction demonstrates the extent to which the cap-and-trade strategy -- allowing facilities to buy and sell pollution credits in order to meet a national limit on greenhouse gas emissions -- has become political poison. In a private meeting with several environmental leaders on Wednesday, according to participants, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), declared, "Cap-and-trade is dead."
Graham and Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) have worked for months to develop an alternative to cap-and-trade, which the House approved eight months ago. They plan to introduce legislation next month that would apply different carbon controls to individual sectors of the economy instead of setting a national target.
According to several sources familiar with the process, the lawmakers are looking at cutting the nation's greenhouse gas output by targeting, in separate ways, three major sources of emissions: electric utilities, transportation and industry.
Power plants would face an overall cap on emissions that would become more stringent over time; motor fuel may be subject to a carbon tax whose proceeds could help electrify the U.S. transportation sector; and industrial facilities would be exempted from a cap on emissions for several years before it is phased in. The legislation would also expand domestic oil and gas drilling offshore and would provide federal assistance for constructing nuclear power plants and carbon sequestration and storage projects at coal-fired utilities.
"This is a different bill," Lieberman said in an interview. "We haven't abandoned the market-based idea, but we're willing to negotiate with colleagues who have different ideas."
Many lawmakers and lobbyists say even a radically different climate bill would face big hurdles to passage, given conflicting corporate and consumer interests, regional divides and a crowded Senate calendar. Energy industry lobbyists have turned much of their attention to proposing numerous variations of more narrow energy legislation.
But President Obama has continued to push for broad legislation that he says would make the U.S. economy more efficient, slow climate change and fulfill U.S. pledges in international climate talks in December to cut the country's emissions by 17 percent by 2020. A U.S. failure to fulfill that commitment could undercut the determination of other nations to live up to their pledges.
Opponents of cap-and-trade, including GOP congressional leaders and some energy companies, have portrayed the House-passed bill as an energy tax in disguise that would hurt U.S. consumers and create a financial commodity that could be subject to manipulation. The measure also came under criticism because it gave away a large number of free allowances to coal users.
Environmental advocates, eager to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation before the November midterm elections, said the shift in strategy represents the best shot at getting something done this year.
"The Senate is understanding this is not a simple problem -- it's multiple problems, and it requires multiple solutions," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.
The change in policy, which might even include giving money raised through carbon pollution allowances directly back to consumers, a scheme known as "cap-and-dividend," could appeal to some wavering senators. Senior Obama administration officials have also been studying the cap-and-dividend approach. But it remains unclear whether that would be enough to produce the 60 votes proponents need, especially when the Senate has yet to finish work on health-care legislation and a jobs package.
Powerful business leaders have their own priorities. Michael Morris, chief executive of American Electric Power, a heavily coal-based utility, said one much-discussed proposal for a cap-and-trade plan limited to utilities was "ridiculous" because it would place an unfair burden on coal-based utilities. He added that "cap-and-dividend would be equally inappropriate." He said it would take money from "mom in the Midwest and dividend it to Paris Hilton."
While Obama has continued to assert the need for any climate bill to raise the price of carbon-based fuels, the American Petroleum Institute has been running television ads during the Winter Olympics saying "Americans say no to raising energy taxes."
Even some moderate Republicans, seen as possible supporters of a new climate bill, remain opposed to the idea of putting a price on carbon, which Lieberman still calls "sine qua non," or an essential ingredient, of any such bill. Andy Fisher, a spokesman for Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), said the senator, who has opposed cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, could support pricing carbon "potentially at some point, but not at the moment."
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) told Kerry this week that he and his colleagues need to produce a bill as soon as possible to have any chance of passage in 2010. Jim Manley, Reid's spokesman, said it is the majority leader's "hope to bring it up to the floor for a vote," adding, "But we've got a whole host of other things on our plate, and a Republican Party that's making it difficult for us to pass all but the most routine legislation."
Kerry said that although the package the three senators will unveil will not have 60 votes when it becomes public, he is confident that it will win over skeptical lawmakers.
"What people need to understand about this bill is this really is a jobs bill, an economic transformation for America, an energy independence bill and a health/pollution-reduction bill that has enormous benefits for the country," Kerry said.
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