1. Calculate how much carbon your are using, be it in electricity usage, air flights, driving costs or other.
2. Display the amount of money it would take to offset your measured carbon usage.
3. Donate said amount to Climate Care so they can put the money towards offsetting your carbon emissions elsewhere with one of their projects.

The image below shows the carbon emissions calculator the website uses.

I personally think this website is a fantastic way to deal with carbon emissions, by donating a proportional amount of funds to other projects that attempt to compensate for the emissions that are generated. Here are a few quotes regarding climate change, carbon emission offsetting and global warming from the climate change website.

Why should you take action to avoid catastrophic climate change?

Global warming is happening right now in front of our eyes. Our weather is changing. Every one of the hottest 15 years on record has occurred since 1980. There is now huge consensus among scientists that we face serious climate change – we just don’t know what level of severity it will reach or when.

We probably have about 20-30 years left to sort this problem out and we need to spend our efforts and money on actions that deliver the biggest and fastest CO₂ reductions possible. We all have a part to play and we all need to work together to spread the understanding of this issue and our determination to tackle climate change. Work out your own ‘reduce and offset’ plan today with our useful reduction tips.

What is climate change?

When fossil fuels and wood are burnt they release greenhouse gases that occur naturally in the atmosphere, making the average temperature around 15°C. Without this protective ‘blanket’ our world would be a much colder -18°C

However, the extra greenhouse gases that humankind has emitted have already significantly altered the composition of the atmosphere, adding to the blanket and increasing the average temperature of the Earth. This is causing human-induced climate change. To stop this spiralling out of control, we must radically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Effects of climate change

The real impact of climate change remains worryingly uncertain, with consequences for all communities, species and environments across the world. Effects include:

• Changing weather bringing drought and flooding, affecting drinking water supplies and agriculture.
• Irreversible loss of many species of plants and animals.
• Rising sea levels, threatening freshwater supplies because of salt water intrusion.
• Melting glaciers, threatening freshwater supplies for millions of people who depend on glacier meltwater for their water supply and irrigation.

We will all experience these effects but an appalling injustice of climate change will be that those people in the developing world, who have contributed little towards the problem, are at greatest risk and will be the hardest hit. They have fewer resources for coping with storms, floods, droughts, disease outbreaks, and disruptions to food and water supplies. This is an issue with the welfare of humans at its heart.

What do you think? How at risk are we? Will you be offsetting carbon emissions at all or do you believe the problem is bigger than this?

“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps”

The iPhone apps, when scaled up to iPad’s larger screen, did not live up to Steve Jobs’ expectation, so due to this, they were scraped from the iPad’s release operating systems. Rumours exist that these apps will be added in a later update to the iPad’s operating system. This is quite important too, as the missing applications are simple and rather fundamental computing programs which I would personal expect to be in any modern general purpose device.

Missing Apps on the iPad

The list of applications scraped from the iPad’s operating system is as follows.

1. Clock – Something as important as the clock application is missing?
2. Calculator – Surely a similar app will be released to compensate the lack of a Calculator app?
3. Weather – No doubt a good third-party whether app will take the place of this if no official weather application is released.
4. Voice Memos – Seems it should still be in there? Why remove it?
5. Stocks – Not fundamental to all users by any means, but should still be a nice default.

Questions for existing iPhone users:

• Why would Apple really want these applications removed other than merely that they look ‘weird’?
• If you had an iPad, would you want these applications to be there as standard? If so, which ones?
• Are these applications (on the iPhone) used regularly and important to you already?