Category: Archive

Nominee qualifications: Nominees shall have shown outstanding
leadership or achievements, with links to the IEA Solar Heating and
Cooling Programme, in one or more of the areas of technical
development, market activities, or information dissemination.
Nominations should be emailed to Drury Crawley, at Drury.Crawley@EE.DOE.GOV. To be considered, each nomination should include:

o name of nominee and coordinates (address, phone, fax, e-mail);

o short statement of why the person should be selected; and

o brief description of how the person’s work is linked to the IEA Solar Heating & Cooling Programme.(Do not send a resume.)

Reference: International Energy Agency Solar Heating & Cooling Programme, website: http://www.iea-shc.org

Erisk Net, 6/12/2005

Protection of sources means no disclosure: However, Mr Carnell
said he could not reveal details of ASIO’s adverse assessment because
of “security considerations”. “The protection of collection
methodologies and various sources means that there are appropriate
circumstances in which disclosure cannot be made,” Mr Carnell said in
his report. “I appreciate that Mr Parkin and others with doubts about
his treatment will most likely find this vexing, but it is inevitable
given the nature of the matter being examined.”

Trip home for Parkin: A left-wing activist for 15 years, Mr
Parkin, who had been in Australia since the end of May, was picked up
by ASIO officers outside a Brunswick cafe in September on his way to
conduct a protest workshop. His six-month tourist visa was cancelled
and he was held at the Melbourne Custody Centre for five days and then
flown home escorted by two Australian immigration officers.

The Age, 7/12/2005, p. 3

Source: Erisk – www.erisk.net 

Three centuries of increasing agriculture tracked: Each grid
square was 10 kilometres across and showed the most prevalent land use.
The current map shows a snapshot of global land use for 2000, but the
scientists also have land use data going back to 1700, showing how
things have changed. “The maps show, very strikingly that a large part
of our planet (roughly 40 per cent) is being used for either growing
crops or grazing cattle,” said Navin Ramankutty, a member of the team.
By comparison, only 7 per cent of the world’s land was being used for
agriculture in 1700.

Massive clearing of the Amazon: The Amazon basin has experienced
some of the greatest changes, with huge areas of the rainforest being
felled to grow soya beans. “One of the major changes we see is the fast
expansion of soybeans in Brazil and Argentina, grown for export to
China and the EU,” Dr Ramankutty said.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 7/12/2005, p. 13

Source: Erisk – www.erisk.net 

Numbers create huge REC registration task: While the remaining
79 per cent of RECs have been created in respect of the output of 217
power stations, over 100,000 individual solar water heaters have now
been installed and RECs claimed against them. The administrative effort
associated with solar water heaters is therefore commensurately large.

Meters not required: Small generators using hydro, wind and
solar energy sources, and not producing more than 25 MWh of electricity
a year have access to special eligibility processes that removes the
need for the output of the station to be metered. A greater number of
small generation units are being covered by the Act, as the special
eligibility requirements allow for easier access by the owners of these
systems.

Reference: Financial Annual Report, Australian Government, Office of
the Renewable Energy Regulator. Contact: Manager, Office of the
Renewable Energy Regulator, GPO Box 621, CANBERRA ACT 2601, ph: (02)
6274 1416, fax: (02) 6274 1725

Erisk Net, 13/12/2005

China, India convenient “excuse” for US: The exclusion of large
and rapidly growing India and China is one of the chief reasons the US
has cited for not signing the Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrial
countries to reduce carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases by
5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. 

Australia still on the outer holding hands with US: Australia is the only other industrialised nation to have refused to ratify the protocol.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 3-4/12/2005, p. 15

Indiana Thompson and high altitude research: Lonnie Thompson is
a geophysicist at Ohio State University in Columbus and a pioneer in
the study of tropical glaciers. His adventures while gathering ice
cores at high altitude have led colleagues to describe him as “the
closest living thing to Indiana Jones”. Thompson and his work are the
subjects of Thin Ice: Unlocking the secrets of climate in the world’s highest mountains by Mark Bowen published by Henry Halt and Company (ISBN 0805064435, $30).

Pioneering on a small budget: The switch from polar to tropical
ice was triggered by a British colleague called John Mercer who had
produced atlases of the glaciers of the world. Thompson started
wondering why no one was taking cores from them. He showed some
pictures of Quelccaya, a big ice cap in the Peruvian Andes, to the
National Science Foundation and received $7000 funding, which was about
enough to get there and, despite misadventures, start research.

Research record shows historical effects of climate change:
Thompson says Mercer, now deceased, was the first person to suggest
that the west Antarctic ice sheet could collapse with global warming.
What do the tropical cores show? Quelccaya, Thompson’s first glacier,
is the one he keeps returning to, as it continues to provide unique
information. It shows the 20th-century warming very clearly in the
record of oxygen isotopes preserved in the ice. It also provided the
first tropical record of the little ice age between the 14th and 19th
centuries, and it records the three decades of drought around AD 600
that probably finished off the pre-Colombian Moche empire. Quelccaya
also contains a record of El Nino climate variations.

Drought 4200 years ago destroys ancient civilisations: Another
big discovery was a huge spike in the amount of dust in many tropical
ice cores 4200 years ago. The dust seems to signify widespread drought
and desertification. It coincided with the collapse of several
civilisations, including the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia and a
crisis in Egypt, where writing on ancient tombs records drought, mass
migrations and sand dunes crossing the Nile.

New Scientist, 26/11/2005, p. 47

Source: Erisk – www.erisk.net

New Scientist, 26/11/2005, p. 47