• Study finds surprising Arctic methane emission source
• NASA tests GPS monitoring system for big U.S. quakes
• Fireball over California/Nevada: How big was it?
• Following life’s chemistry to the earliest branches on the tree of life
• Northern Canada feels the heat:Climate change impact on permafrost zones

Study finds surprising Arctic methane emission source Posted: 24 Apr 2012 11:51 AM PDT The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic region is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As Earth’s climate warms, the methane, frozen in reservoirs stored in Arctic tundra soils or marine sediments, is vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere, where it can add to global warming. Now a multi-institutional study has uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of Arctic methane: the ocean itself.

NASA tests GPS monitoring system for big U.S. quakes Posted: 24 Apr 2012 11:47 AM PDT The space-based technology that lets GPS-equipped motorists constantly update their precise location will undergo a major test of its ability to rapidly pinpoint the location and magnitude of strong earthquakes across the western United States. Results from the new Real-time Earthquake Analysis for Disaster (READI) Mitigation Network soon could be used to assist prompt disaster response and more accurate tsunami warnings.

Fireball over California/Nevada: How big was it? Posted: 24 Apr 2012 11:44 AM PDT A bright ball of light traveling east to west was seen over the skies of central/northern California Sunday morning, April 22. The former space rock-turned-flaming-meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere around 8 a.m. PDT. Reports of the fireball have come in from as far north as Sacramento, Calif. and as far east as North Las Vegas, Nev.

Following life’s chemistry to the earliest branches on the tree of life Posted: 24 Apr 2012 11:21 AM PDT Scientists have traced the development of life-sustaining chemistry to the earliest forms of life on Earth.

Northern Canada feels the heat:Climate change impact on permafrost zones Posted: 24 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT As climate change in the near future is likely to bring raised temperatures at northern latitudes, the characteristics of permafrost could greatly change. Changes to permafrost could have serious impact on existing and future northern infrastructures such as pipelines and could significantly affect northern communities. This study provides one of the first summaries of climate and permafrost temperature relations across northern Canada and provides valuable information needed to prepare for future.

NASA Tests GPS Monitoring System for Big U.S. Earthquakes

WASHINGTON — The space-based technology that lets GPS-equipped motorists constantly update their precise location will undergo a major test of its ability to rapidly pinpoint the location and magnitude of strong earthquakes across the western United States. Results from the new Real-time Earthquake Analysis for Disaster (READI) Mitigation Network soon could be used to assist prompt disaster response and more accurate tsunami warnings.

The new research network builds on decades of technology development supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, NASA, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The network uses real-time GPS measurements from nearly 500 stations throughout California, Oregon and Washington. When a large earthquake is detected, GPS data are used to automatically calculate its vital characteristics including location, magnitude and details about the fault rupture.

“With the READI network we are enabling continued development of real-time GPS technologies to advance national and international early warning disaster systems,” said Craig Dobson, natural hazards program manager in the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This prototype system is a significant step towards realizing the goal of providing Pacific basin-wide natural hazards capability around the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire.’”

Accurate and rapid identification of earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 and stronger is critical for disaster response and mitigation efforts, especially for tsunamis. Calculating the strength of a tsunami requires detailed knowledge of the size of the earthquake and associated ground movements. Acquiring this type of data for very large earthquakes is a challenge for traditional seismological instruments that measure ground shaking.

High-precision, second-by-second measurements of ground displacements using GPS have been shown to reduce the time needed to characterize large earthquakes and to increase the accuracy of subsequent tsunami predictions. After the capabilities of the network have been fully demonstrated, it is intended to be used by appropriate natural hazard monitoring agencies. USGS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are responsible for detecting and issuing warnings on earthquakes and tsunamis, respectively.

“By using GPS to measure ground deformation from large earthquakes, we can reduce the time needed to locate and characterize the damage from large seismic events to several minutes,” said Yehuda Bock, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Orbit and Permanent Array Center in La Jolla, Calif. “We now are poised to fully test the prototype system this year.”

The READI network is a collaboration of many institutions including Scripps at the University of California in San Diego; Central Washington University in Ellensburg; the University of Nevada in Reno; California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena; UNAVCO in Boulder, Colo.; and the University of California at Berkeley.

NASA, NSF, USGS, and other federal, state, and local partners support the GPS stations in the network, including the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory, the Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array, the Bay Area Regional Deformation Array and the California Real-Time Network.

“The relatively small investments in GPS-based natural hazards systems have revolutionized the way we view the Earth and allowed us to develop this prototype system with great potential benefits for the infrastructure and population in earthquake-prone states in the western United States,” said Frank Webb, Earth Science Advanced Mission Concepts program manager at JPL.

The READI network is the outgrowth of nearly 25 years of U.S. government research efforts to develop the capabilities and applications of GPS technology. The GPS satellite system was created by the Department of Defense for military and ultimately civil positioning needs. NASA leveraged this investment by supporting development of a global GPS signal receiving network to improve the accuracy and utility of GPS positioning information. Today that capability provides real-time, pinpoint positioning and timing for a wide variety of uses from agriculture to Earth exploration.

“Conventional seismic networks have consistently struggled to rapidly identify the true size of great earthquakes during the last decade,” said Timothy Melbourne, director of the Central Washington University’s Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array. “This GPS system is more likely to provide accurate and rapid estimates of the location and amount of fault slip to fire, utility, medical and other first-response teams.”
The GPS earthquake detection capability was first demonstrated by NASA-supported research on a major 2004 Sumatra quake conducted by Geoffrey Blewitt and colleagues at the University of Nevada in Reno.

For more information about NASA programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

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Report raises fear of South China Sea war

Updated April 25, 2012 00:14:56

Photo: Tensions are boiling over between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. (Reuters: Cheryl Ravelo)

The chances of a full-scale war erupting which could drag in China, the US, the Philippines and Vietnam are not as remote as one may think.

In recent weeks China and the Philippines had a tense stand-off in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

It involved fishing boats, armed coast guard vessels and eventually even warships.

It is not the first confrontation in the area but the International Crisis Group (ICG) says the situation is potentially getting worse.

A new ICG report, titled Stirring up the South China Sea, has identified key problems within China as making war in the sea potentially more likely.

The report says China’s approach to the sea is marred by competing government departments, nationalist sentiment, unclear laws and a sense of a country being cornered.

It warns those factors could one day push it into a regional war with Vietnam or the Philippines, drawing in the US.

The report found the Chinese government is actively trying to defuse tensions with its neighbours.

But it said that by having multiple Chinese agencies dealing with maritime disputes using armed coastguard vessels and competing for budgets and power, the situation has been made worse.

Clashes in the South China Sea have become more frequent.

Last year a Chinese fishing boat rammed the exploration cables of a Vietnamese ship and, as a result, both countries engaged in live fire exercises.

Just last week, armed Chinese vessels stopped the Philippine navy from detaining Chinese fishermen said to be poaching in contested waters.

Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, the ICG’s north-east Asia project director, says China and other countries have been withholding their navies from getting involved in these incidents.

But she thinks it could increase the likelihood of major battles involving smaller armed policing ships.

“We worry in Crisis Group that the threshold for entry into conflict is much less by having all of these law enforcement and paramilitary vessels because it’s seen as well they’re just law enforcement vessels,” she said.

“So they’re more easily deployed and they’re far less conscious of the rules; the rules of the road, international law, these types of things than would be the PLA navy.

“So they can be more careless and in fact there’s some kind of a quasi-coastguard arms race going on in the region.”

Ms Kleine-Ahlbrandt also raised the possibility that nationalism at home could push China and its neighbours closer to a dispute over competing waters.

She says her organisation is becoming more alarmed about the South China Sea.

“These five countries, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei have actually very overlapping claims and the incidents are increasing because you have essentially a sort of a proxy war going on through fisheries vessels where these countries don’t want to engage through a major conflict through their navies,” she said.

“These incidents, which are going to continue to happen, are getting harder to de-escalate because of the nationalist sentiment in the claimant countries, including, for example, Vietnam and China which makes it more difficult for these countries, particularly when the incident becomes international, to walk away from it because they don’t want to be seen as weak vis-a-vis their own publics.”

She says people might be surprised to know that the Chinese government has to pay attention to what its ordinary people think on issues like this.

“There’s a Chinese Twitter called Weibo so the government has far less control over how to depict certain disputes,” she said.

“The information that gets out there, it can be instantly available in minutes to hundreds of thousands of people.

“When the domestic environment is very heated on these issues it does make it difficult for China to be seen in any way as weak or compromising.”

The report has called for the Chinese Foreign Ministry to take full control of South China Sea disputes but says that at the moment it lacks the authority and resources to manage the other Chinese ministries involved.

Topics:unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, china

First posted April 24, 2012 21:21:09

Are we on the cusp of a third industrial revolution?

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Jeremy Rifkin shares his compelling vision of a bright new energy economy with Green Futures’ Editor in Chief, Martin Wright.

Imagine the internet, only for energy.

Imagine that, as well as tens of millions of personal computers all linked together, exchanging information this way and that, you had tens of millions of personal power stations, pumping electricity to and fro.

Imagine if, working together, they made fossil fuels redundant, resolved all our fears about energy security, and kickstarted a new era of peer-to-peer power sharing. Oh, and made a decisive impact on climate change, too…

Then you’re imagining the sort of future laid out by Jeremy Rifkin, maverick economist and adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a clutch of EU leaders.

I meet Rifkin for coffee in London’s Langham hotel, during a flying visit to promote his new book. He’s affable, relaxed – but speaks with the air of a man who is used to being listened to. And it’s hardly surprising, because the vision he paints is a pretty compelling one. In it, the Facebook generation seizes the initiative, tearing up conventional thinking about where energy comes from and how it’s delivered. They apply all their nous in sharing information and building seamless networks to create a new, resilient energy economy in its place, powered entirely by renewables – solar, wind, water and tidal, biomass and more besides. This will be nothing short of a new industrial revolution, says Rifkin, and its impacts will be as dramatic and sweeping as any that have gone before.

“Great economic revolutions happen”, he says, “when new energy regimes emerge that facilitate more complex civilisations and more energy flow. In turn, they require communication revolutions to manage them. And when communication and energy revolutions come together, historically, they change the economic footprint.”

It happened in the 19th century, he argues, when steam power helped bring printing costs down, enabling the spread of the written word as never before, while railways unified nations and continents. It meant we could “introduce public [ie state] schools, and create a literate workforce to manage steam and coal power. We couldn’t have done it with an illiterate work-force; it needed that communications revolution.”

Then in the 20th century, electricity and oil combined to trigger a mass-consuming, car driving society, managed and marketed by radio, TV, the telephone…

Now, says Rifkin, we’re on the cusp of revolution number three – one that will sweep away our existing energy infrastructure. It will replace the “elitist, centralised, top-down” model of fossil fuel plants with an ‘energy internet’, where individual power suppliers and consumers seamlessly swap and trade electricity, as and how they need it, across a Europe-wide smart grid. Essentially, energy will move as information increasingly does now – to and from millions of sources and consumers.

Fighting talk – so how do we get there?

Entrepreneurs will play their part, says Rifkin: they will gatecrash the energy sector with the same élan that saw the internet start-ups rip apart the complacency of the old computing and music industry giants. But, unlike some cornucopian optimists, he doesn’t believe the free market alone will whisk us into a resilient future: good old-fashioned dirigisme has a role, too.

Rifkin’s revolution rests on five key ‘pillars’. First, a commitment from governments to drive renewable energy (as expressed in the EU’s 20% by 2020 target). Second, a massive expansion in distributed energy, with every building transformed into a renewable-power plant. Third, finding a solution to the problem of storing energy – with Rifkin favouring hydrogen as the most practical storage medium. Fourth, creating a smart grid, and fifth, using electric vehicles as a two-way power source come storage ‘tank’.

So far, how revolutionary? If much of that sounds familiar, it’s hardly surprising. Rifkin shares a lot of common ground with the new wave of green optimists who enthuse over the potential of a growing convergence of IT and energy [see ‘Getting creative with data‘]. And it has to be said, a future in which cheaper, more efficient renewables power an all-electric car fleet, and combine with smart grids to transform energy networks is hardly a novel idea.

So where will the juice actually come from?

“Everywhere!”, he replies – then adds an interesting qualification. “My first inclination was, we’ll go to the Mediterranean for the sun; the Irish have the wind, the Norwegians have the hydro, and so on… So, we’ll concentrate it, put it in a high voltage line and ship it. Then, I realised we were using 20th century thinking! If renewables are distributed and found everywhere, why are we only collecting them in [a few places]?”

So, no glittering arrays of concentrated Saharan sun? No vast swathes of North Sea turbines? What about all that Icelandic geothermal…?

“Look, concentrated solar, wind, geothermal parks are all right”, responds Rifkin. “But they’re transitional: they’re essential to get us started, but they are a tiny part of this revolution and you cannot run the world on [them]. It can’t be done.”

Instead, he wants us to zoom in on “the number one cause of energy use, the number one cause of climate change: buildings. We have 191 million buildings in the EU. That’s our [energy] infrastructure: homes, offices and factories. The goal is to convert every single building so everyone has their own green micro power plant. So you get solar off your roof, wind off your walls, geothermal heat [from] under your ground, energy from your garbage anaerobically digested, ocean tides if you’re on the coast etc, etc.”

Once you’ve got the power, though, you have to store it. As Rifkin puts it: “The sun isn’t always shining, the wind isn’t always blowing; they are intermittent energies. So I’m in favour of every kind of storage: pumped, flow batteries, fly wheels, capacitors – but I’m putting most of the emphasis on hydrogen. Why? Because it’s the basic element of the universe, it’s the lightest element, it’s modular. You can put it in a home or a big utility. So, when the sun hits the roof of your factory or home, you generate electricity. When you have a bit of electricity you don’t need, you put it in water like in high school chemistry [to produce hydrogen]. When you need [power] you just convert it back. It’s a tiny thermodynamic loss compared to bringing [power produced by] oil, gas, coal and nuclear to us.”

Electric vehicles play their part too. They act as mini storage facilities in their own right, taking electricity from the grid to run, and feeding it back when not needed.

“Now, here’s the key”, Rifkin concludes. “These five pillars together are an infrastructure. They are a mega-technology platform, they are a nervous system for a completely new economic era – they are power to the people. Distributive capitalism, if you will.”

It’s persuasive, heady stuff. It has certainly persuaded many EU leaders. Rifkin is that rare American: an unashamed Europhile. He’s kept the faith even as gloom has descended over the continent, recently remarking that, if the Eurozone splits up, “we’re into a dark age.”

One of his recent books bore the subtitle ‘How Europe’s vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the American dream’. And the compliment has been returned. The European Parliament endorsed the principles of the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’, and many see Rifkin’s fingerprints all over the EU’s ambitious energy and climate targets. He’s served as adviser to successive holders of the Presidency, whose names he drops with an easy familiarity: “When Romano Prodi was there, I told him we had to get this moving, so we put in €2 billion for R&D. Then, under Manuel Barroso, we put in €8 billion as a public/private roll out. When Chancellor Merkel came in, I said: ‘You’ve got to let Germany lead.’ She put in €500 million…” Some credit Rifkin with playing a key role in influencing the German decision to abandon nuclear power.

His confidence in EU institutions as a springboard for progress might ring a little hollow to European ears just now, but some leading businesses are also on board, with IBM, Cisco, Philips, Bouygues and Acciona all in conversation with Rifkin. And beyond the EU, Rifkin is advising the UN’s Industrial Development Organisation, and starting work with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce, too.

Rifkin’s influence is hardly surprising, because his confidence is infectious. Yet when he pauses for breath, you can’t help but find yourself wondering if it’s all a touch Panglossian. Are we really going to be able to create this best of all possible energy economies? Are millions of micro power plants going to provide all the heavy lifting we need for industries such as steel, paper and cement? After all, it’s one thing to see a surge of potential for distributed power; quite another to imagine the whole of our fossil-fuelled infrastructure crumbling in the face of the energy equivalent of a bunch of geeks in their garages. With the EU ( – the EU!) as nursemaid…

Rifkin brushes off such scepticism with a practised hand. “That old way of thinking doesn’t address the fact that these [distributed renewable] energies are found everywhere [and] the technology is going to get cheaper and cheaper. It’s following the same curve as mobile phones and desktop computers from the late 70s to 2010. They became so cheap they gave them away: now you buy the service, not the product. The same is happening on this curve right now: we’re just in the early adoption stages. Solar, wind, geothermal, heat pumps, bio-converters – they are all going to get cheaper and cheaper. And once the technology becomes cheap, the sun is free, the wind is free, the heat underground is free, and your garbage is free. When millions and millions of players are collecting even a little bit of surplus, it just overwhelms any kind of energy you can imagine from these little centralised nuclear and coal-fired power plants. It’s just like desktop computers: when you connect millions of them they wipe out anything you can get from the centralised super computer.”

The fossil fuel giants are roughly where the music business was a decade or so ago, he argues. “When millions of kids started file sharing, [the music companies] first thought it was a pain in the ass, and then they thought it was a joke, then they tried to legislate, then they put in encryptions, then they collapsed.” But as important as the obvious potential is the fact that we simply don’t have a choice, Rifkin believes. Unless we seize this moment to crack our dependency on the fossil stuff, we’re going to be trapped on a vicious rollercoaster ride.

“When fuel costs rise, all the other prices across the supply chain go through the roof, because everything’s made out of fossil fuels: fertilisers, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, construction materials, synthetic fibres, power, transport, heat and light. So, when oil went over $80/barrel in 2007, everything else went up. At $100 a barrel, the speculators came in to gain the market. At $120/barrel we had food riots in 22 countries because [the prices of] wheat, rice, barley and rye were doubling or trebling. We had one billion people in harm’s way, according to the UN. At $147/barrel, it shut down. Prices were so prohibitive, consumers stopped buying. That was the economic earthquake. The collapse of the financial market 60 days later was an aftershock.”

He insists there’s no way out for oil. “Every time we try to re-grow the global economy at the same rate we were growing before July 2008, all the [fuel] prices shoot up, all the other prices for everything else go up, purchasing power goes down and we collapse. And this is exactly what’s happening right now. In 2009, oil was at $30 a barrel because the economy had stopped around the world. As soon as we started replenishing inventories in 2010, oil goes up, all the other prices are going up, purchasing power is going down and the economy is collapsing again. These are four-year intervals. Every time we try to restart the engine and start replenishing inventories, prices rise, and at around $125-150/barrel, the engine shuts down. I don’t think you can get through this four year cycle of growth and collapse. It’s very dangerous, it’s an endgame. And if there is a way to get through this wall, somebody needs to tell me what it is.”

Petro-optimists, of course, will point to shale gas, tar sands and the recent mega discoveries of oil off Latin America, which have shaken some of the more simplistic claims of the ‘peakists’. For Rifkin, they merely exacerbate problems: “They’re dirty, they emit CO2 [and in the case of shale gas] there are huge issues of water contamination”.

And what about nuclear? Rifkin is dismissive. “I don’t even spend time on nuclear energy; it’s a waste of my time.” But wait a minute, what about the arguments put forward by a growing number of environmentalists such as Mark Lynas or George Monbiot, who’ve come to see it as the least worst option in a warming world?

“Look, nuclear was dead in the water after Chernobyl”, responds Rifkin. “Its only come-back strategy was: ‘We could be the saviour on climate change.’ Well, we’ve got 400 nuclear power plants in the world. They’re old, they’re going to be decommissioned, and they only make up 6% of the energy mix. Our climate scientists tell us that, for them to have a minimum impact on climate change, which would be the whole reason for them coming back, they’d have to be 20% of the mix. That means we’d have to have 2,000 nuclear power plants. We’d have to replace the existing 400, and build [some] 1,500 more: that means three power plants every 30 days for the next half a century at a cost of trillions of dollars. Can we really afford that?

“Second, we still can’t get rid of the nuclear waste. We’re 60 years in, and we don’t have an answer. Third, we face [serious] uranium deficits by 2035, just with the existing 400 plants. We could recycle uranium to plutonium, but do we really want plutonium all over the world in an age of uncertainty?

“Finally, we don’t have enough water. That’s the big one. Over 40% of all the fresh water in France is used to cool nuclear reactors. When it goes back it’s heated and it’s dehydrating ecosystems for agriculture.” (During the 2003 European drought, water shortages forced many of France’s nuclear reactors to shut down or operate below capacity.)

But you don’t have to use fresh water… “Yes, you could build salt water plants but then you have the possibility of more violent weather conditions.” So when you put it together I would be shocked if from the business point of view we replaced half of the 400 plants we have now, and that would get us to 2% [of our] energy.”

And nuclear fusion? “Fusion is one of those pipe dreams. It’s always sometime in the future.”

“But the real point”, says Rifkin, “is that all of this – nuclear, shale gas, whatever – is centralised thinking. It’s the old guard. The real question is: How do you regrow any economy in the world based on an industrial revolution that is over? Answer: You can’t do it.”

Then he turns the question on me: “Where do you want to be in 20 years from now? Do you want to be in the sunset of a dying 20th century infrastructure, or in the sunrise technologies of an emerging third industrial revolution?” Its great strength, he argues, its resilience, lies in the fact that the future of power is lateral. “If you’re of an older generation, like us, you think of power as top-down, but the kids think of it as side-by-side.”

We’ve talked for over an hour, well past the cut off time laid down by his publisher. At 65, Rifkin’s impressively energetic. He claims to be tired after his flight, but it hardly shows, and he politely waves away the hovering PR with a smile, “It’s OK, we’re enjoying ourselves…”

Then he winds up the interview with a characteristically optimistic flourish. “Try to imagine, in 2050, you’ll have had three generations growing up on lateral power and the internet. Are they going to allow themselves to be surrounded by these centralised 20th century ideas? Come on, the kids are going to wipe this out!”

Martin Wright is Editor in Chief, Green Futures.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Essential Rifkin
• Born: Denver, Colorado, 1945
• Prize-winning economics student, underwent a political awakening in 1966, on seeing “my frat friends beating the living daylights” out of Vietnam war protestors.
• Became peace activist and environmentalist. Staged ‘Boston Oil Party’ in 1973, on 200th anniversary of Boston Tea Party, dumping empty oil barrels in the harbour.
• Launched Foundation for Economic Trends, which works on a range of economic, environmental and climate change issues.
• Variously described as “a social and ethical prophet” (New York Times) and “the most dangerous man in science” (Time Magazine).
• Advisor to European Parliament and several EU presidents and heads of state, including Angela Merkel (Germany). Principles of the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ adopted by the Parliament, influences EU energy and climate policy.
• Books include Entropy: A New World View (1980); The Hydrogen Economy (2002); and The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (2004).

• Small variations in magnetic fields can be environmental stresses
• Diversity aided mammals’ survival over deep time
• Climate change may create price volatility in the corn market

Small variations in magnetic fields can be environmental stresses Posted: 23 Apr 2012 03:42 PM PDT We are surrounded by a constantly changing magnetic field, be it Earth’s or those emanating from devices, such as cell phones. Scientists are interested in understanding how these magnetic-field fluctuations change biochemical reactions inside us.

Diversity aided mammals’ survival over deep time Posted: 23 Apr 2012 03:41 PM PDT The first study of how mammals in North America adapted to climate change in “deep time” found that families with greater diversity were more stable and maintained larger ranges than less diverse families.

Climate change may create price volatility in the corn market Posted: 22 Apr 2012 10:49 AM PDT Corn, America’s No. 1 crop, could see its prime growing region shift to the Canadian border or its price volatility increase sharply within 30 years. A new study points to climate change as the cause.