EcoRadio

Category: General news

Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on

  • Extreme physics at the ends of the Earth

    NASA balloon.jpg

    Image: NASA balloon over Antarctica, NASA

    Anil Ananthaswamy, a science journalist and consultant for New Scientist, has been to more of these lonely locations than just about anyone, and in The Edge of Physics he weaves a remarkable narrative that combines fundamental physics with high adventure. The story takes him from the giant telescopes atop the Chilean Andes to a dark-matter detector deep in a defunct Minnesota iron mine, to the neutrino observatory known as IceCube, whose optical sensors have been placed up to 2.5 kilometres below the surface of the perpetually frozen South Pole.

    Check out Anil Ananthaswamy’s video of his travels to physics’ most extreme sites

    Ananthaswamy carefully explains the science relevant to each of these sites, dipping into history where needed to flesh out the background. Ultimately, though, it is the remote, unforgiving locations that anchor the story. “These magnificent telescopes and detectors can work only in the most extreme settings,” he writes. “Their surreal environments are the unsung characters in this unfolding story – venues rarely appreciated and often overlooked.”

    The two sites that bookend the story are, perhaps, the most familiar. We begin at the mount Wilson observatory in California, where Edwin Hubble first deduced that the universe is expanding. At the time, mount Wilson was a pristine, dark-sky site from where astronomers could probe the heavens. Today it lies at the edge of Los Angeles’s urban sprawl. The penultimate chapter finds Ananthaswamy at the Large Hadron Collider, built in a tunnel that straddles the France-Switzerland border. The LHC has received enough press in the past few years for it to have become practically a household name; even so, as the author reminds us, it is the largest single science experiment ever devised by our species, and if we are lucky it may tell us if the universe is made of tiny strings or contains hidden dimensions.

    Very_Large_Telescope.jpg

    Image: Very Large Telescope in Chile, ESO/G.Hüdepohl

    Readers might be less familiar with the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope, which rests in the frigid waters of Lake Baikal in Siberia, looking for meagre flashes of light that tell of collisions between neutrinos and molecules of water. The observatory is run on a shoestring, with only one luxury: the traditional Russian banya, or sauna, where “naked men sit in an outbuilding, chuck water on hot stones to raise steam, and beat each other with leafy twigs and branches of birch”.

    The Edge of Physics is really two stories in one: a travelogue that takes the reader to some of the most desolate places on our planet, and a survey of the most urgent problems in physics and cosmology, from dark energy and string theory to multiple universes. Ananthaswamy is a worthy guide for both journeys.

  • IMF Green Fund will raise $100bn a year.

    The managing director of the International Monetary Fund has announced that his staff are working on a ‘Green Fund’ that has the potential to raise $100bn per year by 2020.

    During a speech in Nairobi, Kenya, which focused on Africa’s need to rebuild following the global economic crisis, Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the fund would help with climate change adaptation and mitigation in developing countries.

    Mr Strauss-Kahn called upon the international community to marshal the resources needed to help low-income countries to tackle climate change – an issue he called “the shock to end all shocks.”
    “Without action, Africa will suffer more from drought, flooding, food shortages, and disease, possibly provoking further instability and conflict,” he said.

    “[While] some may rightly argue that climate change is not in the mandate of the IMF…the amount of resources needed has clear macroeconomic implications, sustainable growth in developing countries will require large-scale, long-term investments for climate change adaptation and mitigation.”

    He emphasised that while the IMF did not intend to manage such a fund, it aimed to offer something that “can make a significant contribution to the global debate and for consideration by the international community.”

    He acknowledged that launching such a scheme would entail a major political effort but he also said that the “potential pay-off is enormous–for Africa and the world.”

    Nicholas Stern, author of what is perhaps the most influential report on the economics of climate change, welcomed MR Strauss-Kahn’s speech.

    Lord Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, said: “The ‘Green Fund’ is a creative and constructive idea which shows that the International Monetary Fund recognises clearly the very serious risks that climate change creates for future global economic growth and development.

    “Both the risks and the necessary response have major macroeconomic implications. As serious as the current economic crisis is, climate change poses an even more profound and fundamental threat to the world if we do not tackle it; as Mr Strauss-Kahn said: “This could well be the shock to end all shocks”.

    “As the world attempts in this decade to manage the build-up of debt in many countries and global saving-investment imbalances, we must at the same time embark on a path of radical reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, and with this new idea, the IMF is rising to a huge and urgent challenge.

    “The two great challenges facing the world this century are managing climate change and overcoming poverty. If we fail on one, we will fail on the other.

    “Developing countries need significant financial support for their plans to make the transition to low-carbon economic development, and to help them adapt to those impacts of climate change that cannot now be avoided. All countries of the world must both reduce emissions and adapt, but Africa will be hit earliest and hardest.

    “A ‘Green Fund’ could raise resources for developing countries quickly and effectively; speed is of the essence as there are great dangers in delay as concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise in the atmosphere.”

    Sam Bond

  • Humans driving extinction faster than species can evolve, say experts

     

    However until recently it has been hoped that the rate at which new species were evolving could keep pace with the loss of diversity of life.

    Speaking in advance of two reports next week on the state of wildlife in Britain and Europe, Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature – the body which officially declares species threatened and extinct – said that point had now “almost certainly” been crossed.

    “Measuring the rate at which new species evolve is difficult, but there’s no question that the current extinction rates are faster than that; I think it’s inevitable,” said Stuart.

    The IUCN created shock waves with its major assessment of the world’s biodiversity in 2004, which calculated that the rate of extinction had reached 100-1,000 times that suggested by the fossil records before humans.

    No formal calculations have been published since, but conservationists agree the rate of loss has increased since then, and Stuart said it was possible that the dramatic predictions of experts like the renowned Harvard biologist E O Wilson, that the rate of loss could reach 10,000 times the background rate in two decades, could be correct.

    “All the evidence is he’s right,” said Stuart. “Some people claim it already is that … things can only have deteriorated because of the drivers of the losses, such as habitat loss and climate change, all getting worse. But we haven’t measured extinction rates again since 2004 and because our current estimates contain a tenfold range there has to be a very big deterioration or improvement to pick up a change.”

    Extinction is part of the constant evolution of life, and only 2-4% of the species that have ever lived on Earth are thought to be alive today. However fossil records suggest that for most of the planet’s 3.5bn year history the steady rate of loss of species is thought to be about one in every million species each year.

    Only 869 extinctions have been formally recorded since 1500, however, because scientists have only “described” nearly 2m of an estimated 5-30m species around the world, and only assessed the conservation status of 3% of those, the global rate of extinction is extrapolated from the rate of loss among species which are known. In this way the IUCN calculated in 2004 that the rate of loss had risen to 100-1,000 per millions species annually – a situation comparable to the five previous “mass extinctions” – the last of which was when the dinosaurs were wiped out about 65m years ago.

    Critics, including The Skeptical Environmentalist author, Bjørn Lomborg, have argued that because such figures rely on so many estimates of the number of underlying species and the past rate of extinctions based on fossil records of marine animals, the huge margins for error make these figures too unreliable to form the basis of expensive conservation actions.

    However Stuart said that the IUCN figure was likely to be an underestimate of the problem, because scientists are very reluctant to declare species extinct even when they have sometimes not been seen for decades, and because few of the world’s plants, fungi and invertebrates have yet been formally recorded and assessed.

    The calculated increase in the extinction rate should also be compared to another study of thresholds of resilience for the natural world by Swedish scientists, who warned that anything over 10 times the background rate of extinction – 10 species in every million per year – was above the limit that could be tolerated if the world was to be safe for humans, said Stuart.

    “No one’s claiming it’s as small as 10 times,” he said. “There are uncertainties all the way down; the only thing we’re certain about is the extent is way beyond what’s natural and it’s getting worse.”

    Many more species are “discovered” every year around the world, than are recorded extinct, but these “new” plants and animals are existing species found by humans for the first time, not newly evolved species.

    In addition to extinctions, the IUCN has listed 208 species as “possibly extinct”, some of which have not been seen for decades. Nearly 17,300 species are considered under threat, some in such small populations that only successful conservation action can stop them from becoming extinct in future. This includes one-in-five mammals assessed, one-in-eight birds, one-in-three amphibians, and one-in-four corals.

    Later this year the Convention on Biological Diversity is expected to formally declare that the pledge by world leaders in 2002 to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 has not been met, and to agree new, stronger targets.

    Despite the worsening problem, and the increasing threat of climate change, experts stress that understanding of the problems which drive plants and animals to extinction has improved greatly, and that targeted conservation can be successful in saving species from likely extinction in the wild.

    This year has been declared the International Year of Biodiversity and it is also hoped that a major UN report this summer, on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity, will encourage governments to devote more funds to conservation.

    Professor Norman MacLeod, keeper of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum in London, cautioned that when fossil experts find evidence of a great extinction it can appear in a layer of rock covering perhaps 10,000 years, so they cannot say for sure if there was a sudden crisis or a build up of abnormally high extinction rates over centuries or millennia.

    For this reason, the “mathematical artefacts” of extinction estimates were not sufficient to be certain about the current state of extinction, said MacLeod.

    “If things aren’t falling dead at your feel that doesn’t mean you’re not in the middle of a big extinction event,” he said. “By the same token if the extinctions are and remain relatively modest then the changes, [even] aggregated over many years, are still going to end up a relatively modest extinction event.”

    Species on the brink of being declared extinct

    The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 208 species as “possibly extinct”, more than half of which are amphibians. They are defined as species which are “on the balance of evidence likely to be extinct, but for which there is a small chance that they may still be extant”.

    Kouprey (or Grey ox; Bos sauveli)

    What: Wild cattle with horns that live in small herds

    Domain: Mostly Cambodia; also Laos, Vietnam, Thailand

    Population: No first-hand sightings since 1969

    Main threats: hunting for meat and trade, livestock diseases and habitat destruction

    Webbed-footed coqui (or stream coqui; Eleutherodactylus karlschmidti)

    What: Large black frog living in mountain streams

    Domain: East and west Puerto Rico

    Population: Not seen since 1976

    Main threats: Disease (chytridiomycosis), climate change and invasive predators

    Golden coqui frog (Eleutherodactylus jasperi)

    What: Small orange frog living in forest or open rocky areas

    Domain: Sierra de Cayey, Puerto Rico

    Population: No sightings since 1981

    Main threats: Unknown but suspected habitat destruction, climate change, disease (chytridiomycosis) and invasive predators

    Spix’s macaw (or little blue macaw; Cyanopsitta spixii)

    What: Bright blue birds with long tails and grey/white heads

    Domain: Brazil

    Population: The last known wild bird disappeared in 2000; there are 78 in captivity

    Main threats: Destruction of the birds’ favoured Tabebuia caraiba trees for nesting, and trapping

    Café marron (Ramosmania rodriguesii)

    What: White flowering shrub related to the coffee plant family

    Domain: Island of Rodrigues, Republic of Mauritius

    Population: A single wild plant is known

    Main threats: Habitat loss, introduced grazing animals and alien plants

    Source: IUCN and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. To mark the International Year of Biodiversity, the IUCN is running a daily profile of a threatened species throughout 2010. See iucn.org.

  • EU exporting ‘one third. of CO2 emissions to poorer contries

    EU exporting ‘one-third’ of CO2 emissions to poorer countries

    Ecologist

    9th March, 2010

    Study shows industrialised countries are ‘outsourcing’ carbon emissions to countries like China, one quarter of whose CO2 emissions are from exports

    European countries are ‘outsourcing’ almost a third of their carbon dioxide emissions to less industrialised countries, according to a new study.

    Researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science found that a significant proportion of the carbon emissions associated with the consumption of goods and services in industrialised countries are actually emitted outside their borders.

    Underestimating

    This ‘outsourcing’ of carbon emissions means countries like the UK, which annually imports goods responsible for more than 250 million tonnes of CO2, are underestimating their real carbon footprint.

    In the case of Switzerland, outsourced emissions actually exceeded the amount of carbon dioxide emitted inside the country in the global trade data from 2004 used by the researchers.

    ‘Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China,’ said lead author Steven Davis, from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.

    Outsourced emissions

    Fellow author Ken Caldeira said countries should be measuring the carbon dioxide emissions not only inside their borders but also the amount released during the ‘production of the things that we consume’.

    ‘One implication of emissions outsourcing is that a lot of the consumer products that we think of as being relatively carbon-free may in fact be associated with significant carbon dioxide emissions,’ said Caldeira.

    Both researchers said industrialised countries like the UK and US must admit this fact when it comes to international agreements on cutting emissions.

    ‘Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system. Effective policy must have global scope. To the extent that constraints on developing countries’ emissions are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise,’ they said.

    Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Professor Edgar Hertwich and colleague Glen Peters have produced a website, ‘The Carbon footprint of nations‘ where you can check on the carbon footprint of individual country’s imports and exports.

    Useful links
    Full study on ‘outsourcing’ of CO2
    Carbon Footprint of Nations website

  • Vehicle scrappage scheme drives down emissions of new cars

     

    Everitt said:

    “The industry is well on its way to meeting EU regulatory targets of a 130g/km fleet average by 2015, but the current rate of improvement must be maintained.”

    “Building consumer awareness and delivering effective mechanisms to influence buying behaviour through a long-term environmental tax regime, and the government’s recent ultra-low carbon incentive scheme, will become increasingly important.” Last month the Guardian revealed that only two electric cars – an £87,000 sports car and £25,000 four-seater Mitsubishi – would be available from the start of the ultra-low carbon incentive scheme.

    The Mini sector had the lowest average emissions last year – dropping 6.7% to 115.6g/km. Luxury car models – which averaged 250.3g/km last year – were the worst pollutants, although emissions in this sector were down 6% on 2008.

  • Methane’s impact on global warming far higher than previouly thought

     

    Drew Shindell, of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who led the study, said that the findings added to the importance of measures to contain methane emissions, as well as those of carbon dioxide, which will be discussed at the Copenhagen climate summit in December.

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    As methane breaks down much more quickly than carbon dioxide, the impact of cuts on climate would also be faster. “For long-term climate change there’s no way around dealing with CO2 — it’s the biggest thing and it lasts hundreds of years,” Dr Shindell told The Times. “But if we were to have a concerted effort to deal with non-CO2 we could have a very large impact on the near term.

    “Substantial reductions in methane, carbon monoxide and black carbon: that’s the way to make a big difference. I think it should be more of a priority [for Copenhagen].”

    Dr Shindell’s results, published in the journal Science, also raise the possibility that global warming forecasts may be too optimistic. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, predicts that global temperatures will rise by between 1.1C and 6.4C during the 21st century.

    The study has further implications for emissions trading schemes, which currently focus only on carbon dioxide. For these to be effective the warming effects of methane need to be pegged to those of carbon dioxide at the right “exchange rate”.

    Dr Shindell said: “We undervalue methane. The whole point of having a scale is to relate different gases together, to enlarge the pool of mitigation options. But if you’ve got the wrong value for one, clearly you don’t have maximum efficiency.”

    The researchers wrote in Science: “We found that gas-aerosol interactions substantially alter the relative importance of the various emissions. In particular, methane emissions have a larger impact than that used in current carbon-trading schemes or in the Kyoto Protocol.”

    The exchange rate between carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is generally calculated according to global warming potential (GWP), which measures the effects of one tonne of a gas on warming over 100 years in comparison to one tonne of carbon dioxide.

    Keith Shine, of the University of Reading, one of the originators of the GWP concept, said that Dr Shindell’s work would help to refine this. “It does change the picture quite significantly,” he said. “GWP is an exchange rate between different gases and this does potentially change the rate to make methane more valuable, giving more encouragement to reduce methane emissions.”

    He said, however, that emissions controls should continue to focus chiefly on carbon dioxide. “The long-term effects of carbon dioxide are so strong that if you take the eye off the ball you will be storing up problems for the future.”

    Methane is acknowledged as the second most important greenhouse gas produced by human activity after carbon dioxide and is responsible for about a fifth of warming effects. Its chief sources are landfill sites, fossil fuel energy and agriculture, particularly rice and livestock farming.

    In the study Dr Shindell used computer models to investigate how methane, carbon monoxide and other greenhouse gases besides CO2 interacted with aerosols — airborne particles such as sulphate molecules.

    Sulphate molecules, produced when sulphur dioxide is oxidised in the atmosphere, have a cooling effect on the climate as they reflect heat but, while their direct effects are included in climate models, their indirect effects in combination with methane and other gases are not.

    Methane and carbon monoxide reduce levels of sulphate aerosols, because they use up oxidants such as hydroxyl in the atmosphere. Fewer oxidant molecules are thus available to oxidise sulphur dioxide to produce sulphate.

    “What happens is that as you put more methane into the atmosphere, it competes for oxidants such as hydroxyl with sulphur dioxide,” Dr Shindell said. “More methane means less sulphate, which is reflective and thus has a cooling effect. Calculations of GWP including these gas-aerosol linkages thus substantially increase the value for methane.”

    Chris Huntingford, of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said: “This is an excellent analysis demonstrating that methane emissions have the potential to add more to future warming than hereto realised. This new research complements the well-established result that carbon dioxide emissions have been responsible for a large fraction of the global warming observed since pre-industrial times.

    “There is a requirement to distil this more complete understanding of how the many different atmospheric gases interact, both between themselves and with humans. Policy decisions must account for such interactions and links to emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and atmospheric aerosols.”