Acidified landscape around ocean vents foretells grim future for coral reefs

The seas are slowly being made more acidic by the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from factories and cars being pumped into the atmosphere and then dissolved in the sea. The likely impact of this acidification worries scientists, because they have found that predicting the exact course of future damage is a tricky process.

That is where the undersea vents come in, says Dr Jason Hall-Spencer of the University of Plymouth. “Seawater around these vents becomes much more acidic than normal seawater because of the carbon dioxide that is being bubbled into it,” he told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, California, last week. “Indeed, it reaches a level that we believe will be matched by the acidity of oceans in three or four decades. That is why they are so important.”

As part of his research, Hall-Spencer has scuba-dived into waters around vents and used submersibles to study those in deeper waters. In both cases the impact was dramatic, he told the conference.

“The sea floor is often very colourful. There are corals, pink algae and sea urchins. But I have found that these are wiped out when the water becomes more acidic and are replaced by sea grasses and foreign, invasive algae.

“There is a complete ecological flip. The seabed loses all its richness and variety. And that is what is likely to happen in the next few decades across the world’s oceans.”

Hall-Spencer also noted that in acidic seawater a type of algae known as coralline algae – which act as the glue holding coral reefs together – are destroyed.

“When coralline algae are destroyed, coral reefs fall apart,” he said. “So we can see that coral islands like the Maldives face a particularly worrying future. Rising sea levels threaten to drown them, while acidic waters will cause them to disintegrate.

“It is a very worrying combination.”

Critics not sold on NSW transport plan.

Critics not sold on NSW transport plan

AAP February 21, 2010, 8:02 pm

The NSW government’s new transport blueprint for Sydney dumps the much-maligned CBD metro scheme in favour of expanded light rail and bigger, swifter heavy rail links to the suburbs.

But sceptics are already panning the 10-year plan as another Labor promise that won’t grow legs.

Following a specially convened cabinet meeting on Sunday, Premier Kristina Keneally announced the $50.2 billion Metropolitan Transport Plan, which officially scraps the controversial CBD Metro and revives the northwest rail link.

But commuters will still have a long wait for the Epping to Rouse Hill line, with works not due to start until 2017 – almost 10 years after the plan was first announced.

Ms Keneally also revealed taxpayers would foot the bill for compensation payments to disgruntled tenderers for the shelved metro plan.

She would not disclose how many millions of dollars had been squandered on the project but said private contractors left out of pocket would be compensated.

“We will reimburse all reasonable costs for the CBD (metro),” Ms Keneally told reporters in Sydney.

Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell said the bill should be sent to Labor’s head office, not the people of NSW.

The transport blueprint contains a mixture of new and previously announced projects, and focuses mostly on western Sydney. Of the projected $50.2 billion in spending, more than $7 billion is for new or expanded transport infrastructure and services.

Spending of $3.1 billion is earmarked for new trains, $2.9 billion for more buses, $225 million for six ferries, and a $500 million expansion of the current light rail through the inner west.

Ms Keneally said the existing light rail line to Lilyfield would be extended to Dulwich Hill, and 4.1km of track would be laid between Circular Quay, Barangaroo and Haymarket.

Express train services will be introduced to serve the Blue Mountains, Richmond, Penrith, Blacktown and Parramatta.

NSW motorists will fork out up to $30 a year in extra registration fees to help pay for the upgrade, according to Treasurer Eric Roozendaal.

The weight tax for motor vehicles would increase to “a little less than” 60 cents a week, he said.

The rest of the funding will come from whatever’s left from the $5 billion allocation for the CBD metro project as well as budget funds.

Ms Keneally fronted a throng of journalists to deliver her announcement, calling the plan a response “to the challenges of Sydney’s growing population”.

But critics said the NSW public was weary of broken promises and had reason to suspect the new plan was a stunt ahead of the looming election.

Action for Public Transport spokesman Jim Donovan said the public had zero confidence in Labor’s transport promises, saying he remembered hearing similar things from the Iemma and Rees governments.

“They are good projects, better than some of these metro ideas were,” he said, referring to the new blueprint.

“I am disappointed it’s so long until the northwest rail link will be running, and the trouble is, even if it’s built by 2025 there is no indication that it is going to connect to the city properly.”

He described the blueprint as a “stunt”, adding: “They are trying to win a few more votes for the election next year.”

NSW Greens MP Lee Rhiannon agreed there was deep cynicism among the public.

The Sydney Business Chamber said Labor would have difficulty convincing people it would deliver on long-term infrastructure projects.

“Unfortunately the government has been its own worst enemy in delivering its transport initiatives,” chamber executive director Patricia Forsythe said in a statement.

“Over a decade the government has released nine transport plans, blueprints, reports or statements totalling more than $100 billion in projects that have never seen the light of day or have been severely curtailed or delayed.”

Urban Taskforce Australia, an organisation representing large property developers and financiers, said it supported the plan, but it called for an increase in new housing approvals to accompany the proposed transport projects.

Public submissions can be lodged at www.shapeyourstate.nsw.gov.au.

Gas pipeline through contaminated Baltic given go-ahead

Ecologist

19th February, 2010

Environmental groups in Germany, Finland and Denmark claim gas pipeline will devastate the Baltic Sea’s already fragile marine ecosystem

Three legal challenges are being brought against the construction of a major undersea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The €7.4 billion Nord Stream project, heavily promoted in recent weeks by Russian prime minister Vladmir Putin, has now been approved by all the Baltic countries throug whose territorial waters the pipeline will pass.

Construction is expected to start as early as April this year.

Legal action

However, campaign groups in three of the countries that have approved the pipeline are attempting to delay construction, claiming environmental impacts have not been properly assessed.

Separate cases being brought in Germany by WWF, in Finland by the Estonian Fund for Nature (ELF) and in Denmark by the Estonian Naturalists Society (ENS), all allege the permits for the project should not have been issued by the national authorities.

Jüri-Ott Salm, CEO of the Estonian Fund for Nature, said they were concerned about the toxic sediment that would be released by the construction of the pipe and clearing of munitions dumped in the Sea.

He said alternative routes overland had not been properly considered and that ELF wanted a new environmental assessment made.

Munitions dump

Ivar Puura from the Estonian Naturalists Society, said its case was specifically about munitions dumps in Danish and Swedish waters – which it claims have not been properly assessed.

‘If Nord Stream AG [the consortium building the pipeline] is concerned on the environmental safety, it should take time to finish the incomplete assessments of environmental impacts.

‘The appeal is seeking the delay in construction and communicates the warning of scientists that there are too many open questions on known risks and uncertanties, that should be answered before the works are launched. Otherwise, the risks to human health and ecosystem services are too high,’ said Puura.

A spokesperson from Nord Stream said €100 million of environmental surveys had been undertaken and that any complaints were directed against the national authorities rather than them.

‘So far we are not aware of any details that could lead to a delay. We are looking forward to a timely start to work in April.’

Useful links
Nord Stream
Estonian Fund for Nature (ELF)
Estonian Naturalists Society (ENS)

20 February, 2010

World’s top firms cause $2.2 Trillion of environmental damage, report estimates;.

Later this year, another huge UN study – dubbed the “Stern for nature” after the influential report on the economics of climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern – will attempt to put a price on such global environmental damage, and suggest ways to prevent it. The report, led by economist Pavan Sukhdev, is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage.

Ahead of changes which would have a profound effect – not just on companies’ profits but also their customers and pension funds and other investors – the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment initiative and the United Nations Environment Programme jointly ordered a report into the activities of the 3,000 biggest public companies in the world, which includes household names from the UK’s FTSE 100 and other major stockmarkets.

The study, conducted by London-based consultancy Trucost and due to be published this summer, found the estimated combined damage was worth US$2.2 trillion (£1.4tn) in 2008 – a figure bigger than the national economies of all but seven countries in the world that year.

The figure equates to 6-7% of the companies’ combined turnover, or an average of one-third of their profits, though some businesses would be much harder hit than others.

“What we’re talking about is a completely new paradigm,” said Richard Mattison, Trucost’s chief operating officer and leader of the report team. “Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them.”

The biggest single impact on the $2.2tn estimate, accounting for more than half of the total, was emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change. Other major “costs” were local air pollution such as particulates, and the damage caused by the over-use and pollution of freshwater.

The true figure is likely to be even higher because the $2.2tn does not include damage caused by household and government consumption of goods and services, such as energy used to power appliances or waste; the “social impacts” such as the migration of people driven out of affected areas, or the long-term effects of any damage other than that from climate change. The final report will also include a higher total estimate which includes those long-term effects of problems such as toxic waste.

Trucost did not want to comment before the final report on which sectors incurred the highest “costs” of environmental damage, but they are likely to include power companies and heavy energy users like aluminium producers because of the greenhouse gases that result from burning fossil fuels. Heavy water users like food, drink and clothing companies are also likely to feature high up on the list.

Sukhdev said the heads of the major companies at this year’s annual economic summit in Davos, Switzerland, were increasingly concerned about the impact on their business if they were stopped or forced to pay for the damage.

“It can make the difference between profit and loss,” Sukhdev told the annual Earthwatch Oxford lecture last week. “That sense of foreboding is there with many, many [chief executives], and that potential is a good thing because it leads to solutions.”

The aim of the study is to encourage and help investors lobby companies to reduce their environmental impact before concerned governments act to restrict them through taxes or regulations, said Mattison.

“It’s going to be a significant proportion of a lot of companies’ profit margins,” Mattison told the Guardian. “Whether they actually have to pay for these costs will be determined by the appetite for policy makers to enforce the ‘polluter pays’ principle. We should be seeking ways to fix the system, rather than waiting for the economy to adapt. Continued inefficient use of natural resources will cause significant impacts on [national economies] overall, and a massive problem for governments to fix.”

Another major concern is the risk that companies simply run out of resources they need to operate, said Andrea Moffat, of the US-based investor lobby group Ceres, whose members include more than 80 funds with assets worth more than US$8tn. An example was the estimated loss of 20,000 jobs and $1bn last year for agricultural companies because of water shortages in California, said Moffat.

The streets, glowing red in the image taken, recorded a maximum temperature of 33 degrees. The bitumen surrounded by concrete were fully 4 degrees hotter than the maximum temperature recorded at Observatory Hill that day. The most conspicuous red zone on the map was the huge rectangle of concrete at the Hungry Mile, west of the Harbour Bridge. (The Hungry Mile is officially known as Barangaroo, a ridiculous name for a major new precinct.) What is proposed for the Hungry Mile/Barangaroo? A new forest of office towers with barely a fig leaf of trees. What is proposed for the expansion of Sydney? More density, more tower clusters, more hot spots built along major transport arteries.

That is why, contrary to the weather reports we see each day, it is not the outer suburbs, furthest from the moderating coolness of the sea, that are the hottest, it is the areas with the highest concentrations of roads, traffic and high-rise towers. Their stored heat leads to more air-conditioning at night, and so the heat-sink cycle goes.

Modern culture is built around creating urban heat sinks, yet governments obsess less about this real-world, everyday problem than the more abstract problem of carbon pollution. Fixing the first problem would help ameliorate the second.

But are there any grand plans for turning the web of our major city’s blacktops into pale-surfaced roads? No. Any master plan for increasing the vegetation on footpaths and common areas? No. Any plans for retrofitting the kerb guttering and stormwater system so more water can soak into roadside green areas? No.

All this is fantasy stuff for our engineers and planning departments. Instead, we build desalination plants, install more air-conditioners, and cram in more office and apartment towers, while the Rudd government runs a gangbusters immigration program, with an extra 300,000 people a year coming through legal immigration and backdoor immigration via the student visa program – the plan they chose not to tell voters about before the last election.

Sydney will absorb more of this than anywhere else. The heat sinks in Sydney and Melbourne will just get hotter. Multiply this by thousands, and you have a defining global trend.

Humanity recently crossed a historic divide. In 1955, 68 per cent of the world’s population lived in rural areas and 32 per cent in urban areas. Last year, the majority tipped the other way. More people live in urban areas than rural areas. In 20 years the balance is estimated to be 60-40 urban-rural, a momentous change in less than a century.

So the impact of climate warming caused by the urban heat sink effect is real for the majority of the world’s population. Beyond that, the story becomes more complex. In December, 2007, professors Ross McKitrick and Patrick Michaels argued in a paper (published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres) that half the global warming trend recorded from 1980 to 2002 could be attributed to the urban heat island effect.

More provocatively, McKitrick commented that the most widely published graph showing a dramatic global temperature rise was ”an exaggeration”, adding, ”I have also found that the UN agency promoting the global temperature graph has made false claims about the quality of their data.”

This was a direct affront to the UN’s scientific consensus, which argues urban areas had made little impact on global warming trends. Some of the bedrock research for this position was done by Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

One of his papers was published in Nature in 1990, co-authored by Wei-Chyung Wang, who studied data from Chinese weather stations. Their paper concluded that urban heat caused a negligible effect on rising recorded temperatures. After Jones became a figure of controversy, he was asked for the location of the weather stations used in the study. Only after intense pressure were details released, but the locations of the rural weather stations were not included. When Wang was asked about the omissions he said he could no longer find the records.

Last October, McKitrick wrote in the National Post: ”I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent co-authors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess.”

Last Thursday the University of East Anglia announced an ”independent external reappraisal” of the research produced by the Climatic Research Unit. Jones, already suspended, will remain stood down during the inquiry.

So should the argument that the world’s urban population exploding from 900 million to 3.4 billion in little more than 50 years has had a negligible impact on the earth’s temperature and the world’s weather stations. That, too, is due for a reappraisal.

Victoria vulnerable to another Black Saturday: Cesar Melham

“Instead the safety of the state is being left in the hands of volunteers.”

Mr Melham, whose union represents full-time staff at the Department of Sustainability and Environment, said the state was “abusing the generosity” of its Country Fire Authority volunteer firefighters.

While the government claimed it could draw on more than 3000 staff, many of those were part-time or casual employees or bureaucrats and many were not able to take part in fighting fires, or in prescribed burns.

He said there were “too many chiefs” in fire agencies and not enough fire fighters.

“We need a professional full-time fire fighting force,” he told the commission. “You can’t go and fight a war with a part-time army.”

Mr Melham said that even more damning than its failure to act on its promises to boost numbers after the 2003 Esplin Inquiry into Victoria’s bushfires, the latest state budget had cut the department’s funding by $47 million, “notwithstanding Black Saturday”.

Mr Melham also said the Victorian government’s target burn of 130,000 hectares annually should be tripled to 385,000 hectares, as recommended by a parliamentary inquiry last year, and resources needed to be multiplied 10 times “if we are fair dinkum”.

He said the state’s bushfire strategy was fragmented and uncoordinated and marred by lack of resources and trained staff.

He said a single fire authority, such as the old Victorian Forest Commission, should be re-established.

“We need to put all the resources back together,” he said. “It just makes sense. It would give us a better fighting chance to fight these fires when they hit us.”

Mr Melham’s comments went unchallenged by state government lawyers at the royal commission, who had no questions for the union leader.

Category: News

Acidified landscape around ocean vents foretells grim future for coral reefs