EcoRadio

Category: Uncategorized

  • Subsea methane could become an even bigger game changer than unconventional production

    ubsea methane could become an even bigger game changer than unconventional production

    By GE Look aheadPosted Jul 14, 2013

    Chikyu research ship

    Methane, trapped on the sea floor in icy deposits, could become a major future source of fuel. Japan, which currently produces only one thousandth of the oil it needs, is betting on it.

    Cold, high-pressure water traps methane secreted by organisms on the sea floor causing it to form methane hydrate. The location, quantities and extraction methods for this energy source are just beginning to be understood, but a US Geological Survey estimate places the world supply at about twice that of all other fossil fuels combined.

    Methane hydrate has been found in offshore deposits all around the world, including off both US coasts and the Gulf of Mexico, off the western shores of Africa, along India’s coastlines, off the coast of China and in Japan’s territorial waters.

    The Japanese government runs the best funded and most sophisticated methane hydrate research program in the world, with $700m invested over the last ten years. This is still a small fraction of total Japanese R&D investment in, for example, conventional oil and gas, which was about $2.9b over the ten years ending in 2011. But that could change if current efforts to extract methane hydrate continue to be successful.

    In February, the Japanese government announced plans for developing commercially viable technology for exploiting methane hydrate by 2018. The country has every incentive to develop this potentially vast new resource given its lack of other resources and its troubled nuclear power industry.

    A primary research tool in this endeavor is the Chikyu, a $540m scientific research vessel whose original mission was to probe to the Earth’s mantle with a 9.5km drill. Now, it has been pressed into service exploring methane hydrate deposits off the Japanese coast and developing methods to extract the gas that could, one day, result in industrial-scale production. An expedition by the Chikyu in March returned samples of methane hydrate, which looks like muddy ice, from the sea floor. These samples showed promise for future gas production.

    Given enough research and development and investment in production, methane hydrate could prove as big an energy game changer for Japan as shale gas has proven to be for the United States.

    And, if Japan is successful in developing its methane hydrate resources, other countries may well follow. Already the US (with a $15m programme), India and South Korea ($30m each) are exploring methane hydrate as a potential future energy source. Although these are still relatively small programmes, their size could change quickly once the technologies for extracting methane hydrate economically are developed and become available.

    Share

  • Seas may rise 10 yards during centuries ahead

    Seas may rise 10 yards during centuries ahead

    By John Upton

    Under water.
    Shutterstock
    The future view from your favorite beach.

    Sea-level rise is currently measured in millimeters per year, but longer-term effects of global warming are going to force our descendants to measure sea-level rise in meters or yards.

    Each Celsius degree of global warming is expected to raise sea levels during the centuries ahead by 2.3 meters, or 2.5 yards, according to a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    The world is currently trying (and failing) to reach an agreement that would limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Business-as-usual practices could yet raise temperatures by 4 (or even more) degrees Celsius.

    Multiply 2.5 yards by 4 and you are left with the specter of tides that lap 10 yards higher in the future than today. That’s 30 feet, the height of a three-story building. For comparison, the seas rose less than a foot last century.

    Here is a chart from the new study that illustrates long-term sea-level rise projections under four warming scenarios:

    Click to embiggen.
    PNAS
    Click to embiggen.

    Now, it’s important to note that the new study looks at sea-level rise over the next 2,000 years. The study doesn’t make predictions for how rapidly the seas will rise during that time frame; it just lays out what is possible in the long term. From the study:

    On a 2000-year time scale, the sea-level contribution will be largely independent of the exact warming path during the first century. At the same time, 2000 years is a relevant time scale, for example, for society’s cultural heritage.

    The difference between this study and others, some of which have foretold less dramatic rises in water levels, is the extent to which it considers ice-sheet melting.

    Compared with the amount of water locked up in the world’s glaciers, which are melting rapidly, Earth’s two ice sheets hold incredibly vast reservoirs. The Antarctic ice sheet alone could inundate the world with 60 yards of water if it melted entirely. And then there’s the Greenland ice sheet, which suffered an unprecedented melt last summer.

    The ice sheets are not yet melting as dramatically as the glaciers, insulated as they are by their tremendous bulk. In fact, the melting glaciers and the melting ice sheets are contributing roughly equally to today’s rising seas, despite the differences in their overall bulk.

    But a hastening decline of the ice sheets is inevitable as accumulating greenhouse gases take their toll.

    The authors of the new study, led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, analyzed sea levels and temperatures from millennia past, combining those findings with climate models to get a glimpse of the shifting coastlines of the future. From the study:

    [C]limate records suggest a sea-level sensitivity of as much as several meters per degree of warming during previous intervals of Earth history when global temperatures were similar to or warmer than present. While sea-level rise over the last century has been dominated by ocean warming and loss of glaciers, the sensitivity suggested from records of past sea level indicates important contributions from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

    The study’s lead author, Potsdam researcher Anders Levermann, said the results reveal the inevitability of rising water levels as heat accumulates on Earth.

    “Continuous sea-level rise is something we cannot avoid unless global temperatures go down again,” he said in a statement. “Thus we can be absolutely certain that we need to adapt. Sea-level rise might be slow on time scales on which we elect governments, but it is inevitable and therefore highly relevant for almost everything we build along our coastlines, for many generations to come.”

    John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

  • Tony Abbott’s hot air on soil carbon plan

    climate code red
    This shows Abbott’s complete lack of knowledge re climate issues. CCS is unproved and would have very little

    scope. if any, in Australia. Like Martin Ferguson’s proposal to sequester carbon dioxide under our ocean beds and

    the equally ridiculous proposal to render coal down into fuel oil.

     

    Tony Abbott’s hot air on soil carbon plan : reliance on soil carbon to “offset” greenhouse emissions “scientifically flawed”

    Posted: 14 Jul 2013 11:13 PM PDT

    by David Spratt

    One-sided reliance on soil carbon policies –  which are at the heart of the Liberal-National Party’s “direct action” climate plan to reducing Australia’s greenhouse emissions – is “scientifically flawed” according to a group of seven Australian and UK climate researchers including Climate Commissioner Prof. Will Steffen, writing in Nature Climate Change.

    The scientists say that while the land carbon buffer can provide “a valuable, cost-effective, short-term service in helping to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide”, in the bigger picture – including the environmental limits to soil carbon and the huge quantity of new emissions each year – considering carbon storage on land “as a means to ‘offset’ CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels… is scientifically flawed.”

    The researchers say that the capacity of the land to remove atmospheric carbon and store it in vegetation and soil is limited to the amount previously depleted by land use. If all the carbon so far released by land-use changes – mainly deforestation – could be restored through reforestation this would “reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide at the end of the century by 40–70 parts per million (ppm)”.  Yet human activity including from burning fossil fuels has already pushed the level up by 120 ppm, and we are still adding 2–3 ppm every year. This is why soil carbon cannot act as an “offset” to the total volume of human emissions, past or future.

    The research concludes that “there are strict, environmentally determined limits on the maximum amount of carbon that can be restored to land carbon stocks, and good reasons why this maximum will not be achieved”. And because carbon dioxide once emitted into the atmosphere is long-lived, then “the most effective form of climate change mitigation is to avoid carbon emissions from all sources. This means that there is no option but to cut fossil fuel emissions deeply, and not to continue these emissions under the erroneous assumption that they can be offset in the long term by the uptake of carbon dioxide in land systems.”

    In other words, reliance on soil carbon – to the exclusion of programmes to cut fossil fuel emissions deeply – can only fail if the aim is to avoid hot, dangerous and then catastrophic global warming.  Yet, that is precisely what the Abbott Liberal–National Party climate plan proposes to do.

    In releasing “The Coalition’s plan for real action on Energy and ResourcesI in 2010”, a supporting media statement made the priority clear:

    The single largest opportunity for CO2 emissions reduction in Australia is through bio-sequestration and the replenishment of soil carbon in particular.’

    On the ABC’s QandA on 16 August, 2010, Tony Abbott reiterated that his climate plan:

    …basically… involves going to the market and buying abatements through soil carbon, through tree planting, through businesses that are prepared to change their processes to less emitting ones.

    And whilst oppositional spokesperson Greg Hunt provides a rider that “we will always select the lowest cost abatement, whether it is in the land sector, the waste sector, the resources sector, the power sector or through actions such as energy efficiency”, his emphasis too always seems to be on soil carbon, as in this speech on 18 April 2013:

    Our Direct Action Plan is a simple, low touch market mechanism. The Emissions Reduction Fund will not only reduce our emissions, it will improve Australia’s environment through a range of measures including revegetation, better land management and enhanced soil quality.

    It is clear that the Opposition is desperate not to put a tax or price on greenhouse emissions or to go near constraining the coal industry or the coal and gas-fired electricity generators  in any way. Their policy is to give the big polluters a free ride, so whenever a little detail is squeezed from them about their plan, it is always about just one thing … soil carbon!

    Two years ago, Hunt told Lateline that “a million hectares at a 150 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per hectare” could be abated annually through soil carbon.

    But as ABC’s Steve Cannane reported:

    … a new three-year CSIRO study into soil carbon raises serious doubts about those claims.
    The figures released to Lateline tonight show, “In the parts of the national soil carbon program that studied soil carbon changes over time – most showed soil carbon changes that were within the range (0.3 – 2.0 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per hectare per year) or lower.”
    At the top end of that range, you’d need a land mass of at least 75 million hectares to abate 150 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. If you take the 0.3 per cent figure, then you’d need 500 million hectares, or two thirds of the land mass of Australia.

    And in May this year, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald:

    Climate change department officials told a Senate estimates hearing on Monday night that soil carbon and revegetation projects are currently expected to deliver just 3.7 million tonnes a year of emissions cuts by 2020. Labor says these new estimates blow a hole in the Coalition’s direct action climate change policy, which suggested up to 85 million tonnes per year of carbon dioxide cuts could come from soil carbon projects alone by the end of the decade

    The soil carbon claims at the heart of Tony Abbott’s climate plan do not add up, either in the detail or in the big picture story as to whether they can be a substitute for deep cuts and the elimination of fossil fuel emissions. If Tony Abbott and Greg Hunt were to say that carbon sequestration is important and necessary, but it cannot in isolation avoid a climate catastrophe if you do not at the same time have policies for deep cuts in new emissions leading to zero emissions, they would be more credible.

    RELATED POSTS

  • Ring of Fire – Home to Earthquakes and Volcanoes of the Earth

    Pacific Ring of Fire

    Ring of Fire – Home to Earthquakes and Volcanoes of the Earth

    By , About.com Guide

    Plate Tectonics MapSignificant tectonic plates on the earth’s surface.

    Public Domain from US

    The “Ring of Fire” (map) is an arc stretching from New Zealand, along the eastern edge of Asia, north across the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and south along the coast of North and South America. The Ring of Fire is composed over 75% of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes.This huge ring of volcanic and seismic (earthquake) activity was noticed and described before the invention of the theory of plate tectonics theory. We now know that the Ring of Fire is located at the borders of the Pacific Plate and other major tectonic plates.

    Plates are like giant rafts of the earth’s surface which often slide next to, collide with, and are forced underneath other plates. Around the Ring of Fire, the Pacific Plate is colliding with and sliding underneath other plates. This process is known as subduction and the volcanically and seismically active area nearby is known as a subduction zone. There is a tremendous amount of energy created by these plates and they easily melt rock into magma, which rises to the surface as lava and forms volcanoes.

    Volcanoes are temporary features on the earth’s surface and there are currently about 1500 active volcanoes in the world. About ten percent of these are located in the United States.

    This is a listing of major volcanic areas in the Ring of Fire:

    • In South America the Nazca plate is colliding with the South American plate. This has created the Andes and volcanoes such as Cotopaxi and Azul.
    • In Central America, the tiny Cocos plate is crashing into the North American plate and is therefore responsible for the Mexican volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Paricutun (which rose up from a cornfield in 1943 and became a instant mountains).
    • Between Northern California and British Columbia, the Pacific, Juan de Fuca, and Gorda plates have built the Cascades and the infamous Mount Saint Helens, which erupted in 1980.
    • Alaska’s Aleutian Islands are growing as the Pacific plate hits the North American plate. The deep Aleutian Trench has been created at the subduction zone with a maximum depth of 25,194 feet (7679 meters).
    • From Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to Japan, the subduction of the Pacific plate under the Eurasian plate is responsible for Japanese islands and volcanoes (such as Mt. Fuji).
    • The final section of the Ring of Fire exists where the Indo-Australian plate subducts under the Pacific plate and has created volcanoes in the New Guinea and Micronesian areas. Near New Zealand, the Pacific Plate slides under the Indo-Australian plate.

  • Election Timing and the Issues of Election Writs ( ANTONY GREEN )

    « Political Parties for the 2013 Federal Election | Main

    July 15, 2013

    Election Timing and the Issues of Election Writs

    Twice today I’ve been told of a scenario that sees Australia going to the polls on 24 August.

    The scenario sees the Labor caucus meeting on Monday 22 July to approve Kevin Rudd’s proposed rules for electing the Labor Party Leader. Kevin Rudd would then visit the Governor General on Tuesday 23 July to call an election for 24 August.

    Nice theory, but a Tuesday visit to the Governor General would require the election to be held on 31 August, not 24 August.

    The writs for a 24 August election have to be issued on Monday 22 July, and there are several complications that make announcing an election and issuing writs the same day difficult.

    According to the timetable set out in the Commonwealth Electoral Act, the minimum time period from the issue of the writ to polling day is 33 days. The day the writ is issued is treated as day zero, and from there you count 33 days to the minimum campaign period, also remembering that polling day must be a Saturday.

    It is why writs are normally issued on a Monday just under five weeks before polling day.

    However, the election is usually announced a day or two before the dissolution and issue of the writs. This is because of the time it takes to co-ordinate the legal rituals surrounding the process.

    The Prime Minister must visit the Governor-General and request a dissolution and an election. There is little doubt the Governor-General will accept this advice, but then the legal technicalities come in.

    A proclamation has to be issued dissolving the House of Representatives. The writ initiating the 150 House elections and the Senate elections for the ACT and Northern Territory have to be prepared and then signed by the Governor General.

    In addition, the state Governors have to be located and instruction given to them through the formal channels to issue writs for the half-Senate elections.

    All this takes time, though some of it can be prepared in advance so in theory, Kevn Rudd could ask the Governor-General to be in Sydney on 22 July so he can head over to Admiralty House after the caucus with the pre-prepared writs to call the election. But it would all be a bit rushed, and still run into potential problems with locating the state Governors.

    Malcolm Fraser went through this process in one day with the snap double dissolution election in 1983, but the timetable for the election has since been made more rigid.

    There is nothing to stop Prime Minister Rudd announcing the election for 24 August on the weekend before the caucus meeting, and then visiting the Governor-General after the meeting.

    But one thing that won’t be happening is the Prime Minister visiting the Governor-General on Tuesday 23 July and asking for an election on 24 August.

    An election called after the caucus meeting is more likely to be 31 August than 24 August.

    Posted by on July 15, 2013 at 10:25 AM in Election Date Speculation | Permalink

    Comments

    Antony, why are the State Governors involved? How can they be instructed to do anything by the Federal (rather than State) parliament?

    COMMENT: Because the Constitution says they issue the Senate writs. As I wrote in the post, the Governors are requested to issue the writs through the formal channels, which formally means on the advice of the state Premiers, but informally means the writs are issued for polling on the date requested by the Prime Minister.

    This mattered in 1974 when the Whitlam government had requested that writs be issued for a half-Senate election. The Bjelke-Petersen government issued the writs for the appointed date, but issued the writ early before Senator Gair had resigned to lock in five Senate positions rather than six. I do not think similar games would be played today.

    Posted by: SomeGuyOnTheInternet | July 15, 2013 at 11:08 AM

    Kevin Rudd has announced changes to the timing of the transition of a Carbon Tax to an Emissions Trading Scheme (I think these are the right terms). Would these changes require parliament to pass amendments, or can they be made by Cabinet without Parliament returning on 20 August? Otherwise it becomes an election promise, not a change of government policy.

    COMMENT: The change requires legislation which requires parliament to sit. If parliament doesn’t sit then the proposal is essentially an election promise

  • Bangladesh Pollution, Told in Colors and Smells

    Bangladesh Pollution, Told in Colors and Smells

    Khaled Hasan for The New York Times

    In Savar, Bangladesh, site of April’s factory disaster, untreated factory wastewater is common. More Photos »

    By
    Published: July 14, 2013

    SAVAR, Bangladesh — On the worst days, the toxic stench wafting through the Genda Government Primary School is almost suffocating. Teachers struggle to concentrate, as if they were choking on air. Students often become lightheaded and dizzy. A few boys fainted in late April. Another retched in class.

    Multimedia
    World Twitter Logo.

    Connect With Us on Twitter

    Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines.

    Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

    The New York Times

    More Photos »

    The odor rises off the polluted canal — behind the schoolhouse — where nearby factories dump their wastewater. Most of the factories are garment operations, textile mills and dyeing plants in the supply chain that exports clothing to Europe and the United States. Students can see what colors are in fashion by looking at the canal.

    “Sometimes it is red,” said Tamanna Afrous, the school’s English teacher. “Or gray. Sometimes it is blue. It depends on the colors they are using in the factories.”

    Nearly three months ago, the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people, in a disaster that exposed the risks in the low-cost formula that has made Bangladesh the world’s second-leading clothing exporter, after China, and a favorite of companies like Walmart, J. C. Penney and H & M. That formula depends on paying the lowest wages in the world and, at some factories, spending a minimum on work conditions and safety.

    But it also often means ignoring costly environmental regulations. Bangladesh’s garment and textile industries have contributed heavily to what experts describe as a water pollution disaster, especially in the large industrial areas of Dhaka, the capital. Many rice paddies are now inundated with toxic wastewater. Fish stocks are dying. And many smaller waterways are being filled with sand and garbage, as developers sell off plots for factories or housing.

    Environmental damage usually trails rapid industrialization in developing countries. But Bangladesh is already one of the world’s most environmentally fragile places, densely populated yet braided by river systems, with a labyrinth of low-lying wetlands leading to the Bay of Bengal. Even as pollution threatens agriculture and public health, Bangladesh is acutely vulnerable to climate change, as rising sea levels and changing weather patterns could displace millions of people and sharply reduce crop yields.

    Here in Savar, an industrial suburb of Dhaka and the site of the collapsed Rana Plaza building, some factories treat their wastewater, but many do not have treatment plants or chose not to operate them to save on utility costs. Many of Savar’s canals or wetlands are now effectively retention ponds of untreated industrial waste.

    “Look, it’s not only in Savar,” said Mohammed Abdul Kader, who has been Savar’s mayor since his predecessor was suspended in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster. “The whole country is suffering from pollution. In Savar, we have lots of coconut trees, but they don’t produce coconuts anymore. Industrial pollution is damaging our fish stocks, our fruit produce, our vegetables.”

    Bangladesh has laws to protect the environment, a national environment ministry and new special courts for environmental cases. Yet pollution is rising, not falling, experts say, largely because of the political and economic power of industry.

    Tanneries and pharmaceutical plants are part of the problem, but textile and garment factories, a mainstay of the economy and a crucial source of employment, have the most clout. When the environment ministry appointed a tough-minded official who levied fines against textile and dyeing factories, complaining owners eventually forced his transfer.

    “Nobody in the country, at least at the government level, is thinking about sustainable development,” said Rizwana Hasan, a prominent environmental lawyer. “All of the natural resources have been severely degraded and depleted.”

    Less than two miles from the site of Rana Plaza, the Genda primary school has a student body made up mostly of the children of garment workers. Golam Rabbi, 11, who is the top-ranked student in the third grade there, lives with his mother and two younger brothers in a single room. The boys use price tags collected from factory floors as makeshift playing cards.

    “The school always smells,” Golam said. “Sometimes we can’t even eat there. It is making some kids sick. Sometimes my head spins. It is hard to concentrate.”

    Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting.