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  • South Eastern capitals face 50 degree days

    From the Australian

    MELBOURNE, Adelaide and Sydney will blister in temperatures of more than 50C by 2050, according to the first hard look at the impact of climate change on extreme weather.

    The forecast is part of a long-term prediction that temperatures on the hottest day of the year will rise dramatically in parts of southern Australia, including the southern Murray-Darling Basin, much of coastal NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

    But the study did not find evidence that other parts of Australia would be so severely affected.

    “No one’s ever looked at these numbers before,” said Andy Pitman, co-director of the University of NSW Climate Change Research Centre in Sydney.

    Scientists with the CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have also assessed the nation’s future climate but they focused on average changes in extremes of temperature and rainfall due to climate change.

    Along with graduate student Sarah Perkins, Professor Pitman analysed daily temperatures. “There is nothing wrong with what they did, but they missed that last bit of evidence that identified the ‘extreme’ extremes,” Professor Pitman said.

    The researchers first tested the effectiveness of many climate modelling systems by “hind-casting”, testing how well they predicted past conditions.

    After identifying the most reliable models, they simulated daily changes in temperature and rainfall as greenhouse gases increased in the atmosphere. They found the increase altered the pattern of warming for rare super-hot days.

    To their surprise, there was also an indirect effect. Global warming led to a reduction in rainfall which, in turn, reduced evaporation. “If there’s less evaporation, the land surface becomes hotter, a process known as positive feedback,” Professor Pitman said.

    That is why extreme events in places such as Darwin and Perth did not outpace those in the south: there’s no feedback there.

  • Arctic oil reserves relieve economic pressure

    From the ABC 

    US Government scientists say they believe the Arctic holds as much as 90 billion barrels of oil, which is enough to meet the current world demand for almost three years.

    The report by the US Geological Survey also estimates that the Arctic contains as much natural gas, more than 1,600 trillion cubic feet, as all the reserves known to exist in Russia.

    This is the first time the survey has looked at the entire Arctic Circle and it says the area accounts for about 13 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 per cent of its undiscovered natural gas.

    As global warming melts the ice in the Arctic Circle the area becomes more accessible to companies that want to exploit its natural resources.

    Energy companies have already found more than 400 oil and gas fields north of the Arctic Circle, but it is still essentially unexplored when it comes to fuel.

    Russia is competing with China, Denmark, Norway and the United States to grab the huge energy resources in the Arctic, but environmentalists are warning that when oil companies move in, wildlife will be lost.

  • Reduce your footprint: Hire a human

    Here’s a relatively simple way to reduce your greenhouse emissions and unemployment at the same time. Hire a human.

    We all know that the energy we consume in our daily lives is what causes global warming, the problem is that a low energy lifestyle looks pretty drab and miserable when stacked up beside our push-button, always-on world of convenience.

    It is a lot easier to throw a frozen dinner in the microwave than to prepare dinner from freshly grown, organic ingredients, or to grab a packet of biscuits and bucket of dip on the way to a meeting, than to knock off an hour earlier to bake and make your own. We are trapped in a vicious cycle of earning money to pay for the convenience products that allow us to maintain our busy lifestyles.

    If the alternative, though, is staying at home to bake our own bread, sprout our own mung beans and kill and prepare our own chickens, many of us are simply not prepared to make the transition.

    Food is only the tip of the iceberg. The dish-washer, food processor, washing machine, vacuum cleaner and lawn mower all consume hundreds of kilowatts of energy to manufacture and more energy to run. The thought of chucking in these appliances and applying the elbow grease is not an appealing one.

    The solution may be as simple as paying someone else to do it for you.

    For the last one hundred and fifty years, machines have replaced humans because labour was expensive. Cheap, plentiful energy has made it more cost-effective to hire (or buy) a machine to do the job. In 1900, 75 per cent of work performed in the United States was done by muscle power. Horses pulled carriages and ploughs, men harvested crops, dug ditches and unloaded ships. Almost all domestic chores and food production was carried out by hand.

    During the sixties, the phrase “untouched by human hand” advertised food that was hygenic and scientifically produced. Today less than one percent of work is manual.

    Now we move into an era where resources are limited and labour is plentiful.

    The new slavery is a term coined to describe the global phenomenon of factories in the world’s megacities that employ millions of people on subsistence wages without any consideration of sick pay, retirement funds or opportunity to educate their children. When the worker collapses, they are simply thrown into the street and a new one is found. Their prospects are considerably worse than those of negroes captured in Africa and transported across the Atlantic two hundred years ago.

    Even in the isolated, pampered world of suburban Australia, there are plenty of people under-employed and without sufficient resources to put a decent roof over their heads.

    Do the numbers for your own family.

    If you were to cut your food bill in half by buying only staple ingredients, stop paying for childcare and babysitters and employ a cook and carer instead, how much worse off would you be?

    You could come home to a freshly cooked meal every night, with the washing already folded and put away. You might even have time to sit back and have fun with the family.

    Given that the cost of manufactured goods and energy is going to keep rising rapidly for the foreseeable future, the numbers are only going to get better.

    If you want to help solve the affordable accommodation crisis at the same time, you might start clearing out that spare room, now.

  • Farmers gird loins for carbon soil battle

    Grain and animal farmers are clamouring to be recognised for the contribution that new (or renewed) cropping methods can make to burying carbon-dioxide in the soil.

    Organic matter is 57 percent carbon and industrial farming practices have halved the amount of organic material in the soil. Perennial grasses and crops planted into existing stubble instead of bare soil can restore this organic matter to near natural levels. Hundreds of tonnes of carbon can be stored in every hectare of soil by simply adopting sustainable farming practices.

    Visiting Australia for the Grains Industry Conference in Melbourne next week, David Miller, of the Iowa Farm Bureau said that American farmers are now earning between $US3 and $US7 per tonne for the carbon dioxide stored using such practices. The system pays around 20% of the global prie for carbon dioxide but the low price means that rigorous auditing is not required and the scheme operates on a voluntary basis without much bureaucracy.

    Australian farmers are incensed that they have not been acknowledged for their contribution to reversing global warming. It is the changes to land use that has kept Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions below the generous eight percent increase over 1990 levels that was negotiated under the Kyoto protocol. Industry and the energy sector have significantly increased their carbon emissions while farmers have footed the bill.

    Last week’s Green Paper released by the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, only rubs salt into the wounds. While it exempts farmers from the carbon trading scheme until 2015 it provides taxpayer subsidies to the coal-fired electricity generators and completely exempts energy exporters.

    Even Woodside Petroleum is angry about the scheme. CEO, Don Voelte, said that the industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars cleaning up its act, and is now being hit for it. “We are not dirty enough to get the compensation,” he said.

    With farmers, environmentalists and petroleum producers all on the same side, the government is clearly taking a high risk gamble to keep the powerful coal lobby happy.

    Because the nation’s food supply is at stake, we can only hope that the government recognises that the farmer’s close relationship with nature puts them in the prime position to steer us toward a carbon neutral future.

    Giovanni posts sustainable farming stories to www.thegenerator.com.au

  • Wheat gamble in Western Australia falters

    Mr Tutt said WA was now facing the very real possibility of a 7.5mt harvest.

    He said this season was taking a similar path to last year with patchy, dry conditions preventing many crops from going in the ground.

    The prediction was made after Rural Business Development Corporation (RBDC) chairman Dexter Davies conducted an urgent visit to the Esperance region last week.

    Mr Davies reviewed the dry conditions on farms in the area at the request of Esperance Shire president Ian Mickel, who has also written a letter to Agriculture Minister Kim Chance outlining the situation’s severity and seeking assistance.

    Mr Davies said the situation was serious but warned it was not a crisis “at this stage”.

    He warned the dry conditions were getting particularly stark for growers in the eastern part of the region, especially those with livestock.

  • Soil carbon scheme takes off in USA

    Since 2003, the CCX has traded soil carbon under a broad zone system that assumes that over specific land types, under certain practices like minimum tillage or rotational grazing, an average amount of soil carbon will be generated.

    “Midwestern US soils that have adequate rainfall and good crop potential receive 0.6 metric tons of credit per year,” Mr Miller said.

    “The drier, less productive soils of the southern Plains states receive 0.2 metric tons of credit per year.”

    Arid desert soils, and some sandy soils in Florida are excluded from the system.

    “I believe that the CCX approach of establishing the scientific mean, but then using a credit rate that is discounted by some amount—such as 20pc as CCX does—is an appropriate way to set a rate that has strong statistical validity,” said Mr Miller.

    “With a credit rate that is discounted from the mean, the statistical probability of an agricultural-based credit delivering at least as much sequestration as is credited is greatly enhanced.”

    Perhaps as importantly as the small offset credits received by farmers—ranging from $3-$7 a ton—engagement with the CCX has driven interest and research into greenhouse gas sequestration.

    “We have protocols developed and implemented for no-till, grasslands, rangeland management, afforestation, managed forests, agricultural methane destruction at livestock facilities, and biomass substitution for coal,” Mr Miller said.

    “We have producers enrolled, projects verified, credits registered and traded and producers paid. That represents substantial achievement towards development of a new market and all of the market infrastructure that is required to have a well functioning and successful market.”

    The CCX traded 23 million tons of carbon credits in 2007, under a fully voluntary system.

    Closer to home, Alex McBratney, Professor of Soil Science at the University of Sydney, is working on a similar discount methodology that he believes may have the scientific rigour to get soil carbon into the Kyoto II protocol to be thrashed out in 2012.

    “It’s based on the best statistical sampling theory that we can muster, and some new technology,” Prof. McBratney said.

    “The methodology will tell you how much carbon you’ve fixed over five years, across a whole farm—not a plot or paddock—and it will also tell you the uncertainty on that number.”

    So far his research has been unfunded, but he is hopeful that an application before the Australian Research Council will get the project up and running.

    “Agriculture needs to be in the carbon trading system,” Prof. McBratney said.

    “Soil has the ability to sequester carbon. The only issue is whether you can audit it. But unless you can actually sequester carbon somewhere, I don’t see how the cap-and-trade system actually works—so we need some sinks for carbon.”