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Author: Neville

  • Lack of plans comes to light

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     It is important that major hospitals provide accommodation for patients or family who
     travelling long distances for treatment. RPA at Camperdown provides this facility for moderate cost.

    Lack of plans comes to light

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    Linda Samera via CommunityRun ljrsamera@gmail.com via sendgrid.info
    10:12 AM (6 minutes ago)
    to me

    Dear Supporters,

    Last Monday I had the privilege of meeting with the General Manager (GM) of Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH) Sue Shilbury, and the Divisional Manager of Allied Health, Frances Tolliday, to discuss accommodation. I would like to share with you the outcomes from that meeting as they are very important.

    I travel to Sydney for treatment one week out of every four. Until now I have had the stressful job of negotiating with RNSH to subsidise accommodation every month. They have not been easy to negotiate with on this.

    At the meeting the GM gave me her word that RNSH would subsidise my accommodation each month until the end of this year. This is a big win as it removes the stress of having to lobby for accommodation for myself each month. This also sets a precedent for others who are not able to afford accommodation when referred to RNSH for healthcare. This does not, however, solve the long-term problem of the lack of onsite accommodation at RNSH.

    During the meeting the GM admitted that she had known about the date of closure of Blue Gum Lodge 6mths before it happened. She also said that plans had been drawn up for “some” onsite country patient accommodation in the last few years. At the last minute another group was given the site and the plans for accommodation were scrapped. This is important to note.

    The intermediate plan for onsite accommodation involves the “Douglas Building” at RNSH. This building will become available in December 2014 when the current occupants move to a new building (currently under construction). Ms Shilbury mentioned however that there are other groups vying for this site and no plans have been drawn up for patient accommodation in this building. This is not good enough. There are still no guarantee that the site will not be taken by someone else as what happened last time.

    The long-term plans are even more fluid. To date there is no site marked for long-term country patient accommodation. There is therefore no plans drawn up. One possible site was mentioned but there are several contenders for it. Also, Ms Shilbury could not tell me how many beds it would be. She claims there is no way to find out how many will be needed despite the fact that Social Work and the Cancer Council have this data. She would not be moved on this claim. Instead the GM has decided to ask the Social Work department to log how many people need accommodation in the next 2mths. This is a grossly inadequate method for determining the need for accommodation as not everyone speaks with the Social Work department about their need.

    Sue Shilbury and Frances Tolliday gave me their word that country patient accommodation is a top priority for RNSH. However, I am not convinced. There is no commitment to planning and building accommodation or to really finding out how many people need accommodation each week. There is still many barriers in place to stop people accessing subsidised accommodation in the interim and no understanding of the importance of removing these barriers. The bottom line is that the GM of RNSH does not believe that country patient accommodation is important or her responsibility. She has agreed to personally keep me informed of the progress with the long-term plans for onsite, purpose-built patient accommodation. I hope she keeps to her word on this as I believe we have a long way to go in progressing plans. I will keep you all informed of any progress.

    In the meantime we need to continue to put pressure on the major hospitals in Sydney and on the State Government to provide onsite affordable accommodation for country people. We need a fair go on this issue. If you are travelling to RNSH for your healthcare please contact the social work department and let them know. If you cannot afford to pay for accommodation please tell the Social Work Department so they can secure funding for you. Sue Shilbury gave me her word that no one will be turned away if they need accommodation subsidised by RNSH. We need to take her on her word. No one should have to go into debt over accommodation just to get the treatment that is their right to have. Also please consider writing to Sue Shilbury about the lack of accommodation and how this affects you. She needs to hear from those it is disadvantaging.

    Thank you so much for your ongoing support. This meeting was an important step in this campaign. We now know where we stand with RNSH! We will continue to lobby for accommodation at all tertiary hospitals in NSW. Keep up the good work!

    Kind regards,

    Linda Samera

     

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    Linda Samera via CommunityRun ljrsamera@gmail.com via sendgrid.info
    10:12 AM (6 minutes ago)
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  • Understanding how mountains and rivers make life possible

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    Understanding how mountains and rivers make life possible

    Date:
    March 13, 2014
    Source:
    Stanford University
    Summary:
    Scientists have devised a pair of math equations that better describe how the topography and rock composition of a landscape affects the process by which carbon dioxide is transferred to oceans and eventually buried in Earth’s interior. Scientists have long suspected that the so-called the geologic carbon cycle is responsible for Earth’s clement and life-friendly conditions because it helps regulate atmospheric concentrations of CO2, a greenhouse gas that acts to trap the sun’s heat. This cycle is also thought to have played an important role in slowly thawing the planet during those rare times in the past when temperatures dipped so low that the globe was plunged into a “snowball-Earth” scenario and glaciers blanketed the equator.
    Stanford assistant professor Kate Maher holds up two different soil types. The soil on the left is young, dark, and composed of more chemically reactive minerals. The sample on the right is older and made up of less reactive minerals such as clays.
    Credit: Matthew Rothe

    Favorable conditions for life on Earth are enabled in part by the natural shuttling of carbon dioxide from the planet’s atmosphere to its rocky interior and back again. Now Stanford scientists have devised a pair of math equations that better describe how topography, rock compositions and the movement of water through a landscape affects this vital recycling process.

    Scientists have long suspected that the so-called the geologic carbon cycle is responsible for Earth’s clement and life-friendly conditions because it helps regulate atmospheric concentrations of CO2, a greenhouse gas that acts to trap the sun’s heat. This cycle is also thought to have played an important role in slowly thawing the planet during those rare times in the past when temperatures dipped so low that the globe was plunged into a “snowball-Earth” scenario and glaciers blanketed the equator.

    “Our equations suggest that different landscapes have different potentials for regulating the transfer of carbon dioxide,” said Kate Maher, assistant professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences who developed the equations along with her colleague, Environmental Earth System Science professor Page Chamberlain. The research, which was supported by the National Research Foundation, is described in the March 14 issue of the journal Science.

    The geologic carbon cycle begins when volcanoes release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Some of the CO2 mixes with rainwater and falls back to Earth as carbonic acid. On land, the carbonic acid chemically erodes, or “weathers,” silicate rocks exposed at Earth’s surface to produce bicarbonate and release elements such as calcium and magnesium that eventually wash into the ocean. Over millions of years, these elements are transformed into rocks such as limestone. When plate tectonics push the carbonate-loaded seafloor down into Earth’s mantle, the carbon is released again as CO2, which is vented back into the atmosphere through volcanic eruptions, thereby completing the cycle.

    The equations developed by Maher and Chamberlain address the weathering component of the geologic carbon cycle. The amount of weathering that occurs depends on several factors. One is the makeup of the soil: older soils that have already been weathered dissolve more slowly compared to soils made of fresh rock. “As you weather soil and sediment over time, they become less and less chemically reactive,” Maher said. “Physical erosion, which is often associated with mountainous regions, replenishes the soil with reactive minerals.”

    Another consideration is the length of time that water spends flowing through the soil, a variable that scientists call the “fluid travel time.” The more time rainwater spends flowing through soils, the more weathering that occurs. The fluid travel time is in turn affected by the topography of the landscape-water tends to flow more slowly across a flat surface than down an incline.

    In the real world, these different factors interact in complex ways. They might work together to speed up the weathering process, or they could oppose each other to slow the process down. For example, consider precipitation falling onto a mountain. Because of gravity, the corrosive water may flow more quickly through the mountain, thus reducing the fluid travel time. However, the soils in mountainous regions also tend to be younger and thus richer in elements such as calcium and magnesium, and as a result are more reactive and easily weathered. The competition between the flow of water and the reactivity of the soils limits how much weathering can occur. Maher and Chamberlain argue that these limits are important for maintaining CO2 levels within an acceptable range to maintain temperatures suitable for life.

    The equations could improve scientists’ understanding of the geologic carbon cycle by integrating the study of the interactions between the geologic and hydrologic factors that affect rock weathering. Prior to this, scientists tended to study the influence of topography and water on chemical weathering separately. “Our work provides a quantitative framework that links together many qualitative observations from modern weathering environments, but also provides new hypotheses regarding how these processes may work together,” Maher said.

    Maher and Chamberlain are currently using real-world observations of rivers from around the world to modify and improve their equations.

    Story Source:

    The above story is based on materials provided by Stanford University. The original article was written by Ker Than. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

    Journal Reference:

    1. K. Maher, C. P. Chamberlain. Hydrologic Regulation of Chemical Weathering and the Geologic Carbon Cycle. Science, 2014; DOI: 10.1126/science.1250770

    Cite This Page:

    Stanford University. “Understanding how mountains and rivers make life possible.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 13 March 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140313142708.htm>.

  • Global warming melts last stable edge of Greenland’s Zachariae ice stream, scientist say

    Global warming melts last stable edge of Greenland’s Zachariae ice stream, scientist say

    Posted 23 minutes ago

    The last edge of the Greenland ice sheet that resisted global warming has now become unstable, adding billions of tonnes of meltwater to rising seas, scientists have said.

    In a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers said a surge in temperature from 2003 had eased the brakes on a long “river” of ice that flows to the coast in north-eastern Greenland.

    Known as an ice stream, the “river” takes ice from a vast basin and slowly shifts it to the sea – in the same way that the Amazon River drains water.

    In the past, the flow from this ice stream had been constrained by massive build-ups of ice debris choking its mouth.

    But a three-year spell of exceptionally high temperatures removed this blockage and, like a cork removed from a bottle, helped accelerate the flow, the study said.

    The ice stream, called Zachariae, is the largest drain from an ice basin that covers a whopping 16 per cent of the Greenland ice sheet.

    From 2003 to 2012, north-eastern Greenland disgorged 10 billion tonnes of ice annually into the ocean, the study found.

    “North-east Greenland is very cold. It used to be considered the last stable part of the Greenland ice sheet,” said Michael Bevis, an Earth sciences professor at Ohio State University, who led the study.

    “This study shows that ice loss in the north-east is now accelerating. So, now it seems that all the margins of the Greenland ice sheet are unstable.”

    Greenland is estimated to contribute 0.5mm to the 3.2mm annual rise in global sea levels.

    The main tool in the study was data from a network of 50 Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors along the Greenland coast.

    The monitors use Earth’s natural elasticity as a stethoscope of the ice sheet.

    Ice is heavy, so when it melts in massive quantities the land rebounds and the position of the sensors changes slightly.

    To get a wider picture, the GPS data was then overlaid with data from three US satellites and a European one that measured ice thickness from space.

    “The Greenland ice sheet has contributed more than any other ice mass to sea level rise over the last two decades and has the potential, if it were completely melted, to raise global sea level by more than seven metres,” said Jonathan Bamber, a professor at Britain’s University of Bristol.

    “About half of the increased contribution of the ice sheet is due to the speed-up of glaciers in the south and north-west. Until recently, north-east Greenland has been relatively stable. This new study shows that it is no longer the case.”

    AFP

  • A Star in a Bottle An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.

    A Reporter at Large

    A Star in a Bottle

    An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.

    by March 3, 2014

    Commercial reactors modelled on <small>ITER</small> could generate power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste.

    Commercial reactors modelled on ITER could generate power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. Illustration by Jacob Escobedo.

    Years from now—maybe in a decade, maybe sooner—if all goes according to plan, the most complex machine ever built will be switched on in an Alpine forest in the South of France. The machine, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. At its core, densely packed high-precision equipment will encase a cavernous vacuum chamber, in which a super-hot cloud of heavy hydrogen will rotate faster than the speed of sound, twisting like a strand of DNA as it circulates. The cloud will be scorched by electric current (a surge so forceful that it will make lightning seem like a tiny arc of static electricity), and bombarded by concentrated waves of radiation. Beams of uncharged particles—the energy in them so great it could vaporize a car in seconds—will pour into the chamber, adding tremendous heat. In this way, the circulating hydrogen will become ionized, and achieve temperatures exceeding two hundred million degrees Celsius—more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core.

    No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. Like the sun, the cloud will go nuclear. The zooming hydrogen atoms, in a state of extreme kinetic excitement, will slam into one another, fusing to form a new element—helium—and with each atomic coupling explosive energy will be released: intense heat, gamma rays, X rays, a torrential flux of fast-moving neutrons propelled in every direction. There isn’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing. Metals, plastics, ceramics, concrete, even pure diamond—all would be obliterated on contact, and so the machine will hold the superheated cloud in a “magnetic bottle,” using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world. Just feet from the reactor’s core, the magnets will be cooled to two hundred and sixty-nine degrees below zero, nearly the temperature of deep space. Caught in the grip of their titanic forces, the artificial earthbound sun will be suspended, under tremendous pressure, in the pristine nothingness of ITER’s vacuum interior.

    For the machine’s creators, this process—sparking and controlling a self-sustaining synthetic star—will be the culmination of decades of preparation, billions of dollars’ worth of investment, and immeasurable ingenuity, misdirection, recalibration, infighting, heartache, and ridicule. Few engineering feats can compare, in scale, in technical complexity, in ambition or hubris. Even the ITER organization, a makeshift scientific United Nations, assembled eight years ago to construct the machine, is unprecedented. Thirty-five countries, representing more than half the world’s population, are invested in the project, which is so complex to finance that it requires its own currency: the ITER Unit of Account.

    No one knows ITER’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes ITER the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically, the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet from environmental catastrophe. Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe, a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope, commercial reactors modelled on ITER will be built, too—generating terawatts of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium. It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning, as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth, and bend it to humanity’s will. ITER, in Latin, means “the way.”

    The main road to the ITER construction site from Aix-en-Provence, where I had booked a room, is the A51 highway. The drive is about half an hour, winding north past farmland and the sun-glittered Durance River. Just about every form of energy is in evidence nearby, from hydroelectric dams to floating solar panels. Seams of lignite, a soft brownish coal, run beneath the soil in Provence, but the deposits have become too expensive to mine. Several miles from Aix, a large coal plant, with a chimney that climbs hundreds of feet into the sky, is being converted to burn biomass—leaves, branches, and agricultural debris. ITER is being built a mile or two from the wooded campus of the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives, a state-funded research organization, created in 1945 to advance nuclear power, and now also renewable energy. Evergreen oak and Aleppo pine cover the foothills; beneath them, the French government maintains its largest strategic oil reserve.

    ITER’s headquarters, a five-floor edifice, was erected two years ago. An undulating wave of gray concrete slats shade its floor-to-ceiling windows. Its interior is simple: whitewashed walls, polished-concrete floors. The building’s southern façade overlooks a work site, more than a hundred acres of construction on the opposite side of a berm. By the time the reactor is turned on—the formal target date for its first experiment is 2020—the site will be home to a small city. Nearly forty buildings will surround the machine, from cooling towers to a cryogenics plant, which will produce liquid helium to cool the superconducting magnets. A skywalk extends from the second floor of the headquarters to the berm, where a capacious NASA-style control room will one day be built. For now, the bridge ends in a pile of ochre dirt, and the only way to the vast expanse of construction is via a circuitous drive.

    “A Star in a Bottle” continues

  • Germany’s aggressive push for a clean-energy future (+video)

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    Germany’s aggressive push for a clean-energy future (+video)

    Germany has a bold plan for a clean-energy future. A majority of the public is on board even though they’re paying a steep price – but industry is balking.

    By , Staff writer / March 9, 2014

    Employees at Freiberg’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems are bathed in sunlight, filtered through solar panels. Germany’s green energy push is the subject of the cover story in the March 11, 2014 issue of The Christian Science MonitorWeekly magazine.

    Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor

    Enlarge

    Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

    On the Black Forest’s western slopes – in the land of cuckoo clocks and Brothers Grimm – there is a city that calls itself “green.”

    Rich silver deposits first lured settlers to Germany‘s Freiburg im Breisgau back in the 12th century, but today this quaint city is anything but medieval. Freiburg is a prototype for a clean-energy future that Germany is aggressively pursuing.

    Nations across the globe are looking increasingly to wind, water, and the sun to power their economies in the decades to come. But Germany stands apart as a global leader in the industrialized world’s push to limit fossil-fuel consumption. Forging a stable path to a post-carbon economy would be a watershed moment in human history – not to mention a tremendous economic boon for whoever finds the way. But it will not be easy to shift off the coal, oil, and natural gas that have powered global economic development for centuries.

    In Freiburg – where silicon has overtaken silver as the city’s focus – the energy transition is getting a trial run.

    Solar panels line the train station’s glassy facade, from which visitors alight into a bustling shopping district. Photovoltaic panels top the pitched roofs of churches, schools, and houses in sleepy residential quarters and help power the local soccer stadium and city hall. Students from all over the world study renewable-energy engineering at the University of Freiburg, established under the Habsburgs more than 500 years ago. After they graduate, they might get a job up the street at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, Europe‘s largest solar research facility.

    Along the historical center’s cobblestones, where Marie Antoinette traveled en route to live not-so-happily-ever-after in France, slick modern trams run on electricity generated exclusively from water, wind, and the sun. When this corner of old Europe was flattened in an air raid six months before the fall of the Third Reich, Freiburg’s 13th-century cathedral was among a handful of buildings that survived – the Gothic Münster‘s spire still soars over the sleepy square below but shares the skyline with wind turbines spinning on nearby peaks.

    Freiburg’s passion for alternative energy dates back to protests that blocked the construction of a nearby nuclear plant in the 1970s. But Ukraine’s 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster further galvanized locals, and the green momentum grew as the threat of climate change came into focus.

    Over the decades, Freiburg expanded its own clean-energy and efficiency infrastructure and worked with regional utilities that trade largely in wind, solar, and hydro power.

    By 2011, when Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant rekindled anti-nuclear sentiments and prompted the immediate shutdown of Germany’s oldest nuclear plants, Freiburg had already cut its carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 20 percent from 1992 levels. And it aims to cut 20 percent more by 2030. But even as it has built an economy and identity around efficiency and renewable energy, Freiburg gets only about 5.5 percent of its electricity from locally generated, renewable sources. The rest is a mix of renewable and nonrenewable energy from regional utilities. Plans are under way to install additional wind energy capacity locally and enact more efficiency measures, with the goal of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

    It is difficult enough to transform how a quiet city’s 230,000 residents heat their homes, cook their food, and light their streets. Doing the same for an industrialized superpower of 82 million is an entirely different affair. If Germany can demonstrate how to run a major economy on primarily sunlight, wind, and water, it would tip the global scales in favor of renewable energy and accelerate a worldwide shift away from fuels that contribute to global warming.

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  • Your vision for this movement GET-UP

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    Your vision for this movement

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    GetUp!
    12:16 PM (9 minutes ago)
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    There’s so much at stake, NEVILLE.2014 is shaping up to be a year that challenges our movement – with threats to the Reef, the climate and our ABC already looming large. But these challenges will only make us stronger. We’re ready for the fight ahead – and we know you are too – so it’s time to get planning.

    Help shape our priorities for the year ahead in our annual Member Vision Survey.

    As a thank you, you’ll be the first to see a new video project introducing some of the wonderful members who made 2013 our most impactful year yet. We’ve heard their stories, and now we want to hear yours. Today there are more than 670,000 of us that make up the GetUp movement. We all have a story to tell, a reason why we’re here and a vision for an Australia we can be proud of.

    Make sure that vision is part of our plan for the year ahead.

    Thanks for being part of the GetUp movement,
    Sam for the GetUp team

    Take our annual member Vision Survey and tell us what your vision is for our movement this year

    GetUp is an independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group. We use new technology to empower Australians to have their say on important national issues. We receive no political party or government funding, and every campaign we run is entirely supported by voluntary donations. If you’d like to contribute to help fund GetUp’s work, please donate now! If you have trouble with any links in this email, please go directly to www.getup.org.au. GetUp has recently updated our Privacy Policy, to read the policy go to: www.getup.org.au/about/privacy-policy. To unsubscribe from GetUp, please click here. Authorised by Sam Mclean, Level 2, 104 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills NSW