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  • Typhoon Haiyan: thousands feared dead in Philippines

    Typhoon Haiyan: thousands feared dead in Philippines

    Death toll still unknown as path of destruction leaves many parts of the Philippines inaccessible to government and aid officials

    Link to video: Philippines typhoon Haiyan: scale of devastation emergesAt least 1,200 people have been killed and whole cities flattened after Typhoon Haiyan raced through the Philippines, leaving a trail of destruction that officials have compared to the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami.

    The super-typhoon – considered the strongest recorded storm to ever hit land – made landfall on Samar and Leyte islands in the eastern Visayas at about 4.40am on Friday local time, with winds up to 315km/h (195mph) tearing roofs off buildings, turning roads into rivers full of debris and knocking out electricity pylons.

    With many provinces left without power or telecommunications, and airports in the hardest-hit areas, such as Tacloban in Leyte province, in tatters, experts say it is still impossible to know the full extent of the storm’s damage – or deliver badly needed aid.

    Roughly 12 hours after the 600km (370-mile)-wide Haiyan blew west towards Vietnam, where it is expected to make landfall early Sunday, officials and aid workers are only now beginning to piece together details on the number of dead and injured.

    The Philippine Red Cross estimates that more than 1,000 people were killed in Tacloban alone, where bodies have been found “piled up around the roads” and in churches – with government figures showing that more than 4 million have been directly affected. The World Food Programme has mobilised some $2m (£1.25m) in aid and aims to deliver 40 tonnes of fortified biscuits to victims within the next few days.

    Satellite images show normally green patches of vegetation ripped up into brown squares of debris in Tacloban, where local TV channel GMA broadcast images of huge storm surges, flattened buildings and families traipsing through flooded streets with their possessions held high above the water.

    The head of the UN Disaster Assessment Co-ordination Team, Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, described “destruction on a massive scale” in the city of 220,000 and said: “The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami. There are cars thrown like tumbleweed and the streets are strewn with debris.”

    Al-Jazeera correspondent Jamela Alindogan was trapped in her hotel as the eye of the storm passed overhead and ripped the roof off the building. Evoking scenes of chaos as badly hurt victims wandered the streets without medicine, food or water, and doctors at the local hospital attended to the wounded in the dark without electricity or candlelight, she said: “There is no food, not even in the hotels, and there’s no water. The situation is really very desperate.”

    Other sources told of victims trying to climb out from under rubble to find assistance, and mobs rampaging through the streets looking for food, water or medicine, and looting electrical goods and groceries from malls. “Almost all the houses were destroyed,” said Major Rey Balido of the Philippines national disaster agency. “Only a few are left standing.”

    Relatives of those living in the typhoon’s path have had no news from their loved ones and are nervously waiting until power is restored to the area. “I spoke to my mother just a few hours before the typhoon made landfall in my city, Tacloban,” said taxi driver Sherwin Martinata, 32, in the capital, Manila. “She was saying she was all right but now I have no idea if my family is safe. There is no power, no phones. I can’t get through at all. I’m worried, but I’m powerless.”

    Those living in the hardest-hit areas, such as the eastern Visayas, are among the poorest in the Philippines, say aid agencies, who warn that there will be little to no savings for many of the victims to fall back on – putting an already vulnerable population at even greater risk of future food and job insecurity.

    On Bohol island – where a 7.3-magnitude earthquake toppled colonial-era churches and killed some 200 people last month – residents were successfully evacuated ahead of the storm and as a result many lives were probably saved, said Mathias Eick of the European commission’s humanitarian aid department (Echo). However, because the island’s main power supply comes from neighbouring Leyte, residents are still without electricity or water.

    In Tacloban, where many residents live along the coast, the sheer force of the storm was just too much for the buildings to withstand, with evacuation centres such as stadiums and churches later collapsing. “The sheer magnitude and scale of the disaster sort of overpowered all the contingency measures, and we’re fearing that we’ll be finding more dead bodies in those evacuation centres themselves,” said Alwynn Javier of Christian Aid.

    Without information on the ground or access to hard-hit areas, aid agencies have been stuck, not knowing how much aid is needed or which areas need it most.

    “The only information we have been able to get so far is from the UN and some from the news,” said Javier. “We should have good ground reach, but are really impeded by this lack of access because even our partners on the ground have been hit themselves.”

    Officials and rescue workers hope that Sunday will see concerted efforts by authorities to set up command centres and rescue groups, which will in turn help bring supplies to those who need them most. But gaining access to those areas will prove hard, said Richard Gordon of the Philippine Red Cross, who added that without bulldozers or tractors to clear paths, volunteers will have to bring cutting equipment to clear uprooted trees and debris.

    The Philippines sees roughly 20 typhoons every year, with some more devastating than others. Last year’s Typhoon Bopha killed more than 1,100 people and caused over $1bn in damage.

    Haiyan – the 25th typhoon to hit the Philippines this year – is expected to make landfall in several provinces in central Vietnam with winds around 220km/h (137mph). More than 450,000 troops have been deployed, as well as 12 planes, 356 ships and thousands of vehicles, in order to mobilise supplies, with more than 300,000 people evacuated in Da Nang and Quang Ngai provinces.

    “It may be the strongest storm to hit Vietnam in history,” said Vietnam’s director of the Central Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting Centre in Bui Minh Tang. Coastal areas should expect to see waves as high as 5-8 meters (16-26ft) and a wind radius up to 500km wide, officials warned.

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  • Reviving nuclear power debates is a distraction. We need to use less energy

    Reviving nuclear power debates is a distraction. We need to use less energy

    The documentary Pandora’s Promise presents an environmentalist case for nuclear power. But why has the world has not turned to it as a solution? It’s a matter of economics
    GBR: Sellafield Nuclear Plant In West Cumbria
    Sellafield nuclear power plant in West Cumbria. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

    There’s been a lot of buzz recently about a new film by controversialist documentary-maker, Robert Stone. Pandora’s Promise presents an environmentalist case for nuclear power, argued by a number of recent converts including Mark Lynas and George Monbiot. These converts have reached the conclusion that the dangers of global warming outweigh the health risks of nuclear power which have been exaggerated by opponents (including, in the past, themselves).

    The film spends a fair bit of time mocking this view, as represented by Dr Helen Caldicott, who apparently claimed more than a million deaths had resulted from the Chernobyl disaster (more conservatives estimates range from 4,000 to 500,000). It is correctly argued that the health damage associated with coal-fired electricity (disregarding those arising from climate change) far outweighs that of nuclear power, at least during the operational lifetime of power plants.

    The only surprising thing about this film is the release date. The makers and participants are apparently unaware that the rest of the world had this debate 10 to 15 years ago, and that, for the most part, the advocates of nuclear power were victorious. Environmentalists largely abandoned anti-nuclear campaigns and focused their energy on attempts to reduce the use of fossil fuels, and promote energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. While most environmentalists remained sceptical of, or opposed to, nuclear power, the end of active opposition paved the way for a range of pro-nuclear policy initiatives.

    In the years after the signing of the Kyoto protocol, most major countries, including the US, UK, Japan, China and India adopted or reinforced policies supporting nuclear power. Some European countries, notably including Austria and Germany, went the other way. Even in Europe, however, the long-stalled industry was revived with the start of construction on new plants in France and Finland.

    The really big developments were in the US. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed with bipartisan support and building on earlier initiatives of the Bush Administration, offered the nuclear power industry a range of incentives and subsidies that the developers of wind and solar power could only dream of. It includes authorising cost-overrun support of up to $2bn total for up to six new nuclear power plants, the extension of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act through 2025, and huge loan guarantees. The shift in policy attitudes was widely acclaimed as heralding a “nuclear renaissance”, with dozens of new plants being announced in the US and many more worldwide.

    So, why, a decade later, must a film like Pandora’s Promise campaign in favour of nuclear power? The answer is that the nuclear “renaissance” turned out to be more like a return to the nuclear dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s.

    Most of the new plants announced with such enthusiasm have been cancelled or deferred indefinitely. Those that have commenced construction have run over time and over budget, exactly as happened in the last big nuclear boom of the 1970s. The poster child is the Olkiluoto plant in Finland, originally announced in 2000, with a completion date of 2009 and a cost of 3bn euros. The current estimated completion date is 2015, and the cost has blown out to 8.5bn. A French plant with a similar design is having the same problems .

    In the US, only four new plants are being built, all at existing sites, and all behind time and over budget. It seems unlikely that any new projects will be undertaken much before 2020. Innovative ideas like small modular reactors are being explored, but any substantial application is decades away. The situation appears somewhat better in China and India, although past experience with construction projects in these countries has raised safety concerns. And even in these countries, targets for nuclear power expansion are being scaled back while those for renewable energy are being increased.

    So, the fact that the world has not turned to nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a matter of economics. In the absence of a substantial carbon price, nuclear energy can’t compete with coal and other fossil fuels. In the presence of a carbon price, it can’t compete with wind and solar photovoltaics. The only real hope is that, if coal-fired generation is reduced drastically enough, always-on nuclear power will be a more attractive alternative than variable sources like solar and wind power. However, much of the current demand for “baseload” power is an artifact of pricing systems designed for coal, and may disappear as prices become more cost-reflective.

    To put the point more sharply, if we are convinced by the arguments of Pandora’s Promise, what would the makers of the film have us do? Stop protesting against nuclear power? Most of us did so decades ago. Abandon restrictions on uranium mining and export? The Australian government has done so already, with barely a peep of protest. The only remaining restrictions on exports to India relate to concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation, not nuclear energy, and seem likely to be dropped in any case. Give nuclear power a level playing field to compete against renewables? In the US at least, nuclear power is already treated more favourably than alternatives, leaving aside the massive subsidies already handed out in the 20th century. The same is true in many other countries that have sought, with limited success, to promote a nuclear renaissance.

    Having done all of these things, the unfortunate facts are unchanged. The problem of climate change is not going away, and, in the absence of massive subsidies, no one is going to build nuclear power plants on a scale sufficient to make much of a difference. To address the problem of climate change, we need to use less energy, use it more efficiently and generate it more sustainably. Reviving 20th century debates about nuclear

  • Climate experts to enviros: “The time has come” to embrace nuclear power

     Even Dr. James Hansen is suggesting Nukes to counter Climate Change.
    Tuesday, Nov 5, 2013 04:17 AM +1100

    Climate experts to enviros: “The time has come” to embrace nuclear power

    Wind and solar power alone won’t do enough to counter climate change, say four top climate scientists

    Topics: Nuclear Power, renewable energy, Climate Change, greenhouse gasses, Oil and Gas, fossil fuels, Wind energy, Solar Power, , ,

    Climate experts to enviros: Nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, in Waynesboro, Ga.(Credit: AP/Mary Ann Chastain)

    In an ideal world, we’d move steadily away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, like wind and solar, while neatly avoiding messy alternatives like natural gas and nuclear power. But according to four top U.S. scientists, renewable energy won’t be enough to head off the rapidly advancing reality of climate change. Despite the scary things you may be hearing about it, they said, nuclear power is a solution, and it needs to be taken seriously.

    The letter, signed by James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution; Kerry Emanuel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia — all of whom, according to the AP, “have played a key role in alerting the public to the dangers of climate change” – was sent to leading environmental groups and leaders around the world. Advocating for the development of safe nuclear power, they wrote:

    We appreciate your organization’s concern about global warming, and your advocacy of renewable energy. But continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.

    …Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires. While it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.

    Using a bit less tact, Hansen told the AP: “They’re cheating themselves if they keep believing this fiction that all we need” is wind and solar.

    The experts also took pains to address concerns over nuclear safety — something that’s been a particular sticking point for nuclear power in the wake of the disaster at Fukushima:

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    We understand that today’s nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer. And modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks and solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently. Innovation and economies of scale can make new power plants even cheaper than existing plants. Regardless of these advantages, nuclear needs to be encouraged based on its societal benefits.

    Quantitative analyses show that the risks associated with the expanded use of nuclear energy are orders of magnitude smaller than the risks associated with fossil fuels. No energy system is without downsides. We ask only that energy system decisions be based on facts, and not on emotions and biases that do not apply to 21st century nuclear technology.

    Lindsay Abrams Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainability. Follow her on

  • Typhoon Haiyan: what really alarms Filipinos is the rich world ignoring climate change

    Typhoon Haiyan: what really alarms Filipinos is the rich world ignoring climate change

    As Haiyan batters the Phillipines, the political elites at the UN climate talks will again leave poor countries to go it alone
    Philippines Haiyan

    Super-typhoon Haiyan, an equivalent category 5 hurricane, hits the coastal area of Laguna de Bay. Photograph: Herman Lumanog/ Herman Lumanog/Demotix/Corbis

    I met Naderev Saño last year in Doha, when the world’s governments were meeting for the annual UN climate talks. The chief negotiator of the Filipino delegation was distraught. Typhoon Bopha, a category five “super-typhoon” with 175mph winds (282km/h) had just ripped through the island of Mindanao. It was the 16th major storm of the year, hundreds of thousands of people had lost their homes and more than 1,000 had died. Saño and his team knew well the places where it had hit the hardest.

    “Each destructive typhoon season costs us 2% of our GDP, and the reconstruction costs a further 2%, which means we lose nearly 5% of our economy every year to storms. We have received no climate finance to adapt or to prepare ourselves for typhoons and other extreme weather we are now experiencing. We have not seen any money from the rich countries to help us to adapt … We cannot go on like this. It cannot be a way of life that we end up running always from storms,” he said. He later told the assembly: “Climate change negotiations cannot be based on the way we currently measure progress. It is a clear sign of planetary and economic and environmental dysfunction … The whole world, especially developing countries struggling to address poverty and achieve social and human development, confronts these same realities.

    “I speak on behalf of 100 million Filipinos, not as a leader of my delegation, but as a Filipino …” At this point he broke down.

    Saño was uncontactable today, because phone lines to Manila were down, but he was thought to be on his way to Warsaw for the UN talks, which resume on Monday. This time, with uncanny timing, his country has been battered by the even stronger super-typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful ever recorded anywhere – 25 miles (40km) wide and reaching astonishing speeds of possibly 200mph (322km/h).

    We don’t yet know the death toll or damage done, but we do know that the strength of tropical storms such as Haiyan or Bopha is linked to sea temperature. As the oceans warm with climate change, there is extra energy in the system. Storms may not be increasing in frequency but Pacific ocean waters are warming faster than expected, and there is a broad scientific consensus that typhoons are now increasing in strength.

    Typhoon Haiyan, like Bopha, will be seen widely in developing countries as a taste of what is to come, along with rising sea levels and water shortages. But what alarms the governments of vulnerable countries the most is that they believe rich countries have lost the political will to address climate change at the speed needed to avoid catastrophic change in years to come.

    From being top of the global political agenda just four years ago, climate change is now barely mentioned by the political elites in London or Washington, Tokyo or Paris. Australia is not even sending a junior minister to Warsaw. The host, Poland, will be using the meeting to celebrate its coal industry. The pitifully small pledges of money made by rich countries to help countries such as the Philippines or Bangladesh to adapt to climate change have barely materialised. Meanwhile, fossil fuel subsidies are running at more than $500bn (£311bn) a year, and vested commercial interests are increasingly influencing the talks.

    As the magnitude of the adverse impacts of human-induced climate change becomes apparent, the most vulnerable countries say they have no option but to go it alone. The good news is that places such as Bangladesh, Nepal, the small island states of the Pacific and Caribbean, and many African nations, are all starting to adapt their farming, fishing and cities.

    But coping with major storms, as well as sea level rise and water shortages, is expected to cost poor countriues trillions of dollars, which they do not have. “Time is running out,” Saño told the world last year. “Please, let this year be remembered as the year the world found the courage to take responsibility for the future we want. I ask of all of us here, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?”

  • Is Climate Change Worth the Existential Fuss?

    Is Climate Change Worth the Existential Fuss?

    0

     

    Global warming is one of the greatest issues of the 21st century. It is behind numerous ecological issues, both locally and internationally. It manifests through an array of environmental damages including sea-level rise, changing seasonal weather patterns, and increasing severity of extreme weather events. So far, that may sound like a doom laden, existential prep talk from your squeamish biology teacher in 6th form. But as an abstract process that has not even begun to take its full swing, is climate change actually worth all the attention/melodramatic anxiety it is given? Let me show you why it is:

    1. Humans Are Causing Global Warming

    95% of climate science papers now agree that global warming is man-made. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that the majority of global warming since the mid-20th century is due to humans. Arctic evidence underlines this too: Although the changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis cause climatic cooling, the 20th century is the only period in the past 200,000 years during which aquatic indicators showed increased warming.

    2. Fossil Fuel Barons Try to Disprove It

    If Earth were a dying patient, the fossil fuel industry would be the lunatic doctor refusing her imminent death. Indeed, CO2 is responsible for the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions, the key mechanism of global warming. Many accusations have been made against fossil fuel lobbies and oil industry advocates for trying to debunk scientific findings on global warming. But they have vested interests in hiding their blatant mistreatment of Planet Earth. These stakeholders are deliberately deceitful: they know that anthropogenic climate change is real, but they will tell public the opposite so it is misled into being sceptical of climate findings. And even more – they will not stop trying to sell you their lie until they find a more lucrative resource.

    3. We Have No Planet B

    This is simple logic: because we only have one planet, we need to care for it. If technological and scientific progress is to truly benefit humanity, it cannot be allowed to harm nature more than it improves it. It will be very long before we discover a second inhabitable planet, so we had better start taking care of the one we have right now.

    4. The Most Vulnerable States are More Affected

    Since many developing countries particularly in sub-Saharan Africa have built their economies on climate-sensitive agriculture, they will be more adversely affected by global warming. According to Steger, an academic, they will face “increased illnesses, escalating death rates, and crumbling infrastructure.” Whereas coastal areas and small island states everywhere will be affected by rising sea levels and storms, richer countries like the Netherlands are better equipped than poorer countries to adapt. If those in the developed world who create a disproportionate amount of emissions don’t curb them, poorer countries will pay the price more harshly.

    5. Greater Poverty and Resource Wars

    Strong environmental stress provokes greater unemployment and childhood malnutrition through lower yields on food output. The agricultural sector is often unable to adapt to environmental pressure, and higher temperatures render unfeasible the production of certain foods. Although availability of arable land may increase in regions of high latitude, this will be largely compensated by losses in tropical and sub-tropical regions such as Latin South America, Africa, Europe, and India. Not to forget, expanding agriculture to feed a booming human population may even aggravate climate change. It also aggravates ethnic strife, poverty, and resource wars and can be an inter-state security threat in developing countries. Some argue that climate change will uncover the incompetency of rogue states and other non-accountable states to deal with such issues that infuriate millions of vulnerable people. What would happen if that occurred in every rogue state? Let’s not go there.

    6. Depends on Individual Action

    While the growth in greenhouse gases can be attributed more greatly to multinational corporations and businesses, it is also furthered by individual citizens. To tackle climate change, no policy can be the wondrous magical potion – individuals must contribute in their everyday lifestyles. In fact, turning off just one 60-watt incandescent bulb that would otherwise burn eight hours a day can save about 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the bulb. There’s no magic bullet solution, but there are piecemeal remedies, where we can all do our part.

    7. Questions The Survival of The Human Race

    If climate change is one of the greatest challenges to ever face humanity, it is because it has the ability to wipe our species off the face of the Earth. Global warming — a term we so often dismiss as merely sensationalist and exaggerated lark — threatens our very existence on Planet Earth. No other issue apart from the threat of nuclear war  has had as much potential for an irreversible planetary catastrophe.

    So the next time you discuss climate change, do not buy into the “climate porn” of skeptical prejudices and newspapers trying to display contradictory views. The consensus gap between climate scientists and the misled public must be closed. Because trust me, if not today, one day we will inevitably realise – the existential fuss was worth it.

    Is Climate Change Worth the Existential Fuss? Image

    For information, see:

    http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page6.php

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24292615

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/27_09_13_ipccsummary.pdf

    http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2009/10/10567.html

    http://www.onlyoneplanet.com/Suzuki_quote.htm

    http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/international.html

    http://www.sciencecodex.com/water_scarcity_will_create_global_security_concerns

    http://theconsensusproject.com/

     

  • Prime Minister Tony Abbott axes expert advice on firearms, infant formula, high-speed rail, housing, insurance and animal welfare

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott axes expert advice on firearms, infant formula, high-speed rail, housing, insurance and animal welfare

    • Phillip Hudson
    • Herald Sun
    • November 07, 2013 6:47PM

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    Abbott swings axe on expert advice

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott is ditching several advisory bodies. Source: News Limited

    THE Abbott Government is to axe expert advice on firearms, infant formula, high-speed rail, housing, insurance and animal welfare.

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott risks a community backlash but he said some of the 21 groups being abolished had “outlived their original purpose” and it was part of his pledge to cut bureaucracy and red tape.

    The Commonwealth Firearms Advisory Council, formed in 2010, evolved from a group set up to advise John Howard after the Port Arthur shooting and his historic crackdown on guns.

    Its seven members advise the government on a wide range of gun issues and include former police firearms specialists, gun dealers and sporting shooters.

    Mr Abbott has dumped it amid growing concern about gun crime.

    The PM said the government will still get advice from a broad range of sources including industry, community groups, government departments and other advisory councils.

    Typhoon Haiyan

    Ship of shame in asylum stand-off

    Some of the advisory groups being abolished have existed for nearly 25 years, while some were created in the past 12 months.

    The advisory panel on the Marketing in Australia of Infant Formula was established in 1992.

    The High Speed Rail Advisory Group was formed earlier this year and includes former Deputy PM and Nationals leader Tim Fischer. It is being axed because the Abbott Government is not keen on high-speed rail.

    “Many of these non-statutory bodies have outlived their original purpose or are not focused on the government’s policy priorities,” Mr Abbott said.

    “As a result, their work is best carried out by the relevant government departments or agencies.”

    Mr Abbott is scrapping the Australian Animals Welfare Advisory committee created when he was in Cabinet in 2005.

    Others to go include the National Housing Supply Council and the Insurance Reform Advisory Group set up by Bill Shorten after the 2011 floods in Victoria and Queensland.

    Expert advice groups on positive ageing, maritime workforce development, inter-country Adoption and Corporate Wrongdoing are also being chopped.

    Mr Abbott said the activities of these bodies “are no longer needed or can be managed within existing departmental resources”.

    He said this would deliver more efficient and effective government.

    Mr Abbott also said Cabinet submissions will now require regulatory impact statements that set out the cost of red tape.

    “Regulation won’t be the default position for government and will only be imposed where