Author: Neville

Europe disrupted as snow turns to ice

Updated: 10:33, Thursday March 14, 2013

Icy roads are disrupting transport as north-western Europe remains in the grip of unseasonable weather.

The snowstorm on Monday and Tuesday, a few days before the official start of spring on March 20, caused widespread travel chaos with the cancellation of hundreds of flights and the suspension of train services including cross-Channel Eurostar trains.

The Eurostar link between London and Paris, the Thalys line between Paris and Brussels and other high-speed connections in northern France resumed running early on Wednesday, though there were delays.

After being forced to close briefly, Frankfurt Airport, Europe’s third-busiest, said it expected services to progressively return to normal after 812 flights were cancelled on Tuesday.

France was the worst affected by the snowstorm but Belgium, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands also reported major disruptions.

Services were returning to normal in France, with the Paris Metro and suburban train services running, though buses were cancelled because of icy road conditions.

The sun was shining in Paris, where buildings were covered in a picturesque blanket of snow and a lone cross-country skier was seen on the Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower. The temperature was -5 degrees Celsius, well below seasonal averages.

The icy conditions were causing road closures and slowdowns, in particular in the north of France, but highways were gradually opening as snowdrifts were cleared and vehicles stranded during the snowstorm were recovered.

Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, warned disruptions could continue for another 48 hours.

‘I think that things should be better by Friday, at least on the weather front,’ he said.

‘The situation is under control, the organisation is at the necessary level.’

About 69,000 homes were without power in France, including about 30,000 that lost electricity after the snowstorm moved south into the Alps.

Temperatures hovered close to freezing in Britain, with snow expected in parts of Scotland and eastern England. Motorways in the south of the country were blocked as lorries were backed up after delays to freight and passenger services through the Channel Tunnel.

Belgium was also seeing a return to normal with train and public transport services improving, though icy roads were causing some disruptions.

House of Reps passes NDIS bill

AAPUpdated March 14, 2013, 12:27 pm

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Government legislation to set up the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has cleared parliament’s lower house with the support of all MPs.

Families Minister Jenny Macklin, summing up debate on her bill on Thursday, said it was a reform whose time had come.

“It will bring an end to the tragedy of services denied or delayed and instead offer people with disability the care and support they need over their lifetimes,” she said.

“It will end the cruel lottery that besets people today, where the care and support they receive depends on where they live or how they acquired their disability.”

The legislation will enable the NDIS to be launched from July this year.

The scheme will benefit about 26,000 people with disability, their families and their carers, living in selected areas in South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT, the Hunter in NSW, and the Barwon area of Victoria.

It would become a nationwide, demand-driven system of care tailored to the needs of each individual and established on a durable, long-term basis, a tearful Ms Macklin said.

“This bill is an enormous step in ensuring people with disability, their families and carers receive peace of mind,” she said.

Independent MP Rob Oakeshott said only the announcement of the new Pope was of more significance than the legislation’s passage.

“But I reckon this is pretty close to it,” he told parliament.

Commonwealth Bank chief economist Michael Blythe said the data showed the local economy was in good shape during the first months of 2013.

That reduces the chance of the RBA cutting rates in the near future, he said.

“It’s a truly exceptional result,” Mr Blythe said.

“It always pays to be a bit suspicious of big moves in either direction, so no doubt the true picture is a bit weaker than this.

“But nevertheless the labour market looks like it is holding together remarkably well.

“It suggests the economy is in pretty decent shape in the first quarter of 2013.
“Given that, the Reserve Bank has probably done enough and will be sitting on the sidelines for quite a while we think.”

India strives to become ‘drought proof’

In a country of 1.2 billion people, the threat of drought takes on epic proportions
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By Manipadma Jena for IPS, part of the Guardian Environment Network

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 March 2013 17.05 GMT

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A farmer looks towards the sky, while standing amidst his drought-stricken crop. Photograph: Dipak Kumar/Reuters

Over a period of two centuries (between 1801 and 2002), India experienced 42 severe droughts, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation. One of these, in 1979, cut food grain production by 20 percent; another, in 1987, damaged 58.6 million hectares of cultivated land, affecting 285 million people.

In the last decade (2002-2012) three major droughts hit the country, and in 2012 drought shaved off half a percentage point from the Asian giant’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to a 2013 World Bank report.

Seventy percent of Indians live in rural areas, while 58 percent rely solely on agriculture for a living. The 355 million people who fall below the 1.25-dollars-a-day poverty line depend primarily on rain-fed agriculture for subsistence.

Thus drought has become a national priority for the Indian government, particularly as climate change causes ever more erratic monsoon rains.

This week, participants in the United Nations’ High-Level Meeting on National Drought Policy (HMNDP) have descended on Geneva, where they will debate preparedness and mitigation strategies from Mar. 11-15.

“The meeting will help evolve integrated efforts to improve early warning system and adopt…policies to enhance food security and reduce vulnerability,” Laxman Singh Rathore, director-general of meteorology at India’s ministry of earth sciences, told IPS from Geneva.

As a member of HMNDP’s International Organising Committee, India is under pressure to tackle a range of issues that exacerbate the impact on drought, particularly on rural populations.

Despite 2012 being a semi-drought year, “India had 66 million tonnes of food stocks at the start of 2013,” Devinder Sharma, a well-known food and trade policy analyst noted in The Times of India.

“This fiscal year, wheat exports are expected to touch 9.5 million tonnes; rice exports have already crossed nine million tonnes in 2011-12,” he added.

Over the past 12 years, food production growth has averaged about three percent, higher than India’s annual population growth of 1.5 percent over the last 10 years. Despite experiencing slower agricultural growth than some other Asian countries, India is no longer at risk of drought-related famines, as it was some 20 years ago.

“Evidence suggests that the Indian economy today is ‘drought resilient’ but not ‘drought proof’, the distinction being that once drought proof there is no negative impact on the economy, but in a drought-resilient country, there is a negative but manageable impact,” Jatin Singh of SkyMet Weather Services, a private weather forecasting company, told IPS.

According to the ministry of agriculture’s crisis management plan for 2012, “Drought is not a disaster, but a management issue”.

This new dynamic is partly the result of drought adaptation measures that have expanded farmers’ traditional focus on the ‘kharif’ (summer crop), which relied on the monsoon rains, to include the ‘rabi’, or the winter crop, as well.

There has also been a step-up in the sector’s gross capital formation (GCF), which includes investment in irrigation infrastructure, land reclamation, afforestation and development of government farms.

“The state government also offers crop compensation for areas declared drought hit, crop insurance, watershed programmes, rural livelihood generating schemes, investments on recharging groundwater and, in acute conditions, opening up ‘fodder centers’ for livestock,” Ravindra Adusumilli of the Hyderabad-based Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN), told IPS.

But experts say the government will need to do more for the agricultural sector if it wants to prevent incredible hardships for millions of people.

Although agriculture contributed only 14 percent of India’s GDP in the 2011-2012 fiscal year according to the government’s Economic Survey for 2012-203, its importance in maintaining food security during times of drought cannot be underestimated.

Marginal farmers, with land-holdings of up to one hectare, and small farmers who own one to two hectares, form 80 percent of the agricultural workforce and are the most financially indebted group in rural India – 88 percent of West Bengal, 71 percent of Uttar Pradesh and 70 percent of Odisha are in debt, according to the 2003 Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers.

India’s southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh sees two major droughts every five years and its rain-fed arid regions are the most drought prone regions in India. In addition, the state is home to 82 percent of India’s indebted farmer households, according to national agriculture statistics for 2012-2013.

In the eastern Indian state of Odisha, 65 percent of farmland is dependent on rain-fed irrigation. Bolangir and Nabrangpur districts are two of the most drought-prone in the country.

If drought is detected early enough, farmers have a slim chance of falling back on farm-saved seeds, or on the rare provision of government-sponsored seeds, to sow their land a second time.

The more likely outcome of weak monsoon rains, however, is that “30 percent of farmland will be left fallow and farmers, with their families, migrate en masse in search of work”, Suresh Chandra Bisoyi of the Bhubaneswar-based Regional Centre for Development Cooperation told IPS.

Experts are convinced that tackling drought includes addressing rural populations’ access to credit and other financial services.

Farm insurance and credit is assuming greater importance, but much needs to be fine-tuned, admit federal and state government officials.

“While agricultural production has grown so have costs. Today the cost of cultivating (sowing to harvesting) a single hectare of…rain-fed land is 30,000 rupees (600 dollars) and up to 42,000 rupees (840 dollars) for a hectare of irrigated land,” Saroj Mohanty, core committee member of the Farmers’ Federation of Western Odisha, which is currently in negotiations with the Odisha state government over fair farm insurance, told IPS.

“The state government’s disaster compensation remains ludicrously low – 2,000 rupees (40 dollars) for a rain-fed hectare and 4,000 rupees (80 dollars) for an irrigated one.

“What is still more unjust is that a farmer may own more farmland but compensation is paid for no more than a hectare per farmer. And while the individual farmer pays the insurance premium, the compensation is calculated on total land damaged in a panchayat (an administrative union of villages),” Mohanty added.

What is worse, he says, is that tenant farmers are not eligible for insurance compensation because land tenancy is not legal in Odisha. Thus most landless rural peasants and marginal farmers are the worst hit by drought.

“Small farmers in India get less than six percent of farm credit,” according to Sharma. “No wonder farmer suicides show no signs of ending.”

A World Bank report bolstered these claims with the finding that “Rural poor have little access to credit. While India has a wide network of rural finance institutions, many of the rural poor remain excluded, due to inefficiencies in the formal finance institutions, the weak regulatory framework, high transaction costs, and risks associated with lending to agriculture.”

Adusumilli believes that the current national policy is based more on “managing media during periods of drought…and the delivery of the largesse”, than on concrete prevention and mitigation plans.

Expert: Sea level rise in Texas will get worse without action
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Posted: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 4:00 am

COLLEGE STATION — Sea-level rise is not the type of looming coastal natural hazard that announces itself with the roaring bravado of a hurricane, but it is there, in the details of the storm, and will only get worse in the absence of public sentiment to address the issue, says a Texas A&M University researcher and one of the state’s leading coastal development experts.

“It is in the extreme events where people will be noticing the effects most in the short term,” says John Jacob, Extension Program Director with the Texas Sea Grant College Program at Texas A&M. “Hurricane storm surge will be much more significant. A half-foot increase in storm surge elevation can mean tens to hundreds of square miles of additional flooding. Storm tides will be reaching farther inland flooding areas that have not been flooded before. In the longer run, what is today’s storm tide will be tomorrow’s high tide.”

Sea level along the Texas Gulf Coast is rising by a fraction of an inch each year, but this increase is expected to accelerate and possibly inundate one of the state’s most profitable and environmentally diverse regions. As a first step in addressing the problem at the state level, The University of Texas’ Bureau of Economic Geology and Energy Institute recently released a report from a workshop it held last year at the university’s Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas to identify the current status of sea level rise along the Texas Gulf Coast and to assess risks to the region’s ecosystems, communities and economy.

The report, “The Risk of Rising Sea Level: Texas Universities Ready and Able to Help Coastal Communities Adapt” presents the findings of the workshop’s 28 participating scientists from six of Texas’ leading academic institutions, including Texas Sea Grant, along with representatives from the nonprofit, governmental and private sectors.

The report is available online at http://texasseagrant.org.

“Our intention with this white paper is to be educational,” says Wendy Gordon, founder and principal of Ecologia Consulting in Austin, who was hired by The University of Texas to organize the workshop and summarize its finding in a report. “We want to initiate a dialogue among interested parties and these parties should span the entire state because the coast is important to all Texans. We want to raise the awareness about and profile of the issue, and hopefully build public support for more dollars being appropriated for sea level rise research and adaptation.”

Sea-level rise is not a “someday” event. It is already a fact of life in Texas. Current data show coastal water levels are rising about one-fifth of an inch per year, which is about five times the rate seen during the previous 4,000 years and one of the highest rates reported globally, according to the report. It goes on to state that the current rate of sea-level rise in Texas is expected to accelerate further, doubling or even tripling by the end of the 21st century as a warming atmosphere fuels further expansion of the oceans and threatens to melt significant portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

By 2100, much of the Texas coast will most likely be under at least a foot of water and as much as six feet of water.

“We stand to lose a very large amount of one of our most productive environments in all of Texas — the coastal salt marsh,” Jacob says. “All of our significant fisheries depend in one way or another on this environment. As sea level rises, marshes can migrate inland if the land is available, but there are many places on the coast lined with sharp rises or bluffs. In these areas marshes will drown as water rises. Much of the remaining areas are becoming urbanized with shoreline protection that will also hinder marsh migration.”

The rising Gulf of Mexico will directly impact Texas’ 18 coastal counties that account for less than six percent of the state’s landmass but are home to almost a quarter of its 2010 population. According to the report, Texas’ coastal population is growing more than twice as fast as the rest of the state.

“As we just saw with Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast, one of the outcomes of what was a pretty unusual confluence of weather events was a storm surge that was made worse by a century’s worth of sea-level rise,” Gordon says. “People living up and down the Texas coast and also living inland in low-lying regions are looking not only at incremental sea-level rise but also the fact that 10, 20 and 30 years hence, hurricanes that come ashore are going to push the tide even further inland. That becomes a risk to businesses, property owners, residents, and communities all along the coast and in turn it then becomes an economic risk throughout the state.”

The coastal zone is one of the state’s primary economic engines, fueled by oil and gas production and petrochemical refining operations, four of the country’s 10 busiest ports and the considerable infrastructure needed to keep these enterprises running. Texas ports generate about $5 billion in local and state tax revenues and $48 billion in personal income. They also create 1 million direct jobs and 1.3 million indirect jobs annually, “The Risk of Rising Sea Level” states.

The report goes on to cite a recent study by Entergy, a power-generating utility based in Louisiana that serves East Texas, which estimated that the current value of Gulf Coast energy assets is $800 billion.

“As people understand the issues here, we will see more consensus around the need to conduct additional studies and to start developing adaptation strategies,” Gordon says. “This is a long-term issue. We’re trying to get it in front of people now while we still have time to start responding to the threat.”

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METHANE EXTRACTION

The discovery of this new type of methane, what scientists call methane hydrate, has led to two important questions. The first is pragmatic: Will it burn like ordinary methane? It turns out it will. If you take a piece of methane hydrate — it looks like hard-packed snow — and touch a lighted match to it, the sample will burn with a reddish flame. And if that’s the case, it could be used to heat homes, fuel cars and generally power energy-hungry nations such as Japan, the United States, India and China. Recent data suggest that just 1 percent of Earth’s methane hydrate deposits could yield enough natural gas to meet America’s energy needs for 170,000 years

This a very exciting proposal. If if may be possible as Japan is suggesting, in safety
the world’s energy problems would be solved. Why not use the gas that is threatening
the world’s extinction to solve the world’s energy problems. Removal of Methane gases
may help to reduce the danger of Methane eruptions if done safely.

This concept is yet to be proved, but does show some promise for the future.

Neville Gillmore.