Author: Neville

Opposition’s dam plan springs a leak

ABCFebruary 14, 2013, 8:33 am

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A leaked discussion paper shows the Coalition is considering a plan to build more dams, with 100 possible projects already identified.

It is understood the draft paper says the dams would be used to prevent floods, to fuel power stations and to irrigate food production.

The projects discussed include raising the Warragamba Dam, which provides the majority of Sydney’s water, as well as the creation of dams in the Hunter Valley and along the Lachlan River in NSW.

But Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt says the paper is not the Coalition’s official policy.

“We have no proposal for 100 dams as such – those are initiatives which other people have suggested to us and we’ve simply chronicled the submissions,” he said.

“But we’re unashamed about having a vision for Australia as a food bowl, we are unashamed about flood security.”

The paper was given to a Sydney newspaper, and is the second leak of Coalition policy in a week.

Opposition water spokesman Barnaby Joyce says that is cause for concern.

“I’m not concerned about the diligence of the work that’s gone towards it but quite obviously it’s a concern when something is leaked,” he said.
“That’s one of the unfortunate things in politics. It happens to us, it happens to the Labor Party, it happens to the Greens at times.”

Middle East River Basin Has Lost Dead Sea-Sized Quantity of Water: Researchers Cite Pumping from Underground Reservoirs

Feb. 12, 2013 — Already strained by water scarcity and political tensions, the arid Middle East along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is losing critical water reserves at a rapid pace, from Turkey upstream to Syria, Iran and Iraq below.

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Unable to conduct measurements on the ground in the politically unstable region, UC Irvine scientists and colleagues used data from space to uncover the extent of the problem. They took measurements from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, and found that between 2003 and 2010, the four nations lost 144 cubic kilometers (117 million acre feet) of water — nearly equivalent to all the water in the Dead Sea. The depletion was especially striking after a drought struck the area in 2007. Researchers attribute the bulk of it — about 60 percent — to pumping of water from underground reservoirs.

They concluded that the Tigris-Euphrates watershed is drying up at a pace second only to that in India. “This rate is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents,” the scientists report in a paper to be published online Feb. 15 in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Water management is a complex issue in the Middle East, “a region that is dealing with limited water resources and competing stakeholders,” said Katalyn Voss, lead author and a water policy fellow with the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling in Irvine.

Turkey has jurisdiction over the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters, as well as the reservoirs and infrastructure of its Southeastern Anatolia Project, which dictates how much water flows downstream into Syria, Iran and Iraq. And due to varied interpretations of international laws, the basin does not have coordinated water management. Turkey’s control of water distribution to adjacent countries has caused tension, such as during the 2007 drought, when it continued to divert water to irrigate its own agricultural land.

“That decline in stream flow put a lot of pressure on downstream neighbors,” Voss said. “Both the United Nations and anecdotal reports from area residents note that once stream flow declined, the northern part of Iraq had to switch to groundwater. In a fragile social, economic and political environment, this did not help.”

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, which NASA launched in 2002 to measure Earth’s local gravitation pull from space, is providing a vital picture of global trends in water storage, said hydrologist Jay Famiglietti, the study’s principal investigator and a UC Irvine professor of Earth system science.

GRACE is “like having a giant scale in the sky,” he said. “Whenever you do international work, it’s exceedingly difficult to obtain data from different countries. For political, economic or security reasons, neighbors don’t want each other to know how much water they’re using. In regions like the Middle East, where data are relatively inaccessible, satellite observations are among the few options.”

Rising or falling water reserves alter Earth’s mass in particular areas, influencing the strength of the local gravitational attraction. By periodically quantifying that gravity, the satellites provide information about how much each region’s water storage changes over time.

The 754,000-square-kilometer (291,000-square-mile) Tigris-Euphrates River Basin jumped out as a hot spot when researchers from UC Irvine, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research looked at global water trends. Over the seven-year period, they calculated that available water there shrank by an average of 20 cubic kilometers (16 million acre feet) annually.

Meanwhile, the area’s demand for freshwater is rising at the worst possible time. “They just do not have that much water to begin with, and they’re in a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change. Those dry areas are getting drier,” Famiglietti said. “Everyone in the world’s arid regions needs to manage their available water resources as best they can.”

Other authors are MinHui Lo of National Taiwan University, Caroline de Linage of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling, Matthew Rodell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Sean Swenson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

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Macdonald had 14 bank accounts, ICAC told

Date February 13, 2013 – 1:24PM 136 reading now

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Linton Besser and Kate McClymont

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“Farm enterprises” … Ian Macdonald arrives at the ICAC inquiry.

The disgraced former resources minister Ian Macdonald had 14 separate bank accounts during his time as a NSW cabinet minister, a corruption inquiry has been told.

Mr Macdonald accepted it might be possible he had that many, but suggested some might be related to several “farm enterprises”, and said he didn’t know whether all of them were “operational”.

The Independent Commission Against Corruption is questioning Mr Macdonald over almost $200,000 in loans he had received from his former best friend, Greg Jones.

Mr Jones was also a secret investor in Cascade Coal, which was awarded a lucrative exploration licence in 2009 over a coal tenement at Mt Penny, near Mudgee, which is the subject of the inquiry.

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The corruption watchdog has alleged Mr Macdonald and the family of ALP kingpin Eddie Obeid had conspired to manipulate the awarding of the licence, which happened to sit over three properties controlled by the Obeids.

Together with a secret stake in Cascade, the Obeids stood to make as much as $100 million from the allegedly corrupt deal. Mr Jones, and other investors in Cascade Coal, hoped to turn their $1 million investment into $500 million windfall by selling the licence to a larger, related company.

Mr Macdonald, who is being interrogated for a third day at the ICAC, has repeatedly denied knowing of the Obeids’ interest in the properties making up the tenement itself or, indeed, in Cascade Coal.

Earlier, Mr Macdonald said he thought it was acceptable for a minister to “shield” himself behind his department.

“Do you think it is improper for a politician who is a cabinet minister to take actions he knows are unpopular and then require his department to put their stamp on the decision so they attract the blame and not the minister?” asked the Commissioner, David Ipp QC.

“I don’t think it is improper,” Mr Macdonald replied.

The questions were targeted at a decision in late 2008 and early 2009 to reopen the controversial select tender. It was only after the process was reopened that Cascade Coal won the tender for Mt Penny.

Mr Macdonald resigned from NSW Parliament in June 2010 following allegations that he made “errors” in his travel expenses relating to a 2008 trip to Italy and Dubai.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/macdonald-had-14-bank-accounts-icac-told-20130213-2eccd.html#ixzz2KkYNpF3p

Colourful ‘solar glass’ means entire buildings can generate clean power

British firm develops colourful, transparent solar cells that will add just 10% to glass buildings’ cost
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Adam Vaughan

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

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Oxford Photovoltaics uses non-toxic organic solar cell materials printed directly on to glass to produce clean energy. Photograph: Oxford Photovoltaics

A solar power company capable of “printing” colourful glass that can generate electricity from the sun’s energy announced a £2m funding boost on Tuesday.

Oxford Photovoltaics, a spin-off from the University of Oxford, said the investment from clean-tech investors MTI Partners will help its solar glass, which can be dyed almost any colour, take a step closer to the commercial market.

“What we say here is rather than attach [solar] photovoltaics to the building, why not make the building the photovoltaics?” Kevin Arthur, the company’s founder and CEO, told the Guardian. “If you decide to build a building out of glass, then you’ve already decided to pay for the glass. If you add this, you’re adding a very small extra cost. [The solar cell treatment] costs no more than 10% of the cost of the facade.”

These generally cost between £600 and £1,000 per square metre, meaning the new cell treatment wouild cost just £60-£100 extra per square metre.

The technology works by adding a layer of transparent solid-state solar cells at most three microns thick to conventional glass, in order to turn around 12% of the solar energy received into low-carbon electricity. The power can then be exported to the national grid or used for the running of a building.

“Within reason we can print any colour, there’s a wide range of dyes, blues and greens and reds and so on. But different colours have different efficiencies: black is very high, green is pretty good and red is good, but blue is less good,” said Arthur.

The £2m investment will pay for equipment and recruiting staff for the company’s new base on the Begbroke Science Park near Oxford. The company is looking to build a much larger manufacturing facility next year, with full size panels available for sampling and trials at the end of 2014. A4-sized samples will be ready by the end of 2013. While the company is mostly targeting customers planning new buildings, it also “very interested” in retrofits on the facades of existing buildings.

Separately, a team at the University of Sheffield and University of Cambridge this week said they had succeeded in developing a process to ‘spray paint’ solar cells on to surfaces and, potentially in the future, roofs and buildings. The teams believe the process could significantly cut the cost of solar in the future, but currently only works on “very smooth” surfaces and is less efficient than conventional solar panels.

Professor David Lidzey from the University of Sheffield said: “Spray coating is currently used to apply paint to cars and in graphic printing. We have shown that it can also be used to make solar cells using specially designed plastic semiconductors. Maybe in the future surfaces on buildings and even car roofs will routinely generate electricity with these materials.”

Solar power worldwide reached 100GW installed capacity last year for the first time, up from 71GW in 2011 and just 40GW in 2010, according to recent trade body figures.

This dog is better than famous friends for Governor-General Quentin Bryce

Simon Black
The Daily Telegraph
February 13, 201312:00AM

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These dogs specialise in helping the disabled / Pic: Adam Taylor Source: The Daily Telegraph

Governor-General Quentin Bryce with her new friend / Pic: Adam Taylor Source: The Daily Telegraph

SHE has shaken the hands of presidents, curtseyed to royalty and met the Pope – but nothing has put a broader smile on the face of Governor-General Quentin Bryce than a kiss from a labrador.

A range of border collies, poodles, retrievers and jack russels gathered under sofas, chairs and even on a lounge in the front room of Admiralty House for the launch of the Australian and New Zealand Assistance Dogs organisation yesterday.

“These wonderful animals bring out the best in us all,” Ms Bryce said.

Eleven-year-old Abby Matthews’ companion dog Jemima goes everywhere – and does everything with her.

“She’s in the shower with her in the morning, she goes for walks with her. She calls her her ‘furry sister’,” her father Peter said.

Mr Matthews said the approval for a companion dog was “harder than getting a mortgage. But it has changed her life”.

The regional chapter of Assistance Dogs International – ANZAD – acts as a unifying body for seeing eye dogs, dogs for the hearing impaired, dogs for those with diabetes and mental health dogs, as well as a host of others.

Why Tokyo has more to fear from sea-level rise than Vancouver

Posted by Brad Plumer on February 12, 2013 at 1:20 pm

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Some coastal areas have more to fear from climate change than others. Tokyo and Sydney, for instance, are likely to see bigger sea-level rises than Vancouver or London. That’s according to a new study that attempts to model the oddities of the rising oceans.

That’s one fickle ocean. (Getty)

Climatologists have known for many years that the seas are creeping up on us. As humans warm the planet, the world’s ice caps and glaciers are melting and the oceans are expanding. Various projections have sea levels on pace to rise between 2 and 7 feet by 2100.

What makes this so tricky to prepare for, however, is that sea levels won’t rise evenly everywhere. There are huge variations. In some regions, like the Mississippi Delta, the land is sinking, due to sediment erosion or oil drilling. In other places, strong wind and ocean currents can warp the waters and affect local sea levels. Meanwhile, the shrinking ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have their own gravitational pull, creating further imbalances.

So what happens when you take all these factors into account? That’s what a thorough new study (pdf), led by Mahé Perrette of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact research, tries to do. The authors predicted that the average global sea-level rise will be between 56 centimeters and 106 centimeters by 2100, assuming emissions keep rising unchecked. But they found lots of disparities.

Some regions will see sea-level rise that’s between 10 to 20 percent higher than the global average — including India, Bangladesh, Japan, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa. Meanwhile, other areas will see slightly less sea-level rise than the global average, including the Pacific Northwest in the United States and Western Europe. Here’s a neat interactive map from New Scientist that lets you explore the variations:

One of the biggest question marks, meanwhile, is what will happen to the Northeastern United States — particularly New York City. Will it get below-average sea-level rise or an extra-heavy surge? A lot depends on whether Greenland or Antarctica melts faster in the decades ahead. That’s because of gravity.

As it turns out, the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are so massive that they actually generate significant gravity and keep ocean levels in the surrounding areas artificially high. So if Greenland’s ice sheet loses a lot of mass, that will reduce its pull and sea levels will rise more slowly in the northern Atlantic. But if Antarctica is the one losing lots of ice, then sea levels down south will recede and water will be redistributed to more northerly areas — including the Eastern United States.

Recently, climatologists have been arguing over which ice sheet will contribute more to sea-level rise in the decades ahead — a recent comprehensive survey in Nature suggested that Greenland would remain (relatively) stable and West Antarctica’s ice sheet would do more of the melting. These debates aren’t just of academic interest. They can have a big impact on coastal planning.

In any case, studies like these will prove helpful in allowing countries and cities to brace themselves for sea-level rise in the decades ahead. Virtually all coastal areas will need to start planning defenses. But it can make a big difference to know whether to prepare for a 1 meter rise or a 1.2 meter rise.

Further reading:

–Sea levels have been rising for the past 100 years. A look at how that rise may have made the storm surges from Hurricane Sandy worse.

–Can we stop the seas from rising? Yes, but less than you think.