Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for August 2007

Toxic Dolphins: A Note from Ann Novek

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Japanese officials have publicly condemned the eating of dolphin meat especially in school lunches due to mercury contamination:

“We tested some samples purchased at the Gyokyo supermarket in Taiji and Super Center Okuwa in the nearby city of Shingu …

One dolphin sample had a mercury content 10 times above the health ministry’s advisory level of 0.4 parts per million, with a methylmercury readout 10.33 times over the ministry’s own advisory level of 0.3 ppm.

Another dolphin sample tested 15.97 times and 12 times above advisory levels of total mercury and methylmercury, respectively.

The results prompted the two officials to describe dolphin meat as ‘toxic waste’.

Despite health concerns Taiji’s Mayor promises to build a new dolphin processing factory…

You can read more in the Japan Times

Earlier this year Norwegian media reported there was a growing problem with bioaccumulation of toxins in minke whales and that some parts of the whales contained higher concentrations of toxins that were recommended by health authorities.

When Keiko (Free Willy) died in Norway, children wanted to bury him on the beach. However, this was not suitable according to the health authorities due to danger from contaminants. Keiko was also consider ‘toxic waste’.

Cheers,
Ann Novek
Sweden

Register Now for the AEF Conference: Melbourne, Saturday September 8, 2007

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Don Burke and many others will be at the Australian Environment Foundation Conference on Saturday 8th September.

Professor Bob Carter, a foundation member of the AEF, will talk on the myths of climate change. Dr Ziggy Switkowski, the chair of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, will provide insights into nuclear energy use and the environment.

Melbourne University Professor Rick Roush, recently returned from work in the United States, will outline the benefits to the environment of biotechnology while the Victorian government considers lifting the moratorium on genetically modified crops.

Professor Aynsley Kellow of the University of Tasmania’s School of Political Governance will speak on the political and social implications of environmentalism.

So, register at www.aefweb.info now.

I will also be there.

Chris Hogendyk and the Marsh Block

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In May 2005 Chris Hogendyk became aware of a small 260ha property located in the heart of the Macquarie Marshes that was for sale. The property had been used for cattle grazing for over 150 years, and was in a rather sad state after 5 years of drought and overgrazing.

Chris motivated a group of 30 residents of the Macquarie Valley to chip in to buy the property, which they named ‘Burrima’, the local Aboriginal name for ‘Black Swan’.

The group formed a unit trust, the Macquarie Marshes Environment Trust (MMET), and elected a Committee of Management to handle the day-to-day management of the property.

Since the MMET has owned ‘Burrima’:

1. It has been de-stocked, with spectacular regrowth of reeds and other plants

block 2005.jpg
the block in 2005

restored
the same area a few years later

2. An eco-toilet has been put in to cater for visitors

toilet.jpg
Chris Hogendyk is the man with the wide brimmed hat.

3. Walkways have been put across major channels to make the wetland walk more accessible

board walk

4. A total of 1,170 native trees and shrubs, including 600 saltbush, have been planted. Revegetation with native grasses has been planned for this spring.

5. Local traditional owners have been granted access to map scarred trees and Aboriginal middens

The MMET has hosted hundreds of visitors to ‘Burrima’ including local community groups, schools, politicians, birdwatchers, universities, research scientists, and many more.

Chris has also become increasingly determined to expose the environmental water theft and politics that are destroying the two nature reserves in the Macquarie Marshes.

He has been lobbying for policy change through his role as Chairman of Macquarie River Food and Fibre.

Chris is also the General Manager of Auscott Macquarie – a large cotton growing enterprise with a farm and gins in the Macquarie Valley.

Chris is passionate about farming and the environment. His wife Gill Hogendyk is Treasurer of the Australian Environmental Foundation and an active member of the Wildlife Information and Rescue Service (WIRES).

Ignorant armchair environmentalists at the popular blog Larvatus Prodeo criticize Chris on the basis he grows cotton and Gill on the basis she is married to Chris (see comment posted at 4.43pm on October 5). And at least some of those guys and gals wear cotton jeans and t-shirts! If the folk at Larvatus Prodeo want to learn something about wetlands and cotton growing they could volunteer to chip weeds at ‘Burrima’ or in the upstream cotton fields.

Lockwood and Frohlich, Part 1

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It has become common practice in climate science for a press release reporting the findings of a new paper to precede the publication in the journal concerned. Thus, the Lockwood and Frohlich paper ‘Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature’ (M. Lockwood and C. Fröhlich Proc. R. Soc. A doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880; 2007, 10th July) was announced in the 5th July edition of the journal Nature under the headline ‘No solar hiding place for greenhouse sceptics.’

It came as no surprise that Real Climate’s Stephan Rahmstorf was first out of the woodwork:

“This paper is the final nail in the coffin for people who would like to make the Sun responsible for present global warming,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Normally papers are published because there is new research to report, but not this time it seems:

Mike Lockwood, says he was “galvanized” to carry out the comprehensive study by misleading media reports. He cites ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, a television programme shown in March by Britain’s Channel 4, as a prime example.

But wait! There’s more:

Ken Carslaw, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds, UK, points out that solar effects might still be possible. They might have acted to cool the climate in recent decades, but been overwhelmed. If so, the climate could be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than is generally thought, and future temperature increases might be greater than expected if a countervailing solar effect comes to an end.

Lockwood was “galvanised” again in response to criticism of his paper in the UK’s Daily Telegraph:

“I am one of the authors of the Royal Society global warming paper that you say is simple and fundamentally flawed (Comment, July 15). Simple? The idea was to present a straightforward demonstration, without recourse to complex climate models. Flawed? None of the three academic referees the paper was subjected to found any flaws.

Climate change is by far the greatest threat to everyone’s standard of living. Unlike political parties, companies, media stars, works of art, consumer products and even social trends and national economies, a scientific reality is immune to spin.”

(Prof) Mike Lockwood, Southampton University

Meanwhile, Piers Corbyn of Weather Action, who appeared in The Great Global Warming Swindle, had a letter published in The Guardian:

In desperate attempts to shore up their crumbling doctrine of man-made climate change, Professor Lockwood and Henry Davenport (Letters, July 14) themselves cherry-pick data. Prof Lockwood’s “refutation” of the decisive role of solar activity in driving climate is as valid as claiming a particular year was not warm by simply looking at the winter half of data. The most significant and persistent cycle of variation in the world’s temperature follows the 22-year magnetic cycle of the sun’s activity. So what does he do? He “finds” that for an 11-year stretch around 1987 to 1998 world temperatures rose, while there was a fall in his preferred measures of solar activity. A 22-year cycle and an 11-year cycle will of necessity move in opposite directions half the time.

The problem for global warmers is that there is no evidence that changing CO2 is a net driver for world climate. Feedback processes negate its potential warming effects. Their theory has no power to predict. It is faith, not science. I challenge them to issue a forecast to compete with our severe weather warnings – made months ago – for this month and August which are based on predictions of solar-particle and magnetic effects that there will be periods of major thunderstorms, hail and further flooding in Britain, most notably July 22-26, August 5-9 and August 18-23. These periods will be associated with new activity on the sun and tropical storms. We also forecast that British and world temperatures will continue to decline this year and in 2008. What do the global warmers forecast?

Piers Corbyn
Weather Action

The BBC’s verdict was ‘No Sun link’ to climate change.

In Part 2 I’ll take a closer look at some of what the L& F paper did, and didn’t say.

Clean Coal Not an Alternative: Media Release from Matthew Wright

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“The evidence is mounting internationally that so called clean coal will never be achieved as an economical alternative to Renewable Energy,” said Matthew Wright Beyond Zero Emissions Lead Campaigner.

The FutureGen Industrial Alliance has released an Initial Conceptual Design Report to investigate the feasibility of a ‘clean coal’ plant.

Beyond Zero Emissions believes that the report is largely an attempt to just promote coal burning as a necessary part of future global energy and in response has produced a document called the ‘FutureGen Conceptual Design Retort’.

The main aim of so called ‘clean coal’ is to capture the carbon that is ordinarily emitted into the atmosphere by conventional coal-fired power plants, and sequester it in underground reservoirs using a hypothetical technology called partial carbon capture and storage.

The Beyond Zero Emissions ‘Retort’ highlights the fact that the FutureGen plant won’t be fully tested until 2017 and a commercial plant will not be ready until 2022 at the earliest. This means that existing coal-fired plants will be pumping massive quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere for many years before ‘clean coal’ becomes commercially available, assuming it ever does. On page 5 of the Alliance’s report it states that the project was initiated to determine ‘if ‘ the technology is feasible, yet on the same page this is contradicted by the claim, “When successful, the FutureGen plant… will provide the basis for a new generation of reliable, environmentally benign, coal-fueled power plants…” By preemptively assuming a successful outcome, the Alliance exposes its agenda to promote coal as a “… necessary part of a sustainable, global energy portfolio”, despite their own acknowledgement that the technology to eliminate CO2 produced by burning coal may not be feasible.

“James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has stated that there should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until the technology to capture and sequester the CO2 emissions is available.” said Mr Wright.

“The FutureGen Alliance’s claim that they will successfully capture and sequester CO2 emissions at some indeterminate date is an attempt to lull us into accepting the continued operation and construction of coal-fired plants in contradiction of recommendations by eminent scientists.” said Mr Wright

As the world’s largest coal exporter, Australia is also keen to prove the viability of ‘clean coal’ with a proposed plant named ZeroGen. The ‘Retort’ comments that “…this initiative by the Queensland government has been a failure to date. Even the coal industry is sceptical about the plan to pipe carbon dioxide from the Stanwell power plant in Rockhampton, 220km away for geological storage.”

As Australia leaves proven renewable technologies sitting on the shelf, wind power is expanding at a phenomenal rate around the world. Wind power capacity increased by 25% globally in 2006, and is expected to grow by an average of 19% per year up to 2010.

This growth rate, and advances in wind power technology, is making wind power competitive with other energy sources. With this is mind, the ‘Retort’ questions how ‘clean coal’ can ever be cost-competitive given that by 2022 renewable energy is predicted to be less expensive than even conventional coal. ‘Clean coal’, with the extra costs associated with transporting and capturing the carbon emissions, will be more expensive still.

Given the long time-scale and a multitude of unanswered questions hanging over ‘clean coal’ technology, Beyond Zero Emissions suggests that it would be preferable for Australia to implement large-scale wind power and other zero emission technologies now.

“The Liberal and Labor parties have been duped by the coal industries mega marketing machine, lead by Rio Tinto and BHP” said Mr Wright.

“Claims by the industry that we’ll have commercially viable Clean Coal by 2015 ahead of the Americans are laughable”

FutureGen Initial Conceptual Design Report
http://www.futuregenalliance.org/publications/fg_icdr_052507_v2.pdf

‘FutureGen Conceptual Design Retort’, Beyond Zero Emissions.
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/files/FutureGen_Conceptual_Design_RetortV1.pdf

ABC Insight “Power Plays” – exposes the unease around ‘Clean Coal’
http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/index.php

‘Banning New Coal Power Plants Will Slow Warming’, by Staff Writers, Washington (AFP) Feb 27, 2007
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Banning_New_Coal_Power_Plants_Will_Slow_Warming_999.html

‘Coal sector in pipeline push”, Andrew Trounson,22 May 2007
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21771364-643,00.html

‘International wind markets expected to grow by an average of 19% per year up to 2010, according to latest GWEC report’, Global Wind Energy Council.
http://www.gwec.net/index.php?id=30&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=79&tx_ttnews[backPid]=4&cHash=7f90d916d4

‘Wind Power Gathers Speed’, NOVA, Australian Academy of Science.
http://www.science.org.au/nova/037/037key.htm

Climate Change and trace gases – peer reviewed paper by Hansen et al.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf

The Earth today stands in imminent peril
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece

No more coal power, says NASA
http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,23636,21295239-14305,00.html

Rio Tinto to cut coal jobs as drought bites into power
http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/rio-to-cut-coal-jobs-as-drought-bites/2007/05/16/1178995236604.html

CSIRO submission to the Prime Ministers Emission Trading Task force – to stay below 2 degrees C “we need” to keep below 375–550ppm CO2e – We are already at 430ppmm CO2e in earth’s atmosphere http://www.pmc.gov.au/emissionstrading/submissions/142_sub_emissionstrading.pdf

This media release online and printable pdf format
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/media/2007/08/01/12/beyond-zero-emissions-releases-clean-coal-retort-burning-through-lies