Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

Electric Taxis for Tokyo

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THE company promoting the mass adoption of electric cars, Better Place, has just received an award from the Japanese government to conduct a pilot project in Tokyo for the world’s first electric taxis with switchable batteries.   

Not so long ago the company got some money to make Canberra Australia’s first city with an electric vehicle infrastructure. 
 
The Tokyo electric taxi pilot will involve the construction of a permanent Better Place battery switch site in Central Tokyo.  This project will allow for testing of battery switching duration, vehicle range, and vehicle battery life under heavy use operating conditions.   [Read more…] about Electric Taxis for Tokyo

High Fashion and the Climate Crisis

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caroline modelling 06VOGUE is an exclusive magazine about what is really fashionable. This month Vogue Australia has a feature on the ‘Climate Crisis’.

Australian Green’s Senator Christine Milne explains in the article that unless we change our ways there may be no polar bears in the wild and Australia will lose its natural icons. The Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the snow caps on the Snowy Mountains will apparently be gone by 2030. Also, our beaches will have eroded and many Australian cities will be in managed retreat.

The solution, according to the Senator, is for women to “roll up their sleeves just as our great-grandmothers did in the Women’s Land Army during World War 11” and reduce our personal impact on the climate by one tonne of carbon dioxide in a year.

The fashionable way to achieve this is through simple choices including turning the airconditioner down a notch, catching the train once a week and reducing, reusing and recycling what we buy.

It can’t be easy getting a story in Vogue. It is testimony to the widespread appeal of this doom and gloom issue that it is featured in this month’s issue. Of course almost all of what is written is untrue, but then fashion has never been about the truth.

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Extraordinary times call for extraordinary action. By Senator Christine Milne pg 339-340. Vogue Australia. September 2009.

Vogue images are all copyright. So my daugher, Caroline, provides a fashion theme for this blog posting … she was on the catwalk at a hair fashion event a few years ago.

Understanding Ice Sheets and Collapse

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“FOR a glacier to maintain its present size it must have precipitation as snowfall at its source. This leads to a slightly complex relationship with temperature. If the regional climate becomes too dry, there will be no precipitation, so the glacier will diminish. This could happen if the region became cold enough to reduce evaporation from the ocean. If temperatures rise, evaporation is enhanced and so therefore is snowfall. Paradoxically a regional rise of temperature may lead to increased growth of glaciers and ice sheets. Today, for example, the ice sheets of both Antarctica and Greenland are growing by accumulation of snow…

“In the Greenland ice sheet several cores have more than 3 km of undisturbed ice which go back in time for over 105,000 years, much less than the Antarctic equivalent. The Vostok cores in Antarctica provide data for the past 414,000 years before the ice starts to be deformed. Dome F core reached 3035 m and Dome C core 3309 m, and both date back to 720,000 years. The Epica core in Antarctica goes back to 760,000 years, as does the Guliya core in Tibet. But what is more important than the age is that vast thicknesses of ice are preserved, and they retain complete records of deposition, in spite of the fact that temperatures at times during that period have been warmer than now. They do not fit the model of surface melting, either now or then. After three quarters of a million years of documented continuous accumulation, how can we believe that right now the world’s ice sheets are collapsing!” [Read more…] about Understanding Ice Sheets and Collapse

Stopping Volcanoes?

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If our climate catastrophists want to twiddle the dials and stop climate change, they need to play God and change radiation in the galaxy, the Sun, the Earth’s orbit, tidal cycles and plate tectonics. Once they have mastered volcanoes, then we can let them loose on climate change.  Read more here.