Environment

One of the people behind a spoof study claiming that zillions of bacteria in the oceans are to blame for global warming has owned up, saying it was meant to show that some sceptics will uncritically grab any evidence casting doubt on most scientists’ view that human activities are the main cause.

David Thorpe, who works at Cyberium web design company in Wales, said an academic spent about 4 days writing the 4,000 word article that said naturally occurring bacteria in the oceans were emitting 300 times more greenhouse gases than industries. Thorpe said he then spent a couple of days formatting the prank report.

“Anyone looking at it for a few moments could see that it was a spoof. The fact that people grab hold of it to defend their positions just seems to show that they are as credulous as they accuse their opponents of being, or perhaps even more so,” Thorpe told me.

“The point is that we need to have proper scientific evidence to base policies on,” he said. He welcomed sceptics who argued from a knowledge of scientific evidence. “But there are many people willing to jump on anything that supports their argument, whether it’s true or not.”

The academic wants to stay anonymous, and the study has been taken down by the web host. Thorpe owned up in a blog at the weekend, after denying any knowledge of a hoax when I phoned him last week. It is hard to tell how many people were taken in.

The prank won an expert audience partly because it was distributed in an e-mail to 2,000 scientists by a British social anthropologist, Benny Peiser, who agrees that climate change is happening but says that the gloom is often exaggerated. Peiser shot it down as a “nice hoax” after just over an hour. As the New York Times says, that shows the power of the Internet to “amplify, and then dismantle, fictions at light speed”. It even got a brief mention from conservative U.S. radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, after a misunderstanding before a quick retraction.

…And yes, I suppose that Thorpe might be hoaxing me in this blog too … but he was listed as the administrator of the original site, which has now been closed down.

For anyone who missed it, you can puzzle over equations found in the hoax study like this one:

4δ161 x Λ³Жญ5,6,1,8Φ-4 = {(ΣΨ²Њyt3 - 14๖P9) x 49}

2β x ⅜kxgt -§

  The world might squabbling over the Kyoto Protocol and how best to fight climate change.

     But a project involving thousands of ocean robots shows nations can still cooperate when it comes to weather forecasting and understanding the science of global warming.

     The 26-nation Argo project involves deploying and maintaining an array of tube-shaped robots 1.5 metres long across the world’s oceans.

    The robots, called Argos, take a variety of measurements, such as salinity, temperature and ocean pressure. The data is then sent via satellite back to governments, weather forecasting centres and universities.

     Deployments of the $27,000 robots began seven years ago and this month marks the first time 3,000 Argos are operating at any one time. The trick is to maintain that number because the robots have a 4-to-5 year lifespan before their batteries run out.

     ”Argo will allow us to grapple with some of the big climate questions, as well as provide insight into how the ever-changing ocean weather affects marine ecosystems,” said Susan Wijffels of the Australia’s top research body, the state-backed CSIRO.

    She said the project was causing a lot of re-examination of past data of how the ocean has warmed over the past 60 years.

    Past measurements relied on data taken from ships or equipment moored at sea. Argos, however, can descend up to 2 kilometres and take a variety of measurements before surfacing to send their data. Once that’s done, the robots head back to the
depths once more for another cycle of data collection.

    The data can be used to improve weather forecasting and refine complex computer models showing the global impacts of climate change.

    The Argos now allowed scientists to track ocean heat content on a 2 or 3-month basis in real time, said Wijffels, of the CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans National Research Flagship programme.

    At times ocean heat content varies, because of El Nino or a major volcanic eruption.

    “The other exciting thing Argo is allowing us to do is to look at long-term changes in ocean salinity,” she told Reuters.

    This helped track how rainfall was changing over the oceans.

    “The ocean is like a giant integrator…a giant rain gauge. It averages all that rainfall. It is a climate warning signal. It allows us to pick up tiny signals that are very hard to pick up in the noisy data in the atmosphere,” she said.

    Member states of the project, including Australia, China, India, the EU, South Korea and the United States, are meeting this week in Hobart, in southern Australia, to discuss data from the network and how to further refine the robots and their
sensors.

    The problem with Argos, though, is that not many people have heard about the robots or know what they look like.

    Earlier this year, an Australian prawn fisherman snared one in his nets off Mooloolaba in south-east Queensland state — thousands of kilometres from where the probe was originally released.

     The robot had stopped sending its regular radio signals weeks earlier but came to life again in the back of the fisherman’s van.

     Australian scientists eventually tracked down the missing probe by tracking its radio signals and just managed to save the robot from being converted into a letter box by the fisherman.
 (Michael Byrnes in Sydney contributed to this entry)
 

Small island states meeting in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean this week are working on a resolution saying that climate change is a threat to human rights.

Is it?

The idea of linking human rights and the environment — a strategy also adopted by the Inuit in the Arctic who have also launched a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights – is a way to put pressure on all nations to do more to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases.

An attraction for petitioners is that it would work out a lot cheaper than the option of suing major emitters for doing too little to curb emissions from factories, power plants and cars – a charge most often aimed at the United States. Most small island states lack the cash to try the courts.

And, even accepting findings by the U.N. climate panel that it is ”very likely” that human activities are the main cause of recent climate change, it would be hard to persuade a court to order countries to pay compensation or tighten curbs on greenhouse gases.

A human rights route might be easier because it seeks to spread responsibility to all emitters.

If your island home is washed away by rising seas, or if Inuit cannot hunt seals because sea ice is no longer solid, then that might be interpreted as a violation of basic rights, for instance to property, culture and freedom of movement, laid out by the United Nations in the 1948 universal declaration of human rights.

Article 13 says, for instance that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” That might be impossible if a coral atoll has been washed away by rising seas and storm surges — the Maldives comprises 1,200 coral islands less than 2 metres above sea level.

Does it make sense to try to relate global warming to human rights? Tell us your view.

It must have seemed almost too good to be true to climate sceptics who doubt mounting evidence that global warming is man-made — finally, a report showing that nature is to blame.

Only one problem — it’s a hoax.

Why someone went to the trouble of creating a previously unknown “Journal of Geoclimatic Studies” based in Japan, is anyone’s guess.

The study says bacteria naturally living in sediments of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans emit 300 times more carbon dioxide than industrial activity — one of very few reports to challenge findings by the U.N. climate panel that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are “very likely” to be the main cause of warming.

The pranksers even provided obscure details of “benthic bacteria” or “sample invariants from diachronically sectioned quadrants in the western Atlantic: towards a pneumatic equation for bacterial mass”. And if that wasn’t hard enough evidence, here’s a sample of an equation for the mathematically minded…

4δ161 x Λ³Жญ5,6,1,8Φ-4 = {(ΣΨ²Њyt3 - 14๖P9) x 49}

2β x ⅜kxgt -§

Gothenburg University in Sweden, where two of the four authors were listed as working, told me it was a hoax, saying it had never heard of them. Other scientists also said it was a spoof. Sceptical bloggers who had rushed to embrace the findings — there isn’t much research challenging growing evidence that fossil fuels are a main cause of warming — quickly deleted them…

“This could not be more damaging to man-made global warming theory,” wrote one sceptic in a blog. “I somehow doubt if this is going to be on the BBC news.” Another U.S. commentator said it was a “blockbuster” report.

One blogger who saw through the hoax gleefully said it “put the fun back into lying about science.”

“We’re just the website design company,” said David Thorpe at Cyberium in Wales, listed as the administrator of the site. “I don’t know anything about the content. We were just asked to put the website up.”

Phone calls to the owner of the site, listed as being in Japan, went nowhere and e-mails have bounced back.

…So who is behind this? Any ideas?

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Take a look at the world through carbon-colored glasses. This double map, by Jonathan Patz of the University of Wisconsin, offers a graphic way to see the biggest emitters of climate-warming carbon, and at the countries that suffer most from carbon-induced climate change.

The top map shows per capita carbon emissions, the bottom shows the climate-related burden of disease in different regions of the world. It’s fairly plain to see in the small inset maps that are in color; it’s even easier to track in the big gray maps.

On the emissions map, the United States is a big fatso, the countries of Western Europe are a bit hefty, and China and India look almost as they would on a regular map and Africa and Latin America are tiny. The disease-impact map tells a different story: the United States, Europe and Russia are thinner than Paris fashion models and China is notably svelte, while South Asia, Africa and the Middle East are elephantine.

Patz, a professor at the university’s medical school and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, came up with the graphic to show the inequity of the consequences of climate change, and he sees this as an ethical crisis.

“Those most at risk from climate change are the least responsible for causing the problem,” Patz told reporters at a meeting of the American Public Health Association. “But there’s a caveat … I wouldn’t want Americans to think that bad health outcomes from climate change are out there, somewhere. Because we’re in a globalized world, an increase in disease anywhere could be adverse to our own health.”

More information is available in a Reuters story here and from the University of Wisconsin-Madison here.

   The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in December won’t be frosty despite a 2002 row between the U.N. Climate Panel  and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who are sharing the award for alerting the world to the risks of global warming.

Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says he and Gore were already ”very good friends” even before they publicly buried the hatchet and praised each other on learning last month that Gore and the IPCC had won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

A diplomatic source said Gore phoned Pachauri some weeks before the prize annoucement to apologise for denouncing him as the “let’s drag our feet” candidate to lead the IPCC in an article in the New York Times in 2002 when Pachauri was elected with the backing of U.S. President George W. Bush. Pachauri hit back a few days later in a letter accusing Gore of making “derogatory comments” and of unpredictably changing his mind.

So I asked Pachauri — in an e-mail he confirmed he and Gore spoke before the Prize announcement but says he does not want to go into details.

    He added: “I had also seen Mr. Al Gore a couple of years ago during the Clinton Global Initiative, and we had a very cordial exchange…I have known Mr. Al Gore since the days he was a senator and we have been very good friends all along except for the brief misunderstanding that found expression in print in the New York Times in April 2002.”

In 2002, Pachauri won election by 72 votes to 49 against the then IPCC chair Robert Watson, a U.S. citizen who was outspoken in telling governments to do far more to combat warming.

    In fact, Pachauri has been outspoken too — diplomats say he has been far from the foot dragger portrayed by Gore. Rather than dwell on the uncertainties of climate science, the IPCC this year said it was at least 90 percent sure that human activities are the main cause of global warming in the past half-century.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will find his diplomatic skills tested on a trip this month to Antarctica, Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

His visit to Antarctica comes as China, Chile, Britain and others are scrambling to stake claims to the territory. Here’s the latest from Beijing on competing claims to the area that is protected by a 1959 treaty which prevents mineral exploitation of the continent except for scientific research.

Then in Brazil, Ban plans to visit an ethanol plant to make up his own mind about an issue that has sparked fierce controversy. One U.N. expert said recently converting food crops to fuel was a “crime against humanity” — click here to read that story.

 Ban was diplomatic when asked where he stands on biofuels before his departure on Tuesday. 

 ”The U.N. research report published this year underscored that biofuels (have) greater promise in addressing these global warming issues through low-carbon emissions,” Ban said.

“At the same time … it is true that there are some concerns expressed, by specialists or experts, on the possible impact on food security,” he said. 

 ”The elimination of extreme poverty should be also a top priority. Therefore, how to reconcile or have some balanced development addressing these issues will be very important.” 

We already have a debate going on this subject here, so tell us what you think.

  In two years, an entire town in far north Queensland will be powered by the sun. The Australian state has plenty of sun — and plenty of coal.

     In fact, Queensland, a major coal user and exporter, has energy resources galore. But what’s interesting is that in the case of Cloncurry, population 4,500, the sums worked out in favour of solar power, not coal or diesel.

    The A$31 million ($28.6 mln) project, the first of its type for the state, works like this:
     The sun’s rays are tracked by thousands of mirrors, called heliostats, and the beams of intense light are concentrated at the top of 54 shortish towers containing blocks of graphite.

    The sun’s energy heats up the blocks through which water passes, creating steam that drives conventional electricity turbines.

     The 10-megawatt system works day and night because the graphite blocks retain their heat for many hours.

     The town was a natural choice. Abundant sunshine and the notoriety of recording Australia’s hottest day — 53 degrees Celsius (127 degrees Fahrenheit)  in the shade in 1889.

     An Australian company, named Lloyd Energy Systems, developed the graphite block storage and boiler system, said CEO Steve Hollis from Cooma, in New South Wales state, where a test solar tower system is about to go online after years of development (pictured below).

    Lloyd Energy is part of a consortium building the Cloncurry project and the Queensland government has chipped in A$7 million. The government said the solar power station will mean a cut of about 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent
each year for Queensland.

    “The problem with a lot of these rural towns throughout Australia is that the loads are all going up as everyone gets air conditioners and the country energy authorities can’t keep the supply up to them because the lines were never ever designed for the loads that they are getting,” said Hollis.

     “So what they have been forced to do is to put in supplementary supports for the systems, which means either upgrading their networks, that is, duplication of their transmission lines, or in fact put in diesel systems.”

     For the rural energy supply authority that provides power to Cloncurry, solar worked out to be a cheaper alternative, Hollis said. That means the town’s residents won’t have to pay any more for their electricity, he added. The Queensland government said it will monitor the project before further investment. Other towns have already been identified as potential candidates for solar power stations.

    In the meantime, coal will remain king in Queensland.

    “Coal will always have a role in the state’s generation mix,” Ellen McIntyre, senior media adviser for the Office of the Minister for Mines and Energy in Brisbane.

    “Coal-fired generation currently accounts for over 80 percent of total electricity generated in Queensland. It’s hard to imagine the state’s electricity generation mix without coal, in any scenario, in the next 20 years.

    “That’s simply because we have over 32 billion tonnes of high-quality, low-cost, easily accessible black coal, sufficient to last for more than 300 years,” she added.

    The state, though, was looking at curbing its reliance on fossil fuels by developing clean-coal technology as well as renewable energy.

    While more solar power projects are planned elsewhere in Australia, the country still remains a target of criticism for refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions. It’s bound to take many more Cloncurry projects to change that perception.

Here’s some advice you probably hope you never need: if you encounter mountain gorillas in your garden, don’t make direct eye contact. In fact, it’s a good idea to look down modestly. But stand your ground and if possible, don’t be alone. And hope that the gorillas are in a big group too.

This advice comes from Arthur Mugisha, a program manager at the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, which works in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the few mountain gorillas live. There are perhaps 700 or so.

As lovely as it may be to live near a national park that harbors gorillas, the big primates can be a problem to those with croplands near the park. The mountain gorillas are not shy about grabbing bananas or other plants they savor.

“These gorillas are intelligent and they know they are crop-raiding,” Mugisha said on a recent trip to Washington to promote his organization. “So when there is an organized group that comes we can actually chase them without harming them.”

Mugisha and others have organized the people who live nearby into human gorilla conflict groups to keep the gorillas where they belong and out of local farm fields. But sometimes people go into the forest to see the gorillas, and that’s where Mugisha’s expert advice comes in.

“If you are in the forest and the gorillas decide to attack, or when you are going to chase the gorillas in the garden, don’t go alone,” he said. “Go in a group. And do not separate yourselves, one going this way and one going this way.”

The gorillas will be in a group too — from 10 to 40 traveling together.

“The bigger (group) they are, the better — the better for them to handle because they have got a bigger stake. They have got younger ones, they have got females and probably each group has got an alpha male which protects them. So he has more stake if he confronts a big group (of people), he knows he has got many (gorilla) kids to look after, many females to look after, the best thing is to retreat, not put up a fight.”

Specific advice from Mugisha:

“Don’t make aggravating noises. Do not separate the silverback from the young ones because it’s his job to protect the young ones … He will do anything, including grabbing you, in order to rescue the young ones. So when you are chasing (gorillas) do not stand between the silverback and the young ones.”

And don’t get between the gorillas and their exit path back into the forest, Mugisha said.

More information can be seen in the Reuters story here.