More hornbags, sauced from the places where they enjoy a free range lifestyle!
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Wildlife on the attack as Indonesia backs logging
THE Indonesian Government has approved a big increase in logging of its tropical forests, a decision that will lead to a rise in carbon emissions and, most likely, lead to further deadly attacks on villagers by tigers and elephants.
The end of a 14-month moratorium on logging comes amid a spate of macabre maulings of Indonesians by animals struggling to survive in their dwindling habitats.
On Wednesday, an 83-year-old man on the island of Sumatra was killed after 30 wild elephants stampeded through his village. The death followed a month of elephants running amok in the village, which is close to a trail commonly used by the threatened species.
"The elephant routes are almost gone," said Johny Mundung, the co-ordinator for the Indonesian environmental group Wahli in the Sumatran province of Riau, where the attack occurred.
Four people have died in Sumatra in the past 3½ months due to wild elephant attacks. However the deaths caused by Sumatran tigers have been even more dramatic.
The death by mauling of an illegal logger in Sumatra on Wednesday was the ninth in five weeks. About half of Sumatra's forests have been destroyed, the trees logged and, in some cases, replaced with palm oil and pulp plantations.
All the deaths caused by elephants and tigers occurred in areas where such plantations abound.
Indonesia's deforestation has earned it the title of the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China and the United States. More than 80 per cent of the emissions are caused by deforestation.
Indonesia has destroyed more than 28 million hectares of forest since 1990, much of it on swampy, densely forested peatlands that are the world's most potent carbon sinks, absorbing greenhouse gases spewed out by a rapidly industrialising world.
In 2007, the Indonesian Government announced it would stop the clearing of the peatlands, shortly before Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono pledged to reduce carbon emissions from forests by 50 per cent in 2009 and 95 per cent by 2025.
But last month, Indonesia's ministry of agriculture quietly announced it would issue permits for the destruction of another 2 million hectares of peatlands.
"SBY's goal is now mission impossible," said Yuyun Adradi, a Greenpeace forests campaigner.
A sharp fall in palm oil prices has led to calls from the industry, many of them substantial political donors, for more land concessions.
Officials from the agriculture ministry said the new permits would be carefully managed and represented only 8 per cent of the remaining peatlands.
But Greenpeace said that the logging will lead to a huge increase in carbon emissions, as much as 10 times the annual emissions from fossil fuel consumption in Indonesia.
The logging of marshy peatlands creates a environmental triple whammy. The cutting down of the forests and draining of the peat destroys the carbon sinks. Then the oxidisation of the exposed peat - created from thousands of years of organic matter composting - emits more carbon gases.
The third climate change calamity is caused when the denuded and drained peatlands catch fire during the dry season.
Peat is highly combustible and the fires typically burn underground and cannot be doused with traditional firefighting methods, creating smoky haze that drifts across the archipelago and neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia for months.
The end of a 14-month moratorium on logging comes amid a spate of macabre maulings of Indonesians by animals struggling to survive in their dwindling habitats.
On Wednesday, an 83-year-old man on the island of Sumatra was killed after 30 wild elephants stampeded through his village. The death followed a month of elephants running amok in the village, which is close to a trail commonly used by the threatened species.
"The elephant routes are almost gone," said Johny Mundung, the co-ordinator for the Indonesian environmental group Wahli in the Sumatran province of Riau, where the attack occurred.
Four people have died in Sumatra in the past 3½ months due to wild elephant attacks. However the deaths caused by Sumatran tigers have been even more dramatic.
The death by mauling of an illegal logger in Sumatra on Wednesday was the ninth in five weeks. About half of Sumatra's forests have been destroyed, the trees logged and, in some cases, replaced with palm oil and pulp plantations.
All the deaths caused by elephants and tigers occurred in areas where such plantations abound.
Indonesia's deforestation has earned it the title of the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China and the United States. More than 80 per cent of the emissions are caused by deforestation.
Indonesia has destroyed more than 28 million hectares of forest since 1990, much of it on swampy, densely forested peatlands that are the world's most potent carbon sinks, absorbing greenhouse gases spewed out by a rapidly industrialising world.
In 2007, the Indonesian Government announced it would stop the clearing of the peatlands, shortly before Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono pledged to reduce carbon emissions from forests by 50 per cent in 2009 and 95 per cent by 2025.
But last month, Indonesia's ministry of agriculture quietly announced it would issue permits for the destruction of another 2 million hectares of peatlands.
"SBY's goal is now mission impossible," said Yuyun Adradi, a Greenpeace forests campaigner.
A sharp fall in palm oil prices has led to calls from the industry, many of them substantial political donors, for more land concessions.
Officials from the agriculture ministry said the new permits would be carefully managed and represented only 8 per cent of the remaining peatlands.
But Greenpeace said that the logging will lead to a huge increase in carbon emissions, as much as 10 times the annual emissions from fossil fuel consumption in Indonesia.
The logging of marshy peatlands creates a environmental triple whammy. The cutting down of the forests and draining of the peat destroys the carbon sinks. Then the oxidisation of the exposed peat - created from thousands of years of organic matter composting - emits more carbon gases.
The third climate change calamity is caused when the denuded and drained peatlands catch fire during the dry season.
Peat is highly combustible and the fires typically burn underground and cannot be doused with traditional firefighting methods, creating smoky haze that drifts across the archipelago and neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia for months.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Time to chill from the doom, some further hornbags..
Yes, once again I am pleased to purvey some more fotographic efforts, compliments of Amsterdam Bier, and some brand of Vodka I,er, forgot.
Lah.
Poles apart but warming greater than thought
Marian Wilkinson Environment Editor
February 27, 2009
A TWO-YEAR research effort by the world's leading scientists has uncovered evidence of global warming's widespread effect.
Snow and ice continue to decline in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica, affecting sea-level rise and weather patterns, as well as human, animal and plant life.
The findings of International Polar Year, a global research project involving 60 nations, were released yesterday. They confirmed that warming in Antarctica was greater than previously understood and the rate of ice loss from Greenland was increasing.
Dr Ian Allison, of the Australian Antarctic Division, who co-chaired the project told the Herald the effect of global warming in Greenland was clear.
"In Greenland the rate of ice loss is getting greater over the last 10 years and the surface [ice] melt is definitely related to the warming," Dr Allison said.
The project's scientists summed up their findings, saying: "It now appears certain that both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass and thus raising sea level, and that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is growing."
They also warned "the potential for these ice sheets to undergo further rapid ice discharge remains the largest unknown in projections of the rate of sea-level rise by the [United Nations] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change".
Projections for the NSW coast released by the State Government suggest sea levels are expected to rise up to 40 centimetres by 2050 and 90 centimetres by 2100. One centimetre of sea-level rise can have erosion effects of up to one metre in low-lying areas.
The popular belief that Antarctica may be resistant to global warming has been undercut by International Polar Year's research. Data from satellites and weather stations confirmed that for the past 50 years it has been warming at the same rate as the rest of the planet.
Until recently it was only the fragile Antarctic Peninsula that juts up from West Antarctica, which was considered vulnerable to global warming. The peninsula is warming more rapidly than much of the rest of the world with temperatures rising 2.5 degrees in the past 50 years and ice loss increasing 140 per cent in the past decade.
The recent research confirms the Arctic sea ice shrank last year to its second-lowest extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979. The previous low was the summer of 2007. Some scientists are predicting there will be an ice-free Arctic in summer by 2012.
Since the findings by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, it has been widely accepted that the planet's warming is almost certainly due to greenhouse gases being released from the burning of fossil fuels, land clearing and cement manufacturing.
The new research warns greenhouse emissions could rapidly increase from the Arctic warming. The Arctic contains large amounts of greenhouse gas that has been locked in permafrost and below the Arctic Ocean.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Time to relax, some further hornbags..
Chinese New Year in town, and a few quick grab shots whilst taking a somewhat circular route to the pub.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Climate change may be even worse: expert
No, and expert is not the Prophet of doom himself...he's only bringing the message lah...
Read on!
It seems the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough, a top climate scientist warned.
It has been just over a year since the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a landmark report warning of rising sea levels, expanding deserts, more intense storms and the extinction of up to 30 per cent of plant and animal species.
But recent climate studies suggest that report significantly underestimates the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years, a senior member of the panel warned.
"We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected," said Chris Field, who was a co-ordinating lead author of the report.
This is "primarily because developing countries like China and India saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal", Field said in a statement ahead of a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Without decisive action to slow global warming, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and thaw the Arctic tundra, potentially releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide that has been stored for thousands of years.
That could raise temperatures even more and create "a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century."
"We don't want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot," said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.
The amount of carbon that could be released is staggering.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and estimated 350 billions tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been released through the burning of fossil fuels.
The new estimate of the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic's permafrost soils is around 1,000 billion tons. And the Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the globe.
Several recent climate models have estimated that the loss of tropical rainforests to wildfires, deforestation and other causes could increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 10 to 100 parts per million by the end of the century.
The current level is about 380 parts per million.
"Tropical forests are essentially inflammable," Field said. "You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little bit, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires."
Recent studies have also shown that global warming is reducing the ocean's ability to store carbon by altering wind patterns in the Southern Ocean.
"As the Earth warms, it generates faster winds over the oceans surrounding Antarctica," Field explained.
"These winds essentially blow the surface water out of the way, allowing water with higher concentrations of CO2 to rise to the surface. This higher-CO2 water is closer to CO2-saturated, so it takes up less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."
Field is co-chair of the group charged with assessing the impacts of climate change on social, economic and natural systems for the IPCC's fifth assessment due in 2014.
The 2007 fourth assessment presented at a "very conservative range of climate outcomes" but the next report will "include futures with a lot more warming," Field said.
"We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought."
AAP 15/2/09
Read on!
It seems the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough, a top climate scientist warned.
It has been just over a year since the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a landmark report warning of rising sea levels, expanding deserts, more intense storms and the extinction of up to 30 per cent of plant and animal species.
But recent climate studies suggest that report significantly underestimates the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years, a senior member of the panel warned.
"We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected," said Chris Field, who was a co-ordinating lead author of the report.
This is "primarily because developing countries like China and India saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal", Field said in a statement ahead of a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Without decisive action to slow global warming, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and thaw the Arctic tundra, potentially releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide that has been stored for thousands of years.
That could raise temperatures even more and create "a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century."
"We don't want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot," said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.
The amount of carbon that could be released is staggering.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and estimated 350 billions tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been released through the burning of fossil fuels.
The new estimate of the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic's permafrost soils is around 1,000 billion tons. And the Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the globe.
Several recent climate models have estimated that the loss of tropical rainforests to wildfires, deforestation and other causes could increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 10 to 100 parts per million by the end of the century.
The current level is about 380 parts per million.
"Tropical forests are essentially inflammable," Field said. "You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little bit, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires."
Recent studies have also shown that global warming is reducing the ocean's ability to store carbon by altering wind patterns in the Southern Ocean.
"As the Earth warms, it generates faster winds over the oceans surrounding Antarctica," Field explained.
"These winds essentially blow the surface water out of the way, allowing water with higher concentrations of CO2 to rise to the surface. This higher-CO2 water is closer to CO2-saturated, so it takes up less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."
Field is co-chair of the group charged with assessing the impacts of climate change on social, economic and natural systems for the IPCC's fifth assessment due in 2014.
The 2007 fourth assessment presented at a "very conservative range of climate outcomes" but the next report will "include futures with a lot more warming," Field said.
"We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought."
AAP 15/2/09
Friday, February 13, 2009
Record rain in Bourke, floods to hit
A record 200mm of rain has fallen in Bourke as the top end of NSW prepares for floods.
The weather bureau has issued a flood watch and a severe weather warning for the area, just days after flooding claimed lives and forced dozens of evacuations in Queensland.
Heavy falls are expected to continue over the central north of NSW on Saturday, followed by a deluge over the mid-north coast.
Bourke experienced the brunt of the storm conditions on Friday night with more than 200mm falling, causing flash flooding in the district, a State Emergency Service spokeswoman said.
But half of the calls made to the emergency service were from people in Sydney's metropolitan area, she said.
"We've had approximately 40 requests for assistance across the state," the spokeswoman told AAP.
"Approximately 20 of those came from the Sydney metropolitan area - they were related to trees down."
There were no injuries reported and no threats to property, but the worst is still to come, she said.
Heavy rain was expected to hit towns such as Walgett, while further south, Tamworth and Inverell could also be affected, the manager of the Bureau of Meteorology's Flood Warning Centre Gordon McKay said.
Heavy rain was also expected on Saturday and Sunday on the mid-north and north coasts, with the area between Coffs Harbour and Kempsey likely to see falls of 150-200mm.
"We expect over the weekend a low pressure cell to develop off the coast of northern NSW, and that's likely to lead to very heavy rainfalls," Mr McKay said.
Update Mon 16/2/09 from the Sydney Morning Herald lah...............
The heavy weather has also hit some parts of the state inland. Drought-ravaged Bourke woke on Saturday morning to find itself knee-deep in water.
Residents said a thunderstorm dropping hailstones as large as golf balls had swept in on Friday evening, followed by rain that did not let up for 12 hours.
The town got 200 millimetres of rain overnight - a third of its annual rainfall, and the biggest single fall any of the residents could remember.
"I think the previous record was about five inches [125 millimetres] in one go but this has well and truly superseded this " said a local SES controller, Stephen Walsh.
The mayor, Andrew Lewis, said it was a "one-in-120-year event".
Jonathan Roe, a reporter for the The Western Herald, said some children were swimming in the streets on Saturday morning. Other residents were out in their cars touring the flooded areas, and marvelling at the sight of parts of the town submerged.
The rain cut several major highways out of town and paradoxically left residents short of drinking water. Flooding had overwhelmed the pumps that extract the town water supply from the Darling River.
The SES was still working late yesterday to clear water from 25 houses.
Farmers had mixed responses to the downpour.
A cotton grower, Ian Cole, said some of his neighbours had suffered heavy damage to cotton crops, particularly from hail. Another reported that his 1500 sheep were now having to be extracted from " black mud".
But generally graziers were happy as the rain would mean good winter grasses for stock and a "flushing out" of the Upper Darling all the way down to the Menindee Lakes.
The weather left Bourke residents scratching their heads about what would come next.
"Floods up north, and bushfires in Victoria, and here we are in a massive drought and we get two-thirds of our annual rainfall in 12 hours," Mr Walsh said. "We hope we're not going to go without for the next 12 months."
The weather bureau has issued a flood watch and a severe weather warning for the area, just days after flooding claimed lives and forced dozens of evacuations in Queensland.
Heavy falls are expected to continue over the central north of NSW on Saturday, followed by a deluge over the mid-north coast.
Bourke experienced the brunt of the storm conditions on Friday night with more than 200mm falling, causing flash flooding in the district, a State Emergency Service spokeswoman said.
But half of the calls made to the emergency service were from people in Sydney's metropolitan area, she said.
"We've had approximately 40 requests for assistance across the state," the spokeswoman told AAP.
"Approximately 20 of those came from the Sydney metropolitan area - they were related to trees down."
There were no injuries reported and no threats to property, but the worst is still to come, she said.
Heavy rain was expected to hit towns such as Walgett, while further south, Tamworth and Inverell could also be affected, the manager of the Bureau of Meteorology's Flood Warning Centre Gordon McKay said.
Heavy rain was also expected on Saturday and Sunday on the mid-north and north coasts, with the area between Coffs Harbour and Kempsey likely to see falls of 150-200mm.
"We expect over the weekend a low pressure cell to develop off the coast of northern NSW, and that's likely to lead to very heavy rainfalls," Mr McKay said.
Update Mon 16/2/09 from the Sydney Morning Herald lah...............
The heavy weather has also hit some parts of the state inland. Drought-ravaged Bourke woke on Saturday morning to find itself knee-deep in water.
Residents said a thunderstorm dropping hailstones as large as golf balls had swept in on Friday evening, followed by rain that did not let up for 12 hours.
The town got 200 millimetres of rain overnight - a third of its annual rainfall, and the biggest single fall any of the residents could remember.
"I think the previous record was about five inches [125 millimetres] in one go but this has well and truly superseded this " said a local SES controller, Stephen Walsh.
The mayor, Andrew Lewis, said it was a "one-in-120-year event".
Jonathan Roe, a reporter for the The Western Herald, said some children were swimming in the streets on Saturday morning. Other residents were out in their cars touring the flooded areas, and marvelling at the sight of parts of the town submerged.
The rain cut several major highways out of town and paradoxically left residents short of drinking water. Flooding had overwhelmed the pumps that extract the town water supply from the Darling River.
The SES was still working late yesterday to clear water from 25 houses.
Farmers had mixed responses to the downpour.
A cotton grower, Ian Cole, said some of his neighbours had suffered heavy damage to cotton crops, particularly from hail. Another reported that his 1500 sheep were now having to be extracted from " black mud".
But generally graziers were happy as the rain would mean good winter grasses for stock and a "flushing out" of the Upper Darling all the way down to the Menindee Lakes.
The weather left Bourke residents scratching their heads about what would come next.
"Floods up north, and bushfires in Victoria, and here we are in a massive drought and we get two-thirds of our annual rainfall in 12 hours," Mr Walsh said. "We hope we're not going to go without for the next 12 months."
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