Environmentalists have been saying for years that we need to prevent climate change but the emphasis is changing to adapting to it because of the mounting evidence that global warming is happening faster than expected and that it’s already too late to avert the most dangerous consequences.

Al Gore is one of those who has made this change.

For many years green groups have said that adaptation, or coping with climate change, rather than stopping it, was a bit like putting out a fire on the Titanic: desirable, no doubt, but the main thing was to change course.

Two things have changed attitudes:

• Evidence that global warming is happening faster than expected. Manish Bapna of the World Resources Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, believes “it is already too late to avert dangerous consequences, so we must learn to adapt.”

• Evidence is growing that climate change hits two specific groups of people disproportionately and unfairly. They are the poorest of the poor and those living in island states.  That is 1 billion people in 100 countries.

Tony Nyong, a climate-change scientist in Nairobi, argues that people in poor countries used to see global warming as a Western matter: the rich had caused it and would with luck solve it. But the first impact of global warming has been on the very things the poorest depend on most.

The victims share two characteristics. They are too poor to defend themselves by expensive flood controls or sophisticated public-health programmes. And (unlike China or Brazil) their own carbon footprints are tiny. Kirk Smith, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls climate change the world’s biggest regressive tax: the poorest pay for the behaviour of the rich.

If sea levels go up, do you build sea walls or rehouse people? If infectious diseases are rising, do you spend money trying to eradicate the worst ones, like malaria, or on health and nutrition in general? The latter makes sense but most donors concentrate on single-disease efforts. George Soros, a financier who runs a chain of philanthropic organisations, says that in their experience, few people in poor countries have a clear idea about climate change and how to cope with it.

Technorati Tags: climate, climate change, adapting to climate change

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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The latest Newspoll showed that 88% of Australians wanted to see a carbon reduction scheme, with 61% saying it should happen regardless of what other countries did, while a survey of the largest 300 listed companies found that only 28% provided any information on “policies or practices that have been undertaken to reduce greenhouse gases”.

A clear majority, 58 per cent, said they would be prepared to pay more for energy as a result of a carbon trading scheme, although 50 per cent of Coalition voters were against paying more for petrol, electricity and gas.

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens said an emissions trading scheme would not result in higher interest rates, provided the costs, beyond the initial start-up, were relatively small.  He said the initial suggestion had been that a $20-a-tonne price on carbon would lift the consumer price index by 0.9 per cent.

Half of Australia’s biggest companies are failing to provide public information about their environmental or greenhouse policies, according to research on company disclosure.

The lack of disclosure is denying shareholders information that will become vital when an emissions trading scheme is introduced, and is also limiting the commercial opportunities available to companies among today’s environmentally aware public.  A survey (by Grant Thornton) of the largest 300 companies listed on the ASX found that only 28% provided any information on “policies or practices that have been undertaken to reduce greenhouse gases”.

Technorati Tags: carbon, carbon reduction, business, business keeps quiet, Newspoll, Australia, global warming

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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New Zealand won the Bledisloe Cup (Rugby) and also appears to be well and truly winning the climate change action!  They have passed a climate change bill to set up the country’s emissions trading scheme to commence in 2009 and making it the first national cap-and-trade process outside of Europe.

The bill faced a rocky path to approval and the minority-led government was forced into months of negotiation with the Greens and New Zealand First parties to finally win majority support.

The Climate Change Bill will eventually manage all sectors of the economy with limits on the amount of greenhouse gas they can emit.   If a business breaches their limit, they will have to buy credits from users that produced emissions below their ceiling.

The New Zealand will phase in sectors with the following dates – forestry from 2008, transport by 2009, stationary energy such as coal-fired power stations by 2010 and agricultural waste by 2013.   This will include all emissions.

Technorati Tags: Kiwis commit to cap and trade by 2009, climate change, trade, trade process, Europe, Climate change bill

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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They found that there are “escalating problems created by the divergent and inconsistent approach across the country” to waste management.

The report says that the Environment Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC) should draw up a national r strategy to “seek consistent policies between the states and adopt a principles-based approach; including sustainability, the waste hierarchy, extended producer responsibility and user pays cost reflective pricing as guiding principles.”

They were particularly concerned that although there are available alternatives, too much organic material is disposed in landfill because it is cheap, even though this releases methane gas “creating an environmental liability for future generations”.

“They stated that the waste sector will continue to use the low cost option, which is often disposal in landfill…and they want environmental and social costs built into waste management pricing structures.”

It is very important to reduce the organic material going to landfill and also arrange to capture and use of landfill gas emissions,.

This comes at a time when a housing development in Victoria has the residents being told to move out of their homes because of the imminent danger of a major methane gas explosion from a nearby old landfill site.  These poor people are trying to cope with finding more accommodation while still paying their existing mortgages on their near new homes.  This is the sort of nonsense that must not be allowed to happen.  Likewise increasing methane emissions for future generations to cope with is also totally outrageous.

Technorati Tags: Senate committee wants national waste framework, senate, senate committee, national waste, framework

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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The northern hemisphere is hotter now than at any time in the past 1500 years, according to the most comprehensive reconstruction of the earth’s temperature over the last two millenniums.

It’s likely the southern hemisphere is also warmer than ever although data is sketchier, claim US and British scientists.

The new findings come from a team led by Michael E. Mann, director of the Environmental Systems Institute at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.  In an article in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they reported that they’d pulled together the largest ever set of climate data, enabling them to assess changes on decadal and centennial scales.

Associate Professor Mann and his colleagues used “natural climate archives” like tree-rings, corals and ice cores, along with historical documentary records and recently updated instrumental data to reconstruct the climate of past centuries in unprecedented detail and compare it with existing conditions.

“Our results extend previous conclusions that recent northern hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context,” they claimed.

While the new research also concluded that the so-called Medieval warmth from 950-1100 was hotter than previously thought, the last decade was hotter still.

“The findings deeply reinforce the incontrovertible conclusion that we are warming rapidly outside natural variability,” said climate scientist Andy Pitman, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW.

There is obviously a need to obtain more southern hemisphere data. That would help scientists further refine the climate change models used to predict future conditions in regions around the world.

Technorati Tags: more firm data on warming, global warming, climate change, Climate Change Research Centre, university of NSW

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Is bamboo a plant we should be using more in this country?
•    All over Asia bamboo is used for scaffolding when people build multi story buildings.  It is an amazing sight for those of use used to high embodied energy steel scaffolding.  I have not seen the relative strengths and safety factors but there was a lot used on some very tall buildings.
•    Have you seen and felt cloth made from bamboo?  It is beautifully soft!
•    Apparently bamboo also makes wonderful paper
Bamboo is a fast growing “grass” and wonderfully strong.  If it is so good for all these uses should we be using it more?

However, here is a very exciting find by some Australian scientists in northern New South Wales.   Leigh Sullivan, from Southern Cross University, explained the significance of the find to told The ABC’s 7.30 Report.  “This is a really old growth of bamboo here and it’s been here at least 50 years according to the aerial photographs.  So it’s been here a long time shedding leaves onto the ground and when you actually look at the accumulation of the organic matter what we can see is a really thick spongy layer full of organic matter in various states of decay with thick mulch material beneath it.”

Amongst the decay are thousands of tiny capsules of carbon known as plant stones, invisible to the naked eye and virtually indestructible.  “Plant stone is just like a glass jar that has the carbon inside it and that gets deposited into the soil when the plant dies and, basically, it’s very stable, it’s there for thousands of years,” said Jeffrey Parr, also of Southern Cross University.  “The carbon is actually enclosed by a silica coating. The silica coating protects it from being decomposed in soils.”

Apparently the “plant stones” from sugar cane are even plumper, and hold even more carbon.

Some plants make more plant stones than others and with the warming world now desperate to capture and store carbon, these scientists believe they’ve hit on something big.   They were measuring the plant stones to carbon date some ancient soil when they suddenly realised the significance for global warming.

While sugar does not deposit as fast as bamboo, it’s still locking carbon into plant substance at a rapid rate.  With sugar, for every tonne of carbon put into the atmosphere, 2.6 tonne are taken out.  Apparently the key is choosing the right type of sugar cane.

While Australia’s emissions trading scheme, won’t initially include agriculture because of the difficulty measuring things like emissions from things like cattle burping and carbon capture from forests

Until now, people have only concentrated on forests for carbon capturer but tress seldom make plant stones and they give off carbon when they’re cut down.  By contrast, plant stones made by crops and grasses are secured for thousands of years, and if the crop’s harvested and regrown, more new plant stones are created, and they’re easy to measure.

The problem with trees for carbon sequestration is that if you have a fire, a disease, or you want to change the forest back to a paddock, you lose the stored carbon.   With plant stone carbon we can actually get the carbon in the crop and estimate it quite easily before it hits the soil.”
Interesting  Perhaps we should be planting more bamboo.

Technorati Tags: can bamboo save the world, bamboo, global warming, climate change, save the world, bamboo

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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This week he urged Australia to lift its focus on retaining natural forests and grasslands in his “targets and trajectories” report, but the Clean Energy Council said his recommended carbon price caps were not high enough and we need much more renewable energy.  Here is the link to his report http://www.garnautreview.org.au.

We need much more biosequestration to soak up carbon emissions particularly given its potential to reduce the impact on industry of the Government’s carbon reduction measures.

My personal feeling is that his recommended 10% target is ridiculously low.  We really need a 40% reduction target but I felt that a 20% one was a least a compromise between the needs of our children and grandchildren and the needs of business.  Yes I did put the kids first!

Technorati Tags: more from climate change advisor Ross Garnaut, Ross Garnaut, climate, climate change, clean energy council

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Personal wind farms are fast becoming a status symbol in Hollywood, Washington and places in between.   Former President George H.W. Bush has one. Jay Leno does, too. So does Maryland Congressman Roscoe Bartlett all have their own personal wind turbines.

In fact while we complain about even being able to see wind farms in Australia, lots of Americans have them in their front gardens and on rooves of tall buildings.  This would seriously upset our planner and the NIMBYs (not in my back yard)

They aren’t exactly an energy windfall because they are relatively small turbines but they are raising awareness of the problem, and it would end up impacting on the household energy use in many cases due t that awareness.

Wind power was the second-biggest source of electricity capacity added to the U.S. last year, trailing only natural gas, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Even with that gale-force growth, wind power accounts for only about 1% of all electricity generated in the country.

Technorati Tags:   Celebrity Demand For Personal Wind Turbines, personal wind turbines, wind turbine, celebrity, George Bush, Jay Leno, Roscoe Bartlett

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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