April 1 is Fossil Fools Day
March 31, 2009
Posted in Green News
Fancy yourself as a bit of an activist? Well, why not join in Fossil Fools Day? Tomorrow from 12pm to 2pm environmental activists will be marking April 1 by handing over this year’s South African Fossil Fool of 2009 Award to Sasol at their head office in Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg.
The award is Earthlife Africa’s way of highlighting the role Sasol plays in warming our planet.
It takes hard work, years of application, and significant capital investment to win a Fossil Fool Award, says Earthlife.
Sasol has been chosen as this year’s winner because:
- It produces 72.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually; total annual greenhouse gas emissions for South Africa are 446-million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent.
- It’s planning to build a new 80,000 barrels/day coal-to-liquids plant in South Africa. This would add an estimated 23-million to 37-million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on an annual basis.
- And it fixed prices of its goods, both in South Africa and Europe.
Click here for more on Fossil Fools Day globally
Get out the house, go to a green market
March 31, 2009
Posted in Lifestyle
Pretoria’s botanical garden is a fabulous place to spend a lovely autumn day. There are hundreds of big trees to sit under and picnic and, just outside the entrance gate, there’s a restaurant with an outside balcony that has a great view over a pond and the gardens.
This Saturday morning you have the perfect excuse to visit the gardens because the Green market just happens to be on (April 4). It happens on every first Saturday of the month.
This week’s theme is Reduce.Reuse.Recycle and the organisers are calling on all artists/entrepreneurs to come and sell/exhibit all their creative arts products made from recycled materials. “We need revamped clothes (clothes made new with old clothes etc), scrap metal arts, handmade paper, plastic, tin, glass and electronic waste arts and products … and so much more,” they say.
So if you’re interested in taking part or know of someone who might be interested – you may want to give a speech on recycling or give a creative educational demo, for instance – send an email to Melissa at greenmelilly [at] gmail [dot] com. Or just pack a picnic basket and go and commune with nature for a while.
Earth Hour was fun, let’s do it more often
March 31, 2009
Posted in Lifestyle
Tapei 101 building, via Boston.com
I decided to measure my household’s contribution to Earth Hour on Saturday to get an idea of what switching off my lights for an hour could potentially mean for the planet. (I have an energy monitor called The Owl.) Turns out that my household consumption dropped by 250 watts. In South Africa, this means that 24kg less carbon dioxide was pumped into the air because of me. (In SA, 0.978kg of CO2 are emitted for every 1 kWh of electricity).
To be honest, we did go a bit further than switching off the lights. We also switched off two PCs and the television. We lit some candles inside the house and sat on the back steps looking at the stars, enjoying a very peaceful evening – and a family conversation! It’s amazing what can happen when there’s no TV.
In fact, it was so nice that we’ve decided to do it more often.
My 250W saving is apparently the equivalent of planting 0.1 trees. So if I switched off my lights for an hour once a month for a year, it would be the equivalent of planting a tree.
Apparently more than 1,000 cities took part in Earth Hour. Click here for an amazing collection of Earth Hour “before and during” pics from around the world.
State electricity utility Eskom says that South Africans “contributed 400MW of electricity savings to Earth Hour”. That’s 10 percent of the output of a whole power station – Witbank’s Kendal power station, for example, produces around 4,100MW.
It’s also a saving of 400 tons of carbon dioxide, 224 tons of coal and some 576 kilolitres of water, says Dr Steve Lennon, Eskom’s MD for corporate services and its “climate change champion”.
“The 400MW translates to about 4 million 100W bulbs or 6,7 million 60W bulbs switched off on Saturday. This shows a concerted effort by approximately 1 million households,” he said.
Can anyone seriously say that it isn’t worth taking part in Earth Hour?
(Update: Corrected a typo to read: That’s 10 percent of the output of a whole power station – Witbank’s Kendal power station, for example, produces around 4,100MW)
1972 Datsun is world’s fastest electric car
March 30, 2009
Posted in Transport
It’s hard to believe, but click on the clip above and you’ll see it for yourself. A 1972 Datsun, which has been lovingly converted into an electric vehicle, can thrash muscle cars on the drag strip.
The speedy 37-year-old, named the White Zombie by its owner/creator John Waylands, can reportedly do 0 to 90kph in just 3 seconds. Its internal combustion engine with an output of 69hp has been replaced by a custom-built electric set-up and 60 lead batteries, which produce 300hp.
But apparently it’s not the horse power that makes the difference when it comes to electric motors, it’s all in the torque. Electric cars get full torque from the first instant so they can fly out of the starting blocks and leave the competition spluttering in their tyre smoke.
Via :: Gas 2.0
I hope this answers at least some of the 17 questions left by Samuel in a comment on an earlier electric car story.
Call for action: sign up for Earth Hour
March 24, 2009
Posted in Green News
In four days, on Saturday March 28, lights will be switched off for an hour all over the world at 8.30pm as a sign of support for our overexploited Earth. This year one of the aims of the WWF’s Earth Hour is to send a petition of 1-billion names to the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. It is at this meeting that the countries of the world will agree (we hope) to an international response to climate change.
By signing up for the WWF’s Earth Hour campaign you add your name to a global call for effective action to combat climate change.
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon said that Earth Hour promised to be “the largest demonstration of public concern about climate change ever attempted”.
“Earth Hour is a way for citizens of the world to send a clear message.
They want action on climate change.”
So now is your chance to make yourself heard. All you need to do to add your name to this call is to go to the Earth Hour website and sign up. And then on Saturday at 8.30pm, switch off you lights for an hour. Use the time to have a cosy candle-lit dinner or lie on a blanket outside and look at the stars.
Earth Hour started in Australia in 2007, when 2.2-million people and more than 2,100 businesses switched off their lights in Sydney for an hour. Energy consumption reportedly dropped by 10.2 percent for the period – the equivalent of taking 48,000 cars off the road for a year, says the WWF. In 2008, 50-million people around the world switched off their lights for Earth Hour. This year the WWF hopes to reach 1-billion people in 1,000 cities around the world.
In South Africa, an official WWF Earth Hour celebration will be held at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town. The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra will be among the entertainment lined up and mayor Helen Zille will switch off Table Mountain’s lights for the occasion.
In Johannesburg, an Earth Hour party is planned for Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton.
For more information on Earth Hour in South Africa go to the Earth Hour website.
Treevolution’s new, improved newsletter
March 20, 2009
Posted in Green News
Today we launch a new way to keep up to date with environmental news and issues. In addition to the regular news headlines, newsletter subscribers can now also download an extra electronic newsletter. This newsletter, in PDF format, goes beyond just Treevolution’s weekly headlines and looks at issues in a little more detail. We’ve designed it to be both easy to read onscreen and printed out (if you must). Read more
Study links ozone to higher death risk
March 12, 2009
Posted in Green News
Los Angeles smog by Infinite Wilderness licensed under Creative Commons licence
We normally think of ozone in connection with the hole in the atmosphere that’s letting in ultraviolet radiation and increasing the risk of skin cancers. When it’s in the upper atmosphere, ozone is beneficial to us. But when we breathe it in at ground level, it’s not. A new US study has found that long-term exposure to ground-level ozone, a major component of smog, is associated with an increased risk of death from respiratory ailments.
Ground level ozone is formed through a complex chemical reaction in sunlight between nitrogen oxides (NOx), commonly spewed from vehicle exhausts, and industrial factory emissions.
To analyse the risk of death for both ozone and fine particulate matter, two of the most prevalent components of air pollution, researchers followed nearly 450,000 people in 96 metropolitan regions in the United States for two decades, according to the University of California, Berkeley. Michael Jerrett, UC Berkeley associate professor of environmental health sciences, led the study.
The researchers found that people living in areas with the highest concentrations of ozone, such as Los Angeles, had a 25 to 30 percent greater annual risk of dying from respiratory diseases compared with people from regions with the lowest levels of the pollutant.
“This is the first time we’ve been able to connect chronic exposure to ozone, one of the most widespread pollutants in the world, with the risk of death,” said Jerrett.
“Previous research has connected short-term or acute ozone exposure to impaired lung function, aggravated asthma symptoms, increased emergency room visits and hospitalisations, but the impact of long-term exposure to ozone on mortality had not been pinned down until now.”
The study found that for every 10 parts-per-billion (ppb) increase in ozone level, there is a 4 percent increase in risk of death from respiratory causes, primarily pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“World Health Organisation data indicate that about 240,000 people die each year from respiratory causes in the US,” said Jerrett. “Even a 4 percent increase can translate into thousands of excess deaths each year. Globally, some 7.7 million people die from respiratory causes, so worldwide the impact of ozone pollution could be very large.”
The study is published in the March 12 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Source: UC Berkely
Coastal cities under threat from rising sea levels
March 11, 2009
Posted in Green News
Image: Greeland glacier, Nasa/Wallops
Sea level could rise by a metre or more by the end of the century, according new science presented yesterday at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen. This has disastrous implications for the 10 percent of the world’s population, or 600-million people, living in low-lying areas in danger of being flooded.
The new estimates are higher than those in the 2007 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which projected a sea level rise of 18 to 59 centimetres. Scientists at the Copenhagen meeting said that it looked increasingly unlikely that sea level rise would be much less than 50cm by 2100.
Rob Bailey, Oxfam’s climate change policy advisor, said: “These startling new predictions on sea level rise spell disaster for millions of the world’s poorest people. Poor coastal communities in countries such as Bangladesh are already struggling to cope with a changing climate and it can only get worse.
“This must be a wake-up call for rich countries are not doing anywhere near enough to prevent these cataclysmic predictions becoming a reality. Rich countries, who created the climate crisis, must cut their emissions from 1990 levels by at least 40 percent by 2020 and provide the $50-billion that is the minimum needed each year to help the world’s poorest people adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change,” said Bailey.
Dr John Church of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, told the Copenhagen conference: “The most recent satellite and ground-based observations show that sea-level rise is continuing to rise at 3mm/yr or more since 1993, a rate well above the 20th-century average. The oceans are continuing to warm and expand, the melting of mountain glacier has increased and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are also contributing to sea level rise.”
“Unless we undertake urgent and significant mitigation actions, the climate could cross a threshold during the 21st century committing the world to a sea level rise of metres,” said Dr Church.
Eric Rignot, professor of earth system science at the University of California Irvine and senior research scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: “The numbers from the last IPCC are a lower bound because it was recognised at the time that there was a lot of uncertainty about ice sheets. The numerical models used at the time did not have a complete representation of outlet glaciers and their interactions with the ocean. The results gathered in the last two to three years show that these are fundamental aspects that cannot be overlooked. As a result of the acceleration of outlet glaciers over large regions, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are already contributing more and faster to sea level rise than anticipated. If this trend continues, we are likely to witness sea level rise one metre or more by year 2100.”
Measurements around the world show that sea level has risen almost 20 centimetres since 1880, said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. These data also show that the rate of sea level rise is closely linked to temperature: sea level rises faster the warmer it gets.
“If sea level keeps rising at a constant pace, we will end up in the middle of that 18-59 cm IPCC range by 2100,” said Prof Rahmstorf. “But based on past experience I expect that sea level rise will accelerate as the planet gets hotter.”
According to Dr Church, “Sea level is currently rising at a rate that is above any of the model projections of 18 to 59 cm.”
“Different groups may come to slightly different projections, but differences in the details of the projections should not cloud the overall picture where even the lower end of the projections looks to have very serious effects,” says Konrad Steffen, director of the Co-operative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
And South Africa?
Last year the City of Cape Town announced that it had commissioned an in-depth study of the implications of sea-level rise on the city. With 307km of coastline the city is particularly vulnerable to a rise in sea level and an increase in the frequency of storm events predicted as a result of climate change.
According to Gregg Oelofse of the city’s strategy and planning department: “Impacts will be experienced across key service infrastructure such as wastewater treatment works, stormwater pipelines, electricity grids and substations as well as roads and rail routes. In addition, residential property and recreational amenities located in the coastal areas are particularly vulnerable.”
The study aimed to identify the risks so the city could begin to plan adaptation and mitigation strategies to minimise the implications of climate change. What did arise from the study was that if the City of Cape Town did not proactively address climate change the consequences could be severe.
According to a report in the Sunday Times last year, Durban has initiated a climate change programme and other South African coastal cities such as Port Elizabeth and East London may also.
Sources: University of Copenhagen, Oxfam, City of Cape Town, The Times.
Footage of Greenland ice melt
March 11, 2009
Posted in Green News
This amazing footage of meltwater gushing down into a bottomless pit in a glacier in Greeland was shot for a Discovery Channel series called Ways to Save the Planet. Dr Jason Box, a glaciologist, and a colleague are seen risking their lives to measure the flow of water into the moulin – another name for a hole or crevasse in a glacier into which water from the surface flows. Box and his team found that 42-million litres of water a day drained down this particular moulin. Glaciers are the epicentre of global warming, he says.
[Via: Telegraph.co.uk]
Coen brothers do ‘clean coal’ parody ad
March 10, 2009
Posted in Green News
Joel and Ethan Coen – the filmmaking brothers known for such off-beat greats as Fargo, No Country for Old Men, The Hudsucker Proxy and many more – have brought their dark humour to a television ad for an environmental group campaigning against “clean coal” (see above), the Reality Coalition. The coalition is a project of the Alliance for Climate Protection, of which Al Gore is the chairman of the board.
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