If you have a few spare hours a reading of the book entitled 'How The Rich Are Destroying The Earth' by Herve Kempf will provide an answer.

Unfortunately time does not allow for a global 'revolution' even if it was desirable. Conflict and the creation of a multitude of failed states and ravaged environments will not help the development of solar power, water conservation, bio diversity etc.In the past Tudor kings,benevolent millionaires etc have played an important part in shielding the natural world from man's constant inventive destructiveness.It is to be hoped that, given the threat we face and the fact that their billions will not help their children if 'the lights go out',that the billionaires across the world will step up to the plate and play a positive role .

The first to step up should perhaps be James Simons of Renaissance Technologies and T.Boone Pickens of BP Capital Management who EARNED in 2005 1.4 BILLION DOLLARS and 1.4 BILLION DOLLARS respectively according to Le Monde.THIS WAS NOT THEIR CAPITAL BUT THEIR INCOME.

RJMA

REPEAT-PANDORAS BOX IS NOT YET OPEN.


IF PROFESSOR LATIF IS CORRECT, AND MORE SOPHISTICATED MET MODELS MAY PROVE HE IS NOT, THE ACIDIFICATION OF OUR OCEANS WILL CONTINUE REGARDLESS.

IF HE IS CORRECT IT MAY BE OUR CIVILIZATION WILL NOT DISINTEGRATE BEFORE MEASURES ARE PUT IN PLACE TO DEAL WITH GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.

AT THE COMING CONFERENCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS SHOULD BEGIN BY REACHING AGREEMENT ON A RESOLUTION THAT WILL UPSET NO VESTED INTERESTS.

THIS RESOLUTION SHOULD NOT REQUIRE MUCH HORSE TRADING EITHER. IF MEMBERS OF THE ‘GLOBAL OLIGARCHY’ AGREE TO PUT THEIR HANDS IN THEIR POCKETS IT NEED COST THE TAXPAYER AND HESISTANT POLITICIANS NOTHING.

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THE RESOLUTION

IF ,AFTER TWO YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT, ARTIFICIAL TREES CAN BE SHOWN TO BE AS EFFECTIVE AS THEIR DESIGNER MAINTAINS, WE AGREE THAT SUFFICIENT FUNDS WILL BE FOUND TO BUILD AT LEAST 5 MILLION OVER THE FOLLOWING THREE YEARS.

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BY AGREEING THIS STRAIGHTFORWARD MEASURE CONFIDENCE AND FEELINGS OF SOLIDARITY WILL GROW. NEGOTIATORS MAY THEN FIND IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE UNEXPECTED PROGRESS WHEN MORE COMPLICATED ISSUES ARE DISCUSSED.

IT MAY WELL BE THAT WEALTHY PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS, LOCAL COMMUNITIES ETC MIGHT, IF THE ARTIFICIAL TREE PROJECT GAINS CREDIBILITY, BE SUFFICIENTLY ENTHUSED TO DONATE THEIR OWN SAVINGS SO THAT ADDITIONAL ’WOODS’ CAN BE CREATED. WHO KNOWS ?

ONE THING IS FOR CERTAIN AND THAT IS THAT THE LAST THING ANY SURVIVORS OF OUR CIVILIZATIONS COLLAPSE WOULD NEED IS A SYSTEM OF SPACE MIRRORS THEY COULD NOT DESTROY.



RJMA



EXTRACT

In the first report on such geo-engineering by practising engineers, the institution calculates that 100,000 artificial trees — which could fit into 600ha (1,500 acres) — would be enough to capture all emissions from Britain’s homes, transport and light industry. It says that five million would do the same for the whole world.

Dr Fox said that prototypes had been shown to work using a technology, developed by Klaus Lackner of Columbia University in New York, that isolated CO2 using low levels of energy. “The technology is no more complex than what is used in cars or air-conditioning units,” he said.

Professor Lackner estimates that in production the units would cost $20,000 (£12,000) each, while the emissions associated with building and running each unit would be less than 5 per cent of the CO2 it captures over its lifetime.

“The trees could be located in artificial forests close to depleted oil and gas reserves,” Dr Fox said, allowing captured carbon to be stored underground. He added that “it would also be logical to put them by the side of highways”, capturing CO2 from traffic.


EXTRACT


Could it be true that global temperatures will fall before they rise? That's the thrust of a presentation at last week's World Climate conference. Mojib Latif of Kiel University in Germany suggested that cooling caused by natural factors could suppress global temperatures for several years, AFTER WHICH THEY WILL START TO RISE AGAIN.

His presentation, first reported by the eagle-eyed Fred Pearce in the New Scientist, has been seized upon by sceptics and deniers all over the blogosphere.

Professor Latif suggested that the long-term warming trend could be masked - perhaps for as long as 10 or 20 years - by a temporary cooling caused by natural fluctuations in currents and temperatures called the North Atlantic oscillation. "Thereafter," he told the Today programme, "temperatures will pick up again and continue to warm."

Could Latif be right? Who knows? As far as I can tell, his paper has not yet been published, so other scientists haven't had the opportunity to see how strong it is. Vicky Pope of the Met Office suggested this morning that his model might not be as accurate as hers, as it measures only sea-surface temperatures, while the Met Office also takes temperatures below the surface into account.

We know that the world's climate system is a noisy one, in which natural variations of all kinds jostle constantly with the man-made warming signal. No one ever proposed that the global warming trend would be a smooth one, in which temperatures move up a notch every year. What we have seen so far are minor fluctuations weaving around a solid long-term trend. Nor does anyone claim that climate models are perfect. They need to be constantly refined and updated as new information comes to light. But in seeking to predict the future, you have only two options: wild guesswork, supported by a feeling in your bones, or models incorporating all the data scientists can lay their hands on. Those who reject modelling altogether must propose a better means of prediction. Seaweed, entrails and crystal balls don't qualify.

But Latif's presentation is being used by the deniers to dismiss the entire canon of climate science. They choose to overlook the inconvenient fact that HE IS ALSO A CLIMATE SCIENTIST ,WHO BELIEVES THAT THE WARMING TREND CAUSED BY HUMAN ACTIONS WILL BOUNCE BACK AS THE OSCILLATION MOVES INTO ANOTHER PHASE.

GEORGE MONBIOT

Recently China announced a contract has been signed which will lead to Arizona-based First Solar Inc building the world’s largest solar power station in Inner Mongolia. Solar water heaters already supply one in ten of Chinese homes and they hope to have 50% of the nation’s households linked up by 2020. Wind power provision is eight years ahead of schedule. The Chinese government have looked into the future and understand what needs to be done. Some commentators are implying that somehow this remarkable effort is simply PR or a token gesture. If they understood the full implications of recent research they might believe otherwise.

The Chinese scientists now know that the regional and global environment may have to pay a terrible price if they contiue to burn vast amounts of coal in their power stations .As far as carbon dioxide emissions are concerned Chinese emissions will simply make a problem created by the West.even worse.
Global warming predictions by the IPCC are already terrifying.

Unfortunately a second pollutant linked to coal burning, namely sulphur dioxide, is also likely to have an indirect and negative impact on our climate. According to Sheng Huaren , vice chairman of the standing committee of China’s National People’ Congress, acid rain now affects one third of China’s landmass. The Worldwatch Institute said “Chinese air is so saturated with sulphur dioxide that the country has experienced acid rains of a RARELY EQUALLED SEVERITY.”

In 2002 Martin Kennedy and colleagues reported that acid rain, which leaches essential elements from top soils ie magnesium, calcium and potassium) ,may present a greater danger to forest health than was previously realized.It has long been recognised that global warming will produce far greater temperature increases in the Northern Hemisphere than in areas closer to the equator and that these same increases will likely threaten the existence of Boreal forests. If acid rain has already weakened the trees, they are even more threatened and if dead forest ignite, vast amounts of carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere. This scenario was mentioned in an M.A. paper in 1987.

It is vital that developed nations provide whatever financial support and expertise is needed to ensure that Chinese desulphurisation programmes can go ahead at the greatest possible speed. It is also vital that the scientific community examine whether a massive spraying programmes in China, North America and elsewhere, could restore the health of depleted topsoils without causing damage to aquatic environments and/or the trees they are designed to protect.etc.

"Our study not only challenges the dominant paradigm that rocks and soil mineral weathering provide a majority of some important plant nutrients like calcium and potassium," said Kennedy, "but it also proposes that our 'stable' old growth forests are the most at risk from acid rain, and that it is a bigger problem, potentially, than we ever imagined."-Kennedy

RJMA

P.S.

IT IS PROBABLY TIME FOR THE WORLD TO COMMIT TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF FIVE MILLION ARTIFICIAL TREES.OCEAN ACIDIFICATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE MUST BE TACKLED NOW.

Extract

It says that the most promising solution is offered by artificial trees, devices that collect CO2 through their “leaves” and convert it to a form that can easily be collected and stored.Tim Fox, head of environment and climate change at the institution, said that the devices were thousands of times more effective at removing carbon from the atmosphere than real trees

In the first report on such geo-engineering by practising engineers, the institution calculates that 100,000 artificial trees — which could fit into 600ha (1,500 acres) — would be enough to capture all emissions from Britain’s homes, transport and light industry. It says that five million would do the same for the whole world.

Dr Fox said that prototypes had been shown to work using a technology, developed by Klaus Lackner of Columbia University in New York, that isolated CO2 using low levels of energy. “The technology is no more complex than what is used in cars or air-conditioning units,” he said.

Professor Lackner estimates that in production the units would cost $20,000 (£12,000) each, while the emissions associated with building and running each unit would be less than 5 per cent of the CO2 it captures over its lifetime.

IF PLACED IN APPROPRIATE SITES THESE ARTIFICAL FOREST COULD PERHAPS HELP TO SLOW OR HALT THE ADVANCE OF CHINA'S DESERTS.

ANYONE WHO CAN LOOK AT THE THREAT THE WORLD FACES AND SAY THE TREES ARE TOO EXPENSIVE SHOULD HAVE THEIR HEAD EXAMINED IMHO.



http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6811264.ece



REFERENCE MATERIAL

ACID RAIN THREATENS FORESTS MORE THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT.(July 8, 2002)



RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- UC Riverside Earth Scientist Martin Kennedy and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that acid rain, by leaching essential metal nutrients (such as potassium, calcium, and magnesium) from topsoil, may pose a far graver threat to forests than has been previously estimated. This result would especially interest ecologists, biologists, geologists, and policy makers.

"Our work shows that in unperturbed natural ecosystems a very small pool of these nutrients is available and this comes from the atmosphere, mostly as dilute amounts dissolved in rain that then get deposited in topsoil," said Kennedy. "The tight budget of these nutrients is a concern because if the budget is perturbed, the forests are at risk."

If deprived of a certain critical nutrient, such as calcium, a tree faces the risk of dying. In parts of Germany, for example, trees are already dying not from the direct effects of the acid, but from magnesium deficiency, this magnesium loss from the soil stemming from leaching by acid rain. Such leaching results in the loss of topsoil nutrients to groundwater and eventually to rivers.

Kennedy noted that plant roots cannot access all nutrient elements in the soil; some elements are bound in minerals and rocks. "In our study, we were attempting to determine what fraction of the total elements available in the soil the plants could access. We found it was a very small proportion."

It has long been thought that trees obtain their essential metal nutrients from weathered rock particles deep in the soil. But by demonstrating that the trees obtain these nutrients almost exclusively from atmospheric sources, Kennedy and colleagues suggest that the trees cycle a small pool of nutrients that are continually replaced by dilute atmospheric sources.

The scientists experimented on trees in the unpolluted forests of southern Chile (see Fig. 1). "We went to the cleanest atmosphere on earth and looked for a stable ecosystem so that we could find the closest thing to a long-term sustainable forest," Kennedy said (see Fig. 2). "There, we sampled soils, stream water, rain and plants, and analyzed the strontium isotope composition."

Strontium isotopes indicate very accurately which fraction came from the rain and which fraction came from the rock. "We found that in the dominant tree species - the southern Beech - approximately 90% of the strontium, and thus other similar nutrient elements, were brought in by the rain and did not come from soils or rocks, as just about everyone had assumed," said Kennedy.

The researchers also applied a distinctive artificial chemical tracer to the soils in a small portion of the Chilean forest. The tracer mimics the natural nutrients in the soils and trees with the advantage that it can be measured and observed as it moves throughout the soil plant system. By sampling the trees and soil over time and by analyzing the samples for the tracer, the scientists found that within three years most of the tracer was quickly leached from the topsoil. The loss of this element within such a short amount of time surprised the researchers because it implies that a far smaller pool of nutrients is available to the trees from the upper soil than they had imagined.

"The small size of this upper soil nutrient pool has important implications for industrially influenced forests in the northeastern United States and in Europe," said Kennedy. "These forests may be more vulnerable to the effects of acid rain than we had previously thought."

Hydrogen ions from the acid in acid rain replace the nutrient elements in the soil. For every unit of acid added to the soil, an equivalent amount of nutrient elements is removed. As a result, more nutrients get leached from the soil than arrive from weathering of rocks or precipitation (see Fig. 3). Kennedy explained that the Chilean site was invaluable for the research because the cleanest forests indicate how the system should work if left alone. In forests in the northeast United States on the other hand, the system is already disturbed.

"Our study not only challenges the dominant paradigm that rocks and soil mineral weathering provide a majority of some important plant nutrients like calcium and potassium," said Kennedy, "but it also proposes that our 'stable' old growth forests are the most at risk from acid rain, and that it is a bigger problem, potentially,than we ever imagined.

---------------------------------

ACID RAIN IN CHINA

"Acid rain caused by worsening air pollution now affects one-third of China’s landmass, threatening soil quality and food safety, according to Sheng Huaren, vice chairman of the standing committee of China’s National People’s Congress. In 2005, acid rain hit more than half of the 696 cities and counties under air-quality monitoring, with some cities receiving all of their precipitation as acid rain, The Independent reported on August 27.

While air quality has improved in some areas of China as a result of adjustments in the nation’s energy structure and stricter vehicle emissions standards, 40 percent of urban air quality remains below even second-grade national standards, reflecting various levels of pollutants. Sulfur dioxide and inhalable particulate matter are the two major acid rain-causing substances, according to Xinhua News Agency.

More than 25 million tons of sulfur dioxide belched from China’s coal-fired power and coking plants last year, double the level deemed safe for the facilities’ environmental capacity. According to Sheng, the desulfurization facilities in these plants have a combined capacity of 53 million kilowatts, representing only 14 percent of total installed capacity. Shanxi Province in northeastern China, famous for its local coking industry, produced more than 80 million tons of coke (a solid carbon residue used in making steel) in 2005, emitting high levels of sulfurous compounds. Of the more than 680 coking enterprises province-wide, only 65 have applied for environmental protection examination and approval; of these, only 30—or about 5 percent of all coking enterprises—currently meet national sulfur emission standards, Xinhua News Agency reported.

According to Sheng, inhalable particulate matter (PM) is the primary pollutant affecting human health and urban air quality in China. In 2005, 35.8 percent of the nation’s cities suffered from PM pollution at levels below the second-grade national standards; the most polluted regions are northern Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and southwestern Sichuan provinces. Inhalable PM is caused by emissions of soot (fine black particles composed chiefly of carbon, produced by incomplete combustion of coal, oil, wood, or other fuels) and industrial powders. Last year, Chinese soot emissions topped 11.8 million tons and industrial powder emissions totaled 9.11 million tons.

In early August, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank, announced a new venture to help clean up the noxious air pollution from China’s coal-powered homes and factories. Up to US$50 million will be invested in Inner Mongolia’s Xinao Group Corp. to aid the production of dimethyl ether (DME), a more environmentally friendly fuel that can replace diesel in transportation and power generation uses.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4496


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SOLAR POWER IN CHINA


China has just announced that it is to build the world’s biggest solar power station. Ordos City in Inner Mongolia has signed an agreement with the Arizona-based First Solar Inc to construct a 2000 MW plant, which can generate enough electricity to power three million Chinese homes. And it is planned to be part of a giant 11,950 MW renewable energy park, supplying almost six times as much from solar and wind power.

The plans are just the most eye-catching example of a largely-unnoticed renewable energy revolution that is taking place in the world’s most populous country while attention is understandably focussed on its enormously polluting consumption of coal. China already has two thirds of the world’s solar hot water capacity, with solar heaters suppling one in ten of its homes; the government aims to double this by 2020 and, admittedly optimistic, predictions suggest that it may supply half the country’s households by 2020.

Meanwhile, in just two years from a virtually standing start China became the world’s largest produce of solar photovoltaic cells - which produce electricity - by 2007, and is expected soon to be producing a third of the global total. And its windpower is set to exceed its 30,000 MW target in 2012, eight years ahead of schedule.

Geoffrey Lean September 15 2009

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EXTRACT

NUCLEAR ADVOCATE JOHN HUTTON IN TALKS TO TAKE EDF JOB.
Former business secretary in talks with French-owned nuclear energy company about joining as an adviser


Allegra Stratton The Guardian, Monday 14 September 2009


The former business secretary John Hutton, who championed the government's push towards a new generation of nuclear power stations, is in talks with French-owned nuclear energy company EDF about joining their group as an adviser. Hutton, who is to leave parliament at the next election, served as business secretary from 2007-08 and announced the government's decision to build new nuclear reactors. As business secretary in September 2008, he also oversaw the £12.5bn sale of British Energy, the nuclear generator, to EDF, which is 83%-owned by the French state.

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No doubt Gordon Brown's brother, who also works for EDF, will be able to provide a reference.

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NO EX MINISTER SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO WORK FOR A COMPANY THAT HE/SHE HAS HAD IMPORTANT DEALINGS WITH IN GOVERNMENT.AT THE VERY LEAST A FIVE YEAR BAN SHOULD BE IMPOSED.



RJMA