When Napa Valley winery Far Niente resolved to embrace solar power, it faced a big hurdle: how to install ground-mounted panels without sacrificing acres of valuable Cabernet vines.

Enter the latest solar innovation — solar panels that can float on the water rather than being mounted on the ground.

The system, which was given the witty name “Floatovoltaic,” was made by securing 1,000 solar panels on pontoons and floating them on an irrigation pond at the 100-acre Martin Sterling Vineyard, whose grapes make Cabernet Sauvignon wine.

With “Floatovoltaic,” Far Niente was able to save three-quarters of an acre of vines. It removed another acre of vineyard to accomodate a land portion of the system that boasts 1,300 solar panels.

The solar system generates up to 400 kilowatts of electricity at peak times, significantly offsetting the winery’s annual power usage, Far Niente said.

The installation was developed by Thompson Technology Industries Inc, installed by SPG Solar, and uses solar panels from Sharp.

The Olympics Bird’s Nest National Stadium disappeared into the pollution that enveloped Beijing earlier this week, before emerging as the air cleared on Friday. Each day’s photo was taken from my balcony at 8 a.m.

On a bad day the stadium’s central red stripe is barely visible.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

At the U.N. Biodiversity Conference in Bonn, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is being hailed as something of a hero. In what could be seen as an attempt to salvage both the talks and her own reputation as a champion of the environment, she announced millions of euros in handouts to help save the planet’s forests.

 Campaigners fell over themselves praising her for setting an example. The physicist and former environment minister won credit last year for helping to broker EU and G8 deals to tackle climate change and some close to her insist the subject is close to her heart.

But there is a different story. 

Merkel is backpeddling on a wide range of green issues at home as political reality bites. She is robustly defending the powerful German car industry — responsible for one in five jobs in Europe’s biggest economy – against the EU’s planned CO2 caps and her government this week all but dropped plans to change a tax regime on cars that would have encouraged lower emissions.

She is backing energy-intensive companies against the auctioning of CO2 emissions permits and her conservative party has just unveiled plans to cut subsidies for solar energy by 30 percent in 2009. 

What do you think? Is Merkel a real champion of the environment or is she all talk?

News that conservation group WWF has captured rare footage of the critically endangered Javan rhino is bound to set a few hearts racing in the wildlife loving community.

You can view the footage of the mother and calf here.

With fewer than 60 believed to be left in the wild, the footage provides a fleeting glimpse into the secretive world of this one-horned creature on its dwindling home turf on the Indonesian island of Java, where most reside.

The Javan is the world’s rarest rhino species and is probably the rarest large mammal species in the world.

Rhinos everywhere — there are five extant species — are threatened though the news over the past few years has been mixed.

In Africa, the southern white or square-lipped rhino has made a remarkable recovery after it was pushed to the brink of extinction a century ago. It now numbers several thousand mostly in South Africa. 

But the nothern subspecies of the white rhino is almost extinct in the wild with just a few animals left in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The black rhinos of Africa have seen their numbers rebound in the south but may be extinct in west Africa.

Habitat destruction and hunting for their horns, which are valued for medical reasons in Asia and to make daggar handles in Yemen, have been the chief culprits leading to this sad state of affairs.

So the footage caught on WWF’s remote cameras of the Javan rhinos is cause for celebration.

The late great science fiction writer Douglas Adams once co-authored a delightful non-fiction book about some of the world’s rarest wildlife creatures called “Last Chance to See.”

So savour this footage of the Javan rhino and hope we have other chances to see them in the wild in the future.

 Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Colleagues of mine at Columbia have just published a large study of physical and biological changes recorded around the world since 1970 , during which the globe has been warming.

The massive database they compiled describes an extraordinary and fascinating range of phenomena that would likely be sensitive to climate changes like spring flowering of plants, migration times and ranges for birds, fish and insects, spring river flows from winter snow melt, lake freezing and melting times, pollen release, egg-laying, and even the time that bullfrogs start calling in Spring. (It’s hard to find bullfrogs in a lake but it sure is easy to hear them so I trust that data!)   

The database also included long-term changes in things like mountain glaciers, lake algae levels, permafrost and alpine tree ranges. In all, close to 30,000 records were studied. They found that around 90% of the records showed a change that is consistent with a warmer climate.  So, for example, leaves and flowers are budding earlier, ground hogs in the Rockies end hibernation earlier, mountain glaciers are retreating, there are earlier high water river flows and so on. 

We know the planet has been warming but this study shows how sensitive living and physical systems are to temperature changes already. Now try to imagine what it will be like if we get three times the warming of the last century, as is roughly predicted.

The fate of a Chinese species may rest on whether the turtles in this photo mate.   

Biologists believe only four Yangtze giant softshell turtles are left on the planet.  So this month they shipped a more than 80-year-old female that had been living in China’s Changsha Zoo more than 600 miles to the only known male in China, who is more than 100 years old and lives at the Suzhou Zoo.

“I hate to call this a desperation move, but it really was,” said Rick Hudson, a conservation biologist at the Fort Worth, Texas Zoo who helped coordinate the move. “With only one female known worldwide, and given that we have lost three captive specimens over the past two years, what choice did we have?”

Biologists blame hunting, pollution and rampant development for leading to the dire situation.

The good news is the female still lays eggs, but not as many as the up to 100 that younger ones do.  And although in this picture she may appear to be ignoring the male, whose head can be seen emerging from the water in the bottom right, biologists say her journey went well and that the two are getting used to each other nicely. 

Photo by Gerald Kuchling/TSA

When you write about the environment, your e-mail inbox fills up fast with pitches from companies claiming to have the formula for a greener world. Very few are compelling enough to escape the “delete” key. Some are just too weird to deal with. And then there’s this recent sally by the makers of the Biffy.

The Biffy is a bidet attachment for use on a standard toilet, and the promotional copy says it is not only superior for hygiene but promises a cleaner planet because it keeps excess toilet paper out of the waste stream. Take a look at the Web site for video of enthusiastic models uttering the immortal catch-phrase, “I love my Biffy!”

The promotional copy features a quote by the gadget’s inventor, Dr. Warren Smith: “Using toilet paper to clean our bottoms is like trying to clean dishes with a paper towel. Our product provides a practical and more natural way to be clean, while reducing an average family’s toilet paper consumption by up to 75 percent.”

Earlier this month, I toured a Waste Management landfill in Simi Valley, California as part of our series on how companies are turning household garbage and other waste into clean electricity. For our full coverage, click here.

The landfill, which is about 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, surprised me at first because it didn’t smell and the 300 feet of trash was covered in dirt and grass. It looked just like an ordinary hillside.

On one side of the mound, however, trash from all over Ventura County was being flattened and buried into the ground, where the methane gas it produces will be collected and produced into energy to power 2,500 homes. This prevents the methane, which is 21 times more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide, from entering the atmosphere.

In this video, Waste Management spokeswoman Kit Cole explains the process of burying household trash in the landfill to turn it into electricity:

I have a confession to make — I’m glad gas prices in the United States, as elsewhere, are rising. And I’m quietly hoping they’ll keep going higher because there may possibly be no more effective way to promote conservation and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
 
Higher pump prices might be the only way that we Americans will ever even begin adjusting our driving habits and reducing fuel consumption — when it hits you in the pocketbook. The price of gas in the United States may be cresting at over the $4 per gallon level but it is still far lower than it many other countries where fuel taxes are much higher.

In Germany, gasoline is now up to about 6 euros ($9) per gallon. German think tanks have forecast that it would take prices of 10 euros ($15) per gallon to radically change driving habits.
 
Certainly there are fewer mass transit options in the United States than in Europe and elsewhere. And higher fuel prices are especially problematic for people with low or no income. What’s nevertheless disheartening in the United States is that any suggestion of alleviating the price squeeze in the United States through the conservation of fuel by driving less or by driving smaller, more fuel-efficient cars or by using public transportation seems to get drowned out by a strange political debate about temporarily suspending the federal fuel tax for a few months during the summer holiday season.

That seems to be sending the wrong message to Americans, who already use about one quarter of the world’s gas. It’s a wasted opportunity, in the age of climate change, to help a global campaign for conservation.
 
I spent an illuminating week recently driving around in California. It was amazing that so many people are still driving enormous SUVs even though fuel prices are high and rising. It was also amazing that people drive their enormous SUVs and other gas-guzzling cars at such high speeds and with such jack-rabbit acceleration.

I was in my mother’s 10-year-old sub-compact and tried to keep to the 60 mph speed limits on the freeways. It sometimes felt like I was standing still. Speeding cars, trucks and busses were passing on the left, on the right and some wanted to run right over me (it seemed). Even at 60 mph I was evidently a traffic nuisance.
 
Some especially fast cars can go from zero to 60 in 10 seconds or less. Admittedly I’m a bit obsessed with saving fuel. It takes me about 40 seconds to get to 60 mph. Even getting to 30 mph takes about 20 seconds. To save fuel, I try to avoid braking and never step hard on the gas. I got nearly 50 miles per gallon with that car.

A relative who lent me her mid-sized car was amazed when I went twice as far (600 miles) on a tank as she does. She wanted to know the secret. It’s no secret. It’s just common sense. But with political leaders tripping over themselves with promises of a summer fuel tax holiday, few in America seems to be getting that message. 

What do you think about high gas prices? 
 
 

If you’re tired of feeling guilty about driving a gas-guzzling car or cranking up your air conditioning, you could just try hanging your head in shame about that bottle of spring water you are sipping instead.

Yes, the foes of bottled water are at it again, this time in the form of an advertising campaign that aims to promote tap water and underscore the environmental costs of producing and disposing of plastic water bottles.

Tappening, a group that opposes bottled water, is spending $250,000 on a media campaign to promote its cause. Tappening is a joint venture of ad agency DiMassimo Goldstein and public relations firm Ericho Communications. It most recently launched a campaign called “Message in a Bottle” that aims to deliver one million empty water bottles to incoming Coca-Cola CEO Muhter Kent.

The campaign is the latest of many recent attacks on bottled water, including the urging of boycotts by the mayors of cities including London, San Francisco and Seattle.

“We can use our advertising and public relations abilities to un-sell bottled water hype,” said Tappening’s Mark DiMassimo.

The ads will appear as “wild postings” on construction sites in ten U.S. cities as well as in magazines and community newspapers, the group said. The ads claim that last year, plastic bottles generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide and that every year, 38 million bottles end up buried in the ground.