Environment Forum

Pure water from solar power; will it catch on?

 Remote villages in developing countries might benefit from these twin 40-ft long containers (left) — a water purification system driven by solar power — as a substitute for noisy diesel-powered generators, trucks bringing in water or people spending hours every day walking to fetch water.

That’s the hope of the makers, environmental technology group SwissINSO Holding Inc. The small company has recently won its first contracts to supply the systems to Algeria and Malaysia and is aiming to sell 42 units of what it calls the world’s “first high-volume, 100 percent-solar turnkey water purification system” in 2011.

The system, an interesting-sounding technology in a world where more than a billion people lack access to fresh water, could also have extra uses from disaster relief to construction sites or to helping armies stay healthy in remote regions.

Chief Executive Yves Ducommun (below right) says that the machines, housed in the two containers, can pump 100,000 litres of drinking water per day for 20 years at a price of less than $0.03 per litre, including running costs. The system costs between $800,000 and $1.2 million up front, depending on factors such as how many solar panels are needed to drive the purification, which filters out dirt and toxins, or salt from seawater, through a membrane.

That is a lot of money for a village in sub-Saharan Africa – but water is often a huge cost over 20 years and governments or aid agencies might be interested: the makers reckon it supplies enough water for about 5,000 people. Freeing people from walking miles to collect water allows them to do other things, like work or study.

“It’s a cost, but if you think of the cost of carrying water by tanker or truck to remote places, or a unit powered by diesel you are in a better position with our system,” Ducommun told me. And climate change may make water supplies less predictable in coming decades with effects such as floods, heatwaves, drought and desertification.

It’s a bit like long-life lightbulbs: the up-front costs are higher but they last far longer: but it’s hard to convince people with the counter-intuitive idea of saving money by spending more now. Investors have not flocked to the idea — the rarely traded shares fell after a major investor pulled out last year, Ducommun said. They last traded at $0.42 against a high of $1.75 in early 2010, giving the company a market capitalisation of about $30 million.

New monkey puzzles scientists: why does it sneeze in the rain?

A new species of monkey has been found in northern Myanmar, puzzling scientists because of a snub nose that means they are often heard “sneezing in the rain”.

Why would anyone want — let alone evolve – nostrils that fill up with water?

The find of the new type of snub-nosed monkey (story here) coincides with a U.N. meeting in Nagoya, Japan, this week to decide what to do about accelerating losses of species of animals and plants because of human threats, such as loss of habitats to farms or cities or the effects of climate change.

The monkey’s habitat is threatened by logging and a planned Chinese-built hydroelectric dam — conservationists hope it will put pressure on Beijing to protect the rare monkey from an influx of workers. Trees also bind soil together — logging can cause erosion that could silt up the reservoir behind the dam. That means a big economic incentive to protect the monkey’s habitat.

Researchers are mystified by the nostrils.

Local hunters report the monkeys can be located by their sneezing when it’s raining. The monkeys often resort to sitting out downpours in trees face down.

Thomas Geissmann, who is the lead author of the study, says no one knows why they have evolved such noses. Sneezing is an evolutionary dead end if it makes you likely to get caught and eaten.

from Summit Notebook:

Will Bjorn Lomborg be compared to Al Gore?

Bjorn Lomborg (left) worries that people will conclude he's becoming like Al Gore (right).

At first sight, that sounds unthinkable.

Lomborg, a Danish statistician who wrote the book "The Skeptical Environmentalist", argues that the world should develop cheap new green technologies before taking radical steps to fight global warming (...echoes of the policies of former U.S. President George W. Bush).

By contrast, former U.S. Vice President Gore won a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize after describing climate change as a "planetary emergency".

But Lomborg  makes a joking comparison with Al Gore in an interview with the Reuters Global Climate and Environment Summit to illustrate how he reckons debate is often polarised between people who fear global warming means the planet is doomed and others who dismiss it all as a hoax.

Lomborg wants the world to invest $100 billion a year in research and development of new green technologies to help make renewable energies competitive with fossil fuels. The problem is, he says, that some people conclude he's suddenly embracing Gore-style action to confront climate change.

He says people usually denounce him as a denier of climate change because he says the issue is not a top priority. On the other hand, he said: "if you say as I do that we should spend $100 billion on this technology, people say: 'Oh, he's saying we must spend money, he must be Al Gore'."

Is biodiversity a washing powder?

World leaders will hold special talks at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Wednesday about preserving “biodiversity”. 

That might clear up some misunderstandings — an official involved in negotiating a new U.N. treaty said that some surveys show a worrying number of people reckon it’s a brand of washing powder.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s definition runs: “Biological diversity – or biodiversity – is a term we use to describe the variety of life on Earth. It refers to the wide variety of ecosystems and living organisms: animals, plants, their habitats and their genes.”

And it’s being lost at a shocking rate — some U.N. estimates are that three species an hour are going extinct because of loss of habitats to cities, farms and roads to make way for ever more people. Related problems of pollution, climate change and alien species of plants and animals brought in from other parts of the world are also adding to losses. Only about 2 million species have been identified but there could be up to 100 million — by some estimates — from blue whales to amoeba.

As part of a harder-headed way of persuading governments to do more to protect biodiversity, economists are highlighting largely hidden values of nature, such as how forests clean the air or store carbon dioxide, or how coral reefs are nurseries for fish or help cut coastal erosion from storms or tsunamis.

Pavan Sukhdev heads The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity and wants governments to place proper values on the “free” services nature provides. “Just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s worthless,” he says. His team estimates that losses of “natural capital” may be between $2 and $4.5 trillion a year. His project tries to highlight how much it would cost to replace services like insect pollination. Or it shows that the long-term value of a mangrove in Thailand (a source of building wood, fish, coastal protection) is higher than cutting it down and changing it into a shrimp farm.

Negotiators have been working on a draft 20-point plan under the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, meant to be agreed in October at a U.N. meeting in Japan. Among the points in the plan (perhaps to discourage people from trying to put it in their washing machines) is that ”by 2020 at the latest, all people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably”.

Ice thaw exposes trove from pre-Viking hunters

A thaw of ice in the mountains of Norway is helping Lars Piloe and his team of archaeologists uncover a 1,500-year-old trove of equipment used by ancestors of the Vikings to hunt reindeer.

Their work as “ice patch archaeologists” points to one of a few positive side-effects of man-made climate change, widely blamed for shrinking glaciers worldwide.

On other missions to dwindling ice fields they have found arrows, even some with feathers attached. And another expert found a 3,400-year-old leather shoe. (…they speculate that the shoe’s first owner threw it away because it has a hole in the sole).

I was up by the ice a few days ago with my TV colleague Kurt – luckily about 40 cms of snow that fell shortly before had melted away, or the trip would have been in vain for everyone — on days with snow, ”ice patch archaeologists” can’t find anything.

And at almost 2,000 metres, the season is already extremely short — it starts in mid-August and ends as soon as the autumn snows fall, usually around now. Their finds are a stark sign that the ice has not been this small for centuries: feathers or leather turn to dust within days of exposure unless they are properly preserved.

Most of the finds at the ice, known as Juvfonna, are “scare sticks” — perhaps a metre long with another small piece of wood tied to the top to flap in the wind (see picture below left for the carved end of a scare stick where string was tied). Placed in rows on the ice, they would worry the unwitting reindeer just enough to guide them towards hunters lying in wait behind rocks, without causing a stampede. The archaeologists found dozens of the sticks — even I managed to find a couple among the rocks.

Archaeologists speculate that teams of hunters came up from the valley below — probably a 10-hour slog — and left gear at altitude between hunts to avoid carrying the extra weight. Maybe one year at the start of the Dark Ages there was an especially bad early snowstorm that covered up rows of scare sticks — until now. 

Tiger among fluffy toys shows extreme smuggling tricks

The drugged tiger cub (left) hidden among cuddly toys in a bag at Bangkok airport  ranks as one of the most bizarre smuggling tricks.

Imagine the shock of X-raying the bag — as airport workers checking luggage did — and finding a live tiger among the fluffy tiger toys. Maybe it moved, or they spotted the outline of its skeleton among the other toys?

For a story about the two-month-old cub (photo courtesy of wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic) click here. A 31-year-old Thai woman was about to board a flight to Iran when they found the cub in her oversized bag.

It highlights how smugglers find extreme ways of packing away live creatures.

In July, officers at Mexico City’s airport arrested a man trying to smuggle 18 small monkeys from Lima wrapped inside his socks.

Women smugglers have several times been caught with endangered bird eggs hidden in their bras — an aid to incubation and far easier to hide on an international flight than a flapping, squawking parrot.

But Traffic says it’s no joke: smuggling is pushing species of some animals and plants towards extinction. And while it’s hard to pin down the scale of wildlife smuggling, some estimates are between $10 and $20 billion a year, it says.

UN panel once exaggerated costs of climate fight — by 1,000 times

Highlighting errors you made almost a decade ago isn’t often a good way to raise your credibility — but it might help the U.N. panel of climate scientists after controversy over mistakes in its most recent 2007 report.

In 2003, I was at a conference in Moscow at which Bert Bolin of Sweden, the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was trying to persuade a largely sceptical audience of Russian experts that the fight against global warming was affordable.

His problem: a key part of the IPCC evidence he presented exaggerated the costs to the world economy by a mind-boggling 1,000 times.

The cost “has negligible impacts on the projected economic growth”, he assured the audience, under a giant slide showing that the costs, in the worst case, would be almost $18,000,000,000,000,000 this century. (… it was wrong — such an amount would cripple the world economy).

Bolin was a persuasive debater, with wit and deep knowledge, but you could feel from the muttering around the audience that he wasn’t winning that one. He (wrongly) acknowledged that the costs could run to the ”quadrillions” of dollars, and produced other data (rightly) showing that the estimated costs — mostly of shifting from fossil fuels towards renewable energies — could easily be absorbed by an expanding world economy. 

Bolin was under a lot of fire at that conference – especially from Andrei Illarionov, a former aide of then President Vladimir Putin, who said that IPCC scenarios for combating climate change would wreck the Russian economy. Moscow was at the time undecided about whether to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. plan for curbing greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 (it eventually did, despite Illarionov’s objections).

A while after the Moscow conference, the IPCC quietly fixed the graph in the 2001 assessment as an “important correction”, cutting three zeroes.  It now shows that it could cost up to $18,000,000,000,000 - that is still a huge amount but only a few percentage points of world GDP by 2050.

BP, oil and seabirds — Baltic Sea ducks had worse luck

BP’s vast and spreading oil disaster is killing ever more birds and other wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico — but one of the worst spills for birds was a harmless-sounding 5 tonnes of oil in the Baltic Sea in 1976.

That spill from a ship killed more than 60,000 long-tailed ducks wintering in the area after they fatally mistook the slick for an attractive patch of calm water, according to Arne Jernelov, of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, writing in today’s edition of the journal Nature.

By contrast, he writes that fewer than 1,200 birds have  so far been recorded killed after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which has led to a leak of a gigantic 250,000 to 400,000 tonnes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  About 60,000 birds were killed off Alaska in 1989 by the accident usually known as the Exxon Valdez spill (…Exxon’s website calls it The Valdez Oil Spill ), previously the biggest spill off the United States at 37,000 tonnes.

By my maths, the Baltic Sea spill killed one bird for about every 80 grams of oil (…an amount easily spilt when filling up a car), the BP spill (so far) one per 200-330 tonnes. Even tiny amounts of oil can mean that birds’ feathers stick together and let chill water, like in the Baltic Sea, get to their bodies through what is normally a layer of insulation. They can then die of cold.

Jernelov gets backing from the Global Marine Oil Pollution Information Gateway, linked to the U.N. Environment Programme.

“There is no clear relationship between the amount of oil in the marine environment and the likely impact on wildlife. A smaller spill at the wrong time/wrong season and in a sensitive environment may prove much more harmful than a larger spill at another time of the year in another or even the same environment. Even small spills can have very large effects,” it says.

“In a cold climate an oil spot the size of 2-3 square centimetres can be enough to kill a bird,” it says.

Are whales and dolphins smart enough to get special rights?

Some conservationists and experts on philosophy and ethics reckon that whales and dolphins are so intelligent that they should be given rights to life like humans. That could mean extra pressure on whalers in Japan, Norway and Iceland to end their hunts.

The focus on rights is a shift after conservationists successfully won a ban on almost all whale hunts from 1986, arguing that they had been harpooned close to extinction.

And in recent years (with evidence that some stocks are big enough to withstand hunts), many opponents say the moratorium should stay in place, arguing that shooting grenade-tipped harpoons at whales can mean a long, cruel death.

A conference in Helsinki starting today is called “Cetacean Rights” and is about “fostering moral and legal change”. The experts hope to come up with a declaration during the weekend — if the idea of special rights for marine mammals catches on, it could also limit the ability of marine parks to keep the mammals in captivity.

“We need a shift of values,” said Nicholas Entrup, head of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society in Germany and Austria. The WDCS is organising the conference.

But would governments listen?

Many favour protection for whales and dolphins but opening the door to non-human rights might also lead to demands for more rights for other mammals, such as elephants, chimpanzees or maybe even your pet dog.

U.N. climate panel under review: no stranger to controversy

The U.N. panel of climate scientists came under the microscope on Friday by  experts named by the United Nations to figure out how to restore faith in its work after errors including an exaggeration of the thaw of the Himalayas. 

They’ll have to write clearly, check their findings and avoid overstating their case (sounds like a journalism manual). But how? And are there only isolated slips, or a wider problem? Also, why hasn’t the panel learn more from past controversies?

Rajendra Pachauri (below right), chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, acknowledged at the start of the session in Amsterdam there had been errors in the last major report in 2007 — but said the did not detract from the overall conclusions that warming is under way and that people are very likely to be the cause by burning fossil fuels.

The panel has drawn most criticism for wrongly projecting that glaciers in the Himalayas might all melt by 2035 (that was part of a 3,000 page text but did not make it to a summary for government policy makers). Pachauri said people had got the message from the media that  projections of glacier melt were wrong, for instance, but the panel had not managed to restate its overall message that the ice is in retreat around the world. To show that point, he gave the graph (above left).

A repeated theme was that the Geneva-based Secretariat was “lean” with a budget of just $5-7 million a year and would need to be bolstered to face future challenges to its work, including better communications.

Still, it’s not as if the IPCC is a novice – past controversies include a 1995 conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. That was the first, cautious indication that humans were to blame for climate change, raised to a 90 percent certainty in the 2007 report.

“I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process,” Frederick Seitz, head of the George C. Marshall Institute, wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time of the 1995 finding.  And that controversy is still rumbling on — Seitz is among scientists criticised in a new book “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, subtitled “How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming”.