The world might squabbling over the Kyoto Protocol and how best to fight climate change.

     But a project involving thousands of ocean robots shows nations can still cooperate when it comes to weather forecasting and understanding the science of global warming.

     The 26-nation Argo project involves deploying and maintaining an array of tube-shaped robots 1.5 metres long across the world’s oceans.

    The robots, called Argos, take a variety of measurements, such as salinity, temperature and ocean pressure. The data is then sent via satellite back to governments, weather forecasting centres and universities.

     Deployments of the $27,000 robots began seven years ago and this month marks the first time 3,000 Argos are operating at any one time. The trick is to maintain that number because the robots have a 4-to-5 year lifespan before their batteries run out.

     ”Argo will allow us to grapple with some of the big climate questions, as well as provide insight into how the ever-changing ocean weather affects marine ecosystems,” said Susan Wijffels of the Australia’s top research body, the state-backed CSIRO.

    She said the project was causing a lot of re-examination of past data of how the ocean has warmed over the past 60 years.

    Past measurements relied on data taken from ships or equipment moored at sea. Argos, however, can descend up to 2 kilometres and take a variety of measurements before surfacing to send their data. Once that’s done, the robots head back to the
depths once more for another cycle of data collection.

    The data can be used to improve weather forecasting and refine complex computer models showing the global impacts of climate change.

    The Argos now allowed scientists to track ocean heat content on a 2 or 3-month basis in real time, said Wijffels, of the CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans National Research Flagship programme.

    At times ocean heat content varies, because of El Nino or a major volcanic eruption.

    “The other exciting thing Argo is allowing us to do is to look at long-term changes in ocean salinity,” she told Reuters.

    This helped track how rainfall was changing over the oceans.

    “The ocean is like a giant integrator…a giant rain gauge. It averages all that rainfall. It is a climate warning signal. It allows us to pick up tiny signals that are very hard to pick up in the noisy data in the atmosphere,” she said.

    Member states of the project, including Australia, China, India, the EU, South Korea and the United States, are meeting this week in Hobart, in southern Australia, to discuss data from the network and how to further refine the robots and their
sensors.

    The problem with Argos, though, is that not many people have heard about the robots or know what they look like.

    Earlier this year, an Australian prawn fisherman snared one in his nets off Mooloolaba in south-east Queensland state — thousands of kilometres from where the probe was originally released.

     The robot had stopped sending its regular radio signals weeks earlier but came to life again in the back of the fisherman’s van.

     Australian scientists eventually tracked down the missing probe by tracking its radio signals and just managed to save the robot from being converted into a letter box by the fisherman.
 (Michael Byrnes in Sydney contributed to this entry)
 

  In two years, an entire town in far north Queensland will be powered by the sun. The Australian state has plenty of sun — and plenty of coal.

     In fact, Queensland, a major coal user and exporter, has energy resources galore. But what’s interesting is that in the case of Cloncurry, population 4,500, the sums worked out in favour of solar power, not coal or diesel.

    The A$31 million ($28.6 mln) project, the first of its type for the state, works like this:
     The sun’s rays are tracked by thousands of mirrors, called heliostats, and the beams of intense light are concentrated at the top of 54 shortish towers containing blocks of graphite.

    The sun’s energy heats up the blocks through which water passes, creating steam that drives conventional electricity turbines.

     The 10-megawatt system works day and night because the graphite blocks retain their heat for many hours.

     The town was a natural choice. Abundant sunshine and the notoriety of recording Australia’s hottest day — 53 degrees Celsius (127 degrees Fahrenheit)  in the shade in 1889.

     An Australian company, named Lloyd Energy Systems, developed the graphite block storage and boiler system, said CEO Steve Hollis from Cooma, in New South Wales state, where a test solar tower system is about to go online after years of development (pictured below).

    Lloyd Energy is part of a consortium building the Cloncurry project and the Queensland government has chipped in A$7 million. The government said the solar power station will mean a cut of about 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent
each year for Queensland.

    “The problem with a lot of these rural towns throughout Australia is that the loads are all going up as everyone gets air conditioners and the country energy authorities can’t keep the supply up to them because the lines were never ever designed for the loads that they are getting,” said Hollis.

     “So what they have been forced to do is to put in supplementary supports for the systems, which means either upgrading their networks, that is, duplication of their transmission lines, or in fact put in diesel systems.”

     For the rural energy supply authority that provides power to Cloncurry, solar worked out to be a cheaper alternative, Hollis said. That means the town’s residents won’t have to pay any more for their electricity, he added. The Queensland government said it will monitor the project before further investment. Other towns have already been identified as potential candidates for solar power stations.

    In the meantime, coal will remain king in Queensland.

    “Coal will always have a role in the state’s generation mix,” Ellen McIntyre, senior media adviser for the Office of the Minister for Mines and Energy in Brisbane.

    “Coal-fired generation currently accounts for over 80 percent of total electricity generated in Queensland. It’s hard to imagine the state’s electricity generation mix without coal, in any scenario, in the next 20 years.

    “That’s simply because we have over 32 billion tonnes of high-quality, low-cost, easily accessible black coal, sufficient to last for more than 300 years,” she added.

    The state, though, was looking at curbing its reliance on fossil fuels by developing clean-coal technology as well as renewable energy.

    While more solar power projects are planned elsewhere in Australia, the country still remains a target of criticism for refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions. It’s bound to take many more Cloncurry projects to change that perception.

  Paradise and pollution. The two hardly seem to go together. But in Bali, tackling huge amounts of rubbish is a real headache.

   As a frequent visitor to the emerald Indonesian island, I’ve always been a little shocked by the amount of rubbish that is casually discarded by residents.

    Rivers and streams seem to be the favoured dumping sites.
Inevitably, most of the rubbish is flushed downstream during the rainy season and out to sea to greet the tourists.

     ”I can tell you many stories of people who discovered that the guy who was coming to collect the trash would instead throw it in the river behind,” said Paola Cannucciari, program co-ordinator for waste collection and recycling company ecoBali.

More than 100 environment ministers from around the world will be visiting Bali in December for a conference to work out ways to slow climate change. Visitors will be able to see the trash problem if they walk around the main tourist areas of Kuta or Seminyak, away from the luxury enclave of Nusa Dua where the talks will be held. And December is the start of the rainy season, when drains overflow more easily.

    Bali, in a way, has been a victim of its own success. Many Balinese have not fully adapted to the modern Western lifestyle that has supplanted a largely agrarian way of life in just a few decades, particularly in the island’s densely populated south.

     ”If you think in Bali 30 years ago, basically it was just a bunch of surfers would come and then the majority of things the Balinese would use would be all organic,” Cannucciari said.

    Now the waste is made of plastic, bleached paper or Styrofoam.

     ”People are just not educated,” she said, adding the island needed enforceable policies on waste management plus education and information programmes.

     Bali’s unsightly rubbish problem was likely to get worse before things improved, said Christian Fritz, project advisor for Bali International Consulting Group, which advises companies on alternative technologies and sustainable development.

   More than one million foreign tourists have visited Bali so far this year eager to see the famed beaches, walk among the rice paddies or visit temples and watch Balinese dances.

    The economy is booming once more, recovering after bomb blasts in 2002 and 2005 and prompting a building boom for luxury villas, five-star hotels, malls and spas.

     ”It’s an overproduction of waste that goes straight into the ocean,” said Fritz. 

     ”In the time period from seven years to now, the problem is getting bigger. Even if more people are addressing the problem, the problem has proportionately grown through strong development because over the last couple of years you have more individual villas. Those produce additional waste.”

     A major problem was a lack of government-controlled collection and waste disposal sites.

    ”The problem is there are a lot of areas not run by the government. The informal sector is big. There are a lot of illegal dumping sites. People just throw everything there. Most probably it’s connected to a little river or canal. Definitely not what you want to see,” Cannucciari said.

    “The problem of waste management in Bali is huge,” she added. 

     But people were talking about it and awareness was growing, aided by a number of organisations teaching environmental education, ecoBali among them. A number of five-star hotels were also actively involved in recycling their waste.

    But a lot more needs to be done, particularly cleaning up the rivers and streams.

     Surfers also complain about polluted sea water. An American surfer named Dan said the pollution was particularly noticeable after a big storm.

     Dan, who lives in Bali, said he didn’t suffer rashes but had had a string of nasal infections and was told by long-time surfers that after a year his body would develop resistance to the pollution.

      ”A clear example of the problem here, is that you might have a clean beach because it’s in the interests of the hotel industry to keep it clean,” said Fritz.

     “But on the other side you have a river that’s highly polluted
because no tourists go there. That’s a contradiction in itself. It’s the same environment you are living in.”

     As if to underscore the point, just next to the upscale beach-side restaurant where Reuters interviewed Fritz and Cannucciari is a fetid, rubbish-filled stream that empties straight into the ocean.