Jumat, 06 April 2007
S. Pacific Unprepared for Tsunamis?
[Copied from Discovery Channel] Madeleine Coorey, AFP
April 3, 2007 — Australia's hasty reaction to the threat of a tsunami which hit the Solomon Islands contrasted sharply with a lack of equipment and expertise to warn South Pacific nations, experts said.
A massive undersea 8.0-magnitude earthquake spawned the deadly tsunami Monday that pounded the Solomon Islands and triggered emergency warnings around the Pacific of possible sea surges there.
Australian officials were aware almost immediately of the abnormally large quake and predicted from its size and location that there was a chance the country's east coast could be hit by a tsunami.
Beaches along Australia's east coast were quickly closed and ferries crossing Sydney Harbor stopped as officials anxiously awaited news.
But it took hours for any more information about a possible tidal wave to reach Australian cities because of a lack of equipment and expertise in the South Pacific, experts said.
"This was frightening in a sense that we were warned there could've been a tsunami, we were trying to work out the magnitude of it but we were shooting blind, and I don't believe this is good enough," said Peter Beattie, Premier of Queensland state.
The South Pacific needed more equipment, such as tide gauges and satellite-linked buoys, to measure ocean movement so that Australia and its neighbours could be better warned of tsunamis, expert Gary Gibson said.
"It was so frustrating for the first few hours not to have confirmation (of a tsunami)," said Gibson, chairman of the executive committee of the US-based International Seismological Center.
"The Pacific has the best tsunami warning system in the world. The South Pacific is not quite as well set up. You can be waiting a long time to get information."
Gibson said Australia's warning system had been upgraded following the devastating 2004 tsunami, caused by a massive undersea quake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
That tsunami killed 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean shoreline.
"It's a matter of priorities and the priority has been given to the northwest coast because of the possibility of big earthquakes from Indonesia," he said.
The Australian government has said it would review its system after the Solomons tsunami, although its early warning system was on track to be fully operational in 2009. By that time, officials should be able to make more accurate predictions of tsunamis.
Monday's information vacuum led to some overreaction in Australia, particularly in the northeastern city of Cairns, where hundreds of residents attempted to drive to higher ground, causing gridlock on low-lying roads.
That response, said Gibson, "was not based on reality."
Kevin McCue, director of the Australian Seismological Centre, said Australian officials should have used historical data to predict that any tsunami from the Solomons quake would not present a danger here.
"We should have known we weren't going to have a damaging tsunami," he told AFP. "I think it was just an overreaction to Sumatra."
He said Australia should help neighbours such as Papua New Guinea improve their warning systems by giving them equipment and personnel.
But he said no amount of money would help those most at risk escape a tsunami as there was only five minutes after a quake to seek higher ground.
"They don't have telephones, they don't have power. There's no way of alerting people on the ground in the most risky areas," he said.
David Walsh, of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, said there was a large network of water gauges in the South Pacific which were used to determine the risk of tsunamis.
But he noted: "Many of the gauges are inoperable on any given day."
April 3, 2007 — Australia's hasty reaction to the threat of a tsunami which hit the Solomon Islands contrasted sharply with a lack of equipment and expertise to warn South Pacific nations, experts said.
A massive undersea 8.0-magnitude earthquake spawned the deadly tsunami Monday that pounded the Solomon Islands and triggered emergency warnings around the Pacific of possible sea surges there.
Australian officials were aware almost immediately of the abnormally large quake and predicted from its size and location that there was a chance the country's east coast could be hit by a tsunami.
Beaches along Australia's east coast were quickly closed and ferries crossing Sydney Harbor stopped as officials anxiously awaited news.
But it took hours for any more information about a possible tidal wave to reach Australian cities because of a lack of equipment and expertise in the South Pacific, experts said.
"This was frightening in a sense that we were warned there could've been a tsunami, we were trying to work out the magnitude of it but we were shooting blind, and I don't believe this is good enough," said Peter Beattie, Premier of Queensland state.
The South Pacific needed more equipment, such as tide gauges and satellite-linked buoys, to measure ocean movement so that Australia and its neighbours could be better warned of tsunamis, expert Gary Gibson said.
"It was so frustrating for the first few hours not to have confirmation (of a tsunami)," said Gibson, chairman of the executive committee of the US-based International Seismological Center.
"The Pacific has the best tsunami warning system in the world. The South Pacific is not quite as well set up. You can be waiting a long time to get information."
Gibson said Australia's warning system had been upgraded following the devastating 2004 tsunami, caused by a massive undersea quake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
That tsunami killed 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean shoreline.
"It's a matter of priorities and the priority has been given to the northwest coast because of the possibility of big earthquakes from Indonesia," he said.
The Australian government has said it would review its system after the Solomons tsunami, although its early warning system was on track to be fully operational in 2009. By that time, officials should be able to make more accurate predictions of tsunamis.
Monday's information vacuum led to some overreaction in Australia, particularly in the northeastern city of Cairns, where hundreds of residents attempted to drive to higher ground, causing gridlock on low-lying roads.
That response, said Gibson, "was not based on reality."
Kevin McCue, director of the Australian Seismological Centre, said Australian officials should have used historical data to predict that any tsunami from the Solomons quake would not present a danger here.
"We should have known we weren't going to have a damaging tsunami," he told AFP. "I think it was just an overreaction to Sumatra."
He said Australia should help neighbours such as Papua New Guinea improve their warning systems by giving them equipment and personnel.
But he said no amount of money would help those most at risk escape a tsunami as there was only five minutes after a quake to seek higher ground.
"They don't have telephones, they don't have power. There's no way of alerting people on the ground in the most risky areas," he said.
David Walsh, of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, said there was a large network of water gauges in the South Pacific which were used to determine the risk of tsunamis.
But he noted: "Many of the gauges are inoperable on any given day."
Palm Oil Failing as Biofuel
[Copied from Disovery Channel]
Arthur Max, Associated Press
April 2, 2007 — Only a few years ago, oil from palm trees was viewed as an ideal biofuel: a cheap, renewable alternative to petroleum that would fight global warming. Energy companies began converting generators and production soared.
Now, it's increasingly seen as an example of how well-meaning efforts to limit climate-changing carbon emissions may backfire.
Marcel Silvius, a climate expert at Wetlands International in the Netherlands, led a team that compared the benefits of palm oil to the ecological harm from destroying virgin Asian rain forests to develop lucrative new plantations.
His conclusion: "As a biofuel, it's a failure."
Scientists and policymakers from more than 100 countries are meeting in Brussels, Belgium, starting Monday to report on the impact of global warming, including storms, flooding and the extinction of plants and animals.
Then in May, the group intends to issue recommendations on how best to fight it, through new technologies and possible use of alternatives. The lessons of palm oil are sure to figure into their discussion.
Long a primary ingredient in food and cosmetics, palm oil derivatives caught on about five years ago as a source of renewable energy, spurred by subsidies in many European Union countries. Imports have risen 65 percent since 2002.
Palm oil is attractive because it is relatively abundant, cheap at about $550 per ton, and requires few or no modifications to existing power stations.
Unlike carbon-rich fossil fuels, palm oil is considered carbon-neutral, meaning the carbon emitted from burning it is the same as what is absorbed during growth.
But the result of intensified farming has been to unleash far more greenhouse gases than will be saved at power stations.
The report issued late last year by Wetlands International, Delft Hydraulics and the Alterra Research Center of Wageningen University in Holland studied the carbon released from peat swamps in Indonesia and Malaysia that had been drained and burned to plant palm oil trees. About 85 percent of the world's palm oil comes from the two countries, and about one-quarter of Indonesia's plantations are on drained peat bogs, the report said.
The four-year study found that 600 million tons of carbon dioxide seep into the air each year from the drained swamps. Another 1.4 billion tons go up in smoke from fires lit to clear rain forest for plantations — smoke that often shrouds Singapore and Malaysia in an impenetrable haze for weeks at a time.
Together, those 2 billion tons of CO2 account for 8 percent of the world's fossil fuel emissions, the report said.
Friends of the Earth, another environmental group, called the report "astonishing," and said it shows that harvesting palm oil for fuel is counterproductive. "It undermines the whole project," said a climate specialist for the group, Anne van Schaik.
The study was not independently verified by the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn, Germany, or by the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., the two leading monitoring groups. But experts said the research appeared credible. It is due to be published for peer review later this year.
Deforestation is the No. 2 cause of greenhouse gas emissions after the burning of fossil fuels, said Jeffrey Dukes, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts who was not part of the research. He said clearing peat swamps for plantations is "a double whammy."
It not only releases carbon trapped over many millennia, but destroys the most efficient ecosystem on the planet for sucking carbon from the atmosphere, Dukes said.
Expanding production of palm oil is "a terrible decision. Whether or not it's consciously made, it's society going in reverse," he said.
Major power companies are divided on whether to continue or pursue palm oil generation.
Leon Flexman, of RWE npower, Britain's largest electricity supplier, said his company decided against palm oil after a year of study because it could not verify its supplies would be free of the taint of destroyed rain forest or peat bogs, he said.
The Dutch power company Essent announced in December it had stopped burning until it can trace and verify the sources.
Biox, a Dutch startup, said it plans careful scrutiny of palm oil sources but will proceed with construction of three 50 megawatt power stations that burn palm oil byproducts exclusively. That's enough electricity to light all the homes in Amsterdam.
"From the start, we knew we can't stay in business if we can't prove that production is sustainable," said Biox executive Arjen Brinkmann. "Until this report came out, peat lands was not an issue because we hadn't heard of it. Nobody had heard," he said, adding that it will now be a factor in the company's sustainability criteria.
So far, the reservations about palm oil do not seem to have affected the market. Production rose 6.6 percent last year and will increase another 5.5 percent this year to 37 million tons, according to Fortis Bank. Prices have risen 35 percent in the last year and are still rising, it said.
Arthur Max, Associated Press
April 2, 2007 — Only a few years ago, oil from palm trees was viewed as an ideal biofuel: a cheap, renewable alternative to petroleum that would fight global warming. Energy companies began converting generators and production soared.
Now, it's increasingly seen as an example of how well-meaning efforts to limit climate-changing carbon emissions may backfire.
Marcel Silvius, a climate expert at Wetlands International in the Netherlands, led a team that compared the benefits of palm oil to the ecological harm from destroying virgin Asian rain forests to develop lucrative new plantations.
His conclusion: "As a biofuel, it's a failure."
Scientists and policymakers from more than 100 countries are meeting in Brussels, Belgium, starting Monday to report on the impact of global warming, including storms, flooding and the extinction of plants and animals.
Then in May, the group intends to issue recommendations on how best to fight it, through new technologies and possible use of alternatives. The lessons of palm oil are sure to figure into their discussion.
Long a primary ingredient in food and cosmetics, palm oil derivatives caught on about five years ago as a source of renewable energy, spurred by subsidies in many European Union countries. Imports have risen 65 percent since 2002.
Palm oil is attractive because it is relatively abundant, cheap at about $550 per ton, and requires few or no modifications to existing power stations.
Unlike carbon-rich fossil fuels, palm oil is considered carbon-neutral, meaning the carbon emitted from burning it is the same as what is absorbed during growth.
But the result of intensified farming has been to unleash far more greenhouse gases than will be saved at power stations.
The report issued late last year by Wetlands International, Delft Hydraulics and the Alterra Research Center of Wageningen University in Holland studied the carbon released from peat swamps in Indonesia and Malaysia that had been drained and burned to plant palm oil trees. About 85 percent of the world's palm oil comes from the two countries, and about one-quarter of Indonesia's plantations are on drained peat bogs, the report said.
The four-year study found that 600 million tons of carbon dioxide seep into the air each year from the drained swamps. Another 1.4 billion tons go up in smoke from fires lit to clear rain forest for plantations — smoke that often shrouds Singapore and Malaysia in an impenetrable haze for weeks at a time.
Together, those 2 billion tons of CO2 account for 8 percent of the world's fossil fuel emissions, the report said.
Friends of the Earth, another environmental group, called the report "astonishing," and said it shows that harvesting palm oil for fuel is counterproductive. "It undermines the whole project," said a climate specialist for the group, Anne van Schaik.
The study was not independently verified by the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn, Germany, or by the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., the two leading monitoring groups. But experts said the research appeared credible. It is due to be published for peer review later this year.
Deforestation is the No. 2 cause of greenhouse gas emissions after the burning of fossil fuels, said Jeffrey Dukes, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts who was not part of the research. He said clearing peat swamps for plantations is "a double whammy."
It not only releases carbon trapped over many millennia, but destroys the most efficient ecosystem on the planet for sucking carbon from the atmosphere, Dukes said.
Expanding production of palm oil is "a terrible decision. Whether or not it's consciously made, it's society going in reverse," he said.
Major power companies are divided on whether to continue or pursue palm oil generation.
Leon Flexman, of RWE npower, Britain's largest electricity supplier, said his company decided against palm oil after a year of study because it could not verify its supplies would be free of the taint of destroyed rain forest or peat bogs, he said.
The Dutch power company Essent announced in December it had stopped burning until it can trace and verify the sources.
Biox, a Dutch startup, said it plans careful scrutiny of palm oil sources but will proceed with construction of three 50 megawatt power stations that burn palm oil byproducts exclusively. That's enough electricity to light all the homes in Amsterdam.
"From the start, we knew we can't stay in business if we can't prove that production is sustainable," said Biox executive Arjen Brinkmann. "Until this report came out, peat lands was not an issue because we hadn't heard of it. Nobody had heard," he said, adding that it will now be a factor in the company's sustainability criteria.
So far, the reservations about palm oil do not seem to have affected the market. Production rose 6.6 percent last year and will increase another 5.5 percent this year to 37 million tons, according to Fortis Bank. Prices have risen 35 percent in the last year and are still rising, it said.
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