[Pil-pc-oceania] Clippings:

[pacific-edge]

OUR FOOD
Following the controversy of fake free range eggs being sold as authentic
free range, The Age newspaper started a weblog on eggy issues.

Find it at: 
http://blogs.theage.com.au/lifestyle/chewonthis/archives/2007/02/the_hen_or_
your.html 

...............
    
GLOBAL WARMIING
Last Update: Friday, March 9, 2007. 11:15pm (AEDT)

EU summit adopts energy-climate strategy

European Union leaders have clinched agreement on a bold long-term strategy
for energy policy and climate change aimed at leading the world in the fight
against global warming, diplomats say.

The deal setting binding targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions,
developing renewable energy sources, promoting energy efficiency and using
biofuels laid down a challenge to the United States and other industrialised
powers to follow suit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chaired a two-day summit, put forward
the key compromise to secure agreement to set a legally binding target for
renewable fuels such as solar, wind and hydro-electric power - the most
contentious issue.

Leaders accepted the target of 20 per cent of renewable sources in EU energy
consumption by 2020 in exchange for flexibility on each country's
contribution to the common goal.

Germany added wording to win over states reliant on nuclear energy, led by
France, or coal, such as Poland, and small countries with few energy
resources, such as Cyprus and Malta, by adding references to the national
energy mix.

On Thursday, the 27 leaders committed themselves to a target of reducing EU
greenhouse gas emissions, blamed for heating the planet, by 20 per cent by
2020 and offered to go to 30 per cent if major nations such as the United
States, Russia, China and India follow suit.

- Reuters
.............

SUSTAINABLE BUILDING
     
Last Update: Friday, March 9, 2007. 3:46pm (AEDT)

Conservationist uses wine bottles to build energy-saving house

A house in Western Australia's south-west is being built entirely from
recycled wine bottles.

Around 13,500 wine bottles will be used in the walls of the house, which
owner Peter Little says will save energy.

He says by filling the bottles with water, the entire building will be
insulated.

Mr Little has spent 30 years developing environmentally-friendly building
methods and he says this one has potential for Australia's hotter regions.

"Water is probably, I think one of the miracle building materials of this
century which nobody is using," he said.

"From our point of view it can store more energy, heat or cool than any
material we know."
..................

UK first to set legally-binding carbon targets

Britain has become the first country to propose legislation setting binding
limits on greenhouse gases as it stepped up its campaign for a new global
warming pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

In its draft Climate Change Bill, the government said carbon dioxide
emissions had to be cut by at least 60 per cent by 2050, set out five-year
carbon budgets to reach the target and created an independent monitoring
committee to check annual progress.

Prime Minister Tony Blair put climate change at the top of the international
agenda when Britain was head of the Group of Eight industrialised nations in
2005 and it could now become the first nation to limit emissions by statute.

The draft bill also sets a legally-binding interim target for carbon cuts of
26 to 32 per cent by 2020.

Miliband said failure to meet targets could land governments in court.
"Governments that fail to meet the stipulations of the bill will be subject
to judicial review. It will be for the courts to decide what sanctions to
apply," he said.

Environmentalists welcomed the carbon cut budgets, which require any
overshoot in a given year to be recouped later.

The draft bill will go to three months of public and parliamentary
consultation before becoming law next year, but green campaigners want to
raise the 2050 target to 80 per cent and set annual three per cent cut
targets to ensure compliance.

Britain and Germany are leading the charge to extend Kyoto and expand its
scope to bring in Australia and the United States which rejected it in 2001,
and boom economies such as China and India, which - although signatories -
are not bound by it.

The British draft bill comes after European Union leaders agreed last week
to cut carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

The government stressed individual behaviour needed to change and people
needed incentives to reduce carbon footprints and become energy producers as
well as consumers.

Reuters

..........

Scientists have inconvenient news for Gore
William Broad
March 14, 2007

THE environmental campaigner Al Gore may have won over Hollywood with his
documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But the scientific world is proving a
much tougher audience for his relentless campaign to raise public awareness
of climate change. There is a rising chorus of concern, extending even to
"moderate" scientists with no political axe to grind, over the former US
vice-president's tactics and advocacy.

The nub of their concern is a belief that he has over-egged his case. That,
in trying to sell to the public the dangers of complacency in combating
global warming, he is guilty of a number of convenient untruths or
distortions.

The main charges are that he has skated over the Earth's history of climate
change and that his talk of impending doom ignores that change is a
slow-motion process.

Even a top adviser to Mr Gore, the environmental scientist James Hansen,
admits the former vice-president's work may hold "imperfections" and
"technical flaws".

The creeping unease among scientists has emerged in talks, articles and blog
entries over the past few months. Among the critics is Robert Carter, a
marine geologist at James Cook University, Queensland. In a blog late last
year, Dr Carter joined other geologists in ticking off Mr Gore over his
perceived failure to acknowledge the globe's long history of climate change.

"Nowhere does Mr Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he
describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our
planet," Dr Carter wrote. "Nor does he present any evidence that climate
during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of
constant change."

An emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, Don
Easterbrook, told the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America
that he did not want to "pick on Al Gore". "But there are a lot of
inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that
with real data."

Professor Easterbrook disputed Mr Gore's claim that "our civilisation has
never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this".
Nonsense, Professor Easterbrook said. He flashed a slide that showed
temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large
swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts were up to "20
times greater than the warming in the past century". Getting personal, he
mocked Mr Gore's assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except
those industry had corrupted. "I've never been paid a nickel by an oil
company," Professor Easterbrook said. "And I'm not a Republican."

A report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr Gore's
portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium.
Instead, it said current highs appeared unrivalled since only 1600, the tail
end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said
on a blog that Mr Gore's film did "indeed do a pretty good job of presenting
the most dire scenarios". But the June report, he added, shows "that all we
really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400
years".

Some of Mr Gore's centrist detractors point to the report last month by the
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel said humans were the
main cause of the globe's warming, part of Mr Gore's message that few
scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion
process. It estimated that the world's seas would rise a maximum of 58
centimetres this century. Mr Gore envisions rises of up to six metres and
depicts heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves.

Mr Gore, in an email exchange about the critics, said his work made "the
most important and salient points" about climate change, if not "some
nuances and distinctions" scientists might want. "The degree of scientific
consensus on global warming has never been stronger," he said, adding, "I am
trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I
understand."

Although Mr Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority
of science in An Inconvenient Truth. Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the
Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of
Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While
praising Mr Gore for "getting the message out", Dr Vranes questioned whether
his presentations were "overselling our certainty about knowing the future".

"He's a very polarising figure in the science community," said Dr Roger
Pielke, an environmental scientist and a colleague of Dr Vranes at the
University of Colorado. "Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue
to the person, and become a referendum on Mr Gore."

An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar for best documentary and has taken more
than $US46 million ($58.6 million) worldwide. Mr Gore depicted a future in
which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the
coasts and people die en masse. "Unless we act boldly," he wrote, "our world
will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes."

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a
politician. James Hansen, Mr Gore's adviser, and director of NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, said: "Al does an exceptionally good job of
seeing the forest for the trees."

Still, Dr Hansen notes the imperfections. He points to hurricanes. Mr Gore
highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research
suggesting that global warming will increase storm frequency and deadliness.
Yet the past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters
predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the US.

"We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,"
Dr Hansen said of Mr Gore. "On the other hand," he said, "he has the bottom
line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of
vaporisation, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be
stronger, in a warmer climate."

In his email message, Mr Gore defends his work as fundamentally accurate.
"Of course," he said, "there will always be questions around the edges of
the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue
to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions."

He said "not every single adviser" agreed on every point, "but we do agree
on the fundamentals" - that warming is real and caused by humans.

The New York Times

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