The environment in the news friday, 23 June 2006

Other Environment News

Some 400 British companies are taking part in the 100 Days Carbon Clean-up challenge, where they are looking for ways to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the small businesses involved, Fulcrum Consulting, is keeping a diary of its progress for the BBC News website.

21 JUNE: DOWN TO BUSINESS

This week we are launching the first of our carbon saving strategies, having now established benchmarks to measure progress against.

We have decided to break ourselves in gently and are starting with three very simple, office-wide initiatives:

• Not turning the lights on

• Turning off desk and ceiling fans when we go home

• Printing double sided as default

We have printed out flyers (4 to an A4 page) and have attached one to every PC screen this morning.

We decided that this investment in paper was worthwhile as the information disseminated through our internal intranet is not having sufficient impact.

The flyer includes instructions on how to change printer default settings to double sided.

Our receptionist, Danielle, is responsible for our paper purchasing and has promised to keep track of how much we order over the 100 days. We estimate that we currently get though 750 sheets of A4 paper a day. Will we able to make a noticeable difference to this?

Carbon count

Work has proceeded to work out how much carbon dioxide we could fit within our London HQ office. Calculations show that the volume of the three-storey building is approximately 2,900 cubic metres.

Carbon dioxide has a volume - at standard room temperature - of approximately half a cubic metre per kg. Therefore it would take 5,800 kg of CO2 to fill up the building.

We are setting this as our target for the 100 days campaign, and are working on a "building-o-meter" graphic to illustrate our progress towards this target.

Results from monitoring one of our boiling water dispensers demonstrated that we could save 40% by turning it off for evenings and weekends

The energy meters purchased last week have been a great success. We now know that our standard PCs use 70 watts, and our flat-screen monitors 20 watts when they are switched on.

A much larger study covering more of our electrical equipment is being carried out by our "carbon monitors". This will include monitoring equipment when it is on standby to find out which things are worth making an effort to turn off completely at night.

Results from monitoring one of our boiling water dispensers demonstrated that we could save 40% by turning it off for evenings and weekends.

Tessa has sourced a seven-day time switch which can do this automatically and still have the water up to temperature by the time the first cup of tea is required in the morning. At a cost of £4.99, this has a pay back period of less than 4 months.

With four of these boilers in the building, potential annual carbon savings could reach the window sill on the ground floor!

Andy Ford took a monitor home and discovered that a phone charger uses three watts when it is not being used but is still plugged in a socket. This means that in one year, it can waste as much energy as leaving a fan heater on for a whole day.

Next week we are going to turn our attention to recycling.

Susie Diamond, Building Physics Engineer

12 JUNE: HEATED DEBATE

Week two of our 100 days of carbon clean-up and enthusiasm is still running high.

CAD (Computer Aided Design) man Martin has been roped in to help read the meters every Monday morning. We have also discovered a new electricity meter to add to our collection. Work continues to identify the areas served by each meter.

We have purchased three "plug-in mains power and energy monitors" so we can monitor the energy consumed by various appliances. We are kicking off with Tessa's PC, monitor and a desk fan.

We have also bought a device called an "electrisave" that clips on to an electricity meter and gives you a continuous read out of power consumption, CO2 emissions and cost.

We took advantage of the large invited audience for our Fulcrum Sustainability Debate on Thursday evening to announce our involvement in the 100 days campaign.

The debate entitled: "This forum believes that all pre-2000 buildings should be overclad by 2050" was very lively.

The overall conclusion was overcladding would improve thermal insulation and reduce heating requirements, and that this would be a step in the right direction, but would only form a small part of the giant leap required to solve our climate change problems.

'Time budgets'

There has been some debate regarding how much time should be spent on our efforts to reduce emissions, reflecting the issues faced by many companies when balancing upfront investment of time and resources against long term emission reductions and related cost savings.

It was decided that all ideas would be allocated a time budget, and prioritised according to their importance to the project and their potential carbon savings.

The team envisages spending some time getting the project up and running during the first few weeks and then another burst of energy collecting and disseminating results, with a lull during the middle of the project where efforts are made only to keep all our initiatives on track.

Many of the initiatives, such as increasing our recycling rates, turning off lights and appliances, will be done on a voluntary basis with no cost implications.

I myself had a bash at water saving (and therefore saving the CO2 emissions from its treatment and transportation) by siphoning our used bath water out of the bathroom window to water all the flower pots in the back yard - a remarkably easy process.

I am still wondering whether utilising the bath water in this way mitigates the environmental effects of not taking showers instead, but it did make watering the flowers quicker during the hosepipe ban.

Susie Diamond, Building Physics Engineer

5 JUNE: CLEAN-UP COMMENCES

Fulcrum is an engineering consultancy famous for innovation in low-energy and sustainable buildings - however we don't generally get as much time as we'd like to focus our minds on our own carbon emissions!

Most people don't seem to have much idea what their annual energy bills are at home, or what the fuel consumption is for their vehicle

The 100 Days Campaign is a great incentive for us to do this.

We kicked off with a meeting to discuss plans for reducing our emissions as much as possible within the project timescale.

As part of this, we've planned weekly meetings on Tuesday afternoons for the core 100 Days team (Susie, Tessa, Tom, Andrew, Chani and Andy F).

We have allocated the first 10 days for benchmark-setting, idea-gathering and dissemination of information.

A key part of our strategy is getting everyone in the company engaged, and we have set up an e-mail address for staff to send in their ideas.

We've also set up a competition to decide a company reward incentive, with the reward budget equal to the price of a year's worth of savings. Our company intranet will keep people involved throughout the campaign.

Starting point

The first thing we plan to do is establish our benchmarks (i.e. our starting point).

Once we know our base consumption levels we'll be able to measure our success more accurately.

We have been taking monthly meter readings for gas, electricity and water to calculate our annual consumption. This data is not quite as complete as it might be due to the challenges involved with remembering to take monthly readings from meters which are not all easily accessible (chairs and torches are required!).

THE UK EMISSIONS 'CAKE'

British carbon dioxide emissions by source for 2004

Total amounts to 153.0m tonnes (carbon equivalent)

Figures do not include emissions/removals from land use changes and forestry

We have also had problems identifying which meters serve which areas of our three floors of Victorian warehouse building.

Another aspect of our benchmark gathering is to persuade each employee to complete a simple spreadsheet (the "Edge Pledge") to work out their annual carbon emissions due to travel and domestic use.

This has proved harder than anticipated, as most people don't seem to have much idea what their annual energy bills are at home, or what the fuel consumption is for their vehicle - or maybe they are just too busy working to take the time to think about this!

Only nine out of about 60 possible responses so far. We're trying to come up with a suitable incentive to encourage more people to fill it in.

Ideas flow

One of the proposals from today's meeting was to measure the amount of carbon we save during the 100 days in relation to the volume of our office building. We need to do some calculations so that we can calibrate this appropriately.

We've come up with quite a few ideas for initiatives that we want to have a go at during the campaign. We have also created a logo to tie all our initiatives together.

Ideas proposed so far include:

• Buying plug-in energy monitors to work out consumption of various office appliances

• Turning off all the lights; it's summer, we have big windows and it's bright enough without them

• Switching off all boiling water dispensers at night and weekends - we'll just have to wait while they heat up in the mornings

• Finding out how much our PCs, screens, photocopiers etc use in stand-by mode and whether we can optimise their "hibernate" settings when not in use

• Cutting food-miles travelled by the office "daily fruit"

• Ensuring the default for all our printing and photocopying is set to double-sided

• Analyse how much we recycle and whether this could be increased

• Do a transport audit on how staff get to work and site/meetings

Company Director, Andy F, is going to inaugurate our 100 days campaign at the Fulcrum Sustainability Debate on Thursday evening. The title of the debate is "This forum believes that all pre-2000 buildings should be overclad by 2050".

Susie Diamond, Building Physics Engineer

The 100 Days of Carbon Clean-Up challenge is run by the Chartered Institution of Building Service Engineers (Cibse) with support from the Carbon Trust. It runs until 12 September

Story from BBC NEWS:

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Reuters: Only 2 Pct of Coral Reefs Properly Protected - Study

NORWAY: June 23, 2006

OSLO - Less than 2 percent of the world's tropical coral reefs are properly protected from illegal fishing, mining or pollution despite government promises of wider safeguards, an international study showed on Thursday.

"The figures are depressing," said Camilo Mora, a scientist at Dalhousie University in Canada and lead author of the study, carried out in New Zealand by researchers from seven nations.

"Many countries create marine protected areas and then forget about them," he told Reuters of the findings, published in the journal Science.

Lack of protection may mean a further shrinking of reefs worldwide, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean. Reefs are key spawning grounds, are home to species from clown fish to sharks, protect coasts from erosion and also draw scuba-diving tourists.

"Less than 2 percent are extended protection complete with regulations on extraction, poaching and other major threats," the report said.

Overall, 18.7 percent of the area covered by tropical reefs was within marine protected areas -- but most of the conservation was only on paper. "Lines on the map are not enough to protect the world's coral reefs," Mora said.

Many governments have promised wider conservation of nature from reefs to rainforests, partly to help meet a UN goal of slowing an accelerating rate of species loss by 2012.

"While management (of marine protected areas) varies worldwide, it was particularly low in areas of high coral density such as the Indo-Pacific and the Caribbean," said Ransom Myers, a researcher at Dalhousie University.

The study did not name the nations performing worst or best in reef protection. Mora said, however, that Australia had successfully increased protection for much of the Great Barrier Reef.

The scientists reached their figures by building a database of protected areas from 102 countries then comparing it with the extent of reefs, partly mapped by satellites. They then surveyed more than 1,000 managers of protected areas and scientists to gauge the conservation performance.

Story by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

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Reuters: NY TIMES: Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate

June 22, 2006

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

WASHINGTON, June 22 — A controversial paper asserting that recent warming in the Northern Hemisphere was probably unrivaled for 1,000 years was endorsed today, with a few reservations, by a panel convened by the nation's pre-eminent scientific body.

The panel said that a statistical method used in the 1999 study was not the best and that some uncertainties in the work "have been underestimated," and it particularly challenged the authors' conclusion that the decade of the 1990's was probably the warmest in a millennium.

But in a 155-page report, the 12-member panel convened by the National Academies said "an array of evidence" supported the main thrust of the paper. Disputes over details, it said, reflected the normal intellectual clash that takes place as science tests new approaches to old questions.

The study, led by Michael E. Mann, a climatologist now at Pennsylvania State University, was the first to estimate widespread climate trends by stitching together a grab bag of evidence, including variations in ancient tree rings and temperatures measured in deep holes in the earth.

It has been repeatedly attacked by Republican lawmakers and some business-financed groups as built on cherry-picked data meant to create an alarming view of recent warming and play down past natural warm periods.

At a news conference at the headquarters of the National Academies, several members of the panel reviewing the study said they saw no sign that its authors had intentionally chosen data sets or methods to get a desired result.

"I saw nothing that spoke to me of any manipulation," said one member, Peter Bloomfield, a statistics professor at North Carolina State University. He added that his impression was the study was "an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure."

More broadly, the panel examined other recent research comparing the pronounced warming trend over the last several decades with temperature shifts over the last 2,000 years. It expressed high confidence that warming over the last 25 years exceeded any peaks since 1600. And in a news conference here today, three panelists said the current warming was probably, but not certainly, beyond any peaks since the year 900.

The experts said there was no reliable way to make estimates for surface-temperature trends in the first millennium A.D.

In the report, the panel stressed that the significant remaining uncertainties about climate patterns over the last 2,000 years did not weaken the scientific case that the current warming trend was caused mainly by people, through the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"Surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence," the report said.

The 1999 paper is part of a growing body of work trying to pull together widely disparate clues of climate conditions before the age of weather instruments.

The paper includes a graph of temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere that gained the nickname "hockey stick" because of its vivid depiction of a long period with little temperature variation for nearly 1,000 years, followed by a sharp upward hook in recent decades.

The hockey stick has become something of an environmentalist icon. It was prominently displayed in a pivotal 2001 United Nations report concluding that greenhouse gases from human activities had probably caused most of the warming measured since 1950. A version of it is in the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, and Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, have repeatedly criticized the Mann study, citing several peer-reviewed papers challenging its methods.

The main critiques were done by Stephen McIntyre, a statistician and part-time consultant in Toronto to minerals industries, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

They contended that Dr. Mann and his colleagues selected particular statistical methods and sets of data, like a record of rings in bristlecone pine trees, that were most apt to produce a picture of unusual recent warming. They also complained that Dr. Mann refused to share his data and techniques.

In an interview, Dr. Mann expressed muted satisfaction with the panel's findings. He said it clearly showed that the 1999 analysis has held up over time.

But he complained that the committee seemed to forget about the many caveats that were in the original paper. "Even the title of the paper on which all this has been based is as much about the caveats and uncertainties as it is about the findings," he said.

Raymond S. Bradley, a University of Massachusetts geoscientist and one of Dr. Mann's co-authors, said that the caveats were dropped mainly as the graph was widely reproduced by others. (The other author of the 1999 paper was Malcolm K Hughes of the University of Arizona.)

The report was done at the request of Representative Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee, who called last November for a review of the 1999 study and related research to clear the air.

In a statement, Mr. Boehlert, who is retiring at the end of the year, expressed satisfaction with the results, saying, "There is nothing in this report that should raise any doubts about the broad scientific consensus on global climate change — which doesn't rest primarily on these temperature issues, in any event — or any doubts about whether any paper on the temperature records was legitimate scientific work."

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VILNIUS, Lithuania, June 22, 2006 (ENS) - Eleven designated "hot spots" have been removed from the list of the Baltic Sea’s worst sources of pollution following a review of cleanup efforts, officials from the nine Baltic Sea coastal countries and the European Union announced here today at the conclusion of a two day meeting.

The Heads of Delegation to the Helsinki Commission for the protection of the Baltic marine environment (HELCOM) met to develop the strategic Baltic Sea Action Plan, being created by HELCOM to restore the troubled marine environment of the shallow Baltic Sea.

Among the hot spots removed from the list is the Estonian capital city of Tallinn, as well as industrial plants and smaller municipalities in Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Russia. These municipalities and industrial facilities have made improvements in updating their processes and pollution abatement technologies.

Tallinn

The Estonian capital of Tallinn on the Baltic Sea is now clean enough to warrant removal from the HELCOM Hot Spot List. (Photo courtesy Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien)

"The remedial actions at the hot spots should be seen as one of the major steps towards achieving a cleaner marine environment," said Daubaras. He said ongoing remedial activities will be part of the strategic Baltic Sea Action Plan.

Among the hot spots deleted from the list are three municipalities in Estonia including the capital Tallinn, as well as Pärnu and Paide.

Seven municipal wastewater treatment plants in St. Petersburg, Russia were removed from the list.

In Poland, a coking plant in Katowice has been taken off the list, as well as the metallurgical plant Duo-Stal in Bytom, as it has been closed.

In Lithuania, two municipalities - Klaipeda and Siauliai - have been removed from the list as well as three industrial hot spots, including the Amalg Azotaz fertilizer industry, the Panezys food factory, and the Klaipeda cardboard factory on the Lithuanian coast.

"We are witnessing very good progress in the reduction of pollution from point sources such as municipal wastewater treatment facilities, as well as industrial plants," said Kaj Forsius, professional secretary of HELCOM. "Wastewater treatment efficiency at the former hot spots now meets the requirements of the relevant HELCOM Recommendations."

The hot spots list of the most significant point sources of pollution around the Baltic Sea was first drawn up under the HELCOM Baltic Sea Joint Comprehensive Environmental Action Programme (JCP) in 1992.

The most notorious hot spots are point sources such as municipal facilities and industrial plants, but the program also covers pollution from agricultural areas and rural settlements, and sensitive areas such as coastal lagoons and wetlands where special environmental measures are needed.

ferry

The objective of the JCP is to facilitate the implementation of pollution reduction measures at the most polluted sites in the Baltic Sea drainage area.

The program, which is expected to be completed by 2012 at the latest, specifies a series of actions to be undertaken at pollution hot spots.

The environmental hot spots were designated in 1992 by an international group of scientists, engineers, environmental managers, bankers and national representatives, according to practical economic considerations as well as the seriousness of their impact on the environment and human health.

A total of 81 hot spots and sub-hot spots remain on the list today, following the deletion of 82 of the 163 originally identified.

Investment and remediation projects carried out at pollution hot spots around the Baltic Sea have contributed towards overall reductions in the pollution load entering the Baltic Sea catchment area.

Water quality in many coastal waters of the Baltic Sea has improved since 1992, reflecting progress in the treatment of municipal and industrial wastewater, the delegates agreed.

But although progress has been made at municipal and industrial hot spots, "continued and substantial additional support will be required to reach the targets of the program," they said.

HELCOM has already approved the core elements of Baltic Sea Strategic Action Plan, which the commission describes as a common vision of a healthy Baltic Sea and a set of strategic goals and ecological objectives for achieving a commonly acceptable good status of the marine environment.

The next step in the development of the plan will be to identify and detail the kind of actions needed to achieve the agreed environmental objectives within a given timeframe for each of the four main environmental priority issues - curbing eutrophication, preventing pollution involving hazardous substances, improving safety of navigation and accident response capacity, and halting habitat destruction and the decline in biodiversity.

A HELCOM Ministerial Meeting scheduled to take place on November 15, 2007 in Warsaw, Poland is scheduled to adopt the Baltic Sea Strategic Action Plan.

The chairmanship of the Helsinki Commission rotates between the nine Baltic Sea coastal countries and the EU every two years. The Vilnius meeting was the last under Lithuania’s chairmanship of HELCOM.

On July 1, 2006, Poland will officially take over the chairmanship. A chairman, Mieczyslaw Ostojski from Poland's Environment Miinistry will lead the work of HELCOM until June 30, 2008.

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June 22, 2006

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

WASHINGTON, June 22 — A controversial paper asserting that recent warming in the Northern Hemisphere was probably unrivaled for 1,000 years was endorsed today, with a few reservations, by a panel convened by the nation's pre-eminent scientific body.

The panel said that a statistical method used in the 1999 study was not the best and that some uncertainties in the work "have been underestimated," and it particularly challenged the authors' conclusion that the decade of the 1990's was probably the warmest in a millennium.

But in a 155-page report, the 12-member panel convened by the National Academies said "an array of evidence" supported the main thrust of the paper. Disputes over details, it said, reflected the normal intellectual clash that takes place as science tests new approaches to old questions.

The study, led by Michael E. Mann, a climatologist now at Pennsylvania State University, was the first to estimate widespread climate trends by stitching together a grab bag of evidence, including variations in ancient tree rings and temperatures measured in deep holes in the earth.

It has been repeatedly attacked by Republican lawmakers and some business-financed groups as built on cherry-picked data meant to create an alarming view of recent warming and play down past natural warm periods.

At a news conference at the headquarters of the National Academies, several members of the panel reviewing the study said they saw no sign that its authors had intentionally chosen data sets or methods to get a desired result.

"I saw nothing that spoke to me of any manipulation," said one member, Peter Bloomfield, a statistics professor at North Carolina State University. He added that his impression was the study was "an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure."

More broadly, the panel examined other recent research comparing the pronounced warming trend over the last several decades with temperature shifts over the last 2,000 years. It expressed high confidence that warming over the last 25 years exceeded any peaks since 1600. And in a news conference here today, three panelists said the current warming was probably, but not certainly, beyond any peaks since the year 900.

The experts said there was no reliable way to make estimates for surface-temperature trends in the first millennium A.D.

In the report, the panel stressed that the significant remaining uncertainties about climate patterns over the last 2,000 years did not weaken the scientific case that the current warming trend was caused mainly by people, through the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"Surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence," the report said.

The 1999 paper is part of a growing body of work trying to pull together widely disparate clues of climate conditions before the age of weather instruments.

The paper includes a graph of temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere that gained the nickname "hockey stick" because of its vivid depiction of a long period with little temperature variation for nearly 1,000 years, followed by a sharp upward hook in recent decades.

The hockey stick has become something of an environmentalist icon. It was prominently displayed in a pivotal 2001 United Nations report concluding that greenhouse gases from human activities had probably caused most of the warming measured since 1950. A version of it is in the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, and Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, have repeatedly criticized the Mann study, citing several peer-reviewed papers challenging its methods.

The main critiques were done by Stephen McIntyre, a statistician and part-time consultant in Toronto to minerals industries, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

They contended that Dr. Mann and his colleagues selected particular statistical methods and sets of data, like a record of rings in bristlecone pine trees, that were most apt to produce a picture of unusual recent warming. They also complained that Dr. Mann refused to share his data and techniques.

In an interview, Dr. Mann expressed muted satisfaction with the panel's findings. He said it clearly showed that the 1999 analysis has held up over time.

But he complained that the committee seemed to forget about the many caveats that were in the original paper. "Even the title of the paper on which all this has been based is as much about the caveats and uncertainties as it is about the findings," he said.

Raymond S. Bradley, a University of Massachusetts geoscientist and one of Dr. Mann's co-authors, said that the caveats were dropped mainly as the graph was widely reproduced by others. (The other author of the 1999 paper was Malcolm K Hughes of the University of Arizona.)

The report was done at the request of Representative Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee, who called last November for a review of the 1999 study and related research to clear the air.

In a statement, Mr. Boehlert, who is retiring at the end of the year, expressed satisfaction with the results, saying, "There is nothing in this report that should raise any doubts about the broad scientific consensus on global climate change — which doesn't rest primarily on these temperature issues, in any event — or any doubts about whether any paper on the temperature records was legitimate scientific work."

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