Un news Centre: Low-carbon, socially aware business models key to sustainable development – un

Nuclear fuel does not emit carbon dioxide, making it a serious option for "clean energy" proponents over fossil fuels, but governments around the world have turned more cautious on it in the wake of the Fukushima crisis in Japan.

The IEA's deputy head Richard Jones however cautioned that global warming could accelerate much faster and lead to catastrophic consequences if the international community fails to adopt a more aggressive clean energy policy.

"We are not on the pathway to limit global temperatures," he told the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong, referring to an international goal to restrict warming to two degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

The target was set by countries at the Cancun meeting in December 2010.

"If you miss it by 0.1 degree Celsius nobody cares but the problem is it looks like we are on track for more than six degrees Celsius (rise)," he said.

"That is serious. We really don't know what will happen," said the deputy head of the Paris-based agency, set up to monitor energy use.

In its annual report last year, the IEA projected that 360 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity would be added worldwide by 2035, on top of the 390 gigawatts already in use.

However fears over the use of nuclear power could see the IEA halve its projection to 180 gigawatts, its chief economist Fatih Birol told AFP earlier this month.

Jones said the earlier projection would be "overly optimistic in today's environment", and that the IEA will re-evaluate the statistic, but declined to give any figures.

Germany has announced the temporary shutdown of its seven oldest nuclear reactors while it conducts a safety probe in light of Japan's atomic emergency, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that crippled the power station.

Switzerland suspended plans to replace its ageing atomic plants, while in France -- where nuclear makes up 75 percent of electricity production -- environmental groups have called for a referendum on the future use of atomic power.

The backup power systems at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama shut as designed on Wednesday, preventing a partial meltdown like the disaster last month in Japan that was also caused by a natural disaster.

In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, even relatively routine outages at the U.S. nuclear fleet are drawing greater scrutiny.

The three-reactor 3,274-megawatt Alabama plant, located along the Tennessee River about 170 miles north of the Alabama state capital of Montgomery, can power up to 2.6 million homes.

Its units are similar in design to those crippled by the earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima plant.

"The systems at Browns Ferry did exactly what they were supposed to. This is not comparable to Fukushima because it wasn't the result of damage to the plant, rather the lines leaving the plant were cut," said Scott Brooks, spokesman at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

When Browns Ferry lost offsite power, the reactors automatically shut and emergency backup diesel generators kicked in to cool the nuclear fuel.

In Japan, the reactors also automatically shut when the plant lost offsite power due to the earthquake and the backup generators kicked in to cool the fuel, but at Fukushima, the diesel generators were wiped out by the tsunami, allowing the fuel to overheat and ultimately release radiation.

"The (Browns Ferry) reactors will remain shut until we have restored the reliability of the transmission system," said Ray Golden, spokesman for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which owns and operates the Alabama plant.

DAYS TO FIX LINES

The repairs to the U.S. reactor's transmission lines would take days and could possibly take weeks, Golden said, but the plant itself was undamaged.

"The plant can't produce power if that power doesn't have any place to go. So the system shut down automatically. TVA is in the process of restoring power as quickly as possible," the NRC's Brooks said.

The NRC is monitoring the plant amid heightened concern about the ability of nuclear plants to withstand natural disasters.

The tornadoes and thunderstorms left a trail of destruction across seven southern U.S. states on Wednesday, killing at least 220 people in southern states, officials said.

The storm knocked out power to about 300,000 homes and businesses, primarily in the northern parts of Alabama and Mississippi, TVA's Golden said.

In addition to the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, the Tennessee Valley Authority operates several other facilities and provides power to about 150 municipal utilities, which distribute electricity to some 9 million people in seven states.

The federally-owned power generator said its two nuclear power plants in Tennessee -- 1,123 MW Watts Bar and 2,274 MWSequoyah -- were largely unaffected by the storm. Sequoyah continues to provide power to customers and Watts Bar was already shut for scheduled maintenance when the storm hit.

As of 6 a.m. EDT, the Tennessee Valley Authority had restored 12 large transmission lines but still had another 78 out of service, said another TVA spokesman, Scott Brooks.

ALL REACTORS COOL

By Thursday afternoon, the NRC said the TVA had cooled all three units at Browns Ferry to a safe temperature so that the water around the reactor's core will not boil away -- as happened at Japan's Fukushima.

Ken Clark, another spokesman at the NRC, said seven of the eight diesel generators at Browns Ferry were operating to keep the reactors cool and the plant also had some offsite power via the small 161 kilovolt Athens line. He noted that line was not big enough to allow the reactors to restart.

"No point in restarting the reactors until the main offsite power lines are restored because there would be no where to send the power," Clark said.

Clark said the plant had batteries to backup the diesel generators but could run on the diesels "indefinitely" since there was nothing blocking the pathways into the plant to replenish the diesel fuel.
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AFP: Tornadoes whipped up by wind, not climate: officials
28^th April 2011
US meteorologists warned Thursday it would be a mistake to blame climate change for a seeming increase in tornadoes in the wake of deadly storms that have ripped through the US south.

"If you look at the past 60 years of data, the number of tornadoes is increasing significantly, but it's agreed upon by the tornado community that it's not a real increase," said Grady Dixon, assistant professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University.

"It's having to do with better (weather tracking) technology, more population, the fact that the population is better educated and more aware. So we're seeing them more often," Dixon said.

But he said it would be "a terrible mistake" to relate the up-tick to climate change.

The tornadoes that ripped through the US south this week killed over 250 people, in the worst US weather disaster in years, with residents and emergency workers sifting through the rubble on Thursday.

Violent twisters that famously rip through the US south's "Tornado Alley" are formed when strong jet winds bringing upper-level storms from the north interact with very warm, humid air mass from the Gulf of Mexico, said David Imy from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

On Wednesday, a particularly potent storm was whipping up around the heart of that tornado-prone corridor where the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, eastern Texas and northwest Louisiana meet, noted Kristina Pydynowski, a senior meteorologist at the AccuWeather.com website.

Sparking the severe thunderstorms from that point was the much warmer air arriving from the south, over the tropical Gulf. The combining winds at differing altitudes, said Pydynowski, created "significant twisting motion in the atmosphere, allowing the strongest thunderstorms to spawn tornadoes."

Such a mixture would not be prevalent along the US eastern seaboard, so rough weather in that region Thursday would not also spawn tornadoes, at least on the same scale, she said.

Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), also dismissed Thursday climate change as a factor in the deadly tornadoes: "Actually what we're seeing is springtime," he said.

"Many people think of Oklahoma as 'Tornado Alley' and forget that the southeast United States actually has a history of longer and more powerful tornadoes that stay on the ground longer."

Wednesday's deadly tornadoes, according to Imy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were unusual for being "long track," meaning they were on the ground for a longer period of time than usual -- in this case, roiling across the land for 30 miles (48 kilometers) or more.

An average track would be less than five miles, said Imy.

However, the stronger-than-usual tornadoes affecting the southern states were actually predicted from examining the planet's climatological patterns, specifically those related to the La Nina phenomenon.

"We knew it was going to be a big tornado year," he said. But the key to that tip-off was unrelated to climate change: "It is related to the natural fluctuations of the planet."
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Guardian (UK): Deadliest tornadoes since 1974 rip apart towns and lives in six US states
28^th April 2011
Death toll close to 300 after severe storm batters south, with authorities warning of more to come

Tornadoes wreak havoc across southern United States Link to this video

The hilltop town of Rainsville, Alabama, bills itself as a peaceful area surrounded by beautiful ridges, valleys and lakes. By Thursday morning, after a mile-wide tornado had torn through six southern US states, killing at least 297 people, it almost seemed to have been erased from existence.

"It looks like something just washed parts of the town off the map," said Israel Partridge, a volunteer search and rescue worker. "Whole subdivisions, where there were 20 or 30 houses, there is nothing left. It is just totally gone. All that is left are the concrete steps leading up to rubble. It is not just that the houses have severe damage. They are gone."

By 3am on Thursday, when workers finally paused to rest, about 35 bodies had been laid out at the fire department of a town with a population of 5,000, Partridge said. Rainsville, north-east of Birmingham, ranked among the towns worst hit by the dozens of tornadoes unleashed on the south. By late evening, 297 people were confirmed dead across the six states, but some 210 of those, were in Alabama alone.

Barack Obama, who is due to visit Alabama shortly, said he had spoken to the state's governor, Robert Bentley, and approved his request for emergency relief aid.

"Our hearts go out to all those who have been affected by this devastation, and we commend the heroic efforts of those who have been working tirelessly to respond to this disaster," he said.

The national weather service said the storms were the most ferocious some of their forecasters had ever seen; the deadliest since tornadoes in 1974 killed 315 people.

"These were the most intense supercell thunderstorms that I think anybody who was out there forecasting has ever seen," meteorologist Greg Carbin told reporters. "If you experienced a direct hit from one of these, you'd have to be in a reinforced room, storm shelter or underground to survive," he said.

As well as the 210 people killed in Alabama, Mississippi reported 33 dead, Tennessee 33, and Georgia 15, with five in Virginia and one in Kentucky.

The governor of Alabama declared a state of emergency and mobilised the state's 2,000 members of the national guard. Authorities reported that downed power lines and communications and blocked roads prevented them from gaining a full measure of the destruction. A million people in Alabama were without power.

The tornadoes also forced a temporary shutdown at a nuclear plant in Alabama, but the nuclear regulatory commission said there was no danger.

Among the other towns reporting heavy casualties and damage was the city of Tuscaloosa in Alabama, which reported 36 killed. "I don't know how anyone survived," the city's mayor, Walter Maddox, told reporters.

"We're used to tornadoes here in Tuscaloosa. It's part of growing up. But when you look at the path of destruction that's likely five to seven miles long in an area half a mile to a mile wide … it's an amazing scene. There's parts of the city I don't recognise."

Similar scenes unfolded across the south, with television images of heavily damaged churches and government buildings.

In many instances, houses were lifted clear off their concrete foundations, and slammed back down, crushing those seeking shelter.

Adam Melton, a student in Tuscaloosa, told the Alabama university newspaper he and a group of friends had been sheltering in a cellar when the building lifted off above them. "Then a Jeep Cherokee came right over us and hit me in the head. We were underneath of the Jeep on our knees and chest for the end of it," he told the Crimson White. "After we got hit, we pulled five or six people out, but it was gone. The house was gone."

Partridge said he saw the tornado heading straight for his home on Lookout Mountain, about a 10 minute drive from Rainsville. "By the grace of God, where I was it just missed us. You could see it coming towards us and it dumped us with debris, but it took a turn and missed us," he said.

But Rainsville absorbed the full force of the storm system. Landmarks such as the sport stadium were reduced to twisted wreckage. An entire trailer park of 73 mobile homes was destroyed.

"Even the houses that made it suffered severe damage," said Partridge.

US weather forecasters had been warning for days of a powerful storm coming up out of the south-east. Schools were shut and many people took a day off work. However, those precautions were overwhelmed by the sheer force of the storm system.

The tornadoes took up a far wider stretch of ground than typical twisters, and stayed on the ground much longer. A number had wind speeds of more than 200mph, the weather service said. Survivors said they had had no idea what they would be facing. "I believe it caught most people by surprise, or they believed that most portions of their homes would be secure enough when, in fact, most of their homes are completely gone," Partridge said.

The death toll from Wednesday's storms seems out of a bygone era, before Doppler radar and pinpoint satellite forecasts were around to warn communities of severe weather. Residents were told the tornadoes were coming up to 24 minutes ahead of time, but they were just too wide, too powerful and too locked onto populated areas to avoid a horrifying body count.

"These were the most intense super-cell thunderstorms that I think anybody who was out there forecasting has ever seen," said meteorologist Greg Carbin at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

"If you experienced a direct hit from one of these, you'd have to be in a reinforced room, storm shelter or underground" to survive, Carbin said.

The storms seemed to hug the interstate highways as they barreled along like runaway trucks, obliterating neighborhoods or even entire towns from Tuscaloosa to Bristol, Va. One family rode out the disaster in the basement of a funeral home, another by huddling in a tanning bed.

In Concord, a small town outside Birmingham that was ravaged by a tornado, Randy Guyton's family got a phone call from a friend warning them to take cover. They rushed to the basement garage, piled into a Honda Ridgeline and listened to the roar as the twister devoured the house in seconds. Afterward, they saw daylight through the shards of their home and scrambled out.

"The whole house caved in on top of that car," he said. "Other than my boy screaming to the Lord to save us, being in that car is what saved us."

Son Justin remembers the dingy white cloud moving quickly toward the house.

"To me it sounded like destruction," the 22-year-old said. "It was a mean, mean roar. It was awful."

At least three people died in a Pleasant Grove subdivision southwest of Birmingham, where residents trickled back Thursday to survey the damage. Greg Harrison's neighborhood was somehow unscathed, but he remains haunted by the wind, thunder and lightning as they built to a crescendo, then suddenly stopped.

"Sick is what I feel," he said. "This is what you see in Oklahoma and Kansas. Not here. Not in the South."

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said his state had confirmed 195 deaths. There were 33 deaths in Mississippi, 33 in Tennessee, 14 in Georgia, five in Virginia and one in Kentucky. Hundreds if not thousands of people were injured — 600 in Tuscaloosa alone.

Some of the worst damage was about 50 miles southwest of Pleasant Grove in Tuscaloosa, a city of more than 83,000 that is home to the University of Alabama. The storms destroyed the city's emergency management center, so the school's Bryant-Denny Stadium was turned into a makeshift one. School officials said two students were killed, though they did not say how they died. Finals were canceled and commencement was postponed.

A tower-mounted news camera in Tuscaloosa captured images of an astonishingly thick, powerful tornado flinging debris as it leveled neighborhoods.

That twister and others Wednesday were several times more severe than a typical tornado, which is hundreds of yards wide, has winds around 100 mph and stays on the ground for a few miles, said research meteorologist Harold Brooks at the Storm Prediction Center.

"There's a pretty good chance some of these were a mile wide, on the ground for tens of miles and had wind speeds over 200 mph," he said.

The loss of life is the greatest from an outbreak of U.S. tornadoes since April 1974, when the weather service said 315 people were killed by a storm that swept across 13 Southern and Midwestern states.

Brooks said the tornado that struck Tuscaloosa could be an EF5 — the strongest category of tornado, with winds of more than 200 mph — and was at least the second-highest category, an EF4.

Search and rescue teams fanned out to dig through the rubble of devastated communities that bore eerie similarities to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when town after town lay flattened for nearly 90 miles.

In Phil Campbell, a small town of 1,000 in northwest Alabama where 26 people died, the grocery store, gas stations and medical clinic were destroyed by a tornado that Mayor Jerry Mays estimated was a half-mile wide and traveled some 20 miles.

"We've lost everything. Let's just say it like it is," Mays said. "I'm afraid we might have some suicides because of this."

President Barack Obama said he would travel to Alabama on Friday to view storm damage and meet Gov. Robert Bentley and affected families. As many as a million homes and businesses there were without power, and Bentley said 2,000 National Guard troops had been activated to help. The governors of Mississippi and Georgia also issued emergency declarations for parts of their states.

"We can't control when or where a terrible storm may strike, but we can control how we respond to it," Obama said. "And I want every American who has been affected by this disaster to know that the federal government will do everything we can to help you recover and we will stand with you as you rebuild."

The storm prediction center said it received 164 tornado reports around the region, but some tornadoes were probably reported multiple times and it could take days to get a final count.

In fact, Brooks said 50 to 60 reports — from the Mississippi-Alabama line, through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and into Georgia and southwestern Tennessee — might end up being a single tornado. If that's true its path would be one of the longest on record for a twister, rivaling a 1925 tornado that raged for 219 miles.

Brooks said the weather service was able to provide about 24 minutes' notice before the twisters hit.

"It was a well-forecasted event," Brooks said. "People were talking about this week being a big week a week ago."

Gov. Bentley said forecasters did a good job alerting people, but there's only so much they can do to help people prepare.

Carbin, the meteorologist, noted that the warning gave residents enough time to hunker down, but not enough for them to safely leave the area.

"You've got half an hour to evacuate the north side of Tuscaloosa. How do you do that and when do you do that? Knowing there's a tornado on the ground right now and the conditions in advance of it, you may inadvertently put people in harm's way," he said.

Officials said at least 13 died in Smithville, Miss., where devastating winds ripped open the police station, post office, city hall and an industrial park with several furniture factories. Pieces of tin were twined high around the legs of a blue water tower, and the Piggly Wiggly grocery store was gutted.

"It's like the town is just gone," said 24-year-old Jessica Monaghan, wiping away tears as she toted 9-month-old son Slade Scott. The baby's father, Tupelo firefighter Tyler Scott, was at work when the warning came on the TV.

"It said be ready in 10 minutes, but about that time, it was there," Monaghan said. She, Slade and the family's cat survived by hiding in a closet.

At Smithville Cemetery, even the dead were not spared: Tombstones dating to the 1800s, including some of Civil War soldiers, lay broken on the ground. Brothers Kenny and Paul Long dragged their youngest brother's headstone back to its proper place.

Unlike many neighboring towns, Kenny Long said, Smithville had no storm shelter.

"You have warnings," Long said, "but where do you go?"

Some fled to the sturdy center section of Smithville Baptist Church. Pastor Wes White said they clung to each other and anything they could reach, a single "mass of humanity" as the building disintegrated around them.

The second story is gone, the walls collapsed, but no one there was seriously hurt. The choir robes remained in place, perfectly white.

Seven people were killed in Georgia's Catoosa County, including in Ringgold, where a suspected tornado flattened about a dozen buildings and trapped an unknown number of people.

"It happened so fast I couldn't think at all," said Tom Rose, an Illinois truck driver whose vehicle was blown off the road at I-75 North in Ringgold, near the Tennessee line.

Catoosa County Sheriff Phil Summers said several residential areas had "nothing but foundations left," and that some people reported missing had yet to be found.

In Trenton, Ga., nearly two dozen people took shelter in an Ace Hardware store, including a couple walking by when an employee emerged and told them to take cover immediately.

Lisa Rice, owner of S&L Tans in Trenton, survived by climbing into a tanning bed with her two daughters. Stormy, 19, and Sky, 21.

"We got in it and closed it on top of us," Rice said. "Sky said, `We're going to die.' But, I said, `No, just pray. Just pray, just pray, just pray.'"

For 30 seconds, wind rushed around the bed and debris flew as wind tore off the roof.

"Then it just stopped. It got real quiet. We waited a few minutes and then opened up the bed and we saw daylight," she said.

The badly damaged Moore Funeral Home, meanwhile, sheltered the woman who cleans Larry Moore's family business. When the first of three storms hit and uprooted trees in her yard, she figured the funeral home would be a safer place for her two children. As shingles began sailing past the window, she headed for the basement.

"That's what saved her, I guess," Moore said. "It was over in just a matter of seconds. She called 911 and emergency crews had to help her get out."

The storm system spread destruction from Texas to New York, where dozens of roads were flooded or washed out.

In a large section of eastern Tennessee, officials were looking for survivors and assessing damage. In hard-hit Apison, an unincorporated community near the Georgia state line where eight people died, about 150 volunteers helped with the search.

It was unclear how high the death toll could rise. In Mississippi, Lee County Sheriff Jim Johnson and a crew of deputies and inmates searched the rubble, recovering five bodies and marking homes that still had bodies inside with two large orange Xs.

"I've never seen anything like this," Johnson said. "This is something that no one can prepare for."

In recent weeks the Yorkshire coast has played host to a dead whale and a second world war hand grenade. on Thursday, millions of sweetener-sized white granules swept up, closing a three-mile stretch of sand for the day, ahead of the bank holiday weekend.

"It's been fun and games all day," said Christine Mitchell who runs a cafe at Hunmanby Gap, where three fire tenders and police and coastguard vans sealed off the narrow defile leading down to the beach.

Up in the 50p car park, her husband, Horace, emerged from his cabin: "If you go down to the beach, they'll stop you, will the coppers," he said. Sure enough, a friendly cordon redirected hikers along the clifftop path.

"There were shoals of the things," said Tim Whitehead who lives at one of the hamlet's half-dozen cottages and got down to the foreshore before it was shut. "They were like little pellets, masses and masses of them.'

Subsequent drama saw samples of the material, which formed a powdery white slick among strands of seaweed, defy testing by police and environmental specialists. Inspector Leo Suret, of North Yorkshire police, said: "They are all along the high tide mark so they've obviously come from the sea, but we have absolutely no idea how they got there. Our primary concern is public safety, both for the people and animals, and we want to make sure that nobody is going to be harmed."

Samples were sent to analysts in the US, but a British forensic laboratory has concluded that the plastic-like scraps, which did not dissolve in seawater, pose no danger. Hunmanby beach and nearby Primrose Valley have reopened, and no precautions are being taken at Cayton and Scarborough's north bay, where small patches of the pellets drifted ashore later.

The head of environmental services for Scarborough borough council, Andy Skelton, said: "The source is not yet known but it appears to be a hydrocarbon salt commonly used in detergents and lubricants. Cleansing staff have worked hard to remove as much of the product as possible at Hunmanby this afternoon. We're obviously pleased to have determined the product is non toxic and we will continue to monitor the situation over the coming bank holiday weekend."

Hunmanby Gap lies on the "wrecks coast" between Filey and Britain's largest seabird reserve at Bempton Cliffs, which has seen centuries of curious offerings from the North Sea.

The most remarkable was the hauling of a generator up the rock face from a submarine that ran aground in 1921. Helped by "climmers", who made a living shinning down ropes to take seabirds' eggs for collectors, a salvage expert installed the generator in a local engineering factory, which it powered, along with two nearby houses. The rest of Hunmanby did not have electric light until 1931.

Mitchell and her assistant, Irene Artley, said that everyone hoped for sight-seers once the beach reopened. She said: "We're getting used to it, what with the hand grenade last week and the dead whale."Leeds stonemason Ian Whitfield and his wife Angelique, turned away from the shore while on a cycling and caravan holiday, were not complaining. Ian said: "We didn't know that Hunmanby had a Gap, down to the beach, 'till we read about all this happening. So there's a silver lining."
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Telegraph (UK): The 13-year-old who has the world planting trees
29^th April 2011
At the age of nine, Felix Finkbeiner hatched a plan to plant a million trees in his native Germany. Now he's a global eco-superhero

At first glance, Felix Finkbeiner does not seem cut from the cloth with which celebrity is fashioned.

While some adolescent boys can induce hysterical adulation in young girls, Felix, 13, is no Justin Bieber. His stringbean physique is complemented by a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a pudding-bowl haircut. And yet, on a wet Sunday afternoon in southern Germany, he finds himself besieged by a gaggle of young female devotees.

'I really like Felix,’ one delighted 11-year-old, Emilia Georgiev, says, beaming as she shows off his autograph.

Felix is neither child actor, pop star, nor sports prodigy. Instead, Emilia and girls like her want him to sign their copy of his book, Tree by Tree. Felix, from the unremarkable town of Pöcking, near Munich, is an environmental superstar at the helm of a global network of child activists whose aim is to mitigate climate change by reforesting the planet. Behind his apparently unprepossessing facade, Felix is really an action hero. No wonder he gets the girls.

His organisation, Plant for the Planet, recently achieved its target of planting one million trees in Germany; now, Felix is spreading his message around the world. Plant for the Planet is up and running in 131 countries, and the British chapter was established last month, with the aim of planting a million trees here over the next few years. Individuals or planting groups can either 'pledge’ to plant a certain number of trees or make a cash donation – €1 buys one tree.

The results are logged on the Plant for the Planet website. Today, Felix is not only celebrated by his schoolmates and contemporaries, he is also revered as one of the world’s most important environmentalists, appearing on one newspaper’s recent list of the 20 most influential 'Green Power’ activists, along with Brad Pitt (a builder of environmentally responsible homes) and the Prince of Wales.

Plant for the Planet started as a school project four years ago. 'I was supposed to give a presentation on a Monday,’ Felix says, 'so over the weekend I Googled stuff on climate change and came across Wangari Maathai’s campaign.’

Maathai, the daughter of Kenyan farmworkers who won a scholarship to study biology in the US, began her own tree-planting campaign, the Green Belt Movement, in 1977 as a method of tackling soil erosion and encouraging local communities, particularly women, to stand up for themselves, not only environmentally but also politically. In 2004, 45 million trees later, she won the Nobel Peace Prize. 'She achieved so much with so little,’ Felix says. 'So I had the idea that we children could also do something.’

His presentation about climate change went down a storm with his classmates at the Munich Inter­national School. Two days later, his teacher encouraged him to give the same speech to the school’s student council, and shortly afterwards Felix repeated the performance for his headteacher. Soon he was speaking in front of other classes.

On March 28 2007, just over two months after his initial speech, Felix planted the first sapling of his million-tree campaign – a crab apple. Today, he admits, it looks rather forlorn. 'I wish I had known that this crab apple would become so famous,’ Felix’s genial father, Frithjof, says. 'I would have invested in a better tree.’

News of Felix’s campaign reached other schools. Within a week he was fielding calls from students who wanted to join Plant for the Planet; others offered help in building a website. As the project gained traction, Felix began to show his ambition.

'It began to get busy, so I said to my parents, “If we got the money for an employee, could we have one?”’ When the answer was positive, Felix called a big car company with green credentials: Toyota.

Reflecting on this now, the Finkbeiners don’t seem to find anything unusual in a nine-year-old boy asking a multinational firm for €40,000 so that he could hire his environmental group’s first fulltime staff member. Apparently neither did Toyota.

With the money in place, Felix kept campaigning, kept delivering his climate-change talk. Six months after the planting of the first tree, he delivered his message to a local rotary club. In the audience was the CEO of Toyota Germany, Lothar Feuser, who was keen to hear what he was getting for his money.

So impressed was he that he invited Felix to that year’s annual gathering of German Toyota dealers. There, the company subsequently noted, Felix made a speech 'so compelling that participants at the meeting spontaneously pledged €11,000 in donations for Plant for the Planet’. The dealers also started their own tree-planting schemes through schools in their own areas. Suddenly the local project had a national framework.

In April 2008, Felix, still only 10, called a press conference to announce that 50,000 trees had been planted. His father warned Felix 'not to get too disappointed if no one turned up’. But the conference was packed, and Felix’s news was relayed around the country in the press and on television. It was then that the scale of Plant for the Planet hit home. 'We realised, “OK, this is the way it’s going to be,” ’ Frithjof says. 'Getting media attention is easy,’ Felix notes nonchalantly.

From then on, Felix’s commitments snowballed. In June 2008 he attended the UN Children’s Conference in Stavanger, Norway, and was elected to the junior board of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). That November, he addressed the European Parliament. In 2009 he travelled to the UNEP conference in South Korea, explaining the three-year process required to plant a million trees. With that goal in sight in Germany, he invited other nations to start their own Plant for the Planet groups. Last year, aged 12, he was a star of the Cancun climate-change conference.

Frithjof, 49, who runs an economic think tank called the Global Marshall Plan, disputes the idea that his child is in some way special. 'Felix is no wunderkind,’ he says. 'He’s just a normal boy.’

He is also keen to shatter any suspicion that the Finkbeiner family home is a hothouse in which the offspring (Felix has two sisters, Franziska, 14, and Florina, 12) are being artificially encouraged to blossom early.

'Ah yes, the Steffi Graf syndrome,’ he says, referring to the German tennis player whose early career was strictly controlled by her father. On the contrary, if Felix’s career is to suffer any parental interference, it is likely that it will arrest – not assist – his ascent. His mother, Caroline, 51, says, 'All this will stop if his schoolwork is affected.’

Meeting Felix in the flesh, it is initially hard to imagine quite how he has managed to beguile so many people for so long. There is nothing new in the facts and figures about climate change that he uses in his presentations. He is not a scientist. Get him off the topic and he sounds like any other child of his age. But start him on climate issues and a change overcomes him – he starts declaiming in the fluent, self-confident tones of the practised public speaker. He writes his own speeches, and his basic shtick is appropriately childlike in its simplicity. Global warming, he intones, is caused by too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Trees capture this carbon dioxide. The answer to looming climate catastrophe: trees, lots of them.

What about the climate change sceptics?

'We children discussed this often,’ he told delegates at the UN in New York in January. 'We have an answer. If we follow the scientists that tell us there is a crisis and we act, and in 20 years we find out that they were wrong, we didn’t do any mistake. But if we follow the sceptics and in 20 years we find out that they were wrong, it will be too late to save our future.’

Adults, he cheekily told the assembled diplomats, are like monkeys. 'If you let a monkey choose if he wants one banana now or six bananas later, he always chooses the one banana now. We children [have] understood we cannot trust that adults alone will save our future. We have to take our future in our own hands.’

Felix is a gifted orator, unfettered by self-doubt, or by the complexity of the climate debate, and without the smug self-satisfaction that makes many overachieving children unbearable. He is all unaffected charm. Most of all, however, he has an ambition and instincts that are hard to characterise as anything other than political.

For example, 'we children’ is a phrase that he uses again and again, so often that it becomes clear that, as with Maathai, he is interested in achieving the political empowerment of a disenfranchised group through environmental work. Where she championed the rights of women, he is determined that children should have a voice. His reasoning is straightforward: 'For most adults the future seems to mean 20, 30 or even 40 years. But for us children 2100 could still be in our lifetime. For adults it is an academic question if sea levels rise three centimetres or seven metres by the end of this century. But for we children it is a question of survival.’

Plant for the Planet employs 12 staff and raises money for its trees through donations and corporate sponsorship. Felix is not discriminating about whom he teams up with. 'We have many big companies supporting us,’ he says. 'The problems we face are so big that we cannot choose whom we want to work with.’

His public talks may be filled with inspiring visions of the long-term future but, like any good politician, it turns out that he has eyes firmly fixed on the next move. Last month, there was a formal election among Plant for the Planet members to elect a global president. Though the result was never in doubt, there was a loud cheer in the room, at a youth hostel near Felix’s house, when his name was announced. 'I like to win,’ he said afterwards.

Members also elected the organisation’s first global board, 14 strong, to provide a framework for Plant for the Planet to grow further. Felix’s term in charge will be strictly limited to one year (though he will remain prominently involved in the campaign for at least the next two) and, he noted in a statement released after his election victory, 'I am looking forward to handing over the presidency in a year’s time so that the next generation of Plant for the Planet children can take over.’

What happens then is anyone’s guess. If his mother has a say he will no doubt be confining his efforts to the classroom. But that seems unlikely. A Plant for the Planet offshoot seems certain, and Frithjof suggests that this is likely to be overtly political in character. 'People assume Felix will go on to be environment minister,’ he says. 'But I like to tell him that there is no pressure. Even if he doesn’t go on to do anything else, he has already done so much.’
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Telegraph (UK): Indian Ocean current 'could save British climate'
28^th April 2011
An ocean current on the other side of the world could save Britain from a freezing climate like that seen in the film The Day After Tomorrow, say scientists.

Many climatologists believe global warming will stop the Gulf Stream, which keeps Britain much warmer than other countries on a similar latitude, and plunge it into an Alaskan-type climate.

The theory is that global warming will increase the rate of fresh water ice melting in the Arctic Ocean, which will make parts of the North Atlantic less saline and stop the deep water current that helps drive the Gulf Stream.

Four years ago the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even said global warming was “very likely” to slow the current.

The theory was dramatised - with limited success - in the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, which sees a massive snowstorm engulfing New York.

But now oceanographers have found that the Agulhas current, which runs down the east coast of Africa, is spilling increasing quantities of warm, salty water into the South Atlantic.

Huge eddies of warm water are spinning out westwards, past the Cape of Good Hope, where they get swept northwards by the cold Benguela current. Eventually the 'Indian Ocean' water ends up in the North Atlantic - where scientists say it could "stabilize" the effect of melting ice.

Lisa Beal, of the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, explained that most of the water in the Agulhas current never made it into the Atlantic.

But climate change had strengthened the current, leading to bigger and more frequent swirls off the tip of Africa and more "Agulhas leakage" into the Atlantic.

Every decade, the flow from the Agulhas system into the Atlantic could be increasing by 1.4 million to 4 million cubic meters of water per second, she and colleagues wrote in the journal Nature.

She said: "This could mean that current IPCC model predictions for the next century are wrong, and there will be no cooling in the North Atlantic to partially offset the effects of global climate change over North America and Europe.

"Instead, increasing Agulhas leakage could stabilize the oceanic heat transport carried by the Atlantic overturning circulation."

Eric Itsweire, director of the US's National Science Foundation physical oceanography program, which funded the research, added: "Under a warming climate the Agulhas Current system near the tip of South Africa could bring more warm salty water from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean and counteract opposing effects from the Arctic Ocean."

The historical record also indicates there have been dramatic peaks in "Agulhas leakage" over the last 500,000 years, according to the report.

Researchers changed the structure of the food web in Peter Lake, in Wisconsin, by adding predatory fish.

Within three years, the fish had taken over, producing a decline in tiny water plants and an explosion in water fleas.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say the change was preceded by signals that could be used to predict similar collapses elsewhere.

In particular, rapid swings in the density of plants and fleas indicated the food web was unstable and about to change.

The idea that such early warning signals ought to exist is not new - but the researchers say this is the first time it has been demonstrated experimentally.

"For a long time, ecologists thought these changes couldn't be predicted," said research leader Stephen Carpenter from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, US.

"But we've now shown that they can be foreseen. The early warning is clear; it is a strong signal."

Peter and Paul

The Peter Lake food web contained four key components. Insects such as fleas ate tiny water-borne plants, small fish such as golden shiners ate the fleas, and much bigger largemouth bass ate the little fish.

“We are surrounded by problems caused by ecological regime shifts”

End Quote Jonathan Cole Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Beginning in 2008, the researchers began to add more bass, and more than a thousand hatched the following year.

Sensing the threat from these predators, the golden shiners began to spend more time in the shallows or sheltering under floating logs.

Larger fleas moved in, eating the floating plants (phytoplankton).

But the changes were anything but smooth, with wildly varying numbers of fleas and phytoplankton seen at different times.

Eventually, by late 2010, the ecosystem appeared to have finalised its transition from one stable state to another.

This second state, dominated by fleas and largemouth bass, is similar to the situation that had existed for years in neighbouring Lake Paul.

This lake showed no major changes during the three years, indicating that the changes seen in Peter really were caused by the addition of bass.

Banks collapse

Many natural systems appear capable of existing in more than one stable state.

Lakes Peter and Paul in Wisconsin have a 50-year history of use for ecological research

Until 20 years ago, the Grand Banks off Canada's east coast were dominated by cod - so many as to prevent the growth of other species.

Overfishing caused the cod population to collapse.

Other species have since taken their prime position, some of which predate on juvenile cod - perhaps meaning that the prized fish will never return to their former dominance.

The new research suggests it might be possible to detect signals of such a coming crash before it happened.

"Early warning signs help you prepare for, and hopefully prevent, the worst case scenario," said Jonathan Cole from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies near New York, another of the scientists involved.

"We are surrounded by problems caused by ecological regime shifts - water supply shortages, fishery declines, unproductive rangeland - and our study shows that there is promise in identifying these changes before they reach their tipping point."

The principle may have been proved, but the application would still appear to be some way away.

Monitoring any ecosystem with the intensity used at Peter Lake will be expensive, although the ever growing fleet of Earth observation satellites could help in some cases.

Even more problematic is knowing which early warning signs apply in which ecosystem.
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Reuters: Google: renewable energy is long-term effort
28^th April 2011
Google Inc has not given up on its goal of making renewable energy cheaper than coal for consumers but it is not predicting victory soon, its director of green business operations said.

"We are still moving forward," said Rick Needham, in an interview at the company's office in Washington. "I think that is an important goal and a very aspirational goal, but we are doing what we can."

The Internet search giant said in late 2007 it would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in solar, wind and geothermal technologies to help make renewables cost competitive with coal, reviled by environmentalists for its emissions.

Google's co-founder Larry Page, now the company's chief executive, said then the company was optimistic the goal could be met in years, not decades.

The pledge was made before 2008's financial crisis depleted the number of players willing to make big investments in renewable energy.

In addition it was made as hopes were on the rise that Congress would pass a comprehensive energy bill that would have put a higher price on burning coal and other fossil fuels, an effort that died in the Senate last year.

Needham said on Wednesday there were a lot of opportunities in renewables but it takes time to make an impact. "It takes a long-term view," he said. "These are not things you spend a year or two on and say you are there."

"We still have several years to go and these technologies take a while to develop and then deploy at scale," he added.

INVESTMENTS

In recent years Google investment in renewable energy technology companies has tapered off while it has ramped up investment in generating projects, including two this month.

It has made five major investments in renewable energy generation projects, worth more than a combined $350 million.

On April 18, the company said it would invest about $100 million in the world's largest wind farm under construction in Oregon, a $2 billion project called Shepards Flat.

A week earlier it said it was investing $168 million in BrightSource Energy Inc's $1.7 billion-plus Ivanpah solar thermal complex in the California desert, the company's largest investment in the clean energy sector to date.

Both projects will produce power that is far more expensive than that from coal.

But Google believes it can eventually help reduce the costs of renewables by spurring innovation and by showing other companies that renewables can be a good business opportunity.

"We would be very encouraged if other companies, even those involved in this pace were willing to do more," he said.

One reason Google invested in the Shepards Flat wind farm, for instance, is because the project will deploy 2.5 megawatt wind turbines, a size of equipment not used before in the United States.

Needham said success at the project could help deploy more of the turbines at other U.S. wind farms or lead to more research and development on large turbines, which could eventually make them cheaper.

Google is exploring more opportunities in renewables, including enhanced geothermal, where companies would tap into heat deep underground to produce power, Needham said.
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Guardian (UK): Surge in solar panel installations on UK household roofs
28^th April 2011
• Government subsidies driving demand for panels
• Expert says fall in price removes need for feed-in tariff review

Householders rushing to put solar panels on their roof in order to take advantage of government subsidies have more than tripled the amount of solar power in the UK over the past year, figures published on Thursday show.

The lure of making nearly £1,000 a year has led to a record 11,314 people, largely homeowners, installing solar panels in the first three months of this year. The 'solar gold rush' appears to have been driven by the introduction of feed-in tariffs (Fits) last year, which pay businesses, groups and individuals for generating green energy.

The total amount of installed solar power in the UK has jumped from 26 megawatts (MW) before the scheme started on 1 April 2010, to 77.8MW at the end of March this year, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc). This takes the number of solar photovoltaic systems in the UK taking part in the Fits scheme to 28,505, alongside over a thousand micro wind turbines and just over 200 small hydro sites.

But despite the rise in demand, solar power under the Fits scheme still contributes only a tiny amount of the UK's total electricity generation. At 77.8MW, it accounts for just 0.104% of the 75GW provided by fossil fuel, nuclear and large scale renewable power plants. The UK's largest coal fired power station, Drax in Yorkshire, generates approximately 4,000MW.

The surge of installations in the past three months comes despite the government announcing a review of the feed-in tariffs in January, which is expected to reduce tariffs for large-scale solar farms in a bid to protect the scheme for homeowners.

Ray Noble, a solar PV specialist at Renewable Energy Association, told the Guardian: "The vast majority of these installs are domestic and the surge is a result of rising consumer awareness, with people telling one another about solar. It's not a rush to beat the government's solar review [announced in January] – most people haven't even heard of the review. But I think the figures would have been even higher without the review."

Noble said that a fall in solar costs meant the government could avoid excessively reducing payments large solar schemes by cutting the rate of all solar tariff payments: "The cost of solar is falling, because solar panels are getting cheaper and the labour costs are coming down as bigger players and more competition enter what was once a cottage industry. We think the feed-in-tariffs [currently 43.3p/kWH for solar photovoltaics] could come down by as much as 30% and still make financial sense for consumers."

The Decc's figures also reveal that one of the UK's first mega solar schemes came online at the start of this year. The development, which was over 100KW, compared to around 2-3KW for most householders, is the sort that will see payments reduced under the review's proposals, which would affect solar installations above 50KW.

Businesses and environmental groups last week attacked the government review for sending the wrong signal to investors. Penny Shepherd, the chief executive of UKSIF, the UK's leading organisation representing financiers specialising in green investments, said: "One area of particular concern has been the changes to feed-in tariffs [subsidies for renewable energy]. It wasn't the proposal itself, but the sudden revision that sent out the wrong signal – investors need confidence that [the] policy will remain stable."

The government's hoped-for electric car revolution, jump-started by a £5,000 purchase grant per vehicle, is getting off to a slow start with just over 500 people signing up to the scheme since it was introduced at the start of the year.

The figures, revealed in a parliamentary answer by the junior transport minister Norman Baker, show that 534 electric vehicles were registered to the so-called plug-in car grant during the first quarter of 2011. So far, 213 have been delivered.

The incentive scheme, devised by the Labour government to mitigate the fact that electric cars typically cost at least a third more than conventionally-powered equivalents, has sufficient funding during 2011 – the only year for which it is guaranteed pending a coalition review – for 8,600 cars. If sales fail to pick up it will struggle to reach a quarter of that figure.

However, even current registrations are a significant rise on 2009, when just 55 fully electric cars were sold, nearly half of these being the diminutive G-Wiz runaround.

There is likely to be a sales surge as more of the nine cars that qualify for the grant come onto the market in the coming months, among them Vauxhall's Ampera, the Volt from Chevrolet and the new, all-electric version of Toyota's popular Prius hybrid.

While electric cars are a significant outlay – the first two cars on sale, the Mitsubishi i-MiEV and Nissan Leaf both cost about £28,000 – the AA calculates they can be run for about 2p per mile, against around 14p per mile for a similar-sized petrol or diesel car. They also pay no vehicle excise duty, have cheaper insurance premiums, are exempt from London's Congestion Charge and can be charged for free at some public car parks.

The Leaf, which saw 20,000 pre-orders worldwide, has won the European and world car of the year awards, voted by motoring journalists.

Baker's parliamentary answer outlined a series of other green transport schemes, including 201 public sector low carbon and electric vans now on the roads and a £46m scheme to help councils and bus companies introduce hybrid or electric buses.
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ENVIRONMENT NEWS FROM THE

UN DAILY NEWS
Other UN News
29 April 2011

UN News Centre: Low-carbon, socially aware business models key to sustainable development – UN

28^th April 2011

“Business as usual, which leads to broken ecosystems and a warming climate, contributes to increasing economic volatility, and to higher costs and lower profitability of doing business,” said Helen Clark, the UNDP Administrator, in a keynote address to the summit on business solutions for the environment, held in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

“Conversely, I believe that there will be significant business and livelihood opportunities, and a better future for us all, if we collectively commit to a sustainable course. The way we live and the way we do business needs to be aligned with achieving inclusive and low-carbon development,” she added.

Miss Clark said she believes that, increasingly in global markets, goods and services with high carbon footprints and negative social costs will become less competitive and less desirable. She highlighted the proliferation of green certification systems as an indication that future markets will demand greater compliance with environmentally and socially responsible standards.

“Markets will adapt to those global frameworks which are agreed to by the international community,” she said, citing as an example the Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from Their Utilization, which was adopted last year in the Japanese city of Nagoya.

She said the protocol established a groundbreaking new standard for ensuring that local communities and developing countries benefit more equitably from the proceeds and use of biological resources.

Miss Clark expressed UNDP’s solidarity with the one billion people across the world who live in extreme poverty and rely on the environment in which they live for their livelihoods and primary assets. Preserving ecosystems is critical for their daily survival and that of humankind, she said.

She noted that the world’s poor are the most vulnerable to the effects of environmental degradation, including severe floods and droughts, extreme temperatures and rising sea levels resulting from climate change.

“How to advance human development and progress for all those yearning for a better life, while also securing the future of our planet and its ecosystems, is one of the greatest challenges of our time.”

The Administrator emphasized that inclusive and sustainable business models, as well as strong and capable government institutions and good policy, are key to achieving transformative solutions for the planet.

“But above that, we need vision and commitment from all stakeholders, and the passionate belief that we can transform living standards while also sustaining our environment. Developed countries have a heavy responsibility for cleaning up their act, and for supporting developing countries to advance human development in sustainable ways. We are all in this together.”
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ENVIRONMENT NEWS FROM THE

S.G’s SPOKESMAN DAILY PRESS BRIEFING

28 April 2011