By Jonas Hagen
UN Cronicle online
The Stern Review concludes that the cost of acting to decrease global emissions of greenhouse gases is far less than the cost of dealing with the effects of climate change if no mitigation efforts are made.
However, Mr. Stern warned that "even if we are sensible about climate change and get the emissions down, the climate is going to change still more than it has".
While the world was currently experiencing the effects of an increase in global temperatures of 0.7 degrees Celsius, he said that "even if we act strongly to decrease emissions, we've got another 1.5 to 2.0 degrees centigrade to come. So we've seen maybe a quarter or a third of temperature increase we're going to have to cope with. St. Petersburg, New York, London, Cairo, Cape Town, Shanghai, Bombay, Calcutta, Dhaka-they're all under threat from sea-level rise, and many parts of the world will be under threat from hurricanes, typhoons, droughts and floods."
Mr. Stern also warned that the heatwaves that killed thousands of people in Europe in 2003 "will probably be standard by the time we get to 2050", and the Nile river, which ten countries depend on, could drop to one half of current water levels in the second half of this century.
However, the "business as usual" scenario-where no action is taken to reduce emissions- would lead to changes in the earth's climate, he said, "that we don't really understand, absolutely unprecedented and earth-transforming--the difference between where we are now and the last ice age".
Climate change also highlights global inequities, according to Mr. Stern. "All countries in the world will be affected; we're all in this together, but it is the poor that will be hit earliest and hardest. You just have to look at the effects of Katrina in New Orleans, or the effects of the typhoon that hit Bombay a couple of years ago [in July 2005]."
Global security is affected by climate change and "could cause conflict within and across countries", he said, adding that most African leaders he met with at the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa in January 2007 attributed the humanitarian crisis in Darfur to the climate problem-pushed out of their traditional lands by drought, and pastoralists were forced to move and came into conflict with settled farmers.
To reduce emissions, Mr. Stern suggested a range of solutions, which included taxes on emission-producing activities, the development and deployment of low-emission technologies, investing in energy efficiency, and preserving forests around the world.
Time is of the essence, he said. "Even though this is a long-term problem, we've got to start now. We've left it very late. If we had gotten our heads around this problem 20 years ago, it would have been much simpler and much cheaper. If we wait another 20 years, it will be still more difficult and expensive."
Rich countries must take responsibility for a problem they have caused, Mr. Stern said, suggesting emission reductions of 60 to 80 per cent for developed nations. He noted that France had set the goal of a 75 per cent reduction by 2050, the United Kingdom at 60 per cent and the State of California in the United States aimed at 80 per cent.
Developing countries, he added, must understand that they can continue to expand their economies and achieve progress on the Millennium Development Goals-eight targets for human development that UN Member States agreed upon to reach by 2015.
Mr. Stern cited the progressive policy in China, which is "reforesting, not deforesting". The country hoped to make energy production 20 per cent more efficient as part of its 11th five-year plan, which is already underway, he reported, adding that an $8,000 tax was established on sports utility vehicles (SUVs) in Beijing.
"I'm much more optimistic six or nine months ago about where the world is moving", he said.
He called on the international community to "act strongly and on the right kind of scale", stating further that the United Nations is "a place we can really take that forward in a very powerful way".
Mr. Sachs agreed that "we have to move quickly and urgently on this issue. That means setting in place a full century of transition, with much of the transition being completed by 2050."
Some 40 or 50 years from today, energy sources should be very different from what they are today, he said. Supplying significant amounts of energy from nuclear power and coal-fired plants that used carbon sequestration technology, where carbon produced by the burning coal is pumped back into the earth, is "within reach", he noted.
Such plants must be built quickly in China or India, in order to see if they are viable as sources of clean energy. "Once those plants are done, everything is going to become a lot clearer and less hypothetical than it is now", Mr. Sachs pointed out.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
The Changing Climate on Climate Change
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
The message, it seems, has finally gotten through: global warming represents a serious threat to our planet. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, world leaders saw climate change, for the first time, topping the list of global concerns.
Europe and Japan have shown their commitment to reduce global warming by imposing costs on themselves and their producers, even if it places them at a competitive disadvantage. The biggest obstacle until now has been the United States. The Clinton administration had called for bold action as far back as 1993, proposing what was in effect a tax on carbon emissions; but an alliance of polluters, led by the coal, oil, and auto industries beat back this initiative.
To the scientific community, the evidence on climate change has, of course, been overwhelming for more than a decade and a half. I participated in the second assessment of the scientific evidence conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which perhaps made one critical mistake: it underestimated the pace at which global warming was occurring. The Fourth Assessment, which was just issued, confirms the mounting evidence and the increasing conviction that global warming is the result of the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The increased pace of warming reflects the impact of complex non-linear factors and a variety of “tipping points” that can result in acceleration of the process. For instance, as the Arctic ice cap melts, less sunlight is reflected. Seemingly dramatic changes in weather patterns including the melting of glaciers in Greenland and the thawing of the Siberian permafrost have at last convinced most business leaders that the time for action is now.
Recently, even President Bush seems to have woken up. But a closer look at what he is doing, and not doing, shows clearly that he has mostly heard the call of his campaign contributors from the oil and coal industries, and that he has once again put their interests over the global interest in reducing emissions. If he were truly concerned about global warming, how could he have endorsed the construction of coal-fired electricity plants, even if those plants use more efficient technologies than have been employed in the past?
What is required, first and foremost, are market-based incentives to induce Americans to use less energy and to produce more energy in ways that emit less carbon. But Bush has neither eliminated massive subsidies to the oil industry (though, fortunately, the Democratic Congress may take action) nor provided adequate incentives for conservation. Even his call for energy independence should be seen for what it is a new rationale for old corporate subsidies.
A policy that entails draining America’s limited oil supplies I call it “drain America first” will leave the US even more dependent on foreign oil. The US imposes a tariff of more than 50 cents per gallon on sugar-based ethanol from Brazil, but subsidizes inefficient corn-based American ethanol heavily indeed , it requires more than a gallon of gasoline to fertilize, harvest, transport, process, and distill corn to yield one gallon of ethanol.
As the world’s largest polluter, accounting for roughly a quarter of global carbon emissions, America’s reluctance to do more is perhaps understandable, if not forgivable. But claims by Bush that America cannot afford to do anything about global warming ring hollow: other advanced industrial countries with comparable standards of living emit only a fraction of what the US emits per dollar of GDP.
As a result, American firms with access to cheap energy are given a big competitive advantage over firms in Europe and elsewhere. Some in Europe worry that stringent action on global warming may be counterproductive: energy-intensive industries may simply move to the US or other countries that pay little attention to emissions. And there is more than a grain of truth to these concerns.
A striking fact about climate change is that there is little overlap between the countries that are most vulnerable to its effects mainly poor countries in the South that can ill afford to deal with the consequences and the countries, like the US, that are the largest polluters. What is at stake is in part a moral issue, a matter of global social justice.
The Kyoto Protocol represented the international community’s attempt to begin to deal with global warming in a fair and efficient way. But it left out a majority of the sources of emissions, and unless something is done to include the US and the developing countries in a meaningful way, it will be little more than a symbolic gesture. There needs to be a new “coalition of the willing,” this time perhaps led by Europe and this time directed at a real danger.
This “coalition of the willing” could agree to certain basic standards: to forego building coal-fired plants, increase automobiles’ fuel efficiency, and provide targeted assistance to developing countries to enhance their energy efficiency and reduce emissions. Coalition members could also agree to provide stronger incentives to their own producers, through either more stringent caps on emissions or higher taxes on pollution. They could then agree to impose taxes on products from other countries including the US that are produced in ways that unnecessarily add substantially to global warming. What is at stake is not protecting domestic producers, but protecting our planet.
The changing climate on climate change provides political leaders in Europe and other potential members of this “coalition of the willing” an unprecedented opportunity to move beyond mere rhetoric. The time to act is now.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at Columbia University and was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Clinton and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank. His latest book is Making Globalization Work.
The message, it seems, has finally gotten through: global warming represents a serious threat to our planet. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, world leaders saw climate change, for the first time, topping the list of global concerns.
Europe and Japan have shown their commitment to reduce global warming by imposing costs on themselves and their producers, even if it places them at a competitive disadvantage. The biggest obstacle until now has been the United States. The Clinton administration had called for bold action as far back as 1993, proposing what was in effect a tax on carbon emissions; but an alliance of polluters, led by the coal, oil, and auto industries beat back this initiative.
To the scientific community, the evidence on climate change has, of course, been overwhelming for more than a decade and a half. I participated in the second assessment of the scientific evidence conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which perhaps made one critical mistake: it underestimated the pace at which global warming was occurring. The Fourth Assessment, which was just issued, confirms the mounting evidence and the increasing conviction that global warming is the result of the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The increased pace of warming reflects the impact of complex non-linear factors and a variety of “tipping points” that can result in acceleration of the process. For instance, as the Arctic ice cap melts, less sunlight is reflected. Seemingly dramatic changes in weather patterns including the melting of glaciers in Greenland and the thawing of the Siberian permafrost have at last convinced most business leaders that the time for action is now.
Recently, even President Bush seems to have woken up. But a closer look at what he is doing, and not doing, shows clearly that he has mostly heard the call of his campaign contributors from the oil and coal industries, and that he has once again put their interests over the global interest in reducing emissions. If he were truly concerned about global warming, how could he have endorsed the construction of coal-fired electricity plants, even if those plants use more efficient technologies than have been employed in the past?
What is required, first and foremost, are market-based incentives to induce Americans to use less energy and to produce more energy in ways that emit less carbon. But Bush has neither eliminated massive subsidies to the oil industry (though, fortunately, the Democratic Congress may take action) nor provided adequate incentives for conservation. Even his call for energy independence should be seen for what it is a new rationale for old corporate subsidies.
A policy that entails draining America’s limited oil supplies I call it “drain America first” will leave the US even more dependent on foreign oil. The US imposes a tariff of more than 50 cents per gallon on sugar-based ethanol from Brazil, but subsidizes inefficient corn-based American ethanol heavily indeed , it requires more than a gallon of gasoline to fertilize, harvest, transport, process, and distill corn to yield one gallon of ethanol.
As the world’s largest polluter, accounting for roughly a quarter of global carbon emissions, America’s reluctance to do more is perhaps understandable, if not forgivable. But claims by Bush that America cannot afford to do anything about global warming ring hollow: other advanced industrial countries with comparable standards of living emit only a fraction of what the US emits per dollar of GDP.
As a result, American firms with access to cheap energy are given a big competitive advantage over firms in Europe and elsewhere. Some in Europe worry that stringent action on global warming may be counterproductive: energy-intensive industries may simply move to the US or other countries that pay little attention to emissions. And there is more than a grain of truth to these concerns.
A striking fact about climate change is that there is little overlap between the countries that are most vulnerable to its effects mainly poor countries in the South that can ill afford to deal with the consequences and the countries, like the US, that are the largest polluters. What is at stake is in part a moral issue, a matter of global social justice.
The Kyoto Protocol represented the international community’s attempt to begin to deal with global warming in a fair and efficient way. But it left out a majority of the sources of emissions, and unless something is done to include the US and the developing countries in a meaningful way, it will be little more than a symbolic gesture. There needs to be a new “coalition of the willing,” this time perhaps led by Europe and this time directed at a real danger.
This “coalition of the willing” could agree to certain basic standards: to forego building coal-fired plants, increase automobiles’ fuel efficiency, and provide targeted assistance to developing countries to enhance their energy efficiency and reduce emissions. Coalition members could also agree to provide stronger incentives to their own producers, through either more stringent caps on emissions or higher taxes on pollution. They could then agree to impose taxes on products from other countries including the US that are produced in ways that unnecessarily add substantially to global warming. What is at stake is not protecting domestic producers, but protecting our planet.
The changing climate on climate change provides political leaders in Europe and other potential members of this “coalition of the willing” an unprecedented opportunity to move beyond mere rhetoric. The time to act is now.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at Columbia University and was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Clinton and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank. His latest book is Making Globalization Work.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Remote Control Inventor dies
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February 17, 2007SMH
Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, has died.
Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device, died yesterday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp said today.
In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 US patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.
In a May 2004 interview, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.
But he downplayed his role when asked if he felt his invention helped raise a new generation of people too lazy to get off the couch.
"People ask me all the time - 'Don't you feel guilty for it?' And I say that's ridiculous," he said. "It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television."
Various sources have credited either Polley, another Zenith engineer, or Adler as the inventor of the device. Polley created the "Flashmatic," a wireless remote introduced in 1955 that operated on photo cells. Adler introduced ultrasonics, or high-frequency sound, to make the device more efficient in 1956.
Zenith credits them as co-inventors, and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded both Adler and Polley an Emmy in 1997 for the landmark invention.
"He was part of a project that changed the world," Polley said from his home in Lombard, Illinois.
Adler joined Zenith's research division in 1941 after earning a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna. He retired as research vice president in 1979, and served as a technical consultant until 1999, when Zenith merged with LG Electronics Inc.
During World War II, Adler specialised in military communications equipment. He later helped develop sensitive amplifiers for ultra high frequency signals used by radio astronomers and by the US Air Force for long-range missile detection.
Adler also was considered a pioneer in SAW technology, or surface acoustic waves, in colour television sets and touch screens. The technology has also been used in cellular telephones.
The US Patent and Trademark Office published his most recent patent application, for advances in touch screen technology, on Feb. 1.
His wife, Ingrid, said Adler would not have chosen the remote control as his favourite invention. In fact, he did not even watch much television.
"He was more of a reader," she said. "He was a man who would dream in the night and wake up and say, 'I just solved a problem.' He was always thinking science."
AP
Big donation for environmental studies centre
pic: Yahoo founder Jerry Yang.
February 16, 2007
SMH
Jerry Yang, co-founder of internet media company Yahoo, is donating $US75 million ($A96m) to Stanford University, which will spend most of the money on a new environmental studies center, the university said on Thursday.
Yang, who started Yahoo in 1994 with fellow student David Filo while working on his doctorate, planned to make the donations over a period of several years, said Howard Pearson, director of Stanford's development office.
It will be the largest of several donations Yang has made to his alma mater, although Pearson declined to say how much he has previously given.
Yang would make the donations with his wife, Akiko Yamazaki, also a Stanford graduate.
Of the total, $US50 million will pay for a new environment and energy building and $US5 million will go toward a doctor training facility for Stanford's medical school.
The remaining $US20 million will be used for future projects, Stanford said.
Yang's net worth was estimated at $US2.4 billion in 2006, according to a report in Forbes magazine last September.
Stanford received $US911 million in alumni donations in its fiscal year ended August 31, up more than 50 percent from the $US603 million the previous year.
Although Yang obtained both bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford, he never completed his doctorate in electrical engineering, and his biography on Yahoo says he "is currently on a leave of absence" from the program.
Reuters
Bionic eye
Peter Weekes
February 18, 2007
MELBOURNE'S Eye and Ear Hospital will start implanting bionic eyes that restore sight to the blind within a few years.
The hospital is one of three centres outside the United States that have been chosen to implant the revolutionary device developed by the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California.
American scientists said last week that the first six patients to try the bionic eye had learnt how to detect light, distinguish between objects and perceive direction of motion.
"We expected that all they would be able to do would be to differentiate between light and dark.
But we were amazed to find that they can tell the difference between objects such as a plate, a knife and a cup, and tell which way people are moving," said Professor Mark Humayun of the University of California, who led the research.
His team is preparing to test a more advanced version of the implant on as many as 75 patients.
"If the new trial hits its milestones, the second-generation implant could be commercially available in two years," Professor Humayun said.
The device offers hope to millions of people who have lost their vision to retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited eye diseases that cause the degeneration of the photoreceptor cells that capture and process light. It is the most common cause of blindness among those under 50.
The implant is not suitable for every form of blindness, but scientists hope that it might be used to restore the sight of those with degenerative eye diseases, particularly those with macular degeneration who are over 75.
Professor William Campbell, head of the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital's vitro retinal unit, described the device as "the beginning of a very exciting development in opthamology".
"We have been chosen to be one of the centres around the world where they want to put in their implants, but it will be two or three years before we start doing it. We will be putting some of the early models in when we find suitable candidates and after we have been trained."
The device comes in two parts. A tiny camera in the lens or on the bridge of a pair of lightweight glasses captures images.
This information is transmitted to a radio receiver implanted behind the patient's ear that converts it to electrical signals, which are sent to a grid of electrodes implanted in the retina.
These electrodes stimulate retinal nerve cells to produce electrical impulses that send signals to the brain so the patient can see spots of light in different patterns.
While the first-generation device had 16 electrodes, the new one has 60 electrodes and will cost about $32,000.
The first device took 16 years of research, but the second version has taken just four years.
Source: The Sun-Herald
February 18, 2007
MELBOURNE'S Eye and Ear Hospital will start implanting bionic eyes that restore sight to the blind within a few years.
The hospital is one of three centres outside the United States that have been chosen to implant the revolutionary device developed by the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California.
American scientists said last week that the first six patients to try the bionic eye had learnt how to detect light, distinguish between objects and perceive direction of motion.
"We expected that all they would be able to do would be to differentiate between light and dark.
But we were amazed to find that they can tell the difference between objects such as a plate, a knife and a cup, and tell which way people are moving," said Professor Mark Humayun of the University of California, who led the research.
His team is preparing to test a more advanced version of the implant on as many as 75 patients.
"If the new trial hits its milestones, the second-generation implant could be commercially available in two years," Professor Humayun said.
The device offers hope to millions of people who have lost their vision to retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited eye diseases that cause the degeneration of the photoreceptor cells that capture and process light. It is the most common cause of blindness among those under 50.
The implant is not suitable for every form of blindness, but scientists hope that it might be used to restore the sight of those with degenerative eye diseases, particularly those with macular degeneration who are over 75.
Professor William Campbell, head of the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital's vitro retinal unit, described the device as "the beginning of a very exciting development in opthamology".
"We have been chosen to be one of the centres around the world where they want to put in their implants, but it will be two or three years before we start doing it. We will be putting some of the early models in when we find suitable candidates and after we have been trained."
The device comes in two parts. A tiny camera in the lens or on the bridge of a pair of lightweight glasses captures images.
This information is transmitted to a radio receiver implanted behind the patient's ear that converts it to electrical signals, which are sent to a grid of electrodes implanted in the retina.
These electrodes stimulate retinal nerve cells to produce electrical impulses that send signals to the brain so the patient can see spots of light in different patterns.
While the first-generation device had 16 electrodes, the new one has 60 electrodes and will cost about $32,000.
The first device took 16 years of research, but the second version has taken just four years.
Source: The Sun-Herald
Friday, February 16, 2007
Shark-wrestling Phil
Jane Holroyd
February 16, 2007
SMH
A South Australian man who wrestled and killed a 1.3-metre shark on Wednesday has been described as a "risk taker" by his wife.
Phillip Kerkhof, 41, jumped into shallow waters to chase the bronze whaler shark because it was eating bait that he and other fisherman were using off a jetty near Port Lincoln.
Mr Kerkhof wrestled the shark after capturing it in his arms and managed to fling it up onto the jetty before killing it.
His wife Christine said Phillip, a bricklayer, had nine lives.
"Just after we got married he fell off a 100-foot weir and did not even go to hospital," she told theage.com.au.
Mrs Kerkhof said she was at home on Wednesday when her husband arrived at their Louth Bay home with the shark.
"When he brought it home he called, 'Come out here! Come outside!' I walked outside and there's a shark on the lawn. I just shook my head because I'm used to my husband doing crazy things.
"He didn't think," Mrs Kerkhof said. "He'd had a few vodkas and wasn't thinking straight. He just does things off impulse. He thought about it later and said, 'That was a bit dangerous.'"
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
The Stranger Within (Human Chimeras)
New Scientist vol 180 issue 2421
15 November 2003, page 34
Human chimeras were once thought to be so rare as to be just a curiosity.
But there's a little bit of someone else in all of us, says Claire
Ainsworth, and sometimes much more...
EXPLAIN this. You are a doctor and one of your patients, a 52-year- old woman, comes to see you, very upset. Tests have revealed something unbelievable about two of her three grown-up sons. Although
she conceived them naturally with her husband, who is definitely
their father, the tests say she isn't their biological mother.
Somehow she has given birth to somebody else's children.
This isn't a trick question - it's a genuine case that Margot Kruskall, a doctor at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, was faced with five years ago. The patient, who we will call Jane, needed a kidney transplant, and so her family underwent blood tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. When the results came back, Jane was hoping for good news.
Instead she received a hammer blow. The letter told her outright that
two of her three sons could not be hers. What was going on?
It took Kruskall and her team two years to crack the riddle. In the end they discovered that Jane is a chimera, a mixture of two individuals - non-identical twin sisters - who fused in the womb and grew into a single body. Some parts of her are derived from one twin, others from the other.
It seems bizarre that this can happen at all, but Jane's is not an
isolated case. Around 30 similar instances of chimerism have been
reported, and there are probably many more out there who will never
discover their unusual origins.
While cases like Jane's are the extreme, researchers now think that
there's a little bit of chimera in all of us, and what was once seen
as a biological oddity may serve a vital function. We may owe our
lives to being chimeras.
At first, Jane's case had Kruskall completely puzzled. The original
data came from the tests done to "tissue-type" her and her children.
Such tests are based on a set of genes called the HLA complex, which
encode many different immune proteins, including cell surface proteins that immune cells use to distinguish the body's own tissues
from foreign material. There are hundreds of different versions, or
alleles, of each HLA gene, and because of this, each person's
combination of alleles is almost unique. But because the genes are
clustered close together on chromosome 6, they tend to be inherited
together in a block known as a haplotype. Everyone inherits two HLA
haplotypes, one from each parent.
Transplant doctors know that the closer the match between two people's HLA haplotypes, the lower the risk of a transplant between them being rejected. If you need a transplant, the obvious place to look for people with a similar haplotype is your close family. Your siblings, for example, have a 1-in-4 chance of matching yours exactly, while your children will have at least 50 per cent of your HLA genes.
Confronted with Jane's bizarre test results, Kruskall's team's first line of enquiry was to take another look at Jane's HLA genes and those of her immediate family. They identified Jane's haplotypes and dubbed them 1 and 3. They tested Jane's husband too - he had types 5 and 6. And when they looked at her sons they confirmed that the original tissue-typing was correct. While all three shared a haplotype with their father, only one shared one of Jane's. The other two sons had a haplotype of unknown origin, labelled type 2.
The obvious interpretation was that Jane was not the biological
mother of two of her sons, yet they were all conceived naturally,
so how could this be? One possibility was that both boys were
accidentally swapped at birth, but the chance of this happening twice to the same family is very small. Add in the fact that both sons share a haplotype with their father and it becomes a near impossibility.
Stumped, Kruskall sent her data out to colleagues, asking them if
they could make sense of it. Soon researchers around the world were
scratching their heads in bewilderment. "I did get the most amazing
set of explanations," Kruskall recalls. "No one could quite figure it
out." One suggested that Jane had secretly undergone fertility
treatment using donated eggs. Another speculated that Jane and her
husband had got her sister to conceive children with his sperm, and
then pretended they were hers.
The breakthrough came when Kruskall's team checked the HLA haplotypes of other members of Jane's family who had been omitted from the original tests. They discovered that her brother carried the mystery haplotype 2 - suggesting that the two sons were related to Jane in some way after all. "That really provided the spur that kept us going," Kruskall says.
So where did the sons' odd haplotype come from? Since Jane's blood cells provided no match, the team decided to test DNA from some of her other tissues, including her thyroid gland, mouth and hair. What they discovered was astonishing. Some of her tissues carried haplotypes 1 and 3, while others contained 2 and 4 (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 346, p 1546). Jane's body was made up of two genetically distinct types of cells.
There was only one conclusion: Jane was a mixture of two different people.
Kruskall thinks the most likely explanation for this is that Jane's mother conceived non-identical twin girls, who fused at an early stage of the pregnancy to form a single embryo. In medical parlance, Jane is a tetragametic chimera, a person whose body is made up from two genetically distinct lines of cells derived from a total of four gametes - eggs and sperm.
This instantly explains why the tissue-typing yielded such paradoxical results. For some reason, cells from only one twin have come to dominate in Jane's blood - the tissue used in tissue-typing. In Jane's other tissues, however, including her ovaries, cells of both types live amicably alongside each other, hence the apparently impossible genetics of her three sons. One came from an egg derived from the twin whose cells dominate Jane's blood, while his two brothers came from eggs derived from the other twin's cells.
Nobody knows how common tetragametic chimerism is. It often has no outward signs and those who uncover their chimeric nature do so only by accident.
Nature reported a similar case to Jane's in 1979, when genetic tests
suggested that a woman could not be the mother of any of her four
children. There had been no hint that the woman was chimeric.
Some chimeras do have unusual physical features. For example, one
girl was discovered to be a chimera because her eyes were different colours, one brown, the other hazel. Others have come to light when doctors investigated problems with their reproductive systems, and
found that they had structures from both male and female reproductive
organs as a result of having cells of both sexes in their bodies. But most probably go through life utterly unaware of their unusual constitution.
"They are probably dramatically under-diagnosed," Kruskall says, "and also dramatically rare."
Yet this kind of chimerism may still be common enough to cast doubt on the way we carry out genetic tests of parenthood. Kruskall is currently helping out with a court case where a woman is suing her partner, claiming that he is the father of her child. In a bizarre twist that would nonplus even Jerry Springer, tissue-typing tests proved he was the father, but ruled her out as the mother. The situation could be explained by chimerism in the mother, Kruskall speculates.
But what about a case where the father was a chimera? "You could imagine that you could rule out a person who is in fact the father," she says. This is especially plausible if one cell line always comes to dominate in the blood, as happened with Jane. Animal studies of chimerism suggest that this is indeed common.
What's more, the incidence of tetragametic chimerism is set to rise,
Kruskall says, because of modern fertility techniques that increase the rate of twinning. Drugs used to make a woman ovulate can cause her to release more than one egg at a time, for example, while many IVF clinics still transfer more than one embryo into the womb. And the fact that embryos are in close contact in the lab dish or when transferred to the womb may encourage them to fuse, according to a report by a team at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In 1998, they reported a case of a chimeric IVF baby who resulted from the accidental fusion of a male embryo and a female embryo (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 338, p 166). The child was outwardly male, but the left hand side of his internal reproductive system had developed as an ovary and fallopian tube.
Meanwhile, Jane's mystery is solved - and it even has a happy ending. Because her body contains double the normal number of HLA haplotypes, it means that she has a much greater chance of finding a suitable donor kidney.
But the story doesn't end there. There is growing evidence that chimerism in one form or another may not be so unusual at all. In fact, some researchers now think that most of us, if not all, are chimeras of one kind or another. Far from being pure-bred individuals composed of a single genetic cell line, our bodies are cellular mongrels, teeming with cells from our mothers, maybe even from grandparents and siblings. This may seem a little shocking at first. The thought of playing host to cells from other people may offend your sense of individuality. But you may have those outsiders to thank for keeping you healthy.
During pregnancy, the blood of the mother and fetus are kept separate, but some cells manage to slip through, meaning that you will have picked up some cells from your mother, and she some from you. In fact, some 80 to 90 per cent of women carry their children's cells or DNA in their blood during pregnancy and up to 50 per= centcarry them for decades after giving birth, a condition called microchimerism (New Scientist, 24 April 1999, p4). If your mother then had more children, some of your cells could in principle slip back through into your younger sibling's body. And twins can end up swapping cells in the womb, especially if they share a placenta. So a single person can be a veritable menagerie of different cell types from different generations. "Women harbour cells from both their mother and their children," says J. Lee Nelson, an immunologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
The fact that fetal cells persist in their mother's bloodstream for decades has been known since the mid 1990s. But only recently has anyone investigated how common it is for cells to move the other way – from mothers into their children. To investigate this, Nelson and her colleague Natalie Lambert have been searching for maternal cells in the blood of adult women.
In a forthcoming paper in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism, they describe how they took blood samples from 32 healthy women and found that 22 per cent of them were carrying white blood cells from their mothers. These maternal cells were relatively rare - at most there were 50 per million blood cells - but Nelson suspects that more extensive tests of blood and other tissues such as bone marrow would reveal microchimerism in a far greater percentage of women. And the same goes for men too. "Our guess would be that it is probably universal," she says.
This discovery raises some puzzling questions. How come the invading cells don't simply get wiped out by the immune system? Do the cells divide inside their new host? And why do mother and child exchange cells at all - is it just an accident, or does it have a purpose?
In the case of fetal cells crossing to the mother, Nelson says we don't know whether it serves any specific purpose, but one important factor could be that these cells encourage the mother's immune system to tolerate her fetus. After all, pregnancy is rather like hosting a transplanted organ for nine months, and transplant researchers have known for some time that microchimerism caused by white blood cells from the transplant mixing with those of the recipient can encourage the host to accept the transplant under certain circumstances. And researchers think the breakdown of this long-term tolerance to fetal cells may be the cause of some autoimmune diseases in women (New Scientist, 24 February 2001, p 8).
"But what benefit [fetal cells] might offer long term, no one knows,"
Nelson says. As for cells passing from mother to fetus, there are hints that this may play a vital role in keeping the unborn child healthy. Your mother's cells don't just hang around passively in your body, Nelson believes. They might play an active role in repairing your tissues, especially while you are still in the womb. And she has evidence that unknown types of maternal cells cross the placenta and then "transdifferentiate" or transform themselves into different kinds of cells that then become part of the baby's body.
Anne Stevens, a researcher in Nelson's team made the discovery while
studying the bodies of babies who had died from an autoimmune disease
called neonatal lupus syndrome, which attacks heart muscle. In the course of testing the heart cells, she found that the babies' hearts contained muscle cells that could only have come from their mothers. Nelson says she can't yet be sure exactly how they got there, but thinks it likely that blood stem cells from the mother made their way to the heart of the developing fetus and transdifferentiated into heart cells. "It really is amazing," she says. "This is really the next conceptual leap in the entire field, I think."
The question is, what are these maternal cells doing? Are they the cause of the autoimmune disease in the children or are they trying to intervene? One possibility is that the presence of the maternal cells triggers the baby's immune system to attack the heart.
Mother and child usually tolerate each other, but if this were to break down, the fetus's immune system would identify the mother's cells as foreign and attack them, with the fetus's own heart cells getting caught in the crossfire.
But Nelson thinks there is another, more positive explanation. "The second possibility is that the maternal cells are there trying to repair the damaged tissue," she says. Her results don't yet tell her which explanation is correct, but she says: "I always go back to remembering that there could well be beneficial functions because [microchimerism] is so common in healthy people."
While microchimerism may force immunologists to rewrite their textbooks, it may also prod us into seeing ourselves in a new light. Rather than being isolated individuals, perhaps we should see ourselves more as a collective - an individual made of many other different individuals. On one level, you are you, a person with your own thoughts and feelings. But zoom in one level and you are a supercolony of individual cells, some cooperating, others competing. Zoom in to the level of your genome, and you find individual chromosomes and genes, all jostling to get through to the next round of natural selection. It's all a question of perspective.
15 November 2003, page 34
Human chimeras were once thought to be so rare as to be just a curiosity.
But there's a little bit of someone else in all of us, says Claire
Ainsworth, and sometimes much more...
EXPLAIN this. You are a doctor and one of your patients, a 52-year- old woman, comes to see you, very upset. Tests have revealed something unbelievable about two of her three grown-up sons. Although
she conceived them naturally with her husband, who is definitely
their father, the tests say she isn't their biological mother.
Somehow she has given birth to somebody else's children.
This isn't a trick question - it's a genuine case that Margot Kruskall, a doctor at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, was faced with five years ago. The patient, who we will call Jane, needed a kidney transplant, and so her family underwent blood tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. When the results came back, Jane was hoping for good news.
Instead she received a hammer blow. The letter told her outright that
two of her three sons could not be hers. What was going on?
It took Kruskall and her team two years to crack the riddle. In the end they discovered that Jane is a chimera, a mixture of two individuals - non-identical twin sisters - who fused in the womb and grew into a single body. Some parts of her are derived from one twin, others from the other.
It seems bizarre that this can happen at all, but Jane's is not an
isolated case. Around 30 similar instances of chimerism have been
reported, and there are probably many more out there who will never
discover their unusual origins.
While cases like Jane's are the extreme, researchers now think that
there's a little bit of chimera in all of us, and what was once seen
as a biological oddity may serve a vital function. We may owe our
lives to being chimeras.
At first, Jane's case had Kruskall completely puzzled. The original
data came from the tests done to "tissue-type" her and her children.
Such tests are based on a set of genes called the HLA complex, which
encode many different immune proteins, including cell surface proteins that immune cells use to distinguish the body's own tissues
from foreign material. There are hundreds of different versions, or
alleles, of each HLA gene, and because of this, each person's
combination of alleles is almost unique. But because the genes are
clustered close together on chromosome 6, they tend to be inherited
together in a block known as a haplotype. Everyone inherits two HLA
haplotypes, one from each parent.
Transplant doctors know that the closer the match between two people's HLA haplotypes, the lower the risk of a transplant between them being rejected. If you need a transplant, the obvious place to look for people with a similar haplotype is your close family. Your siblings, for example, have a 1-in-4 chance of matching yours exactly, while your children will have at least 50 per cent of your HLA genes.
Confronted with Jane's bizarre test results, Kruskall's team's first line of enquiry was to take another look at Jane's HLA genes and those of her immediate family. They identified Jane's haplotypes and dubbed them 1 and 3. They tested Jane's husband too - he had types 5 and 6. And when they looked at her sons they confirmed that the original tissue-typing was correct. While all three shared a haplotype with their father, only one shared one of Jane's. The other two sons had a haplotype of unknown origin, labelled type 2.
The obvious interpretation was that Jane was not the biological
mother of two of her sons, yet they were all conceived naturally,
so how could this be? One possibility was that both boys were
accidentally swapped at birth, but the chance of this happening twice to the same family is very small. Add in the fact that both sons share a haplotype with their father and it becomes a near impossibility.
Stumped, Kruskall sent her data out to colleagues, asking them if
they could make sense of it. Soon researchers around the world were
scratching their heads in bewilderment. "I did get the most amazing
set of explanations," Kruskall recalls. "No one could quite figure it
out." One suggested that Jane had secretly undergone fertility
treatment using donated eggs. Another speculated that Jane and her
husband had got her sister to conceive children with his sperm, and
then pretended they were hers.
The breakthrough came when Kruskall's team checked the HLA haplotypes of other members of Jane's family who had been omitted from the original tests. They discovered that her brother carried the mystery haplotype 2 - suggesting that the two sons were related to Jane in some way after all. "That really provided the spur that kept us going," Kruskall says.
So where did the sons' odd haplotype come from? Since Jane's blood cells provided no match, the team decided to test DNA from some of her other tissues, including her thyroid gland, mouth and hair. What they discovered was astonishing. Some of her tissues carried haplotypes 1 and 3, while others contained 2 and 4 (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 346, p 1546). Jane's body was made up of two genetically distinct types of cells.
There was only one conclusion: Jane was a mixture of two different people.
Kruskall thinks the most likely explanation for this is that Jane's mother conceived non-identical twin girls, who fused at an early stage of the pregnancy to form a single embryo. In medical parlance, Jane is a tetragametic chimera, a person whose body is made up from two genetically distinct lines of cells derived from a total of four gametes - eggs and sperm.
This instantly explains why the tissue-typing yielded such paradoxical results. For some reason, cells from only one twin have come to dominate in Jane's blood - the tissue used in tissue-typing. In Jane's other tissues, however, including her ovaries, cells of both types live amicably alongside each other, hence the apparently impossible genetics of her three sons. One came from an egg derived from the twin whose cells dominate Jane's blood, while his two brothers came from eggs derived from the other twin's cells.
Nobody knows how common tetragametic chimerism is. It often has no outward signs and those who uncover their chimeric nature do so only by accident.
Nature reported a similar case to Jane's in 1979, when genetic tests
suggested that a woman could not be the mother of any of her four
children. There had been no hint that the woman was chimeric.
Some chimeras do have unusual physical features. For example, one
girl was discovered to be a chimera because her eyes were different colours, one brown, the other hazel. Others have come to light when doctors investigated problems with their reproductive systems, and
found that they had structures from both male and female reproductive
organs as a result of having cells of both sexes in their bodies. But most probably go through life utterly unaware of their unusual constitution.
"They are probably dramatically under-diagnosed," Kruskall says, "and also dramatically rare."
Yet this kind of chimerism may still be common enough to cast doubt on the way we carry out genetic tests of parenthood. Kruskall is currently helping out with a court case where a woman is suing her partner, claiming that he is the father of her child. In a bizarre twist that would nonplus even Jerry Springer, tissue-typing tests proved he was the father, but ruled her out as the mother. The situation could be explained by chimerism in the mother, Kruskall speculates.
But what about a case where the father was a chimera? "You could imagine that you could rule out a person who is in fact the father," she says. This is especially plausible if one cell line always comes to dominate in the blood, as happened with Jane. Animal studies of chimerism suggest that this is indeed common.
What's more, the incidence of tetragametic chimerism is set to rise,
Kruskall says, because of modern fertility techniques that increase the rate of twinning. Drugs used to make a woman ovulate can cause her to release more than one egg at a time, for example, while many IVF clinics still transfer more than one embryo into the womb. And the fact that embryos are in close contact in the lab dish or when transferred to the womb may encourage them to fuse, according to a report by a team at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In 1998, they reported a case of a chimeric IVF baby who resulted from the accidental fusion of a male embryo and a female embryo (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 338, p 166). The child was outwardly male, but the left hand side of his internal reproductive system had developed as an ovary and fallopian tube.
Meanwhile, Jane's mystery is solved - and it even has a happy ending. Because her body contains double the normal number of HLA haplotypes, it means that she has a much greater chance of finding a suitable donor kidney.
But the story doesn't end there. There is growing evidence that chimerism in one form or another may not be so unusual at all. In fact, some researchers now think that most of us, if not all, are chimeras of one kind or another. Far from being pure-bred individuals composed of a single genetic cell line, our bodies are cellular mongrels, teeming with cells from our mothers, maybe even from grandparents and siblings. This may seem a little shocking at first. The thought of playing host to cells from other people may offend your sense of individuality. But you may have those outsiders to thank for keeping you healthy.
During pregnancy, the blood of the mother and fetus are kept separate, but some cells manage to slip through, meaning that you will have picked up some cells from your mother, and she some from you. In fact, some 80 to 90 per cent of women carry their children's cells or DNA in their blood during pregnancy and up to 50 per= centcarry them for decades after giving birth, a condition called microchimerism (New Scientist, 24 April 1999, p4). If your mother then had more children, some of your cells could in principle slip back through into your younger sibling's body. And twins can end up swapping cells in the womb, especially if they share a placenta. So a single person can be a veritable menagerie of different cell types from different generations. "Women harbour cells from both their mother and their children," says J. Lee Nelson, an immunologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
The fact that fetal cells persist in their mother's bloodstream for decades has been known since the mid 1990s. But only recently has anyone investigated how common it is for cells to move the other way – from mothers into their children. To investigate this, Nelson and her colleague Natalie Lambert have been searching for maternal cells in the blood of adult women.
In a forthcoming paper in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism, they describe how they took blood samples from 32 healthy women and found that 22 per cent of them were carrying white blood cells from their mothers. These maternal cells were relatively rare - at most there were 50 per million blood cells - but Nelson suspects that more extensive tests of blood and other tissues such as bone marrow would reveal microchimerism in a far greater percentage of women. And the same goes for men too. "Our guess would be that it is probably universal," she says.
This discovery raises some puzzling questions. How come the invading cells don't simply get wiped out by the immune system? Do the cells divide inside their new host? And why do mother and child exchange cells at all - is it just an accident, or does it have a purpose?
In the case of fetal cells crossing to the mother, Nelson says we don't know whether it serves any specific purpose, but one important factor could be that these cells encourage the mother's immune system to tolerate her fetus. After all, pregnancy is rather like hosting a transplanted organ for nine months, and transplant researchers have known for some time that microchimerism caused by white blood cells from the transplant mixing with those of the recipient can encourage the host to accept the transplant under certain circumstances. And researchers think the breakdown of this long-term tolerance to fetal cells may be the cause of some autoimmune diseases in women (New Scientist, 24 February 2001, p 8).
"But what benefit [fetal cells] might offer long term, no one knows,"
Nelson says. As for cells passing from mother to fetus, there are hints that this may play a vital role in keeping the unborn child healthy. Your mother's cells don't just hang around passively in your body, Nelson believes. They might play an active role in repairing your tissues, especially while you are still in the womb. And she has evidence that unknown types of maternal cells cross the placenta and then "transdifferentiate" or transform themselves into different kinds of cells that then become part of the baby's body.
Anne Stevens, a researcher in Nelson's team made the discovery while
studying the bodies of babies who had died from an autoimmune disease
called neonatal lupus syndrome, which attacks heart muscle. In the course of testing the heart cells, she found that the babies' hearts contained muscle cells that could only have come from their mothers. Nelson says she can't yet be sure exactly how they got there, but thinks it likely that blood stem cells from the mother made their way to the heart of the developing fetus and transdifferentiated into heart cells. "It really is amazing," she says. "This is really the next conceptual leap in the entire field, I think."
The question is, what are these maternal cells doing? Are they the cause of the autoimmune disease in the children or are they trying to intervene? One possibility is that the presence of the maternal cells triggers the baby's immune system to attack the heart.
Mother and child usually tolerate each other, but if this were to break down, the fetus's immune system would identify the mother's cells as foreign and attack them, with the fetus's own heart cells getting caught in the crossfire.
But Nelson thinks there is another, more positive explanation. "The second possibility is that the maternal cells are there trying to repair the damaged tissue," she says. Her results don't yet tell her which explanation is correct, but she says: "I always go back to remembering that there could well be beneficial functions because [microchimerism] is so common in healthy people."
While microchimerism may force immunologists to rewrite their textbooks, it may also prod us into seeing ourselves in a new light. Rather than being isolated individuals, perhaps we should see ourselves more as a collective - an individual made of many other different individuals. On one level, you are you, a person with your own thoughts and feelings. But zoom in one level and you are a supercolony of individual cells, some cooperating, others competing. Zoom in to the level of your genome, and you find individual chromosomes and genes, all jostling to get through to the next round of natural selection. It's all a question of perspective.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
World wakes to climate calamity
Stephanie Peatling, Wendy Frew and Jo Chandler
February 3, 2007
SMH
THE world has been delivered its strongest warning yet that human actions are causing global warming and that greenhouse gas emissions must be reined in by 2020 if humanity wants a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change.
A turbulent future of violent storms, devastating drought, higher temperatures and rising sea levels is inevitable, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its 1200-page report in Paris last night. The work of 2500 scientists over six years, it is considered the most authoritative evaluation of climate change ever produced.
It details six scenarios under which temperatures are predicted to rise from at least 1.1 degrees and possibly as much as 6.4 degrees by 2100.
The final text of the report says it is "very likely" that human activities led by burning fossil fuels account for most of the warming in the past 50 years. It puts this at a 90 per cent certainty - a significant ramping up of the language of the last report of the panel in 2001, which said the link was "likely". Scientists at the final four-day workshop said this was the most important paragraph of the report.
"There can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities," said the senior US Government scientist, Susan Solomon. She called the warming of the Earth "unequivocal and said greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere were not being cancelled by its normal processes.
The report provides what may be cold comfort in slightly reduced projections on rising sea levels - from 18 centimetres to 59cm by 2100, instead of 9cm to 88cm, as forecast in 2001. But there is a flat pronouncement that global warming is essentially a runaway train that cannot be stopped for hundreds of years.
Human-caused warming and rises in sea levels "would continue for centuries" because the process has already started, "even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilised", said the 21-page executive summary, which will be delivered to the world's policy makers.
"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," it said.
The Australian of the Year, the scientist Tim Flannery, said the highest temperature forecasts could spell disaster for many species. "[It] lays out a sort of middle-of-the road trajectory, which is alarming enough, I can tell you, for this century," Professor Flannery said. "Three degrees will be a disaster for all life on Earth. We will lose somewhere between two out of every 10 and six out of every 10 species living on the planet at that level of warming. It will set in train a series of climate consequences that will run for a thousand years."
The forecasted temperature rise is likely to mean Australia's average temperature rises by 0.7 within the next 20 years and as much as four degrees by the end of the century, the former head of CSIRO's atmospheric research division, Graeme Pearman, said.
Other than a subsequent drop in rainfall, Professor Pearman said temperature and sea rises would have serious consequences for coastal communities.
"Australia has continued to develop more and more towards a coastal community," he said.
Building codes had not been developed that would cope with the storms expected to lash the coast in coming years. The report had depressed him, Professor Pearman said.
"We've been hoping someone would find we were wrong. It simply confirms the issue. It's the issue of whether human societies in general have the capacity to respond to a major threat like this. At the moment I'm not sure we are going to have that. I'm not sure we're going to respond in time."
The 2001 report led scientists to castigate the Australian Government for not taking urgent action six years ago.
Labor will now head into the federal election determined to stake out the green vote with a climate policy that argues the cost of doing nothing will destroy the economy and the environment.
The Minister for Environment and Water, Malcolm Turnbull, said people needed to learn how to adapt to hotter temperatures.
"We have to deal with our built environment in terms of how we deal with heat and energy efficiency and, of course, we have to use water more efficiently," Mr Turnbull said. He said meeting the Kyoto target - which allows Australia's emissions to continue to rise - was "virtuous" but would not change anything.
"Of course we should seek to reduce them [emissions], because we are committed to becoming a good global citizen," he said.
The Government is exploring an emissions trading scheme and nuclear power as part of its climate-change strategy and has already committed millions of dollars to experimental technology such as clean coal and geosequestration. But these strategies are unlikely to deliver significant reductions in emissions for several decades.
Polling by green groups shows voters see the environment as a big point of difference between the Government and the Opposition.
A meeting of Labor's shadow cabinet last week agreed to keep the former leader Kim Beazley's pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2050.
The Opposition has already promised to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, introduce emissions trading and boost the use of renewable energy, but it has not provided any clear timetable for how it would achieve the cuts.
"We cannot deal with the water crisis without dealing with the climate-change crisis at the same time," said the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd.
The CSIRO says Australia's emissions must fall 60 per cent by 2050 compared with 1990. But the latest government figures show that by the end of this decade alone, gas emissions from electricity production will have risen by half on their 1990 levels.
The president of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Kurt Lambeck, said yesterday: "This intensive review of the past five years' scientific evidence was undertaken by hundreds of scientists worldwide and confirms what we already know - we have now lost five years that could have been used in implementing remedial actions."
At the Paris meeting, there was a last-ditch bid to water down the statement from two nations — Saudi Arabia and another unnamed country (not the US or Australia) among the 130 countries represented at the plenary. It eventually passed intact after the meeting accepted a suggestion - initiated by the small Australian delegation - to deal with the dissenting country's concerns in a footnote. It states that there are remaining uncertainties over climate change "based on current methodologies".
Other areas of disagreement were over how much sea levels would rise, and concerns about the ferocity of future cyclones, said Dr Geoff Love, head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and a member of the Australian team.
But he said it was not so much about the science as about the semantics in the summary.
As the report co-author Philip Mote, the Washington state climatologist, said in translating his fellow scientists' language: "We did it."
He added: "Scientists are pretty well done arguing about whether the warming in the last 50 years is related to burning fossil fuels."
Professor Flannery said: "It's our problem. We have to do something about it. We have the tools. We're so far lacking the will."
February 3, 2007
SMH
THE world has been delivered its strongest warning yet that human actions are causing global warming and that greenhouse gas emissions must be reined in by 2020 if humanity wants a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change.
A turbulent future of violent storms, devastating drought, higher temperatures and rising sea levels is inevitable, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its 1200-page report in Paris last night. The work of 2500 scientists over six years, it is considered the most authoritative evaluation of climate change ever produced.
It details six scenarios under which temperatures are predicted to rise from at least 1.1 degrees and possibly as much as 6.4 degrees by 2100.
The final text of the report says it is "very likely" that human activities led by burning fossil fuels account for most of the warming in the past 50 years. It puts this at a 90 per cent certainty - a significant ramping up of the language of the last report of the panel in 2001, which said the link was "likely". Scientists at the final four-day workshop said this was the most important paragraph of the report.
"There can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities," said the senior US Government scientist, Susan Solomon. She called the warming of the Earth "unequivocal and said greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere were not being cancelled by its normal processes.
The report provides what may be cold comfort in slightly reduced projections on rising sea levels - from 18 centimetres to 59cm by 2100, instead of 9cm to 88cm, as forecast in 2001. But there is a flat pronouncement that global warming is essentially a runaway train that cannot be stopped for hundreds of years.
Human-caused warming and rises in sea levels "would continue for centuries" because the process has already started, "even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilised", said the 21-page executive summary, which will be delivered to the world's policy makers.
"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," it said.
The Australian of the Year, the scientist Tim Flannery, said the highest temperature forecasts could spell disaster for many species. "[It] lays out a sort of middle-of-the road trajectory, which is alarming enough, I can tell you, for this century," Professor Flannery said. "Three degrees will be a disaster for all life on Earth. We will lose somewhere between two out of every 10 and six out of every 10 species living on the planet at that level of warming. It will set in train a series of climate consequences that will run for a thousand years."
The forecasted temperature rise is likely to mean Australia's average temperature rises by 0.7 within the next 20 years and as much as four degrees by the end of the century, the former head of CSIRO's atmospheric research division, Graeme Pearman, said.
Other than a subsequent drop in rainfall, Professor Pearman said temperature and sea rises would have serious consequences for coastal communities.
"Australia has continued to develop more and more towards a coastal community," he said.
Building codes had not been developed that would cope with the storms expected to lash the coast in coming years. The report had depressed him, Professor Pearman said.
"We've been hoping someone would find we were wrong. It simply confirms the issue. It's the issue of whether human societies in general have the capacity to respond to a major threat like this. At the moment I'm not sure we are going to have that. I'm not sure we're going to respond in time."
The 2001 report led scientists to castigate the Australian Government for not taking urgent action six years ago.
Labor will now head into the federal election determined to stake out the green vote with a climate policy that argues the cost of doing nothing will destroy the economy and the environment.
The Minister for Environment and Water, Malcolm Turnbull, said people needed to learn how to adapt to hotter temperatures.
"We have to deal with our built environment in terms of how we deal with heat and energy efficiency and, of course, we have to use water more efficiently," Mr Turnbull said. He said meeting the Kyoto target - which allows Australia's emissions to continue to rise - was "virtuous" but would not change anything.
"Of course we should seek to reduce them [emissions], because we are committed to becoming a good global citizen," he said.
The Government is exploring an emissions trading scheme and nuclear power as part of its climate-change strategy and has already committed millions of dollars to experimental technology such as clean coal and geosequestration. But these strategies are unlikely to deliver significant reductions in emissions for several decades.
Polling by green groups shows voters see the environment as a big point of difference between the Government and the Opposition.
A meeting of Labor's shadow cabinet last week agreed to keep the former leader Kim Beazley's pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2050.
The Opposition has already promised to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, introduce emissions trading and boost the use of renewable energy, but it has not provided any clear timetable for how it would achieve the cuts.
"We cannot deal with the water crisis without dealing with the climate-change crisis at the same time," said the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd.
The CSIRO says Australia's emissions must fall 60 per cent by 2050 compared with 1990. But the latest government figures show that by the end of this decade alone, gas emissions from electricity production will have risen by half on their 1990 levels.
The president of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Kurt Lambeck, said yesterday: "This intensive review of the past five years' scientific evidence was undertaken by hundreds of scientists worldwide and confirms what we already know - we have now lost five years that could have been used in implementing remedial actions."
At the Paris meeting, there was a last-ditch bid to water down the statement from two nations — Saudi Arabia and another unnamed country (not the US or Australia) among the 130 countries represented at the plenary. It eventually passed intact after the meeting accepted a suggestion - initiated by the small Australian delegation - to deal with the dissenting country's concerns in a footnote. It states that there are remaining uncertainties over climate change "based on current methodologies".
Other areas of disagreement were over how much sea levels would rise, and concerns about the ferocity of future cyclones, said Dr Geoff Love, head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and a member of the Australian team.
But he said it was not so much about the science as about the semantics in the summary.
As the report co-author Philip Mote, the Washington state climatologist, said in translating his fellow scientists' language: "We did it."
He added: "Scientists are pretty well done arguing about whether the warming in the last 50 years is related to burning fossil fuels."
Professor Flannery said: "It's our problem. We have to do something about it. We have the tools. We're so far lacking the will."
Friday, February 02, 2007
UN panel blames humans for global warming
The United Nations (UN) climate panel has agreed that human activities are causing global warming that may bring more droughts, heatwaves and rising seas, delegates say.
The panel's report, due for release tonight and bolstering conclusions from a 2001 study, may put pressure on governments and companies to do more to curb greenhouse gases mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.
Scientists and government officials in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative group on global warming, agreed it was "very likely" that human activities were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years, delegates say.
In IPCC language, "very likely" means at least 90 per cent probability and is the strongest link to human activities since the IPCC was set up in 1988.
The previous study in 2001 said a link was "likely" or 66 per cent probable.
IPCC officials declined comment, saying the report will be released soon.
The IPCC, grouping 2,500 scientists from 130 countries, is also set to say that oceans will keep rising for more than 1,000 years even if governments stabilise greenhouse gas emissions.
The report is the first of four this year by the panel that will outline threats of warming.
Delegates say the Paris meeting, looking at the science of global warming, later agreed a "best estimate" that temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100 over pre-industrial levels, the biggest change in a century for thousands of years.
Rain, less ice
It says bigger gains, of up to 6.3 degrees Celsius in one model, cannot be ruled out but do not fit well with other data.
The world is now about 5 degrees Celsius warmer than during the last Ice Age.
The draft accord projects that Arctic ice will shrink, and perhaps disappear in summers by 2100, while heatwaves and downpours would get more frequent.
The numbers of tropical hurricanes might decrease but the storms would become stronger.
The Gulf Stream bringing warm waters to the North Atlantic could slow, although a shutdown is highly unlikely, it says.
Sea levels are likely to rise by between 28 and 43 centimetres this century, a lower range than forecast in 2001.
Rising seas threaten low-lying Pacific islands and low-lying coastal nations from Bangladesh to the Netherlands.
"Governments planning coastal defences have to live with large uncertainties for now and quite some time in future," Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said.
Professor Rahmstorf wrote a report last year saying that observations of past changes indicated a bigger rise by 2100, of 50 to 140 centimetres.
The Eiffel Tower in Paris, near where the IPCC experts were meeting, was to shut off its famous night-time illuminations for five minutes on Thursday night (local time) to draw attention to energy use.
Many experts hope the IPCC report will spur stalled talks on expanding the fight against global warming.
Thirty-five industrial nations aim to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 under the UN Kyoto Protocol and want outsiders such as the United States, China and India to do more.
Last week President George W Bush said climate change was a "serious challenge".
But he has stopped short of capping emissions despite pressure from Democrats who control both houses of Congress, arguing Kyoto would damage the economy.
- Reuters
The panel's report, due for release tonight and bolstering conclusions from a 2001 study, may put pressure on governments and companies to do more to curb greenhouse gases mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.
Scientists and government officials in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative group on global warming, agreed it was "very likely" that human activities were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years, delegates say.
In IPCC language, "very likely" means at least 90 per cent probability and is the strongest link to human activities since the IPCC was set up in 1988.
The previous study in 2001 said a link was "likely" or 66 per cent probable.
IPCC officials declined comment, saying the report will be released soon.
The IPCC, grouping 2,500 scientists from 130 countries, is also set to say that oceans will keep rising for more than 1,000 years even if governments stabilise greenhouse gas emissions.
The report is the first of four this year by the panel that will outline threats of warming.
Delegates say the Paris meeting, looking at the science of global warming, later agreed a "best estimate" that temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100 over pre-industrial levels, the biggest change in a century for thousands of years.
Rain, less ice
It says bigger gains, of up to 6.3 degrees Celsius in one model, cannot be ruled out but do not fit well with other data.
The world is now about 5 degrees Celsius warmer than during the last Ice Age.
The draft accord projects that Arctic ice will shrink, and perhaps disappear in summers by 2100, while heatwaves and downpours would get more frequent.
The numbers of tropical hurricanes might decrease but the storms would become stronger.
The Gulf Stream bringing warm waters to the North Atlantic could slow, although a shutdown is highly unlikely, it says.
Sea levels are likely to rise by between 28 and 43 centimetres this century, a lower range than forecast in 2001.
Rising seas threaten low-lying Pacific islands and low-lying coastal nations from Bangladesh to the Netherlands.
"Governments planning coastal defences have to live with large uncertainties for now and quite some time in future," Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said.
Professor Rahmstorf wrote a report last year saying that observations of past changes indicated a bigger rise by 2100, of 50 to 140 centimetres.
The Eiffel Tower in Paris, near where the IPCC experts were meeting, was to shut off its famous night-time illuminations for five minutes on Thursday night (local time) to draw attention to energy use.
Many experts hope the IPCC report will spur stalled talks on expanding the fight against global warming.
Thirty-five industrial nations aim to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 under the UN Kyoto Protocol and want outsiders such as the United States, China and India to do more.
Last week President George W Bush said climate change was a "serious challenge".
But he has stopped short of capping emissions despite pressure from Democrats who control both houses of Congress, arguing Kyoto would damage the economy.
- Reuters
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Active Denial System
January 25, 2007
The military calls its new weapon an "active denial system," but that's an understatement. It's a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire.
Apart from causing that terrifying sensation, the technology is supposed to be harmless - a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons.
Military officials say it could save the lives of innocent civilians and service members in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said.
During the first media demonstration of the weapon yesterday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios that US troops might encounter in war zones.
The device's two-man crew located their targets through powerful lenses and fired beams from 500 metres away. That is nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets.
Anyone hit by the beam immediately jumped out of its path because of the sudden blast of heat throughout the body.
While the heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make the participants think their clothes were about to ignite.
"This is one of the key technologies for the future," said Marine Colonel Kirk Hymes, director of the non-lethal weapons program, which helped develop the new weapon.
"Non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in."
The system uses electromagnetic millimetre waves, which penetrate the surface of the skin enough to cause discomfort.
The waves cannot go through walls, but they can penetrate most clothing, officials said. They refused to comment on whether the waves can go through glass.
The weapon could be mounted aboard ships, airplanes and helicopters, and routinely used for security or anti-terrorism operations.
"There should be no collateral damage to this," said Senior Airman Adam Navin, 22, of Green Bay, Wis., who has served several tours in Iraq.
Navin and two other airmen were role players in Wednesday's demonstration.
They and 10 reporters who volunteered were shot with the beams. The beams easily penetrated various layers of winter clothing.
The system was developed by the military, but the two devices currently being evaluated were built by defense contractor Raytheon.
Airman Blaine Pernell, 22, of New Orleans, said he could have used the system during his four tours in Iraq, where he manned watchtowers around a base near Kirkuk. He said Iraqis constantly pulled up and faked car problems so they could scout out US forces.
"All we could do is watch them," he said. But if they had the ray gun, troops "could have dispersed them."
AP
Australian of the Year
Environmentalist awarded top honour
January 25, 2007
SMH
Environmentalist Tim Flannery got an early birthday present today when he was named the 2007 Australian of the Year, giving him a platform to convince Australians about the dangers of over-consumption.
As a scientist who has been warning about sustainability and the risk of climate change for decades, public opinion is finally catching up with Dr Flannery.
But the next year will give him an even greater opportunity to convince sceptics that the globe needs to better live within its means.
Prime Minister John Howard, a late climate change convert, bestowed the honour on Dr Flannery at a ceremony at Parliament House tonight.
"He has encouraged Australians into new ways of thinking about our environmental history and future ecological challenges," Mr Howard said.
A renowned explorer and palaeontologist, Dr Flannery, who will turn 51 on Sunday, was the bookies' favourite to take out the award.
His expertise on climate change has come into its own of late as the nation grows increasingly concerned about what global warming could do to our already dry continent.
He has written best-selling books on the issue, been an environmental adviser to the South Australian and federal governments, catalogued the mammals of Melanesia, discovered dinosaur fossils and kangaroo species in his own country, and taught at Harvard.
Dr Flannery accepted his award with pride, vowing to continue his quest to help Australians live sustainably.
"This award means I have an obligation to the people of Australia to continue the quest to create a sustainable future for our country and for our children," he said.
"We can only call ourselves Australian if we have a long-term future in this country and that means to live sustainably."
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Serial Killer overkill ???
Pickton trial coverage should be respectful: poll
Wency Leung
CanWest News Service
Monday, January 22, 2007
VANCOUVER - A slim majority of B.C. residents say they're interested in the media's coverage of Robert Pickton's murder trial, but most believe news organizations should refrain from reporting salacious details, while one in five say the media have reported "too much" about the case already, according to a poll to be released by the University of B.C. today.
The results of the poll, conducted by Mustel Group for the UBC School of Journalism's Feminist Media Project, found that 52 per cent of the 806 adults surveyed by telephone earlier this month said they are interested in media coverage of the case, compared with 46 per cent who said they are not.
Only one per cent said they are not aware of the trial.
Despite the split in public interest about the case, 53 per cent said the amount of coverage so far is "just right," though 21 per cent said there has already been "too much," according to the poll. Fifteen per cent said there has been too little coverage about the case to date, while the rest did not know.
Pickton's long-awaited trial begins at the New Westminster Courts today, and some 358 members of the local and international media have been accredited to cover the proceedings.
The Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farmer will be tried on six counts of first-degree murder. He has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Marnie Frey and Georgina Papin.
According to the UBC poll, 75 per cent of respondents said the media have so far behaved responsibly in covering the case. Only nine per cent think the media have been irresponsible in their coverage to date.
However, the poll showed that 56 per cent believe the media should restrict violent and sexually explicit details that arise at the trial, compared with 37 per cent who believe the public should know as much detail as possible. The remaining seven per cent did not know.
The survey results indicate that the public isn't as interested in sensational crime stories as the mainstream media might expect, said Mary Lynn Young, assistant professor at UBC School of Journalism.
"There's a disconnect I think," Young said Sunday.
She said the media have largely assumed that crime stories sell newspapers, when, in fact, she said, "there's no systematic data that crime stories sell media over a certain length of time."
On the contrary, she said, the public often prioritizes other issues, such as the environment or health, ahead of crime, and as the poll suggests, when it comes to the Pickton trial, "the clear message was that the public felt less was more."
Young said media should consider the potential impact that revealing violent details from the Pickton trial will have on the public, noting that widespread media coverage surrounding the Paul Bernardo trial in the mid-1990s exacerbated the trauma the Toronto-area community experienced.
"Is it worth putting these details out in the public realm?" Young asked.
"As media, we have not respected the intelligence of our audience enough," she said. "Education levels are rising and I think these (poll) results are signs that people want better quality of information, not just daily trial stenography."
She said that while the trial itself is important, she believes more emphasis should be placed on the larger social issues that led to the disappearance of dozens of Vancouver sex-trade workers, which prompted police to search Pickton's farm in 2002.
For instance, the community and local institutions must bear some responsibility for not addressing the issue of their disappearance, she said.
Young said the UBC poll also showed Vancouver residents are significantly less interested in the Pickton trial than those who live outside of B.C.'s Lower Mainland, in part, because Vancouver residents tend to be younger and are less likely to be consumers of the mainstream news media.
But, she said, another factor may be that Vancouver residents have already heard about the case for several years.
Before the trial even begins in earnest, people may already be experiencing "Pickton trial fatigue," she said.
The survey was conducted between Jan. 3 and Jan. 10, Mustel Group said. The margin of error for the poll is 3.4 percentage points at 95 per cent confidence level.
Vancouver Sun
Wency Leung
CanWest News Service
Monday, January 22, 2007
VANCOUVER - A slim majority of B.C. residents say they're interested in the media's coverage of Robert Pickton's murder trial, but most believe news organizations should refrain from reporting salacious details, while one in five say the media have reported "too much" about the case already, according to a poll to be released by the University of B.C. today.
The results of the poll, conducted by Mustel Group for the UBC School of Journalism's Feminist Media Project, found that 52 per cent of the 806 adults surveyed by telephone earlier this month said they are interested in media coverage of the case, compared with 46 per cent who said they are not.
Only one per cent said they are not aware of the trial.
Despite the split in public interest about the case, 53 per cent said the amount of coverage so far is "just right," though 21 per cent said there has already been "too much," according to the poll. Fifteen per cent said there has been too little coverage about the case to date, while the rest did not know.
Pickton's long-awaited trial begins at the New Westminster Courts today, and some 358 members of the local and international media have been accredited to cover the proceedings.
The Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farmer will be tried on six counts of first-degree murder. He has pleaded not guilty to the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Marnie Frey and Georgina Papin.
According to the UBC poll, 75 per cent of respondents said the media have so far behaved responsibly in covering the case. Only nine per cent think the media have been irresponsible in their coverage to date.
However, the poll showed that 56 per cent believe the media should restrict violent and sexually explicit details that arise at the trial, compared with 37 per cent who believe the public should know as much detail as possible. The remaining seven per cent did not know.
The survey results indicate that the public isn't as interested in sensational crime stories as the mainstream media might expect, said Mary Lynn Young, assistant professor at UBC School of Journalism.
"There's a disconnect I think," Young said Sunday.
She said the media have largely assumed that crime stories sell newspapers, when, in fact, she said, "there's no systematic data that crime stories sell media over a certain length of time."
On the contrary, she said, the public often prioritizes other issues, such as the environment or health, ahead of crime, and as the poll suggests, when it comes to the Pickton trial, "the clear message was that the public felt less was more."
Young said media should consider the potential impact that revealing violent details from the Pickton trial will have on the public, noting that widespread media coverage surrounding the Paul Bernardo trial in the mid-1990s exacerbated the trauma the Toronto-area community experienced.
"Is it worth putting these details out in the public realm?" Young asked.
"As media, we have not respected the intelligence of our audience enough," she said. "Education levels are rising and I think these (poll) results are signs that people want better quality of information, not just daily trial stenography."
She said that while the trial itself is important, she believes more emphasis should be placed on the larger social issues that led to the disappearance of dozens of Vancouver sex-trade workers, which prompted police to search Pickton's farm in 2002.
For instance, the community and local institutions must bear some responsibility for not addressing the issue of their disappearance, she said.
Young said the UBC poll also showed Vancouver residents are significantly less interested in the Pickton trial than those who live outside of B.C.'s Lower Mainland, in part, because Vancouver residents tend to be younger and are less likely to be consumers of the mainstream news media.
But, she said, another factor may be that Vancouver residents have already heard about the case for several years.
Before the trial even begins in earnest, people may already be experiencing "Pickton trial fatigue," she said.
The survey was conducted between Jan. 3 and Jan. 10, Mustel Group said. The margin of error for the poll is 3.4 percentage points at 95 per cent confidence level.
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Abnormal to be a married woman
Jacqueline Maley
January 20, 2007
SMH
THE number of unmarried women in Australia is expected to outstrip the number of married ones by the time census results are released later this year, according to projections by experts.
For the first time, single women and those living in de facto relationships will become the norm, marking the beginning of a social trend that will change the way we live, socialise and conduct relationships.
"My expectation is that the 2006 census results, due out in the middle of this year, will confirm that there are now more single women than women in married relationships," the demographer Bernard Salt told the Herald. "These figures are moving very rapidly."
The projections follow reports this week that 51 per cent of American women are unmarried, according to the latest US census results, a figure which has increased from 35 per cent in 1950 and 49 per cent in 2000.
The last Australian census in 2001 counted 3.5 million married females over the age of 15, compared with 3.4 million unmarried females. Mr Salt said the unmarried figure will rise over the next decade, bolstered by two streams of single women.
"The first is young people in their 20s and 30s who are choosing not to formalise their relationships. This is a social revolution, really, led by Generations X and Y," he said.
"The second source is older women. In about 15 years' time you'll see the number of baby boomer widows really start to ratchet up."
David de Vaus, professor of sociology at La Trobe University and author of a study on living alone in Australia, said the 1989 census showed 59 per cent of women were married. In 1991 it was 55 per cent and in 2001 it hovered around 50 per cent.
"My guess is we'll go down again with the next census results. We'll maybe have 45 per cent in a registered marriage, but to compensate for that we'll probably have higher de facto figures."
Monique Kinerson, 34, says finding a partner is on the top of her "to do" list but recently she has been too busy buying her own unit and working overseas.
"The number of unmarried women is surprising only in that it's not what our parents did," she said. "I have pressure from my family sometimes, saying, 'When will you get serious?' I tell them I am serious about life and what I'm doing."
But it's not all about the generation. Younger women are more likely to be partnered than their male counterparts, says Bob Birrell, director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University.
Their partnering chances also improve during good economic times. But this trend is dramatically reversed in women over 65.
Mr Salt says the burgeoning number of older singles will give rise to new social arrangements for older women.
"We may see the formation of companion relationships, something we saw in the 1920s following the near-decimation of the male population from World War I," he said.
There will also be an increase in venues for over-55s.
"If you look at the groovy inner city, it's all arranged around cafes and restaurants so that anyone aged 18 to 40 can find a partner, but there are no similar venues for older people. That will change."
January 20, 2007
SMH
THE number of unmarried women in Australia is expected to outstrip the number of married ones by the time census results are released later this year, according to projections by experts.
For the first time, single women and those living in de facto relationships will become the norm, marking the beginning of a social trend that will change the way we live, socialise and conduct relationships.
"My expectation is that the 2006 census results, due out in the middle of this year, will confirm that there are now more single women than women in married relationships," the demographer Bernard Salt told the Herald. "These figures are moving very rapidly."
The projections follow reports this week that 51 per cent of American women are unmarried, according to the latest US census results, a figure which has increased from 35 per cent in 1950 and 49 per cent in 2000.
The last Australian census in 2001 counted 3.5 million married females over the age of 15, compared with 3.4 million unmarried females. Mr Salt said the unmarried figure will rise over the next decade, bolstered by two streams of single women.
"The first is young people in their 20s and 30s who are choosing not to formalise their relationships. This is a social revolution, really, led by Generations X and Y," he said.
"The second source is older women. In about 15 years' time you'll see the number of baby boomer widows really start to ratchet up."
David de Vaus, professor of sociology at La Trobe University and author of a study on living alone in Australia, said the 1989 census showed 59 per cent of women were married. In 1991 it was 55 per cent and in 2001 it hovered around 50 per cent.
"My guess is we'll go down again with the next census results. We'll maybe have 45 per cent in a registered marriage, but to compensate for that we'll probably have higher de facto figures."
Monique Kinerson, 34, says finding a partner is on the top of her "to do" list but recently she has been too busy buying her own unit and working overseas.
"The number of unmarried women is surprising only in that it's not what our parents did," she said. "I have pressure from my family sometimes, saying, 'When will you get serious?' I tell them I am serious about life and what I'm doing."
But it's not all about the generation. Younger women are more likely to be partnered than their male counterparts, says Bob Birrell, director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University.
Their partnering chances also improve during good economic times. But this trend is dramatically reversed in women over 65.
Mr Salt says the burgeoning number of older singles will give rise to new social arrangements for older women.
"We may see the formation of companion relationships, something we saw in the 1920s following the near-decimation of the male population from World War I," he said.
There will also be an increase in venues for over-55s.
"If you look at the groovy inner city, it's all arranged around cafes and restaurants so that anyone aged 18 to 40 can find a partner, but there are no similar venues for older people. That will change."
Friday, January 19, 2007
Wild jungle girl
Lost girl recognised by father after 19 years living wild in the jungle
January 19, 2007
HANOI: They say she is "half-human, half-animal". A woman who vanished in the jungle of north-eastern Cambodia as a child has been found after living in the wild for 19 years and has been returned to her father.
Ro Cham H'pnhieng, who cannot speak any intelligible language, appears to have survived by living nocturnally.
Her father, Ksor Lu, says he was able to recognise his daughter by her facial features and the scar on her back, according to yesterday's account in the newspaper Vietnam Rural Today.
Ms Ro was eight years old when she disappeared while herding buffalo in a remote jungle area in 1988. She was discovered this month after a villager noticed his food had been disappearing from a lunch container he left near his farm.
The villager staked out the area, eventually spotting a naked human sneaking in to steal his rice. He gathered some friends, and the group managed to catch her this week.
Ms Ro's father had long thought his daughter was dead. That was until last week, when he was told loggers had found "a forestman" in Ratanakiri province.
Mr Lu arrived and "recognised his daughter from the first sighting" even though her body was blackened, her hair was down to her legs and she could not speak.
Mr Lu said it was difficult to bring her back to normal life because she resisted showering, wearing clothes or using chopsticks. Instead, she would fend him off, shouting and crying.
Four days later she started co-operating, he said. "It is not easy, but life is waiting ahead for her."
Authorities want DNA samples taken from the parents and the woman to see if they match.
Agence France-Presse, Reuters
January 19, 2007
HANOI: They say she is "half-human, half-animal". A woman who vanished in the jungle of north-eastern Cambodia as a child has been found after living in the wild for 19 years and has been returned to her father.
Ro Cham H'pnhieng, who cannot speak any intelligible language, appears to have survived by living nocturnally.
Her father, Ksor Lu, says he was able to recognise his daughter by her facial features and the scar on her back, according to yesterday's account in the newspaper Vietnam Rural Today.
Ms Ro was eight years old when she disappeared while herding buffalo in a remote jungle area in 1988. She was discovered this month after a villager noticed his food had been disappearing from a lunch container he left near his farm.
The villager staked out the area, eventually spotting a naked human sneaking in to steal his rice. He gathered some friends, and the group managed to catch her this week.
Ms Ro's father had long thought his daughter was dead. That was until last week, when he was told loggers had found "a forestman" in Ratanakiri province.
Mr Lu arrived and "recognised his daughter from the first sighting" even though her body was blackened, her hair was down to her legs and she could not speak.
Mr Lu said it was difficult to bring her back to normal life because she resisted showering, wearing clothes or using chopsticks. Instead, she would fend him off, shouting and crying.
Four days later she started co-operating, he said. "It is not easy, but life is waiting ahead for her."
Authorities want DNA samples taken from the parents and the woman to see if they match.
Agence France-Presse, Reuters
Thursday, January 18, 2007
George Bush has plan for global warming
“George Bush has a plan to fight Global warming. Sending 20,000 troops on a mission to the sun.”
David Letterman
David Letterman
Thursday, January 11, 2007
For sale: world's smallest country
January 8, 2007
SMH
A former World War II fort in the North Sea, which was settled 40 years ago and declared a state with its own self-proclaimed royal family, is up for sale, The Times reports.
The tiny Principality of Sealand, which began life as Roughs Tower in 1941, is a 550 square metre steel platform perched on two concrete towers 11 kilometres off the coast of Harwich in eastern England.
It is accessible only by helicopter and boat but according to its owners, who want offers of eight digits or over, boasts uninterrupted sea views, guarantees complete privacy and is a tax haven.
''We have owned the island for 40 years now and my father is 85,'' Prince Michael of Sealand was quoted as saying. ''Perhaps it is time for some rejuvenation.
''Astronomical figures have been mentioned but we will just see what comes forward.''
Although its nation status is disputed, Sealand boasts a military past like any other country, defending its sovereignty from outside threats.
Former British army major Paddy Roy Bates began occupying the island with his family in 1967, declared it a state in international waters and gave himself the title ''prince''.
Britain's Royal Navy attempted to evict him the following year but was unsuccessful. As its forces entered territorial waters, Roy of Sealand fired warning shots from the former fort.
A judge then ruled in his favour that Sealand was outside British government control as it was beyond the three-mile limit of the country's waters.
In 1974, Roy of Sealand introduced a constitution. A flag, national anthem, currency - the gold and silver Sealand dollar which is the equivalent to the US dollar - and passports have followed.
Four years later, Dutch and German businessmen on Sealand to discuss a business deal kidnapped Roy's son, but were overpowered and held as prisoners of war before eventually being released.
AFP
Friday, January 05, 2007
5 NIL
Great Ashes Series !!
Good work !! Go Ponting and the boys.
Will miss Warne and McGrath's bowling and Langer and Martin's batting.
The end of an era in Australian cricket.
Shane Warne was just so good to watch.
Here is a link to Warne's stats:
http://content-aus.cricinfo.com/australia/content/current/player/8166.html
Here is a link to McGrath's stats:
http://content-aus.cricinfo.com/australia/content/player/6565.html
Ride on ...
Bicycle sales outpace cars as companies start treadly fleets
January 5, 2007
SMH
SALES of bicycles outpaced those of motor vehicles in 2006, as more people turned to pedal-power to cut petrol bills.
The industry-backed Cycling Promotion Fund said 1,273,781 new bikes were sold last year, significantly ahead of the 962,521 new cars and trucks bought.
A spokesman for the fund, Ian Christie, said Australians were increasingly using bikes as their preferred form of daily transport.
Mr Christie said sales rose 9 per cent last year as more people turned to bikes to cut petrol costs and boost their fitness.
"There is an emerging trend towards people using bikes as their official company-supplied vehicle in place of the traditional company car," he said.
"Some of Australia's biggest corporations now have bicycle fleets and when you add in government organisations, we now know of at least 50 organisations that operate fleets of bikes.
Although the company bicycle is a long way from taking over from the company car, it's an important trend when you consider that nearly half of all cars sold are to company fleets."
He said sales records were set in all segments of the market, from children's bikes to high-end models, beating vehicle sales for the seventh consecutive year.
Their lead on car sales was extended by 300,000 - a sales edge that exceeds the total sales of the market leader, Toyota.
AAP
January 5, 2007
SMH
SALES of bicycles outpaced those of motor vehicles in 2006, as more people turned to pedal-power to cut petrol bills.
The industry-backed Cycling Promotion Fund said 1,273,781 new bikes were sold last year, significantly ahead of the 962,521 new cars and trucks bought.
A spokesman for the fund, Ian Christie, said Australians were increasingly using bikes as their preferred form of daily transport.
Mr Christie said sales rose 9 per cent last year as more people turned to bikes to cut petrol costs and boost their fitness.
"There is an emerging trend towards people using bikes as their official company-supplied vehicle in place of the traditional company car," he said.
"Some of Australia's biggest corporations now have bicycle fleets and when you add in government organisations, we now know of at least 50 organisations that operate fleets of bikes.
Although the company bicycle is a long way from taking over from the company car, it's an important trend when you consider that nearly half of all cars sold are to company fleets."
He said sales records were set in all segments of the market, from children's bikes to high-end models, beating vehicle sales for the seventh consecutive year.
Their lead on car sales was extended by 300,000 - a sales edge that exceeds the total sales of the market leader, Toyota.
AAP
Monday, December 25, 2006
James Brown is Dead
December 25, 2006 - 7:08PM
Photo: James Brown performs during a concert in Shanghai, China, early this year.Photo: AP
James Brown, the dynamic US singer known as the "Godfather of Soul,'' whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco, died early today in Atlanta, his agent said. He was 73.
Brown was hospitalised yesterday at Emory Crawford Long Hospital with pneumonia and died around 1.45am local time (1745 AEDT), said his agent, Frank Copsidas, of Intrigue Music.
Longtime friend Charles Bobbit was by his side, Copsidas said.
"We really don't know at this point what he died of,'' Copsidas said.
Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolised him, and sometimes openly copied him.
His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others.
Songs such as David Bowie's 'Fame', Prince's 'Kiss', George Clinton's 'Atomic Dog' and 'Sly' and the Family Stone's 'Sing a Simple Song' were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style.
If Brown's claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.
"James presented obviously the best grooves,'' rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. ``To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one's coming even close.''
His hit singles include such classics as 'Out of Sight', ('Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine', 'I Got You (I Feel Good') and 'Say It Out Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud', a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.
"I clearly remember we were calling ourselves coloured, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,'' Brown said in a 2003 AP interview.
"The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.''
He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (best R&B recording) and for Living In America in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.)
He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.
He triumphed despite an often unhappy personal life. Brown, who lived in Beech Island near the Georgia line, spent more than two years in a South Carolina prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer. After his release on in 1991, Brown said he wanted to ``try to straighten out'' rock music.
From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R&B hit, 'Please, Please, Please' in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs. He earned the nickname 'The Hardest Working Man in Show Business'.
With his tight pants, shimmering feet, eye makeup and outrageous hair, Brown set the stage for younger stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince.In 1986, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And rap stars of recent years overwhelmingly have borrowed his lyrics with a digital technique called sampling.
Brown's work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers.
"The music out there is only as good as my last record,'' Brown joked in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
"Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying? You hear all the rappers, 90 per cent of their music is me,'' he told the AP in 2003.
Born in poverty in Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1933, he was abandoned as a four-year-old to the care of relatives and friends and grew up on the streets of Augusta, Georgia, in an ``ill-repute area,'' as he once called it. There he learned to wheel and deal.
"I wanted to be somebody,'' Brown said.
By the eighth grade in 1949, Brown had served three and a half years in Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Georgia, for breaking into cars.
While there, he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took Brown into their home. Byrd also took Brown into his group, the Gospel Starlighters. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.
In January 1956, King Records of Cincinnati signed the group, and four months later 'Please, Please, Please' was in the R&B Top Ten.
While most of Brown's life was glitz and glitter, he was plagued with charges of abusing drugs and alcohol and of hitting his third wife, Adrienne.In September 1988, Brown, high on PCP and carrying a shotgun, entered an insurance seminar next to his Augusta office. Police said he asked seminar participants if they were using his private restroom.
Police chased Brown for a half-hour from Augusta into South Carolina and back to Georgia. The chase ended when police shot out the tyres of his truck.
Brown received a six-year prison sentence. He spent 15 months in a South Carolina prison and 10 months in a work release program before being paroled in February 1991. In 2003, the South Carolina parole board granted him a pardon for his crimes in that state.
Soon after his release, Brown was on stage again with an audience that included millions of cable television viewers nationwide who watched the three hour, pay-per-view concert at Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.
Adrienne Brown died in 1996 in Los Angeles at age 47. She took PCP and several prescription drugs while she had a bad heart and was weak from cosmetic surgery two days earlier, the coroner said.
More recently, he married his fourth wife, Tomi Raye Hynie, one of his backup singers. The couple had a son, James Jr.
Two years later, Brown spent a week in a private Columbia hospital, recovering from what his agent said was dependency on painkillers.
Brown's lawyer, Albert "Buddy'' Dallas, said the singer was exhausted from six years of road shows.
AP
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Affluent lifestyles harming climate
Stephanie Peatling
December 7, 2006
SMH
AFFLUENT lifestyles are producing more waste, using more water and energy and relying more on cars with damaging effects on the environment.
The State of the Environment report, produced every five years and released yesterday, warned that most of the threats reported in 2001 were still present and, in some cases, had worsened.
The past decade had produced higher incomes and lower unemployment, the report found, but the higher consumption rates this brought had affected the environment.
"Realising a sustainable human environment requires a reduction in net consumption and waste," the report found.
"This will involve greater population densities than currently is the case, significant increases in building and material recycling, the capture and use of stormwater, the recycling of wastewater and biological waste, and improved urban form and urban structures.
"It also requires changes in behaviour by individuals."
The chairman of the report committee, University of Queensland Associate Professor Bob Beeton, said "business as usual is not an acceptable model". "We have got to plan to live in this country," he said.
A different approach was needed to get people thinking about their impact on the environment and changing their lifestyles, Professor Beeton said.
"The shock-horror approach is not working," he said.
"If you scare people with something they can't fix they switch off."
Some environmental programs were having unintended consequences and he warned against assuming that market-based approaches would solve natural problems.
The Federal Government will announce a taskforce soon to look at carbon emissions trading and its potential impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
It is also pursuing a national water trading market to help prevent water shortages.
The Minister for the Environment, Ian Campbell, said the Federal Government was "the best friend the environment had ever had".
Spending on environmental programs had increased in the past decade, he said, and the Government was near to its target of planting 1 billion trees.
But the Opposition's environment spokesman, Anthony Albanese, said despite the billions of dollars spent, most environmental indicators were going backwards.
"On John Howard's watch, Australia's greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and our vital waterways are deteriorating," he said.
Mr Albanese released a discussion paper raising the possibility of combining land, water and biodiversity programs to cut back on bureaucracy and increase the amount of money spent on environmental protection.
"Labor will establish national targets for environmental improvement, take immediate action to help avoid dangerous climate change and will put 1500 gigalitres per annum back into the Murray River within 10 years," Mr Albanese said.
The Greens senator Rachel Siewert said the report attempted to "greenwash the severe environmental crisis".
"The report acknowledges that increasing demand for water is placing significant pressure on Australia's inland water systems and notes that the impact of wetlands has been dramatic," she said.
The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don Henry, said: "Our greenhouse emissions continue to rise, the condition of vital waterways is deteriorating and the decline of important indicator species, including many frogs and fish, is reaching alarming levels."
UNDER THREAT
- Greenhouse gas emissions to increase 22 per cent by 2020.
- Rainfall in the eastern states has been below average for five years.
- 231 nationally significant wetlands under threat.
- Ocean temperatures have risen 0.28C since 1950.
December 7, 2006
SMH
AFFLUENT lifestyles are producing more waste, using more water and energy and relying more on cars with damaging effects on the environment.
The State of the Environment report, produced every five years and released yesterday, warned that most of the threats reported in 2001 were still present and, in some cases, had worsened.
The past decade had produced higher incomes and lower unemployment, the report found, but the higher consumption rates this brought had affected the environment.
"Realising a sustainable human environment requires a reduction in net consumption and waste," the report found.
"This will involve greater population densities than currently is the case, significant increases in building and material recycling, the capture and use of stormwater, the recycling of wastewater and biological waste, and improved urban form and urban structures.
"It also requires changes in behaviour by individuals."
The chairman of the report committee, University of Queensland Associate Professor Bob Beeton, said "business as usual is not an acceptable model". "We have got to plan to live in this country," he said.
A different approach was needed to get people thinking about their impact on the environment and changing their lifestyles, Professor Beeton said.
"The shock-horror approach is not working," he said.
"If you scare people with something they can't fix they switch off."
Some environmental programs were having unintended consequences and he warned against assuming that market-based approaches would solve natural problems.
The Federal Government will announce a taskforce soon to look at carbon emissions trading and its potential impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
It is also pursuing a national water trading market to help prevent water shortages.
The Minister for the Environment, Ian Campbell, said the Federal Government was "the best friend the environment had ever had".
Spending on environmental programs had increased in the past decade, he said, and the Government was near to its target of planting 1 billion trees.
But the Opposition's environment spokesman, Anthony Albanese, said despite the billions of dollars spent, most environmental indicators were going backwards.
"On John Howard's watch, Australia's greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and our vital waterways are deteriorating," he said.
Mr Albanese released a discussion paper raising the possibility of combining land, water and biodiversity programs to cut back on bureaucracy and increase the amount of money spent on environmental protection.
"Labor will establish national targets for environmental improvement, take immediate action to help avoid dangerous climate change and will put 1500 gigalitres per annum back into the Murray River within 10 years," Mr Albanese said.
The Greens senator Rachel Siewert said the report attempted to "greenwash the severe environmental crisis".
"The report acknowledges that increasing demand for water is placing significant pressure on Australia's inland water systems and notes that the impact of wetlands has been dramatic," she said.
The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don Henry, said: "Our greenhouse emissions continue to rise, the condition of vital waterways is deteriorating and the decline of important indicator species, including many frogs and fish, is reaching alarming levels."
UNDER THREAT
- Greenhouse gas emissions to increase 22 per cent by 2020.
- Rainfall in the eastern states has been below average for five years.
- 231 nationally significant wetlands under threat.
- Ocean temperatures have risen 0.28C since 1950.
Making Australians understand how easy it is to fight climate change is the biggest challenge facing the nation's leading green politicians.
Stephanie Peatling reports.
Ian Campbell likes to carry a couple of light bulbs with him wherever he goes. The affable federal Environment Minister is not afraid of the dark but is fond of telling people, especially school students, that if everyone in Australia replaced their ordinary light bulbs with energy-efficient ones, the world could do without one coal-fired power station.
"You can't look students in years five or six in the eye and say we can't solve climate change," he says. "You have to empower people and individuals and businesses and break things down into action you can take that will change the world."
While Campbell is in charge of a climate change policy that includes impressive-sounding technological solutions such as geosequestration and controversial options such as nuclear power, he is also responsible for explaining a tricky concept to everyone from primary school students to business leaders.
Since taking on the portfolio in 2004 he has tinkered with various explanations to help people understand climate change and encourage them not to see something as simple as changing a light bulb as pointless.
"I have tried to just simplify it by breaking it down to simple statistics," he says. "One of my favourites is: we have produced 1 trillion tonnes of carbon in the past 150 years; it will be another trillion in the next 50 if we keep going the way we are."
Although he admits the language of "trillions" might bamboozle some people he believes it at least conveys the magnitude of the problem.
Another favourite, trotted out by almost every Howard Government minister, is that closing all power stations overnight would be pointless because China would create the same amount of greenhouse gas emission in about 10 months.
For those not illuminated by the light bulbs, Campbell also travels with a set of coloured wedges, each representing the amount of emissions that could be saved or removed by using renewable energy, being more energy-efficient and turning to nuclear power.
Based on a Princeton University study, the idea is to illustrate that there is no one solution to climate change but that if all options are used, there is every chance the world can head off the dangerous consequences.
"You need real policies; hence all the wedges," Campbell says. "People on the left say you can do it with wind turbines, people on the right say you can do it with nuclear power, but both are wrong. You need everything. If you run through all of the things you need to do, people understand. If the problem is that big then people think it makes sense that there is a range of things that need to be done."
Until this week, Campbell's political competition came from Labor's Anthony Albanese, who tirelessly spruiked the Opposition's climate change policy. But he has been replaced by Peter Garrett, the former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, whose huge public profile will be used to boost the Opposition's environmental credentials, seen as one of the key differences between the two major parties.
The wisdom of the decision was apparent as Garrett crossed the country this week, being approached by an overwhelmingly positive population wanting to know more about Labor's green policies.
Just whom Garrett faces off against next year in the race towards a federal election remains to be seen. The Prime Minister, John Howard, is believed to be considering promoting Malcolm Turnbull, who has impressed with his work on water policy, to a more senior environmental role.The prospect of two of Federal Parliament's most charismatic and recognisable MPs facing each another is enough to make political junkies salivate.
For now, Garrett is taking a more homespun approach to explaining climate change than his Coalition counterpart. Like most other Australian men he likes to talk about his shed - "a little sustainable shed we had some years ago which ran on solar power, a bit of gas and some insulation, but which was designed as an enclosed farm shed".
The building was used by the Garrett family as a weekender for many years. It slept as many as six people and had an annual electricity bill of about $100. Not only does the shed conjure up an instantly recognisable form but it also appeals to people's hip pocket.
"If you're running solar electricity you become aware of energy in a much more acute way than when you're just using it from the grid," Garrett says. "Talking to a younger audience I tend to talk about the fact that the energy has to come from somewhere, to take them through the process of where it comes from. I'm also a notorious nagger in my own family for turning lights off."
Environmentalists and scientists have complained for years that the threat of rapid climate change has been all but ignored by mainstream politics and the media and, as a result, most of the public.
But the past four months have seen the issue dominate discussion, the result of a culmination of factors: a severe drought; Britain's Nicholas Stern report which tried to put a price on the cost of not doing anything about climate change; and An Inconvenient Truth, the film about global warming featuring the former US vice-president, Al Gore.
Until then, most of the coverage of the issue was either scientific threats about what might happen or political wrangling about whether the Federal Government should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' international climate change treaty.
And while the major parties argued about an agreement most people probably thought was about a town in Japan, energy use, car use and all the other things contributing to global warming continued to rise further, compounding the problem.
Environmentalists wondered why people who happily started using the now ubiquitous green bags to cut marine pollution were not at least scared into doing something about climate change. Others, whose job is also to explain climate change, believe that it presents an unprecedented challenge because the idea itself is so complicated.
Professor Brendan Mackey agrees with Campbell and Garrett's moves to deconstruct the idea of climate change, to give people a better understanding of how they can fight it.
Mackey, of the Australian National University's School of Resources, Environment and Society, says people have to understand an issue before they are prepared to do something about it, particularly if doing something involves changing their own behaviour and that of most people.
"They have the message that rapid climate change is happening and humans are causing it but I don't think people understand how that can be. They don't understand the mechanics of it.
They probably have heard about carbon or greenhouse and they have a fuzzy understanding of it.
"They associate it with drought and fossil fuels but how they are linked together is quite complicated. That means you have to take someone's word on it without understanding what's going on."
Mackey says the issue has been oversimplified to the extent that most people assume that any extreme weather event is the "smoking gun of climate change".
"But what we're talking about is long-term changes in weather patterns. When we talk about climate change we will still have weather. It's not like polluted water which might look and taste foul and make you sick if you drink it. We will still have weather but it might create problems. The concept is abstract. So you have to make it more real for people."
There would be people, Mackey says, who think global warming and the hole in the ozone layer are the same thing. This leaves people confused about what needs to be done and instead of being presented with a clear set of solutions, they hear competing slogans from the major political parties.
"Politicians are now talking about climate change presumably because the polls are telling them people are worried about climate change. But what if it rains next week? Will this mean we don't have to worry about climate change?"
Mackey says people need to be told exactly what action needs to be taken, including an honest assessment of whether the worst effects of climate change can be headed off and whether people are prepared to act. It is not as simple as taking the politics out of the equation and leaving people to grapple with a purely scientific approach.
Campbell says it is a good thing for public debate that discussion has moved on from the Kyoto Protocol: "The debate was so simple for so long it worked against people taking action. If people think you can solve it just by doing that it diminishes the quality of the debate. The great thing about this year is it forced a debate on the real solutions."
The Federal Government continues to argue against Kyoto and its binding targets on reducing emissions, saying it would damage Australia's economy because of its reliance on industries such as coal and aluminium.
Instead, it is spending hundreds of millions of dollars investigating what it refers to as technological solutions such as geosequestration (which basically buries emissions underground) and bilateral agreements with countries such as the United States, Japan and South Korea. Howard also recently announced that he had appointed a taskforce to investigate a carbon emissions trading scheme.
Labor, for its part, says it would ratify Kyoto if it won government, as well as significantly boost the amount of energy from renewable sources and institute carbon trading.
Not surprisingly, Campbell and Garrett say politics cannot be taken out of the discussion. After all, they have the responsibility to ensure the issue is stuck in people's minds when they step into the ballot box late next year.
"It seems to me the responsibility cuts in every direction: individuals, businesses and governments," Garrett says.
"Until there's an alignment between all of those then I don't think it's a deficiency for us to talk about bigger policy issues. It's still absolutely essential that the right laws, the right policy settings and the right long-term planning is in place and governments are critically important.
"We need more than ever for this public expression of concern to be translated into government action. It's turning off the light switch and thinking about how we vote."
Ian Campbell likes to carry a couple of light bulbs with him wherever he goes. The affable federal Environment Minister is not afraid of the dark but is fond of telling people, especially school students, that if everyone in Australia replaced their ordinary light bulbs with energy-efficient ones, the world could do without one coal-fired power station.
"You can't look students in years five or six in the eye and say we can't solve climate change," he says. "You have to empower people and individuals and businesses and break things down into action you can take that will change the world."
While Campbell is in charge of a climate change policy that includes impressive-sounding technological solutions such as geosequestration and controversial options such as nuclear power, he is also responsible for explaining a tricky concept to everyone from primary school students to business leaders.
Since taking on the portfolio in 2004 he has tinkered with various explanations to help people understand climate change and encourage them not to see something as simple as changing a light bulb as pointless.
"I have tried to just simplify it by breaking it down to simple statistics," he says. "One of my favourites is: we have produced 1 trillion tonnes of carbon in the past 150 years; it will be another trillion in the next 50 if we keep going the way we are."
Although he admits the language of "trillions" might bamboozle some people he believes it at least conveys the magnitude of the problem.
Another favourite, trotted out by almost every Howard Government minister, is that closing all power stations overnight would be pointless because China would create the same amount of greenhouse gas emission in about 10 months.
For those not illuminated by the light bulbs, Campbell also travels with a set of coloured wedges, each representing the amount of emissions that could be saved or removed by using renewable energy, being more energy-efficient and turning to nuclear power.
Based on a Princeton University study, the idea is to illustrate that there is no one solution to climate change but that if all options are used, there is every chance the world can head off the dangerous consequences.
"You need real policies; hence all the wedges," Campbell says. "People on the left say you can do it with wind turbines, people on the right say you can do it with nuclear power, but both are wrong. You need everything. If you run through all of the things you need to do, people understand. If the problem is that big then people think it makes sense that there is a range of things that need to be done."
Until this week, Campbell's political competition came from Labor's Anthony Albanese, who tirelessly spruiked the Opposition's climate change policy. But he has been replaced by Peter Garrett, the former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, whose huge public profile will be used to boost the Opposition's environmental credentials, seen as one of the key differences between the two major parties.
The wisdom of the decision was apparent as Garrett crossed the country this week, being approached by an overwhelmingly positive population wanting to know more about Labor's green policies.
Just whom Garrett faces off against next year in the race towards a federal election remains to be seen. The Prime Minister, John Howard, is believed to be considering promoting Malcolm Turnbull, who has impressed with his work on water policy, to a more senior environmental role.The prospect of two of Federal Parliament's most charismatic and recognisable MPs facing each another is enough to make political junkies salivate.
For now, Garrett is taking a more homespun approach to explaining climate change than his Coalition counterpart. Like most other Australian men he likes to talk about his shed - "a little sustainable shed we had some years ago which ran on solar power, a bit of gas and some insulation, but which was designed as an enclosed farm shed".
The building was used by the Garrett family as a weekender for many years. It slept as many as six people and had an annual electricity bill of about $100. Not only does the shed conjure up an instantly recognisable form but it also appeals to people's hip pocket.
"If you're running solar electricity you become aware of energy in a much more acute way than when you're just using it from the grid," Garrett says. "Talking to a younger audience I tend to talk about the fact that the energy has to come from somewhere, to take them through the process of where it comes from. I'm also a notorious nagger in my own family for turning lights off."
Environmentalists and scientists have complained for years that the threat of rapid climate change has been all but ignored by mainstream politics and the media and, as a result, most of the public.
But the past four months have seen the issue dominate discussion, the result of a culmination of factors: a severe drought; Britain's Nicholas Stern report which tried to put a price on the cost of not doing anything about climate change; and An Inconvenient Truth, the film about global warming featuring the former US vice-president, Al Gore.
Until then, most of the coverage of the issue was either scientific threats about what might happen or political wrangling about whether the Federal Government should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' international climate change treaty.
And while the major parties argued about an agreement most people probably thought was about a town in Japan, energy use, car use and all the other things contributing to global warming continued to rise further, compounding the problem.
Environmentalists wondered why people who happily started using the now ubiquitous green bags to cut marine pollution were not at least scared into doing something about climate change. Others, whose job is also to explain climate change, believe that it presents an unprecedented challenge because the idea itself is so complicated.
Professor Brendan Mackey agrees with Campbell and Garrett's moves to deconstruct the idea of climate change, to give people a better understanding of how they can fight it.
Mackey, of the Australian National University's School of Resources, Environment and Society, says people have to understand an issue before they are prepared to do something about it, particularly if doing something involves changing their own behaviour and that of most people.
"They have the message that rapid climate change is happening and humans are causing it but I don't think people understand how that can be. They don't understand the mechanics of it.
They probably have heard about carbon or greenhouse and they have a fuzzy understanding of it.
"They associate it with drought and fossil fuels but how they are linked together is quite complicated. That means you have to take someone's word on it without understanding what's going on."
Mackey says the issue has been oversimplified to the extent that most people assume that any extreme weather event is the "smoking gun of climate change".
"But what we're talking about is long-term changes in weather patterns. When we talk about climate change we will still have weather. It's not like polluted water which might look and taste foul and make you sick if you drink it. We will still have weather but it might create problems. The concept is abstract. So you have to make it more real for people."
There would be people, Mackey says, who think global warming and the hole in the ozone layer are the same thing. This leaves people confused about what needs to be done and instead of being presented with a clear set of solutions, they hear competing slogans from the major political parties.
"Politicians are now talking about climate change presumably because the polls are telling them people are worried about climate change. But what if it rains next week? Will this mean we don't have to worry about climate change?"
Mackey says people need to be told exactly what action needs to be taken, including an honest assessment of whether the worst effects of climate change can be headed off and whether people are prepared to act. It is not as simple as taking the politics out of the equation and leaving people to grapple with a purely scientific approach.
Campbell says it is a good thing for public debate that discussion has moved on from the Kyoto Protocol: "The debate was so simple for so long it worked against people taking action. If people think you can solve it just by doing that it diminishes the quality of the debate. The great thing about this year is it forced a debate on the real solutions."
The Federal Government continues to argue against Kyoto and its binding targets on reducing emissions, saying it would damage Australia's economy because of its reliance on industries such as coal and aluminium.
Instead, it is spending hundreds of millions of dollars investigating what it refers to as technological solutions such as geosequestration (which basically buries emissions underground) and bilateral agreements with countries such as the United States, Japan and South Korea. Howard also recently announced that he had appointed a taskforce to investigate a carbon emissions trading scheme.
Labor, for its part, says it would ratify Kyoto if it won government, as well as significantly boost the amount of energy from renewable sources and institute carbon trading.
Not surprisingly, Campbell and Garrett say politics cannot be taken out of the discussion. After all, they have the responsibility to ensure the issue is stuck in people's minds when they step into the ballot box late next year.
"It seems to me the responsibility cuts in every direction: individuals, businesses and governments," Garrett says.
"Until there's an alignment between all of those then I don't think it's a deficiency for us to talk about bigger policy issues. It's still absolutely essential that the right laws, the right policy settings and the right long-term planning is in place and governments are critically important.
"We need more than ever for this public expression of concern to be translated into government action. It's turning off the light switch and thinking about how we vote."
Game of chess anyone ???
MOSCOW, December 14
(RIA Novosti)
An alleged Moscow serial killer, arrested in June, has been charged with 49 murders, but claims that he killed 62 people in all, a senior law police official said Thursday.
Alexander Kshevitsky, a deputy head of the Interior Ministry's operations and investigations bureau, said that in some of the murder cases Alexander Pichuzhkin claims to have committed, the victims are still considered missing.
Pichuzhkin, 32 at the time of his arrest, was earlier charged with killing at least 10 people, most of them in Bitsa park, a stretch of dense woodland in the south of Moscow, where he was apprehended by police this summer.
The investigation determined that Pichuzhkin began killing in 2000. Most of the victims found in the park were killed with a blow to the head after Pichuzhkin approached them from behind.
If it turns out to be true that Pichuzkin, who has already been dubbed the "Bitsa Maniac," killed as many people as he claims, he will become the bloodiest serial killer in Russian history, well ahead of Andrei Chikatilo.
Between 1978 and 1990, Chikatilo, or the "Rostov Ripper," killed 53 people, many of them young women and boys, in and around the city of Rostov, near the Black Sea. He was eventually caught, found guilty of multiple murders, sentenced to death and executed in 1994.
In 1996, Russia imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, and if Pichuzhkin is found guilty of the murders he claims, the most severe punishment he faces will be a life sentence.
For more info on Chikatilo check out:
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/chikatilo/coat_1.html
'Chess murders' Russian charged
14 December
BBC
Russian who reportedly said he wanted to kill 64 people to correspond with the squares on a chess board has been charged in Moscow with 49 murders.
Alexander Pichushkin is suspected of being the "Bitsyevskiy maniac", named after the park where 14 of the victims' bodies were found.
He has allegedly confessed to killing 62 people over six years and reportedly said he had missed his goal.
Prosecutors say they only have evidence to pursue 49 cases.
Mr Pichushkin, who worked at a small grocery store in south-west Moscow, was arrested in June on suspicion of killing a female colleague, whose body was found in Bitsyevskiy park the day before.
The woman, Marina Moskaleva, had reportedly left Mr Pichushkin's number with her son before she was killed.
The killings began in 2000 and led to bodies being found in many parks and other places across the Russian capital.
Many, but by no means all, of the victims were elderly men, and there was little else to link the murders, except that they were caused by a blow to the head.
The head of the Russian interior ministry's criminal investigation department, Alexander Kshevitsky, told the MosNews website that Mr Pichushkin was yet to undergo psychiatric tests to see whether he was fit to stand trial.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Anger and Courage
Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage.Anger at the way things are and courage to change them.
St. Augustine
St. Augustine
Monday, December 11, 2006
Climate change 'to impact big miners'
December 11, 2006
Mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are among six Australian companies most at risk from the impact of climate change, a report says.
Among the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) top-100 listed companies, those involved in emissions-intensive industries are most at risk, says Citigroup research.
In a surprise result, property trusts are among those most likely to benefit from climate change as they could earn emissions credits from a likely trading scheme by reducing energy use when constructing environmentally friendly buildings.
The companies most at risk are Rio Tinto, BHP and BlueScope Steel, Caltex, Iluka and OneSteel, according to the research titled Climate change and the ASX100 - An assessment of risks and opportunities.
Climate change effects companies' profitability due to the cost of potentially pricing carbon,and through weather and climate impacts, the report says.
"Those at risk include emissions-intensive companies, facilities particularly exposed to severe weather damage, agriculture and water-intensive industries exposed to drought, and in the long term insurers that may misprice catastrophe risk," the report said.
BlueScope Steel is the most emissions-intensive company by double that of the next companies, Iluka, OneSteel and AGL and Alumina, when levels of carbon dioxide production for each $10,000 market of capitalisation were compared, the report said.
Citigroup Investment Research managing director Bruce Rolph said some of Australia's biggest companies were beginning to recognise the importance of climate change.
"Some of the big resource companies are taking it seriously - both the issues to do with emissions but also the understanding what physical risks there may be to their portfolio of assets," Mr Rolph said.
He said Rio, BHP and Alumina were among companies most aware of climate change issues and all had strategies in place to reduce emissions.
The report noted that the big miners could be exposed to falling coal sales, as governments seek alternative energy sources to meet climate change commitments.
Prime Minister John Howard announced a task force on the weekend to inquire into Australia's possible involvement in an emissions trading scheme.
The task force of bureaucrats and resource industry figures, will also investigate how Australia might be involved in an emissions trading system that involved other major nations.
Mr Rolph said the research found that the "winners" in renewable energy and gas, as they had low or zero emissions.
"Winners were also in the property industry where a number of property trusts are building sustainable buildings and in some cases earning emissions credits (in the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme) through reducing energy use," he said.
Top of the list of "winners" were property investment company Investa Property Group, energy retailer Origin Energy Limited, and metals recycler Sims Group Ltd.
The airline, media and retail sectors were among the 40 per cent of ASX100 companies that failed to provide relevant climate change information and were therefore not included in the research.
AAP
Mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are among six Australian companies most at risk from the impact of climate change, a report says.
Among the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) top-100 listed companies, those involved in emissions-intensive industries are most at risk, says Citigroup research.
In a surprise result, property trusts are among those most likely to benefit from climate change as they could earn emissions credits from a likely trading scheme by reducing energy use when constructing environmentally friendly buildings.
The companies most at risk are Rio Tinto, BHP and BlueScope Steel, Caltex, Iluka and OneSteel, according to the research titled Climate change and the ASX100 - An assessment of risks and opportunities.
Climate change effects companies' profitability due to the cost of potentially pricing carbon,and through weather and climate impacts, the report says.
"Those at risk include emissions-intensive companies, facilities particularly exposed to severe weather damage, agriculture and water-intensive industries exposed to drought, and in the long term insurers that may misprice catastrophe risk," the report said.
BlueScope Steel is the most emissions-intensive company by double that of the next companies, Iluka, OneSteel and AGL and Alumina, when levels of carbon dioxide production for each $10,000 market of capitalisation were compared, the report said.
Citigroup Investment Research managing director Bruce Rolph said some of Australia's biggest companies were beginning to recognise the importance of climate change.
"Some of the big resource companies are taking it seriously - both the issues to do with emissions but also the understanding what physical risks there may be to their portfolio of assets," Mr Rolph said.
He said Rio, BHP and Alumina were among companies most aware of climate change issues and all had strategies in place to reduce emissions.
The report noted that the big miners could be exposed to falling coal sales, as governments seek alternative energy sources to meet climate change commitments.
Prime Minister John Howard announced a task force on the weekend to inquire into Australia's possible involvement in an emissions trading scheme.
The task force of bureaucrats and resource industry figures, will also investigate how Australia might be involved in an emissions trading system that involved other major nations.
Mr Rolph said the research found that the "winners" in renewable energy and gas, as they had low or zero emissions.
"Winners were also in the property industry where a number of property trusts are building sustainable buildings and in some cases earning emissions credits (in the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme) through reducing energy use," he said.
Top of the list of "winners" were property investment company Investa Property Group, energy retailer Origin Energy Limited, and metals recycler Sims Group Ltd.
The airline, media and retail sectors were among the 40 per cent of ASX100 companies that failed to provide relevant climate change information and were therefore not included in the research.
AAP
Sunday, December 10, 2006
The Report Of The Chief Health Officer released today by NSW Health
In 2005 more than half of all men (57.5 per cent) and almost half of all women (42.3 per cent) over 16 years old were overweight or obese, up from 56 per cent and 41 per cent in 2003.
Almost 25 per cent of school kids were overweight or obese and rates had skyrocketed in the past 20 years. The report blames sedentary lifestyles and high consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor food such as soft drinks for much of the ill health in NSW.
Half of all adults and a quarter of school students don't get enough exercise each day.
Only 4.7 per cent of men, 10.1 per cent of women and 20 per cent of children reported eating the recommended five vegetables a day. Yet 60 per cent of boys and 40 per cent of girls drank more than 250 millilitres of soft drink a day.
As a result, the number of people with diabetes or high blood sugar has almost doubled in the past decade to 8 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women.
Other key findings included a halving of the death rate between 1972 to 1994 and a 12-year increase in life expectancy for men and 10 years for women over the past decade. Although women could still expect to live longer than men (83.7 years compared to 78.8 years), the gap is closing.
Almost 25 per cent of school kids were overweight or obese and rates had skyrocketed in the past 20 years. The report blames sedentary lifestyles and high consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor food such as soft drinks for much of the ill health in NSW.
Half of all adults and a quarter of school students don't get enough exercise each day.
Only 4.7 per cent of men, 10.1 per cent of women and 20 per cent of children reported eating the recommended five vegetables a day. Yet 60 per cent of boys and 40 per cent of girls drank more than 250 millilitres of soft drink a day.
As a result, the number of people with diabetes or high blood sugar has almost doubled in the past decade to 8 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women.
Other key findings included a halving of the death rate between 1972 to 1994 and a 12-year increase in life expectancy for men and 10 years for women over the past decade. Although women could still expect to live longer than men (83.7 years compared to 78.8 years), the gap is closing.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Few own most of the world's assets: Study
Richest 2% of adults hold more than half of global household wealth, data reveals
Dec. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM
Olivia Ward
STAFF REPORTER
There's fierce debate about whether the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. But a pioneering study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research leaves no doubt the tiny fraction of the planet's population who are living in affluence own more than half of its wealth.
"The richest 2 per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth," says a study released yesterday by the Helsinki-based institute, a division of the United Nations University. "And the richest 1 per cent alone owned 40 per cent of global assets in the year 2000."
Some 37 million people worldwide have reached the top rung of the ladder, owning $500,000 (U.S.) in assets, after debts have been deducted.
"What's special about this project is that it puts personal assets into a global perspective," says University of Western Ontario economist James Davies, one of the authors. "It looks at the role of household assets and debts in relation to growth, and for the first time shows what the global distribution of assets looks like."
The study outlines the economic comfort — and discomfort — zone of people and countries by defining wealth as net worth: "the value of physical and financial assets less debts." And it says, "in this respect, wealth represents the ownership of capital."
Although the world's income gap has been amply confirmed, the gap in wealth is even more dramatic.
"Half the world has net worth per adult below $2,200," Davies says.
Not surprisingly, Canada is one of the handful of countries in which wealth is concentrated, though it is less affluent than the United States, the world's richest nation.
"Canada has 2 per cent of the wealthiest 10 per cent of people in the world," Davies points out. "As we only have 0.5 per cent of the world's population, we're right up there, and in fact, over-represented."
Canada has average per capita wealth of $89,252 and the U.S. $180,837, in terms of purchasing power. Japan, with $143,727, ranks just below the U.S.
While capital may be only a part of personal resources, "it is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more broadly, on economic development and growth," the study says.
The world's total household wealth amounted to $125 trillion in the year 2000, a sum which, averaged out, should give every adult $20,500. But in some countries, average per capita wealth was below $2,000, while the richest ranked many times higher.
Does the sharp division of the world's wealth mean that globalization has failed?
"Some people are certainly gaining from it, and others are suffering," says Davies. "We should not see globalization as necessarily reducing global inequality."
Dec. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM
Olivia Ward
STAFF REPORTER
There's fierce debate about whether the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. But a pioneering study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research leaves no doubt the tiny fraction of the planet's population who are living in affluence own more than half of its wealth.
"The richest 2 per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth," says a study released yesterday by the Helsinki-based institute, a division of the United Nations University. "And the richest 1 per cent alone owned 40 per cent of global assets in the year 2000."
Some 37 million people worldwide have reached the top rung of the ladder, owning $500,000 (U.S.) in assets, after debts have been deducted.
"What's special about this project is that it puts personal assets into a global perspective," says University of Western Ontario economist James Davies, one of the authors. "It looks at the role of household assets and debts in relation to growth, and for the first time shows what the global distribution of assets looks like."
The study outlines the economic comfort — and discomfort — zone of people and countries by defining wealth as net worth: "the value of physical and financial assets less debts." And it says, "in this respect, wealth represents the ownership of capital."
Although the world's income gap has been amply confirmed, the gap in wealth is even more dramatic.
"Half the world has net worth per adult below $2,200," Davies says.
Not surprisingly, Canada is one of the handful of countries in which wealth is concentrated, though it is less affluent than the United States, the world's richest nation.
"Canada has 2 per cent of the wealthiest 10 per cent of people in the world," Davies points out. "As we only have 0.5 per cent of the world's population, we're right up there, and in fact, over-represented."
Canada has average per capita wealth of $89,252 and the U.S. $180,837, in terms of purchasing power. Japan, with $143,727, ranks just below the U.S.
While capital may be only a part of personal resources, "it is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more broadly, on economic development and growth," the study says.
The world's total household wealth amounted to $125 trillion in the year 2000, a sum which, averaged out, should give every adult $20,500. But in some countries, average per capita wealth was below $2,000, while the richest ranked many times higher.
Does the sharp division of the world's wealth mean that globalization has failed?
"Some people are certainly gaining from it, and others are suffering," says Davies. "We should not see globalization as necessarily reducing global inequality."
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