There’s something about the weather

Have you noticed anything about the weather lately? Do the topics of global warming or climate change ever pop up in conversation near you? Do you believe things are changing? Do you believe you can do anything about it? Do you care?

Inclement weather

So here we are in 2014. If you watch the news there have been extremes happening every year and 2013 was no exception. Want some details? Check out this collection of stories from The Guardian.

There have been lots of international meetings such as the recent one in Warsaw, but what is happening?

Does it matter? Maybe you figure it won’t be a problem in your lifetime, but do you have children? Grandchildren? What will become of them if the sea level rises?

My home is in a once in a 100 years flood zone, low risk hopefully, but still a risk. Many of our roads have sea water spraying over them during king tides now, what will happen if sea levels rise?

A lot of people scoff at global warming, especially when we are experiencing extremes at both ends of the scale, hot and cold. There is no denying that storms are becoming more aggressive and it seems like every day there is a flood or storm somewhere. Let’s just look at right now, today:

• UK Committee Cobra set up to discuss floods
• A foot of snow expected in the US North East
• Toronto issues extreme cold alert
• Cyclone Bejisa
• Cyclone Christine

Recent research suggests global temperatures could increase by 4 degrees by 2100. I won’t be around, but my grand children will be. If that happens and the sea levels rise, New Zealand will be interesting. We have already agreed that the people of Tuvalu can live here, but they are just one of the islands at risk.

But lets think about coastal mega-cities. We watch TV films depicting what life will be like, but we see them as Hollywood thrillers, not reality, yet we see news stories every day about erosion claiming coastal properties. What happens to cities that are on reclaimed land, or low lying cities. I’m not talking about my fatherland of the Netherlands, but how about Auckland, Sydney, Los Angeles, Manila or Mumbai?

Changes are happening, but some countries are still burning coal like there is no tomorrow (pun intended). We didn’t introduce emission testing in New Zealand, I was told because it was too expensive. We have a small population so can’t afford to do much, we are raising the height of some motorways which is good.

When I was in New Orleans last year, they were flat out raising the levees on the Mississippi, ironically at a time when the levels were so low that some of the river boats couldn’t make their usual trips. It’s mostly cleaned up now, but there is still plenty of evidence of the devastation caused by Sandy.

Of course it’s not just about super storms, or flood plans it’s about climate change. Weather patterns means changes to agriculture, movement of work forces, major disruptions to supply chains, problems with fresh water availability, I’m enjoying the longer summers, but I have cracks in fences and in the ground from last year that didn’t move back over winter.

This was just a bit of a ramble really, but climate change is something we need to think about now and we need to think about it starting in our own back yards. How are you going to be prepared, what will it mean for you? Are you ready for the next big storm? Are you ready for a tsunami? Do you know your evacuation route? Do you have an emergency plan? Do you think it will always happen to someone else or that it isn’t your responsibility?

Here’s a last thought from close to my home. In Australia this week, they are predicting potential temperatures of up to 50 degrees C. Last year Australia had the hottest weath, jobs, er in over 100 years. The thing is we are hearing these sorts of stories every year now. That means fires, that means lost lives, it means lost homes, jobs, businesses.

This is what happened in Australia at 30 degrees, imagine what 50 degrees could mean?

 

 

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Low Carbon Future

I’ve just finished reading an excellent story by Chris Barton in the NZ Herald, which is a good primer for the Copenhagen conference that John Key is going to? The cricket on TV is on in the background and apparently Key is in Wellington watching New Zealand vs Pakistan, so he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get to the airport.

He quotes Phil Scadden, a geo-scientist from Dunedin, as saying that by 2025 we could cover all our energy needs using wind, hydro, geothermal and other relatively green sources if we were prepared to spend a great deal of money.

I find it hard to believe that NZ will spend the money, especially if we are insistent on Kyoto and other deals which would require us to pay other countries who have less carbon emissions than us. For my money I think that we should invest the same amount of money on cleaning up our own act.

I ask myself if we can afford to be prissy about seeing lots of wind turbines on hilltops. Personally I think they look really good. I was in the Netherlands earlier this year and the site of hundreds of wind turbines was quite inspiring. I don’t have a problem with having them far enough away so they don’t cause noise polution. We have plenty of great spots in the country that are almost always windy, such as Ohakea, which I believe from memory means place where four winds meet. It certainly never disappointed when I used to go down to the Ohakea Air Base to race land yachts, a very green speed sport:)

Something that annoys me when we talk about clean and green in this country is the lack of emission controls for diesel vehicles. If I was given a dollar for each diesel soot sprewing truck, with black soot backs delivering frozen meat, I would be able to retire today.

I’d also like to know why NZ is following other countries, with Feed-in Tarriffs, which I have previously blogged about. The concept was raised a long time ago by the Green Party, where there would be subsidies and incentives for people to put solar panels on their rooves and allowed them to sell surplus power into the grid.

Anyway, this whole situation disturbs me. Instead of fixing our problem at home, we want to pay other countries who are more fortunate than us, in having more trees etc. NZ has the ability to be self sustainable if we put our brilliant scientists and inventers on the job. We could be isolated from a lot of the problems of climate change in other parts of the world. Once we have it licked, then we can give them access to our know how. That might make a great new export for us.

For now, I’ve been for a 9 1/2 km bush walk/jog, finished my blog and am going to go and by an electric lawn mower. It is plastic, doesn’t need oil or petrol, won’t rust and will therefore last much longer.

Dead zones in the ocean

I was talking with someone recently about the Waikato River water that provides some 10% of the drinking water in Auckland. This was approved despite much protest, on the basis that Metrowater would only use it in emergencies. I suspect that Mayor George Wood at the time knew that it would end up being turned on all the time, as part of his deal with his crony mayors.

The water was declared safe by WHO standards, however councillor Joel Cayford, who is now employed by ARC said that it was unsafe. I attended the public meeting where he explained that WHO standards listed a number of quality requirements, but excluded many ingredients such as dioxins, heavy metals, fertiliser and more. In my opinion the meeting wasn’t helped by constant interjections from rent a protester, which didn’t help the cause.

Not long after approval was given by the regional mayors, including the Mayor Bob Harvey of Waitakere who approved it on the condition that Waitakere water would only come from local dams in the rainforest, thus not having to take this water.

What has this got to do with dead zones in the ocean? Well here’s the thing. A lot of the objections against using Waikato river water were because it contains huge amounts of leached chemicals from farms including fertiliser, antibiotics and much more. It appears that these same types of chemicals are flowing from rivers around the world into the sea and several studies are suggesting that the rise in industrial food production is increasing the number of dead zones rapidly.

Oceanic dead zones are areas where the oxygen levels in the water are so low that they kill of almost all forms of marine life. There are now more than 400 oceanic dead zones around the world and they are growing fast.

According to experts, including NASA a major contributor to these dead zones is fertiliser that flows to the ocean from farms both in the form of chemicals leaching from farms and from the animal manure which still contains these chemicals. The nitrogen and phosphorous feeds the algae and phytoplankton, making these plants grow rapidly.

In New Zealand, we have become aware of algal bloom. This is occurring more commonly now both in coastal waters, such as our local Waiheke Island, and also in freshwater lakes, including many in the Waikato, where 10% of our drinking water is coming from.

So what does this mean? We know that fresh water is going to be on of the important issues in the future, both from climate change and from man-made intervention. We know that our oceans are becoming polluted, much of it from man-made waste. We know that the fish stocks are becoming depleted in many parts of the world, due to over fishing, to feed growing nations. But fish are also now seriously at risk from the oceanic dead zones, where oxygen levels are so low that fish and other marine life can’t survive.

We seem to be in danger of creating the ‘unrealistic and unbelievable’ wasted planet that is often depicted on science fiction movies.Am I exaggerating? Well check these examples out:

A dead zone the size of New Jersey of the coast of Oregon and Washington, may be irreversible.

The Mississippi Delta dead zone is one of the smaller ones in the world, only 3,000 square miles. The US Government is investing $320 million to try to slow it down, but as long as the chemicals keep flowing down and farm production is increased, we have a problem.

The Baltic sea apparently contains 7 of the 10 worst oceanic dead zones and it appears that the surrounding countries haven’t been doing much about them. The end result could be the loss of almost all marine life in the area. This map shows how bad it is in places, where the red areas represent areas where the water essentially contains no oxygen.

It appears that the man-made damage to the oceans and lakes in the world could present an even greater problem than global warming and of course one that is compounded by it. If so much water ends up unable to sustain life, how will we survive, especially the poorer areas on the planet, where water is already scarce. The sea’s health is not something we can take for granted, no matter how vast it appears. The attractive colours of algae bloom that we sea coming back each summer in bigger areas, is evidence that we need to change some of our ways, and quickly.

I’ll leave the last word to Joanne from Rocketboom who explains it far more succinctly than I:

Feed-in Tarriffs and The Greens Party

So election year is hear and in less than 2 months the political fate of New Zealand will be decided for the next 3 years. With Greenhouse / Global warming , Kyoto and the global call for positive action on sustainability, I would have thought that The Green Party would have had the perfect opportunity to become a dominant force.

In several parts of the USA there are government subsidies and interest free loans on the purchase and installations of solar panels for domestic use. New Zealand has major problems with power. This year the lakes which are used to generate hydro electricity in the South Island were close to empty and given that this has been a recurring situation, it is only a matter of time before we start having enforced power cuts.

The government has been quick to sign the Kyoto Protocol which apparently gives us a sustainability debt which we will have to pay to other countries. In my humble opinion this is stupid, not the least because countries including our Australian cobbers and the USA have not signed. But more so because we would be far better using those funds, taxpayers dollars, to do better things at home, such as interest free subsidies for urban water tanks for drinking water and solar panels on our homes to generate water to heat it. Surely that would make better sense?

When I started to research this, I found that South Australia is enforcing a concept that they got from the NZ Green Party which is a Feed-in-Tarriff. I’m amazed that I had never heard of it! I’m not sure if that reflects more poorly on me for not knowing or on the Greens for not being more vocal about it. Anyway, rather than providing subsidies and interest free finance, which I feel we should still enforce, this concept requires the power companies to purchase excess power from consumers who have solar power in their homes, at a price higher than they pay to the commercial grid.

If we are in for some serious problems as a consequence of global warming, rising sea lavels, increased pollution in lakes and rivers, exacerbated by increasing water temperature, how is it that the Greens do not feature high on the political radar. I suspect that a lot of it is driven by their perception as tree huggers, driving sooty diesel vans who used ot be extremely vocal, but just didn’t seem like us, the average Joe Public. They don’t fit the mould of the ordinary politician, perhaps because they represent only one (important) facet of life on planet Earth today. They haven’t convinced us that we need them, which is a shame, because they may have some great ideas that we dn’t know about. Maybe they need to make some changes to the way they present themselves.

So here’s the problem. I can’t afford to spend between $30,000 for water heating and $100,000 for generate power to my home equivalent to what I get off the grid today. But if I could borrow the money interest free and pay for it from savings as well as selling excess back into the grid I’d be keen.

In Vitro Grown Meat – Feeding the Future

The other day I was thinking about the proposed manned Mars trip and trying to get my head around how to feed a number of astronauts for a 1,000 day trip in a small space craft. The thought was started while reading an article about Cosmic Rays, which are a potential threat to astronauts, but that is entirely another discussion.

Our planet today has a number of problems in being able to feed a growing population, which combined with major droughts in some parts of the world and heavy rains in others, exacerbated or caused by global warming, we are already in a situation of food crisis. If you are reading this blog, you probably don’t personally have a problem, but the problem is nevertheless there.

The first problem, which is the most difficult, is poverty. According to the World Hunger Education Service, almost 1 billion people have incomes of no more than US$1 per day. That doesn’t buy a whole lot of food.

Given the climate conditions, growth of population, finding the ground to plant sufficient crops that are not labour and water intensive is difficult and another issue is lack of certain key needs such as proteins.

One option for this going forward could be to grow food in vats. All kinds of food could be grown in vats and they have been doing this in Science Fiction books for close to 100 years. Now vegetable matter, fungus and yeast are relatvely easy, meat is a different story.

As I continued on my thread, I was thinking about chicken being one of the most popular if not the most popular meat being eaten today. The way they bread chickens in poultry farms for meat or eggs is commonly regarded as cruelty although the farmers will argue that they have little choice.

Tissue engineering is a science that has been around for quite a while. In fact if you have a child today, you already have the option of harvesting the stem cells from your baby’s umbilical cord. Cordbank in New Zealand offers cryogenic storage of your baby’s umbilicus, so that if your child ever got cancer and needed fresh stem cells, they are there and ready. The Stem Cells have your child’s exact DNA, so there are no risks of rejection if they are needed and at this stage they have no age damage. Stem cells have the inherent ability to become pretty much any human organ.

Tissue engineering has the potential to not only save lives, but also to prolong it. In future it could be used to help people recover from brain injuries and perhaps condiions such as Parkinsons Disease. It can help with regenerating heart tissue and much much more.

It can also be used to generate food. Distasteful as it may sound, I’m sure in the future if you were offered fish chunks that were made in a lab in a double blind test with real fish of the same sort, you would struggle to tell whch one was real. This isn’t Sci-Fi, it has already been achieved. One of the motives for this research was the type of space travel I mentioned at the beginning of this blog.

If you could eat nice white chicken meat that was tender and had the same texture you expected, but no chickens were mistreated or battery grown in cramped conditions, i.e. no sentience and no pain. Why wouldn’t you? If you could provide healthy food to millions of people in environments where they otherwise couldn’t get it and would suffer from malnutrition and eventually die a horrible death, why not?

I’m not sure what, if any research in tissue engineering is happening in NZ, but we have the credentials to do it and government support for biotechnology. In the medical world there is plenty happening such as the orthopaedic research at Otago University. If I’m lucky, I could live longer because of this research. I would love to see 120 or 130 years on this planet, and not vegetating in a rest home, wouldn’t you?

Will New Orleans be the first major city to be abandoned because of Global Warming?

Climate change is occuring at a faster pace than anyone anticipated and the evacuation of New Orleans for the 2nd time as a consequence of Cyclone Gustav could portend the first city that is changed or even abandoned as a consequence of global warming.

We have known for some time that some of the Pacific Atolls could end up under water (what about parts of Hawai), but I don’t think anyone predicted that they would be telling 2 million people to leave their homes again. Many of these won’t go back to try to establish their lives yet again and if they hadn’t lost many of their valuable posessions, especially the heirlooms, family photos and other things that can’t be replaced by insurance, you could understand why they would not want to go back, even if they have their roots there.

What happens when you have a city that noone wants to live in? When the insurance companies no longer want to cover property in the area, homes or contents.

We have known for a few years that some of the Pacific Islands and atolls could disappear as the sea level rises, but we didn’t anticipate something this bad so soon especially on the US Mainland.

Climate change is happening fast and in my humble opinion, now is a good time to start thinking about where you live and whether your home is at risk. I don’t think the real estate values in New Orleans will hold in future. I suspect that if you find a house you want and are prepared to put a roof on it, or clean the mud, silt and top soil off the carpet, that you can have it.

So now have a think about your own home. Is it safe from weather extremes? If the sea rises a couple of metres, will you still be above the water level? Will you be able to get supplies, fresh water and food? What about electricity or gas? All the things you take for granted.

In New Zealand there have been lots of stories about what to do in an emergancy, the yellow pages have guides as to what to stock up on, but if we took a poll today and asked how many households in the cities could last a week or more without the utilities, it would be very few.

What about all those people who have bought nice waterfront properties. Even by normal extremes some of them have had water on their doorstep. I know because in a couple of storms I wave skied into their backyards. So what will happen to the property values of waterfront homes? Would you buy one right now?

The USA has many areas that are prone to severe weather conditions. In fact if they are everywhere. The likelihood is that if they are bad now, they will become significantly worse over the next few years. Something to think about if you are moving to another town or state. Other parts of the world are feeling it too. In New Zealand we are having floods on top of floods and now roads are getting buried under slips and landslides are forcing people to evacuate their houses. Africa and Australia are experienceing drought while India and parts of Europe get flooded. The European government is trying to shore up plans to help water regugees.

Through all of this, unless you are in an emergency zone, or supporting refugees, chances are that you have been thinking, I’m glad I don’t live there, or this will never happen to me. Think again, very soon.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

So how about the weather in Auckand

So we survived another storm on the weekend. I was playing poker in the NPPL Regional finals on Saturday when the storm was up to its mischief. The guy sitting next to me got a phone call while he was playing to say that the chimney had been blown off his roof and had fallen through the roof of his garage. He thought he should leave and sort it out, so he went all in AND WON! Then he went all in again, determined to get out of there. I think after that he decided the roof could wait, lol.

Then when I got home I found that a third of my bottlebrush tree was lying accross the footpath, but it would have to wait till light the next day. While I was sitting down watching the abysmal performance of the All Blacks against the Wallabies, friends got home to find the fire department tying down the roof of their house. We got off lucky.

This is not typical Auckland weather, or at least it didn’t used to be, but I recall watching the news a few months ago and they were saying, get used to it. This is a symptom of global warming and although Auckland is not perceptably warmer, especially this year, we have started getting frequent subtropical downpours. We have always had four seasons in a day, but not the sort of rain that drops a swimming pool on your roof, followed by the sun, followed by another rain bomb.

So now that we are back to normal, they say the next storm is going to start at 3PM today.

I wonder what the situation is with our water levels. They have been saying that we were short of water fr the hydro electric power lakes. I hope they are closer to normal now. Also wondering about drinking water, we are still getting Waikato River water because it is cheaper to keep giving it to us, than it is to stop. I know it is only a percentage (what percentage?) but the rain will also be draining huge amounts of fertiliser and other contaminants into the river and eventually into our taps. I know they filter a certain amount of contaminants out, but it will be far from pure.