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Charlton Crown

Flooding experts say Britain will have to adapt to climate change - and fast - 1 views

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    "You are looking at retreat," says Prof Colin Thorne, a flooding expert at the University of Nottingham. "It is the only sensible policy - it makes no sense to defend the indefensible." This assessment of how the UK will have to adapt to its increasing flood risk is stark, but is shared by virtually all those who work on the issue.Centuries of draining wetlands, reclaiming salt marshes and walling in rivers is being put into reverse by climate change, which is bringing fiercer storms, more intense downpours and is pushing up sea levels. Sea walls are now being deliberately allowed to be breached, with new defences built further back, and fields turned into lakes to slow the rush of the water, as flood management turns back towards natural methods.Thorne says the strategy of once more "making space for water" has been around for a decade, but the urgency of implementing it has increased sharply. "We thought then we were talking about the 2030s, but it is all happening a heck of a lot quicker." Large parts of southern England had their wettest January ever recorded, the Met Office announced on Thursday, and the Somerset Levels, much of which is below sea level, have been inundated for weeks. "I have enormous sympathy for these people," says Thorne. But he thinks the 1,000-year history of keeping the sea out of the area is coming to the end. "Can the Somerset Levels be defended between now and the end of the century? No," he says. Hannah Cloke, a flooding expert at the University of Reading, agrees: "We could make the choice to protect the Levels forever, but that is going to take a lot of resources. My gut feeling is that you are going to have to let that be a marshland in the end. But people live there and have their livelihoods there, so it is very tricky." Cloke says greatest priority across the country is giving people the help they need to adjust to more frequent floods, from warnings and emergency planning down to home-level protection, such as water-absorbing
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    Source: http://blog.crowncapitalmngt.com/flooding-experts-say-britain-will-have-to-adapt-to-climate-change-and-fast/ "You are looking at retreat," says Prof Colin Thorne, a flooding expert at the University of Nottingham. "It is the only sensible policy - it makes no sense to defend the indefensible." This assessment of how the UK will have to adapt to its increasing flood risk is stark, but is shared by virtually all those who work on the issue.Centuries of draining wetlands, reclaiming salt marshes and walling in rivers is being put into reverse by climate change, which is bringing fiercer storms, more intense downpours and is pushing up sea levels. Sea walls are now being deliberately allowed to be breached, with new defences built further back, and fields turned into lakes to slow the rush of the water, as flood management turns back towards natural methods.Thorne says the strategy of once more "making space for water" has been around for a decade, but the urgency of implementing it has increased sharply. "We thought then we were talking about the 2030s, but it is all happening a heck of a lot quicker." Large parts of southern England had their wettest January ever recorded, the Met Office announced on Thursday, and the Somerset Levels, much of which is below sea level, have been inundated for weeks. "I have enormous sympathy for these people," says Thorne. But he thinks the 1,000-year history of keeping the sea out of the area is coming to the end. "Can the Somerset Levels be defended between now and the end of the century? No," he says. http://bit.ly/1cWF58F http://bit.ly/1nbYkMH
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    "You are looking at retreat," says Prof Colin Thorne, a flooding expert at the University of Nottingham. "It is the only sensible policy - it makes no sense to defend the indefensible." This assessment of how the UK will have to adapt to its increasing flood risk is stark, but is shared by virtually all those who work on the issue.Centuries of draining wetlands, reclaiming salt marshes and walling in rivers is being put into reverse by climate change, which is bringing fiercer storms, more intense downpours and is pushing up sea levels. Sea walls are now being deliberately allowed to be breached, with new defences built further back, and fields turned into lakes to slow the rush of the water, as flood management turns back towards natural methods.Thorne says the strategy of once more "making space for water" has been around for a decade, but the urgency of implementing it has increased sharply. "We thought then we were talking about the 2030s, but it is all happening a heck of a lot quicker." Large parts of southern England had their wettest January ever recorded, the Met Office announced on Thursday, and the Somerset Levels, much of which is below sea level, have been inundated for weeks. "I have enormous sympathy for these people," says Thorne. But he thinks the 1,000-year history of keeping the sea out of the area is coming to the end. "Can the Somerset Levels be defended between now and the end of the century? No," he says. Hannah Cloke, a flooding expert at the University of Reading, agrees: "We could make the choice to protect the Levels forever, but that is going to take a lot of resources. My gut feeling is that you are going to have to let that be a marshland in the end. But people live there and have their livelihoods there, so it is very tricky." Cloke says greatest priority across the country is giving people the help they need to adjust to more frequent floods, from warnings and emergency planning down to home-level prote
Ashtrid Nicks

Naomi Klein: 'Big Green Groups Are More Damaging Than Climate Deniers' - 1 views

http://ashgandhi.skyrock.com/3185643503-Naomi-Klein-Big-Green-Groups-Are-More-Damaging-Than-Climate-Deniers.html Canadian author Naomi Klein is so well known for her blade-sharp commentary that it...

crown capital management reviews naomi klein big green groups are more damaging than climate deniers

started by Ashtrid Nicks on 16 Sep 13 no follow-up yet
Augusto Crossini

Scam Eclipses Solar Power Prospects - 1 views

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/scam-eclipses-solar-power-prospects/article4932007.ece The prospect of the State harvesting rooftop solar energy in plenty to tide over its energy cri...

scam eclipses solar power prospects

started by Augusto Crossini on 24 Jul 13 no follow-up yet
Alysia Power

Milestone Claimed in Creating Fuel From Waste - NYTimes.com - 0 views

Milestone Claimed in Creating Fuel From Waste - NYTimes.com Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/business/energy-environment/company-says-its-the-first-to-make-ethanol-from-waste.html?_r...

Milestone Claimed in Creating Fuel From Waste - NYTimes.com

started by Alysia Power on 01 Aug 13 no follow-up yet
dianne hann

Let us hope the harbingers of climate-change doom are wrong - 1 views

"I was born in the fine city of Limerick, Ireland, on the mighty Shannon. You could say I spent my youth surrounded by water" source: http://blog.crowncapitalmngt.com/let-us-hope-the-harbingers...

Crown Capital management environmental monitoring Let us hope the harbingers of climate-change doom are wrong

started by dianne hann on 07 Feb 14 no follow-up yet
Belle Mogar

Japan Aims to Beam Solar Energy Down From Orbit - 1 views

http://ashleeketchum22.blogspot.com/2013/09/japan-aims-to-beam-solar-energy-down.html (Sen) - The Japanese space agency JAXA is developing a revolutionary concept to put "power stations" in orbit ...

japan aims to beam solar energy down from orbit

started by Belle Mogar on 01 Oct 13 no follow-up yet
Klariz Vodlik

Another Nail in the Coffin - 3 views

http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/another-nail-in-the-coffin-2013-07-26 This is Basic Gold Mining 101: There is this rock, see? Underground, see? It has gold in it. The ratio of gold (if yo...

the crown capital management international relations review another nail in coffin

started by Klariz Vodlik on 26 Jul 13 no follow-up yet
Charles Crown

Warning: Toxics are Lethal, Daily Dose of it to be Tracked - 0 views

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    The thought could be scary, knowing how much toxins you inhale everyday. Through the help of technology European researchers are gearing up to monitor thousands of people. Smartphones are given away to record the chemicals to which they are exposed every day. Exposome, the term used by European Commission to study the effects of environmental exposures to human health. It was then hope that the four-year studies will benefit public health in ways that genome research so far has not. Exposone could reveal a warning or warnings of environmental health issues for use. "There's been too much emphasis on genetic factors, which contribute relatively little to disease compared with environmental factors," says Martyn Smith, a toxicologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is participating in the newly funded Exposomics project. Paolo Vineis, an environmental epi¬demiologist at Imperial College London, leads the €8.7-million project. Some studies do not always succeed like the Genome-wide association studies, in which scientists search for genetic variants linked to disease. They have failed to fully explain why some people are more susceptible than others to chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. The new study will work this way, subjects will carry smartphones equipped with sensors to measure exposures, and their blood will be analyzed to monitor molecular changes. The majority of the participants are already concerned in other long-term health studies. In order to understand the triggers for conditions such as heart disease, asthma and lung cancer, goal is to look for biomarker differences between people walking through areas with low air pollution and those exposed to urban fumes. The idea is to differentiate the difference the toxins will cause the human health basing on their environment. Vineis's exposomics approach has already exposed gene-expression signatures that connect people's leukaemia risk with their exposure to heavy me
Frank McGraw

Wood boiler users dispute heavy pollution claims - 1 views

OXFORD -- The smoke emanating from outdoor wood-burning furnaces can lie thick and low. Rather than rising and dispersing, it can spread out, leaving smoky particles hanging about. In a time when ...

crown capital eco management wood boiler users dispute heavy pollution claims

started by Frank McGraw on 12 Feb 14 no follow-up yet
Charles Crown

Climate change is happening 10 times faster than ever - 1 views

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    Stanford University recently published a report in the journal Science pointing but the extent to which the climate change rate - so much heat absorbed in very little time -is overtaking any other eras of warming or cooling in the Earth's 65 million years history. If present estimates are precise, the researchers state, that pace will speed up to 50 or even 100 times quicker than anything we have observed in the past. Scientific American explains: They observed climate occurrences or primary transitions that have transpired on Earth from the time of the dinosaurs' extinction. Those include the time when the Earth came out of an ice age. Temperatures then went up between 3 and 5 degrees Celsius, similar to the amount scientists predict is possible with the prevailing climate change. But that change occurred within about 20,000 years, the scientists pointed out, and not mere decades as it is now the case. Another study conducted by University of Texas and put out in the journal Nature, has discovered that the Antarctic permafrost is also melting at a rate 10 times faster compared to anything measured previously, that is, in the last 11,000 years. The scientists explain that the dramatic shift is not due to higher temperatures but to altering weather patterns in which the region is experiencing more sunlight than before. The researchers of the Antarctic case are not overly worried at their findings, explaining that for the Arctic polar ice to melt at this rate would be much more problematic. The findings of the Stanford study are not as hopeful. To keep up with the present rate of global warming, says study author Christopher Field, we have to begin adjusting accordingly on a significantly faster timetable. The chances of reducing its effects now, in his calculation, is not so bright: To keep the temperature rise to about 1.5 degrees, the Earth would have to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, and then attain negative emissions, that is,
Charles Crown

Fewer resources, greater stress, more disasters: Climate change linked to violence amon... - 1 views

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    A world becoming warmer and experiencing more droughts and other climate-connected disasters is apt to bring about a considerable upsurge in fierce conflicts between individuals as well as whole societies, a major study has revealed.An analysis of 61 in-depth cases of violence has shown that personal clashes and wider civil conflicts grow considerably in number with significant changes to weather patterns, such as rising temperature and lack of rain, scientists said.Even fairly modest shifts away from the average lead to noticeable rise in the occurrence of violence, according to the study which theorized that the expected rise of in average world temperatures this century could result in a 50 per cent growth in major violent conflicts such as civil wars. The scientists suggest that climate shifts, especially rising temperatures, are bound to cause more frequent conflicts over progressively declining natural resources, on top of the physiological impact on people due to hotter weather. "We need to be cautious here. We do not mean that it is inevitable that further warming in the future will produce more conflict. We are saying that previous changes in climate -- especially, past temperature increase -- are connected with increasing personal and group disputes," said Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley. "It is certainly possible that future communities will be more able to deal with severe temperatures than we do today; but we believe that it is risky to just presume that this will be so," said Mr. Burke, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Science. The study was based on an investigation of the scholastic literature for historical narratives of violent disputes, from individual aggression, such as murder and assaults to greater conflicts such as riots, racial tensions, civil war and even primary declines of civilisations that existed thousands of years back. Disputes between groups rather than between persons exhibited
Mariana Hugo

Innovative Farmers Using Solar-Biomass - 1 views

http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/renewables/innovative-farmers-using-solar-biomass/60214.article LIKE many poultry farmers in the UK, Brian and David Jamieson - brothers and proprietors of two...

crown capital eco management reviews innovative farmers using solar biomass

started by Mariana Hugo on 27 Nov 13 no follow-up yet
Charles Crown

For Already Vulnerable Penguins, Study Finds Climate Change Is Another Danger - 1 views

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    Life has never been easy for just-hatched Magellanic penguins, but climate change is making it worse, according to a decades-long study of the largest breeding colony of the birds. The chicks are already vulnerable to predation and starvation. Now, the study at Punta Tombo, Argentina, found that intense storms and warmer temperatures are increasingly taking a toll. "Rainfall is killing a lot of penguins, and so is heat," said P. Dee Boersma, a University of Washington scientist and lead author of the study. "And those are two new causes." Climate scientists say more extreme weather, including wetter storms and more prolonged periods of heat and cold, is one impact of a climate that is changing because of emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. While monitoring the penguin colony, Dr. Boersma and her colleagues also documented regional temperature changes and increases in the number of days with heavy rains. The study, which is being published online Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE, is one of the first to show a direct impact of climate change on seabirds. Most studies have looked at how warming temperatures affect animals indirectly, by altering predation patterns or food supplies. William J. Sydeman, senior scientist at the Farallon Institute in California, who was not involved in the research, said the study linked changes in climate, which occur on a scale of decades, to the daily scale of life in the colony. "That's a unique contribution," he said. The colony at Punta Tombo, in a temperate and relatively dry region about midway along Argentina's coast, is home to about 200,000 breeding pairs of the penguins, which are about 15 inches tall as adults. Dr. Boersma has been working there since 1982, with long-term support from the Wildlife Conservation Society. For this study, the researchers compiled data on nearly 3,500 chicks that they meticulously tracked by checking nests once or twice a day throughout the six-month breeding season, w
lara eifel

Crown Capital management environmental monitoring on How Climate Change Is Worsening Ca... - 3 views

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    Leading Scientists Explain: http://crowncapitalmngt.com/ Scientists have long predicted that climate change would bring on ever-worsening droughts, especially in semi-arid regions like the U.S. Southwest. As climatologist James Hansen, who co-authored one of the earliest studies on this subject back in 1990, told me this week, "Increasingly intense droughts in California, all of the Southwest, and even into the Midwest have everything to do with human-made climate change." Why does it matter if climate change is playing a role in the Western drought? As one top researcher on the climate-drought link reconfirmed with me this week, "The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999." If his and other projections are correct, then there may be no greater tasks facing humanity than 1) working to slash carbon pollution and avoid the worst climate impact scenarios and 2) figuring out how to feed nine billion people by mid-century in a Dust-Bowl-ifying world. Remarkably, climate scientists specifically predicted a decade ago that Arctic ice loss would bring on worse droughts in the West, especially California. As it turns out, Arctic ice loss has been much faster than the researchers - and indeed all climate modelers - expected. And, of course, California is now in the death-grip of a brutal, record-breaking drought, driven by the very change in the jet stream that scientists had anticipated. Is this just an amazing coincidence - or were the scientists right? And what would that mean for the future? Building on my post from last summer, I talked to the lead researcher and several other of the world's leading climatologists and drought experts. First, a little background. Climate change makes Western droughts longer and stronger and more frequent in several ways, as I discussed in my 2011 literature review in the journal Nature: Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. Wha
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