By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes

Here is a simple test. Watch this animation of successive months of data from NASA’s AQUA satellite. It is a record of methane release from the Arctic from March 2003 until March this year. If it doesn’t send a chill down your spine, you simply don’t know enough important stuff. If you see it and think “so what?” and do nothing – ask nothing – learn nothing – you are a danger to everybody else. And your children. And their children.

Snippets from the Interwebs 3

China is installing the world's largest system (click link for Technology Review article) for generating electricity by collecting methane gas emitted by fermenting cow manure. Anaerobic digestion systems are very highly favoured in future to digest not only manure, which is what everyone is familiar with but also green and food waste – even special energy crops. It’s true that capturing methane and burning it produces CO2 but the carbon is from the planet’s “currrent account”, not the fossil fuel “deposit account” that contributes to altering the climate. Methane is also 23 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2 so it makes sense to collect and burn it anyway, particularly if by doing so, the obtained energy substitutes for and displaces the use of fossil fuel carbon.
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If all the toilet roll inner tubes produced every year in the United States were placed end to end they would stretch for a million miles, or 4 times further than the Moon
Scott paper have announced a new “tube free” toilet roll – click link to see original story
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Ocean acidification
This article from the geological society (yes, the original British, established in 1807, one) has more on ocean acidification. Scientists, from the University of Plymouth and the University of Santa Catarina, Brazil have studied the effect, on foraminifera (a species of plankton with a calcium carbonate shell) of increased levels of CO2 in the ocean. They state that at a mean pH of 7.8, the pH level predicted for the end of the century, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non-calcifying ones take over. The current level is about 8.07. The pre-industrial level was about 8.18, thus ocean acidification is actually a reduction in alkalinity. Sea water des not need to actually become acidic before very serious effects happen.
Unless we curb CO2 emissions (forget climate change for the time being) we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae. Similar lowering of ocean pH levels were closely associated with massive extinctions in the past.  Plankton are right at the bottom of the ocean food chain and they also sequester colossal quantities of CO2 in their shells, not to mention replenishing the oxygen supply of the atmoshere. We shouldn’t do anything to change them - but we sure as h*ll are doing.
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Peak Everything
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development reported, back at the end of last year, that an expert group had been set up by the European Commission  to screen a list of forty-nine "potentially critical" raw materials whose availability to industry could come under threat as global competition for natural resources intensifies. Of particular worry to Europeans are rare earths, collections of metals and elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods, including batteries used in electric cars. The Chinese are developing a stranglehold on supplies of many of the most important ones. Recycling will never mean as much as it will do when we can’t get enough stuff to make our stuff.
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Blade Runner meets Babylon

Text and picture adapted from from the New York Times 29/10/2010 (click picture for link to original story)
One family are going to live in this 27 story house in Mumbai. All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
Here’s the understatement of the year:
“A gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
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One way to do “food security”
Land grabbing… or at least buying up land.  South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Qatar, Kuwait. are buying up large areas in Africa to supply themselves with food and other agricultural products. Also leading the rush are international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds as well as UK pension funds, foundations and individuals attracted by some of the world's cheapest land.  Here’s a link to an Observer investigation of this trend.
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LONDON, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Scotland should produce enough renewable electricity to meet all its power demand by 2025, First Minister Alex Salmond said. "I'm confident that by 2025 we will produce at least 100 percent of our electricity needs from renewables alone, and together with other sources it will enable us to become a net exporter of clean, green energy”

Methane – it’s a gas

Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, although it stays active in the atmosphere for less time. Unlike carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere a century or more once released, methane persists in the air for about 10 years.  It will be a serious problem if the permafrost in the tundra and Alaska melts and the underground methane comes up and the previously frozen vegetation generates more. It would be even worse if the undersea methane clathrates bubbled up (a form of methane+water ice which stays down there because of the cool temperature and pressure). Large scale release of methane would be a very strong positive feedback to global warming and if it starts to happen, then we are *%$#*’ed.

Large scale release of methane from clathrates has been associated with very rapid temperature rises and mass extinctions of species in the pre-historic past  - Permian-Triassic extinction event and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

The story linked to below shows that it is not just “natural” releases that deserve attention because apparently there are large scale leaks from the global oil and gas processing infrastructure that have the same warming power of the emissions from over half of the coal plants in the United States. Because of methane’s lower residence time in the atmosphere, aggressively reining in emissions now would mean that far less of the gas would be warming the earth in a decade or so. Fixing the leaks would be a valuable “low hanging fruit” to get on with NOW!

click on this link to the New York Times story

This picture uses an Infra-red camera to show an “invisible” leak form a gas holder

In routine operations, great yet invisible plumes of gas enter the atmosphere when new wells are activated, old wells are invigorated to boost gas flows and wells are purged of fluids by letting out cough-like bursts of gas.

Human Poop to the rescue!

This is an irresistible video of a London based American designer who's thinking basically. Just a little wacky, she is pretty engaging as she waxes rhapsodically about the virtues of thinking again about "poop". An almost ignored "resource", she shows how we can generate at least some of our energy needs from it. Although the voice-over sound quality varies at times, there is a cute backing musical soundtrack that adds to it.

The embed code that they supply for the video means that it will dominate the blog area (or may be cut off on the right hand side, depending on which browser you have - as always, Firefox is favourite) so I have tried to post a smaller version below which may or may not work in Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome. Let me know how it was for you...

Stuff - not too sustainable yet, but maybe, just maybe?

Hot air ballooning used to have an image of strawberries and champagne in the wicker basket, whilst watching the (switch on Noel Coward accent) terribly, terribly English countryside drift by. In just the same way that snowboarding attracts a somewhat different crowd to the "skiing in Klosters" types, so too does one-man hot air ballooning, or "cloudhopping" (click for website).

Once upon a time I got a Private Pilots Licence(group D) for Microlights. I was somewhat surprised to see that it also licenced me to fly hot air balloons, although I didn't ever fly one because no-one ever got me a "round tuit".


I think it will be harder to get people to vote for a sustainable society if there’s no fun in it! Although these things use fossil fuel (propane gas cylinders) to fly and the canopy is made from oil derived polyurethane coated rip stop fabric (near enough the same as paragliders are made of today, and hang gliders used to be made of 35 years ago, when I started flying) I still think there will be a future for "toys" like these "leap a building in a single bound" cloudhoppers.



Don't quote me but I imagine that cylinders of methane gas could substitute for the propane - methane can be generated in one's backyard by anaerobic decomposition of organic waste.

Jersey has been generating methane industrially from sewage waste for many years (and using the gas to generate electricity which partially runs the waste treatment plant). There are smaller domestic size systems which can generate your own gas from food waste, like this one from India.

Here’s a link to a good website on anaerobic digestion.

The balloon seat, harness and supporting structure are mostly made of stainless steel so few problems there, but what about the balloon fabric, I hear you cry. Well, how about this company that recycles, or repurposes, this type of fabric and turns it into neat, lightweight backpacks, gym bags, laptop covers and wallets, among other things. Click for Baumm's website.

Treehugger.com did an article about them (click link here)