Ocean power could supply entire cities

Frightened by your power bill? A report released by the CSIRO today has found ocean power generated by waves, currents and tides could supply a city the size of Melbourne by 2050.

In homes across the country, power bills are under scrutiny like never before as prices continue to rise.
The CSIRO has also been running the ruler over a range of future energy options including ocean power which is generated from waves, tides and currents.
Alex Wonhas, the director of a CSIRO program looking at energy transformation, says waves could be a big part of the future.
"We found it could provide up to 10 per cent of Australia's future energy needs by 2050. That's roughly equivalent of a city the size of Melbourne," he said.
But that is likely to be a long way off. Mr Wonhas says getting ocean energy off the sea floor and into homes is fraught with environmental as well as technical and commercial barriers.
"The technical challenges are really around making sure these devices last in the quite hostile ocean environment for maybe one or two decades.
"The commercial challenge is about reducing the cost of these devices," he said.
Carnegie is a Perth-based company that is working on technology to harness the power of waves.
It recently signed a deal with defence to supply power to Australia's largest naval base at Garden Island near Perth.
The company's chief operating officer, Greg Allen, says the company has invested more than $60 million with another $16 million coming from state and federal governments.
"The overall cost of the project is more than the revenue that we'll get from the sale of powers will recover," he said.
While it may be more expensive for some time to come, Mr Allen says Australia risks falling behind without the investment.
"It's not just the Australian Government that's doing this. Other governments around the world are funding the emerging renewable technologies - and in particular wave," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-25/ocean-power-could-supply-entire-cities/4153112

Ocean fertilisation debate rages on

GERMAN researchers say they have evidence that sowing the ocean with iron particles sucks up and stores carbon dioxide (CO2), preventing the gas from stoking climate change. 
 
But the paper they published on Wednesday touches on a fiercely controversial issue called geo-engineering and has come under attack from other scientists and environmentalists.
The detractors said a far bigger question - whether such schemes could damage the marine biosphere - remained unanswered.
Published in the science journal Nature, the paper is one of the biggest and most detailed probes into ocean fertilisation, a practice that is banned under international law although scientific research into it is permitted.
Its goal is to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in the deep sea so that it no longer adds to the greenhouse effect.
This would be done by scattering the ocean surface with iron dust, a nutrient for microscope marine vegetation called phytoplankton. As the plants gorge on the iron, they also suck up atmospheric CO2 thanks to natural photosynthesis.

In the next step, the phytoplankton die and sink to the deep ocean floor -- taking with them the CO2, which would lie in the sediment, possibly for centuries.
Critics, though, say geo-engineering schemes are riddled with unknowns, both in cost effectiveness and risks for the environment.
Scientists led by Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven took a research ship to the Southern Ocean off Antarctica in 2004.
There, they located a giant eddy -- a slowly-moving clockwise-rotating swirl 60 kilometres (37 miles across) that had relatively little interchange with the rest of the ocean -- and used it as a testbed for a five-week experiment.
They scattered seven tonnes of commercial iron sulphate particles, which within four weeks developed into a giant bloom of diatom plankton.
The diatoms then died, sinking in clumps of entangled cells, "far below" a depth of 1,000 metres (3,250 feet), according to samples measured with a gadget called a fluorometre.
They were probably deposited on the sea floor in a "fluff layer" that should remain for "many centuries and longer," Smetacek's team say.
Further work is needed to see what happens when sideways currents hit the diatom blooms, they add.
But other scientists have sounded a loud note of caution, saying the experiment took place in exceptional conditions and did not consider other environmental consequences.
Among them was Professor John Shepherd, who chaired a landmark report in 2009 by Britain's Royal Society into geo-engineering.
It concluded that ocean fertilisation would not suck up that much CO2 and could be harmful to the marine biosphere.
"Whilst the new research is an interesting and valuable contribution in this evolving field, it does not address the potential ecological side effects of such a technology in what is a poorly understood field," Shepherd said in an email to AFP.
The Canada-based ETC Group, an environmental NGO campaigning against geo-engineering, said the study "only focuses on a few narrow aspects and disregards or ignores others."
"The intended purpose of ocean fertilisation is to significantly disrupt marine ecosystems through drastic changes on phytoplankton, which is the base of the marine food web, so the effects would propagate throughout the ocean in unpredictable ways," it said.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/breaking-news/ocean-fertilisation-debate-rages-on/story-e6freoo6-1226429617900

Pseudo-science thrives in new political climate

Anyone who places any stock in safeguarding the current and future climate (and for that matter anyone who doesn't) should prepare themselves for the risk that very soon, climate science deniers, contrarians and sceptics will be running the show.
All the polls suggest that the Liberal-led Coalition will sweep to power at next year’s Federal election. Current Liberal leader Tony Abbott, if we care to remember, once described climate change as “crap“.

Our descent into the deluded world of pseudo-science occupied by astrology, creationism, crystal healing and homeopathy is almost complete. 

Views shared among Abbott’s parliamentary coalition ranks are that climate science is a “leftist fad” and a “work of fiction”.
The Liberal-National Party’s new Queensland Premier Campbell Newman and his environment minister Andrew Powell have both said they’re unable to accept the evidence of human-caused climate change, going against the scientific findings of the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology and every major science academy on the planet.

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Instead the Newmans and Abbotts of this world would rather stake the future of their constituents, our economies, our food supplies and our coastlines on the ideologically-blinkered pseudo-science of narrow vested interests and free market fundamentalists.
The latest snapshot on this inglorious race to the bottom came last week during the Queensland LNP state conference with a motion proposed by the Noosa LNP member Richard Pearson.
Pearson’s motion called on the state’s education minister John-Paul Langbroek to “remove environmental propaganda material, in particular post-normal science about ‘climate change’, from the curriculum and as adjunct material at exam time”. The motion was passed with party members overwhelmingly in favour.
LNP state representative Glen Elmes recently thanked Pearson in parliament for helping him win his Noosa seat at the state election earlier this year (perhaps those visits to Noosa by fake experts Christopher Monckton and Professor Bob Carter have rubbed off on the Sunshine Coast community).
As reported on Brisbane Times, Pearson said: “Few people understand that the so called science of climate change is really what can be defined as ‘post-normal’ science,” before apparently arguing that climate change went beyond traditional understanding of science based on experimentation and falsifiable theories.
To Pearson and others, the experiments of John Tyndall in 1859 which established the warming properties of what we now know to be greenhouse gases just didn’t happen. Not in existence either, are the reams of scientific papers over many decades which have attempted but failed to falsify the “theory” that burning fossil fuels is causing the world’s average temperature to rise, the oceans to become more acidic, the sea levels to rise and the ice at the poles to melt.
Also not in existence is last week’s study by almost 400 scientists (they’re everywhere) which showed that greenhouse gas emissions were increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events.
So far, Premier Newman has clarified that while Pearson’s motion has been passed by the party, this doesn’t mean it will be adopted by the parliamentary group which he leads.
“We will always do the right thing by Queenslanders ahead of the LNP,” he said, forgetting that just a few weeks ago he told Queenslanders the state was actually “in the coal business”.
Regardless, reaction to the motion has been damning. Anna-Maria Arabia, the chief executive of Science & Technology Australia, which represents almost 70,000 scientists and technology experts in Australia, described it as “extremely harmful”.
The secretary of the Queensland Teachers’ Union Kevin Bates told The Australian that it was important schools taught children to have an “open mind” (but presumably not so open that your brain falls out). “Our greatest concern is that this is a government that is going to interfere in the education process,” he said.
One blogging research scientist wrote that the motion was “preparing our children for future ridicule".
Helping in this process is the Institute for Public Affairs, which has been sending out a discredited book on climate change to Australian schools. The book How To Get Expelled From School, written by Professor Ian Plimer, a member of the board of two of Gina Rinehart’s mining companies, was launched by former Prime Minister John Howard.
At the launch, Professor Plimer said “one of the aims of this book is to maintain the rage, because we have an election coming”.  Clearly, Professor Plimer sees his book as a political tool.
While consistently claiming that school children are being brainwashed by climate change “propoganda”, those who push this line rarely (if ever) produce any actual evidence. Pearson didn’t define what he meant by “propaganda” or “post normal science”.
Plimer’s genuine piece of propaganda was described by the Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, which analysed his book, as “misleading” and based on “inaccurate or selective interpretation of the science”.
It should not be forgotten that Tony Abbott isn’t afraid of pushing his own misinformed climate dogma on young schoolkids when given the chance.
In 2010, he told a class of five and six year olds in Adelaide: “OK, so the climate has changed over the eons and we know from history, at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth the climate was considerably warmer than it is now.”
Nobody should be surprised that conservative politicians are unable to accept climate change science. A survey of political representatives at local, state and federal level carried out in late 2009 found that acceptance of climate change science was divided along political lines.
The University of Queensland survey found only about one third of Liberal/National politicians accepted the world was warming because of human activity. This compared to nine out of 10 Labor politicians and practically all Greens.
Then there’s the “conservative white male effect” discovered by scientists (yes, them again) in the US linking the described demographic to the denial of human-caused climate change.
The Australian conservative political movement’s lurch towards the denial of human-caused climate science is like a mirror-image of the same enlightenment-crushing ideas of many US Republicans.
None of the recent candidates for the Republican presidential nomination (excusing possibly John Huntsman) were able to publicly back climate change science, with some reverting to scepticism after previously accepting the issue.
Also in common with the US is the existence of Tea Party-style “grassroots” activism in Australia, helped along by free market think tanks that claim regulating greenhouse gas emissions is an attack on our freedom.
But rather than have an honest debate about a policy response to a real world risk, they sink to trying to discredit climate science while telling the public that carbon dioxide from burning coal is just “food for plants”.
Earlier this week the climate sceptic organisation the Galileo Movement, founded by two retired Noosa (!) businessmen, tweeted a link to a document written by Viv Forbes claiming coal was not dirty and CO2 was plant food. No mention anywhere in the document that Forbes is a director of Stanmore Coal.
Galileo’s patron is Sydney radio host Alan Jones, who recently told a crowd that climate science was “witchcraft” and a “hoax”.
Our descent into the deluded world of pseudo-science occupied by astrology, creationism, crystal healing and homeopathy is almost complete. It’s a place where progress dies and business-as-usual thrives.

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/pseudoscience-thrives-in-new-political-climate-20120718-22944.html#ixzz213SetLbd

God particle discovery excites scientists

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: The scientific world is buzzing with one of the biggest physics discoveries in years. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced today that they've pinned down the long-searched-for sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson.

If you're like me, you're maybe a bit challenged when it comes to physics theories. You probably have no idea what that means. Somebody who does understand though is Professor Geoffrey Taylor. He leads Australia's research contribution to that Geneva project. He joined me moments ago from a science conference in Melbourne where the announcement was made.

Professor Taylor, just before coming on air I saw somebody Tweet, "Anyone got an English explanation for the Higgs boson discovery? I'm excited, but I don't know why." Can you help us out, Professor Taylor. What does this mean?

GEOFFREY TAYLOR, PHYSICIST, UNI. OF MELBOURNE: Well, the experimentalists and the theorists in the theatre that I've just come out of are also very excited, which is uncharacteristic of physicists. But - so I have to step back a little bit to give you some background. The standard model, a so-called standard model of particles that make up our universe and their interactions has been with us for 20, 30, 40 years now and has been almost unbreakable. We experimentalists have been running to try and find a chink in the armour of the standard model for all this time. It's been a very successful theory, but there are missing ingredients. And tonight, the Higgs boson has - is the final ingredient which has been found now.

LEIGH SALES: So to give those of us who aren't physicists a sense of the importance of this discovery, can you compare it to some other famous scientific breakthroughs that we might have heard of?

GEOFFREY TAYLOR: Yes, it's a massive step for us because it's a very unusual particle. It's not just another run-of-the-mill particle from the zoo of particles that have been discovered over the years. It's - it really - it's a new field which - so it really compares with understanding the electromagnetic field, which is absolutely fundamental to our modern lives.

LEIGH SALES: Absolutely - mobile phones, satellites, all those sorts of things. What might be the ... ?

GEOFFREY TAYLOR: Absolutely. Which we're not - they were not foreseen of course when the electromagnetic models were developed.

LEIGH SALES: So, does that mean it's possible to foresee what might be some of the applications from this discovery or not?

GEOFFREY TAYLOR: Well, by example, when the electromagnetic theory was developed, nobody knew what would come from it, so - and we're in that situation now. This has been a massive intellectual step for us, a very, very challenging experiment to come to grips with whether the Higgs particle exists or not. As for its practical applications, that's really something for the future.

LEIGH SALES: Some people call this the God particle. Why is that?

GEOFFREY TAYLOR: Well it gets lots of press. If I tell you the real reason for it, it's not quite as lofty. It was called the "God damn particle" 'cause it was so hard to find, and - but with the title the God damn particle the publishers weren't going to publish Leon Lehman's books so it was toned down to the God particle and the name has stuck ever since. But it does have some very important properties, probably not as strong as a God though.

LEIGH SALES: Well does it change people's theories about the universe or the way the universe started?

GEOFFREY TAYLOR: It narrows it down. Not necessarily the way it started, but the way that it evolved in that first fraction of a second of the universe. It gives us a tighter platform from - for which to go even further and to probe the universe even more. So we've raised the level of the foundations of our understanding now with this very important discovery. And so from this higher level, we can go further in probing even deeper questions like what's the nature of dark matter, what is - are there additional symmetries of nature, additional forces? Are there more than three space dimensions? So, as I said, it gives us a stronger base from which to ask these questions. It narrows down the range of possibilities.

LEIGH SALES: So now that this mystery is solved, is there another Holy Grail for physicists?

GEOFFREY TAYLOR: I suspect the one which is really hard to get to is gravity at the quantum scale, so gravity is - at the very smallest scale. But already by going to this understanding of the standard model, it gives us a better feeling for new types of fields. We're still a long way from quantum gravity, but that's probably the Holy Grail - to bring that into an understanding on the same par as electromagnetism and the weak interaction.

LEIGH SALES: Well you can work on that now that we've got this God damn particle. Professor Taylor, thank you very much.

GEOFFREY TAYLOR: Thank you, Leigh.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2012/s3539090.htm?WT.svl=transcripts