The Witches Digest

Chile’s government said on Friday (26th December 2008) the area surrounding the Chaiten Volcano, which erupted in May for the first time in thousands of years, was still not safe and that a decision regarding the future of the town of Chaiten would be made in coming days.

The Volcano, only six miles (10 km) from the town, started spewing ash, gas and molten rock on May 2, forcing the evacuation of about 7,000 residents.

A cloud of debris that soared as high as 20 miles (32 km) into the air was kept aloft by the pressure of constant eruptions for weeks, and even covered towns in neighbouring Argentina with volcanic ash.

“We received the latest report from the Universidad Catolica … and the only thing I can tell you is that the volcano is exactly as dangerous as it was before,” Interior Minister Edmundo Perez-Yoma told reporters.

“We were hoping we might have better news, but unfortunately we don’t.”

The government has not dismissed the possibility of relocating the small town and making the whole area a no-go zone for years to come, but many locals have said they want to return to their homes in Chaiten.

“The volcano is still active,” Perez-Yoma said. “Given the latest definitive information, we will be making a decision in the coming days.”

Chile has the second largest and most active chain of volcanoes in the world after Indonesia.

About 90 percent of the town was flooded in May as volcanic ash caused nearby rivers to breach their banks.

Australian wildlife officials were using satellite tracking to monitor a group of 11 pilot whales returned to the sea after a mass stranding on the island state of Tasmania.

The whales were the only ones from a group of 64 long-finned pilot whales that survived the mass stranding on Saturday.

Global Positioning System (GPS) devices were attached to five whales, a mix of adult and juvenile whales, and authorities said the surviving pod was swimming strongly away from land.

“These units have told us that the animals did all join up again even though they were released in a three hour period and their survival prospects are very good.” Rosemary Gales from Tasmania’s Department of Primary Industries told local media.

The whales were found stranded on Saturday along a stretch of Anthony’s Beach at Stanley on Tasmania’s northwest coast, a site where repeated strandings have occurred in the past. Around one-third of them were juveniles.

On Sunday, rescuers released 11 surviving whales into the ocean after day-long effort which involved relocating them by road to another beach.

Gales said it was the first time GPS devices have been used to track whales after a stranding in Australia.

Pilot whales are among the smaller whales, typically up to about five meters in length and dark with a grey underbelly.

Environmentalists said the chances of whales surviving a mass stranding were usually low, but the relatively small size of the pilot whales may have helped rescuers save them.

Mass strandings of whales occur periodically in Australia and New Zealand for reasons that are not entirely understood. Theories include disturbance of echo-location, possibly by interference from sound produced by human activities at sea,

It has plagued scientists and politicians for decades, but scientists now say global warming is not the problem. 

We are actually heading for the next Ice Age, they claim.

British and Canadian experts warned the big freeze could bury the east of Britain in 6,000ft of ice.

Most of Scotland, Northern Ireland and England could be covered in 3,000ft-thick ice fields. 

The expanses could reach 6,000ft from Aberdeen to Kent – towering above Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest mountain.

And what’s more, the experts blame the global change on falling - rather than climbing - levels of greenhouse gases. 

Lead author Thomas Crowley from the University of Edinburgh and Canadian colleague William Hyde say that currently vilified greenhouse gases – such as carbon dioxide – could actually be the key to averting the chill. 

The warning, published in the authoritative journal Nature, is based on records of tiny marine fossils and the earth’s shifting orbit. 

The Earth has seen dramatic climate fluctuations – veering between cold and warm extremes - over the past three million years, the researchers say. 

And changes in the Earth’s orbit and slowly falling levels of carbon dioxide are the cause.

The team says we are approaching a turning point, in the next 10,000 to 100,000 years, which will lead to the new ice sheets smothering much of Europe, Asia and South America. 

The theory, which is based on computer models, suggests ice sheets will also slash sea levels by up to 300m, so Russia and Alaska will be connected by land. 

The North Sea will become part of a huge glacier stretching from Holland and Scandinavia to the Russian Far East.

Professor Crowley said the stark findings do not mean we should stop fighting warming. 

But he urged: ‘Don’t push the panic button.’

‘There’s no excuse for saying “we’ve got to keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,”’ he told Reuters. 

‘Geologically it’s tomorrow, but we have lots of time to argue about the appropriate level of greenhouse gases.’

Technorati Tags: co2, environment, global warming

Purple crocuses, the source of the precious spice saffron, are abloom once again in Italy’s Tuscan hills, centuries after they vanished.

It is midday at the Vecchio Maneggio farm near Florence, and five people are seated at a table covered with hundreds of the flowers.

Picked in the early morning while still closed, they are now slowly beginning to open.

For the rest of the day, nimble fingers will extract the tiny red filaments which will become saffron, used chiefly in cooking but also for colouring and in some medicines.

“A machine could never do this laborious, delicate and above all lengthy work of extraction,” said Paolo Pieraccini, who runs the farm with his sister Tiziana.

“You realise it takes 125,000 flowers to produce one kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of saffron!”

Each flower yields three pistils, or stigmas, which provide the reddish-coloured saffron, used as currency in the Middle Ages and still hugely expensive today.

After the fragile pistils have been removed, they are dried overnight at a temperature of 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit), a process that removes 80 percent of their weight.

Then they are put into little sachets weighing a tenth of a gramme, a tiny fraction of an ounce, sold for 3.50 euros (4.50 dollars) each, making saffron worth 35,000 euros (45,000 dollars) a kilo, more expensive than gold.

Indeed, in the Middle Ages it was known as “red gold”.

In those days, the fields of “crocus sativus” stretched out of sight around San Gimignano, and saffron was used as a currency in trading and property dealing.

It was money from saffron that helped build the famous towers that rise from the walls of the city and can be seen for miles (kilometres) around, a magnet for tourists.

But in the 17th century, when cheaper, though inferior, saffron could be imported from France, cultivation withered and all but died.

Even so, some families continued to produce saffron for their own consumption, using the traditional methods.

At the Vecchio Maneggio farm, Tiziana Pieraccini, now in her 40s, decided in 2001 to increase production and revive taste for the condiment.

Seven years on, she is San Gimignano’s leading producer with half a hectare (a little more than an acre) under cultivation.

Twenty other small local farms have followed her example.

In 2005, Italian saffron even received an official label of recognition for its purity, strong taste and colouring properties.

“We have huge demand, our production goes quickly,” Tiziana Pieraccini said. “For six months we have had nothing in stock.”

She warned that saffron is “the world’s most counterfeited spice, especially when it is in powdered form: people merrily add anything at all, even clay.”

This year’s harvest, which takes place over several weeks in October and November, should be quite good, brother Paolo predicted, “even if we don’t beat our absolute record of 1.38 kilogrammes (48 ounces).”

The farm has recruited some unusual outside help in the form of prisoners at the San Gimignano jail. Paolo has taught them the art of producing saffron, and several rows of crocuses have been planted within its walls.

Technorati Tags: Environmental News, herb farms, saffron, spices

Hong Kong may be known as the Pearl of the Orient for its bright-light, big-city allure, but the ubiquitous practice of keeping neon signs and buildings blazing all night has come under growing fire from green groups.

One of the world’s most densely built-up and populated metropolises, Hong Kong is also one of the most brightly lit.

From bustling streets bathed in an array of neon signs to gargantuan spotlight-strewn advertising hoardings to massed light-specked skyscrapers twinkling off the waters of Victoria harbor at night, the glow over the sleepless city makes it difficult to glimpse stars in the night sky.

In an era of growing green consciousness and global warming fears, environmentalists are increasingly critical of this ostentatious display, calling it as unnecessary and wasteful.

“The trend is getting worse and worse,” said Hahn Chu, the environmental affairs manager for Friends of the Earth: “Hong Kong always thinks the brighter things are, the more prosperous we seem, but people often forget that we’re wasting energy.”

While Hong Kong doesn’t have compulsory measures for lights out, a recent public opinion poll on energy conservation by the Council for Sustainable Development found 71 percent of over 80,000 people backed turning off neon lights in the small hours.

In 2008, the city’s environmental protection department received some 50 complaints about light pollution, up from the 40 cases received in 2007, with neon signs posing a growing nuisance for the public.

“FLAMBOYANT WASTAGE”

A massive neon sign advertising luxury brand Prada was found to be one of the worst offenders in an online poll, spilling intense white light onto a near-deserted Central street until till 5 a.m. every day.

“This is flamboyant wastage and creates light pollution,” one respondent was quoted as saying.

A spokesperson for Prada in Hong Kong said it had noted the concern, was “actively seeking a solution and we will reduce the lighting,” she added without giving specifics.

In an initiative named “Dim It Please,” Friends of the Earth called on retailers and building owners to set a lights-off time after business hours to conserve energy and reduce emissions.

The group says Hong Kong’s electricity consumption grew 18 percent between 1997-2006, outpacing local population growth of 5.9 percent in the same period.

Light pollution however, is by no means unique to Hong Kong.

NASA photographs of global “artificial night sky brightness” display a conspicuous “luminous fog” around much of Western Europe and North America as well much of Japan, Taiwan, while Hong Kong shows up as a bright spot in the southern China region.

Global experts say light pollution has become so pronounced that two thirds of the U.S. population and about half the EU are no longer able to see the Milky Way with the naked eye.

Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang seems to be seeing the light.

In his annual policy address last week he said the government would “assess the problem of energy wastage of external lighting and study the feasibility of tackling the problem through legislation.”

Technorati Tags: global warming, green consciousness, light pollution

The number of tiger attacks on people is growing in India’s Sundarban islands as habitat loss and dwindling prey caused by climate change drives them to prowl into villages for food, experts said Monday.

Wildlife experts say endangered tigers in the world’s largest reserve are turning on humans because rising sea levels and coastal erosion are steadily shrinking the tigers’ natural habitat.

The Sundarbans, a 26,000 sq km (10,000 sq mile) area of low-lying swamps on India’s border with Bangladesh, is dotted with hundreds of small islands criss-crossed by water channels.

“In the past six months, seven fishermen were killed in an area called Netidhopani,” Pranabes Sanyal of the World Conservation Union said.

“Owing to global warming, the fragile Sundarbans lost 28 percent of its habitat in the last 40 years. A part of it is the core tiger reserve area from where their prey migrated.”

But as sea levels rise, two islands have already disappeared and others are vulnerable. Wildlife experts say the destruction of the mangroves means the tigers’ most common prey, such as crocodiles, fish and big crabs, is dwindling.

Sundarban villagers pass through tiger territory on boats to fish in the sea, or to collect honey in forest areas.

“Villagers are not supposed to enter a number of islands earmarked as tiger territories, but they seldom follow the rules, get attacked and claim compensation,” Pradip Shukla, a senior forest department official, told Reuters.

Villager Ashutosh Dhali became a local celebrity after television cameras captured him being attacked in February.

“We were trying to catch the tiger perched on a tree of our village with tranquilizer shots,” said the 47-year-old villager.

“But it flung on me after falling on a net and bit my loins.”

Once home to 500 tigers in the late 1960s, the Sundarbans may only shelter between 250 and 270 tigers now, wildlife officials say. The Indian Statistical Institute said the number is as low as 75.

Most tigers have been wiped out due to poaching and habitat loss. Authorities said a tiger was killed by poachers in the Sundarbans earlier this month, the latest such killing in India.

The area is the world’s largest mangrove reserve and one of the most unique ecosystems in South Asia, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Ullas Karanth, of the Wildlife Conservation Society India, says that the Sundarbans are a poor quality tiger habitat because of low prey densities.

“The tendency to seek alternate prey in the form of livestock — and sometimes humans — might be higher in these tigers,” Karanth said.

As sea levels rise, mangroves have been overexposed to salt water. Many plants have lost their red and green colors and are more like bare twigs, exposing tigers to poachers who hunt them for their skin and bones.

There were about 40,000 tigers in India a century ago. A government census report published this year says the tiger population has fallen to 1,411, down from 3,642 in 2002, largely due to dwindling habitat and poaching.

Technorati Tags: global warming, tiger attacks

Residents of a pollution-plagued Chinese city are mobilizing against a proposed chemical plant they fear will menace their health, with some urging marches against the scheme they say puts growth before the environment.

Now Taizhou residents, dismayed at the prospect of another chemical plant in an area already crowded with them, are threatening to re-enact those protests — and again bring into focus China’s struggle to balance growth with growing public anger over pollution and environmental threats.

“Resolutely oppose the PX project. As Taizhou residents, everyone must take some action,” “We want clear water and green hills, not toxic cash.”

China’s leaders have vowed to create a more “harmonious society” with cleaner air and water, even at the cost of slower economic growth. But this dispute threatens to become another battle pitting citizens against local officials whose priority often remains attracting fresh investment and revenue.

A website devoted to opposing the project urges residents to “surround Taizhou.”

“Let the people speak out. Give them full rights to know and express themselves,” said the latest posting, dated Sunday. “Environmental problems are the world’s problems, and every individual’s.”

Internet messages also urge residents to send around text messages organizing mass “strolls” against the project.

EAGER OFFICIALS

Coastal Taizhou is a hub of chemical production and the big plant would be a feather in the cap for local officials.

“This is a rare historic opportunity, and a big project to enrich the people of Taizhou,” stated an official news report in April that announced the plan.

“We must seize the initiative and go all out to win it.”

But residents and workers in Taizhou have long complained about water, air and fields putrid with pollution.

The proposed chemical production plant would make ethylene and paraxylene as part of a larger petroleum processing complex costing 60 billion yuan ($8.8 billion), according to reports in the official Taizhou Daily.

A Taizhou city environmental official told Reuters the project, led by China’s top oil and gas firm CNPC, was still in planning stages and had not been approved. He declined to answer more questions and gave only his surname, Wang.

China National Petroleum Corp and its listed PetroChina unit both declined to say which was managing the project and had no immediate comment on the growing opposition.

Residents opposing the plant have said it was about three times the size of the one proposed for Xiamen.

But that project in neighboring Fujian province petered out last year after a wave of mass “strolls” by residents, challenging the ruling Communist Party’s ban on public protest.

In May this year, about 200 people staged a rare protest in a southwest China against a big petrochemical complex, saying it would cause air and water pollution.

In these protests, environmental worries have stoked calls for expanded rights for citizens in the one-Party state. Taizhou appears to continue that trend.

“In a democratic society, the government’s decisions must represent public opinion,” said one internet essay questioning the project.

Underwater cacophony caused by commercial and military ships has become so intense that it is killing whales, scientists at the World Conservation Congress say.

“The noises generated by ships create what I call acoustic smog,” said Michel Andre, director of the Laboratory of Applied Bio-Acoustics in Barcelona.

Just as air pollution reduces one’s field of vision, “noise pollution in the sea reduces the zone in which whales can feed and hampers their ability to communicate,” he told AFP in an interview.

“There is no place in the world’s oceans that is untouched.”

Many shipping lanes follow the coastal routes that whales have traced for millions of years as they roam the planet’s seas.

The result is a crescendo of beachings, strandings and collisions as whales and other sea mammals disoriented or physically damaged by noise lose their bearings.

Recent research on a population of some 300 sperm whales living around the Canary Islands provide an unique window onto the problem.

Sperm whales normally migrate, but the squid upon which they feast are so plentiful in these waters that this group has made the region their permanent home, Andre said.

Maritime traffic, however, is taking a terrible toll — since researchers began monitoring the area, six to 10 whales have been killed each year by collisions with ships.

“If we don’t do something, in a few years there won’t be any sperm whales left here,” Andre said.

The consequences would extend beyond the loss of a whale population, he warned. “Each whale eats about one tonne of squid per day. All that uneaten squid would completely disrupt the food chain,” he said.

Some forms of noise pollution are so powerful that “a whale can be killed outright by the shock,” said Carl Gustav Landin, head of marine programmes for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Sonars used by the military and the oil industry can exceed 230 decibels in volume, and can be deadly within a one- or two-kilometer (-0.6 or 1.2-mile) radius, Andre said.

Eighty-five decibels — the unit used to measure sound pressure — can cause permanent damage to the human ear.

Research published in the United States last week shows that climate change is amplifying the problem.

The acidification of oceans caused by rising sea temperatures reduces sound absorption in the water by up to 40 percent, meaning that noise travels much further.

“Ambient noise levels in the ocean … are set to increase significantly,” the study, published in the Geophysical Research Letters, concluded.

A website created by Andre’s team demonstrates the scope — and volume — of the problem (www.sonsdemar.eu).

The site features an interactive map showing the heavy maritime traffic around the Iberian peninsula, as well as the auditory footprint in red of each vessel in realtime.

By moving an icone representing a whale, one can hear the extent to which the sound the animal produces is masked by noise pollution.

Working in partnership with other researchers around the world, Andre will soon extend the map to cover the world.

The plight of the whales has come before the US Supreme Court.

On Thursday, some of the judges indicated they favoured slapping down a lower court ruling that curbs the use of powerful sonar in US Navy training exercises.

Even if the sonar harms the giant sea mammals, national security would likely take priority, some of the justices suggested.

Claudia McMurray, assistant secretary of state for oceans, environment and science and head of the US delegation at the congress in Barcelona, acknowledged it was hard to reconcile security and environmental interests.

“It is a delicate balance for us,” she told AFP.

But Andre insisted solutions are available. “Technology exists that would allow military to continue their activities without putting the future of whales in peril,” he said. “It is a shame this is not happening.”

Google aims to do for the power grid what it did for the Web.
Having conquered the market for Web search by first simplifying how it is done and then making sales of related advertising more efficient, Google Inc is now funding green technology and using its brand power to lobby for policy change.

Google launched a plan on Wednesday to wean the United States off burning coal and oil for power by 2030, and cut oil use for cars by 40 percent. That will cost trillions of dollars, but Google believes it should ultimately save money.

Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the annual cost of the energy plan would anyway be less than the $700 billion being considered to bail out the financial industry, and he saw some parallels between the energy challenge and the credit crisis.

“That is an unconscionable failure of system design,” he said. “It is inconceivable to me that the sum of the financial industry would have created that as a possible outcome.”

He said Google had not yet felt the economic impact of it, but added it was hard to say what would happen next.

“There is an equivalent scale problem in energy,” he told reporters after a speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club entitled “Where Would Google Drill?.” “I’m a computer scientist and computer scientists love scale problems. We like scale and replication and leverage in a technical way.”

Through its philanthropic arm Google.org, the company is backing start-ups designing wind, solar and geothermal technologies, which it hopes will eventually be cheaper than coal. Google invested $45 million in such companies this year.

Google itself is improving its servers and their buildings, identifying $5 million in building efficiency investments that will pay for themselves in two and a half years. New efficiency standards for computers could cut power consumption by the equivalent of 10 to 20 coal-fired plants by 2010, Google said.

Google’s energy plan calls for stricter building codes, a commitment to wind and solar tax credits that have lapsed in the past, and a price on carbon through cap-and-trade or tax.

Google recently partnered with General Electric Co to speed up development of grid technology. Echoing calls by both presidential candidates for an upgraded power grid, Google wants to see more smart meters and real-time pricing to let people see how much energy they use and what it costs them.

Schmidt, a business adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign, was discouraged by talk of “clean coal” among Republicans, but said generally of energy policy: “Regardless of who becomes president, there will be action on this front.”

Asked if he would ever enter politics, Schmidt told the Commonwealth Club meeting: “That is very flattering, but the answer is ‘hell no.’”

At the time of Google’s initial public offering in 2004, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin pledged employee time and about 1 percent of Google’s equity — 3 million shares — plus 1 percent of profits to philanthropy. In 2006, Google converted 300,000 shares into about $90 million to set up Google.org.

Technorati Tags: cleaner energy, google, philanthropy

From household solar panels to thermal generators big enough to power a town, sun power has enjoyed explosive growth around the world.

Everywhere, that is, except on the sun-drenched continent of Africa.

With an average daily dose of five-to-seven kilowatts per hour (kWh) for every square metre (10 square feet), Africa has more potential for producing energy from the sun than almost anywhere on Earth, with the possible exception of northern Australia or the Arabian peninsula.

Yet the continent accounts for only a miniscule percentage of the world’s solar energy output. And most of what it does generate is produced in one country, South Africa.

“In Africa, there is a growing awareness of the potential benefits of solar, especially as the conventional grid continues to prove unreliable. Lots of people are looking for alternatives,” said Lawrence Agbemabiese, a Paris-based energy expert at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

And the need for energy could hardly be more urgent: in sub-Saharan Africa barely one person out of four has access to grid electricity. And in the region’s rural areas, this falls to just a tenth.

At the micro scale, grassroots groups are pushing solar through simple, low-tech applications. One such example is the solar cooker, in which a polished concave dish focuses sunbeams onto a pot, slowly heating water.

But on a macro scale, solar power is almost untapped. Why so?

Most reasons boil down to money.

Solar panels, or photovoltaic systems, use semiconductors to generate electricity, and can be used for individual buildings or villages. Another solar source, but in a collective role, is solar thermal, which uses the sun to create steam that turns a turbine to generate electricity.

Both technologies are sprouting across wealthier economies, but only thanks to tax breaks and discounts that remain beyond the reach of the planet’s poorest continent.

“The photovoltaic boom in Europe and Japan depend on a very generous pricing structure. It is a policy found only in rich countries,” explained Yves Bruno Civel, head of France’s Renewable Energy Observatory, based in Paris.

“One has to be realistic: Africa will not be able to surf on the current wave. That will happen when economies of scale result in a drop in prices,” said Agbemabiese.

Beyond financial constraints, solar technologies suffer from an image problem in parts of Africa, because they usually operate on a small scale and in isolation.

Indeed, some rural areas continue to resist solar energy out of fear that it will preclude later access to national or regional electricity networks.

But there is a silver lining: in the same way that cell phones are a cost-efficient alternative to laying telephone lines, the very fact that solar panels can be installed in the remotest of regions can make them a more affordable solution than connecting to existing power grids.

There can be hidden costs of depending on a centralised source of energy, explained Agbemabiese.

For rural hospitals, for example, an eight-hour power cut by the electricity grid can destroy thousands of dollars’ worth of medicine, he said.

Some governments have initiated policies to promote use of solar energy at village level.

In west Africa, for example, Burkina Faso offers state-backed micro-credit loans, paid back over two or three years, that make it possible for a family to purchase a solar panel. Ghana is also looking at how to set up a system of financial incentives.

The continent is also making its first tentative steps towards large-scale solar generators big enough to power an entire region.

A “solar plan” sketched by the newly-minted Union for the Mediterranean — a grouping of European Union (EU) nations and non-EU countries — aims to create gargantuan thermodynamic generators in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

With a projected output of 100 gigawatts by 2050, a project initiated by Middle Eastern and North African nations called “Desertec” could not only help power large swathes of northern Africa, but parts of Europe as well via trans-Mediterranean cables.

One gigawatt is enough to power a city the size of San Francisco.

Concerns about soaring oil costs, dependence on Russian natural gas, and climate change have made some EU nations keen to push the project forward.

But sub-Saharan Africa — far from Europe, lacking infrastructure and in some places prone to chronic instability — will have a hard time attracting such investments, experts say.

Technorati Tags: environment, solar energy