Latest on climate change:

All that can be said with any degree of certainty is that the debate about climate change is far from over. Indeed it could be said that the debate is intensifying. On one side is the camp that is convinced that the climate is likely to warm dramatically in the future. This camp is in little doubt about what is causing this unprecedented warming. Man is the cause and it is only Man that can bring about the solution. (ie reduce excessive greenhouse gas emissions)

On the other side are those who remain in denial and justify their outrageous claims to do nothing on outright red herrings. One day it is the cycle city of sunspot activity, the next day it is something else. (eg a carbon tax will cost too much, or ‘we’ simply can’t afford it)
For those who have the most to loose, it is normal to involve lobbyists to back up their claims. These lobbyists like to quote scientists or ‘reputable people’ to justify their biases. The latest idea is to utilise historical temperature records to suggest if anything, ‘the planet should be cooling’. These same historic records indicate that the planet has experienced average temperature fluctuations of greater than 4c in the past at regular intervals. In this context, whatever is likely to happen in the future could be seen as 100% normal and without any possible influence from Man.

http://planetearth8.webs.com/videostowatch.htm

Car of the future

Today is the day that I saw the most irresponsible false hope that I have seen for some time on Television news. BMW no less have a new prototype car of the future. This car has quick acceleration, power and is green to run. Bold statements are being made that fossil fuels will quickly become a relic in the future as this new prototype vision comes true sometime in 2012.

I certainly hope so; yet a mere hint of capitalist pragmatism should be thrown in. What incentives are going to be used to encourage people to ditch their current modes of transport: After all; Not everyone takes climate change or peak oil seriously. Why upgrade when you don’t really need to; or like what you already have?

Of course the major flaw in all this wishful thinking is simply this. What working class person has the spare cash to upgrade to such modern technology in today’s economic climate?
Only the rich, famous and maybe all those trendy politicians and businessmen; I fear.

The world is at a knife edge

Now is the time to write what I really think. I just don’t know anymore. The denial that the world has a problem that cannot be solved through economics is epidemic. There is little that I can do about that. It is not as though I have not tried to come up with some imperfect solutions. I am probably just ahead of my time. Instead I will just need to learn patience. A time will come when the solution becomes obvious…

Until then the inevitable will come to be. The global economy will move along from one crisis to another. Who knows; perhaps the worst is behind us and we can all live up to our combined potential?

And then again, maybe not. The world is at a knife edge. It could go either way from here. The problems in Greece are miniscule to the problems that an unprecedented rate of climate change will bring. We all need to wise up now before it is too late. After all; like it or not but we are all in this mess together. The way out of this mess is obvious. However there will need to be some changes politically. For example it may be time that we trusted what the UN stands for a bit more and maybe if we all voted more green minded. The status quo is simply not living up to my expectations.

Greece Crisis and how it impacts the OECD.

It is time that I come out of the closet. Yep, I am a barely disguised revolutionary not that I care much anymore. Events are taking place that are causing more than a few to ponder. Greece is not the only country that has been living beyond its means. What does this mean?

It means that when things go wrong and you blame your government; you should really be blaming yourself. It is election year here in New Zealand. Who are you going to vote for?

I know that I am biased, but maybe the Green party leaders had it right all along. There is more to life than just working. There is also spending time with your family and exploring the great outdoors…I could go on; but suffice is quite straightforward. Money is not real. Conservation and Sustainability is.

Global Warming

It is the economic picture which is more worrying if you live in the OECD and are a climate change denier. Many countries including New Zealand have grown their economies at the expense of foreign debt. (both private and public) Now that the global economy is continuing to limp along; this outstanding and ongoing debt is proving to be a major problem.

To think for a moment that politics can overturn the realities of climate change would be a major mistake to make. The unpalatable truth for someone in my perspective is simply this. Climate change is unable to be taken seriously because to take it seriously would result in detrimental economic consequences that no-body could afford right now. I mean the US should be shouting loud and clear about closing down coal burning power stations until carbon sequestration technology is perfected.

This higher voice will never happen now since the only feasible alternative is nuclear energy. After the recent accident in Japan, nuclear energy is seen as unsafe. We will continue to kid ourselves that we can keep up with electricity demand with renewable energies and forget what happens on a cloudy day or when the wind isn’t blowing in the middle of summer. It seems obvious that coal powered power stations will proliferate as the best backup energy plan. The increasing demand for electricity in China and elsewhere is relentless. New power stations are added on line on a weekly basis and many of these are coal fired.

It goes without saying that this all paints an ominous picture of the future. What was already a bad situation from a greenhouse gas perspective is just likely to get even worse. Methane gas is up to 20x more potent that CO2, but the half life of methane is much shorter. 20 years later in the atmosphere and methane all but disappears as a major contributor to greenhouse gases. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for CO2. Its half life is 5x longer.

The planet is now locked into a unpredictable climate situation for the next 100 years plus, and the chances of a sudden spike in methane emissions at some point during that period seems inevitable. Increasing levels of greenhouse gases can only increase upwards and beyond 450 from here, well past the safe limits of 350 passed some time ago that would prevent any tipping point. The planet is warming and there is absolutely nothing that man can now do about this phenomenon. It is simply too little and far too late.

As the planet warms, the climate will change and the weather will become more and more unpredictable. Weather patterns are already shifting and the shift of weather patterns is playing havoc with some farmers and cities who have to make do with much less water. Sure such events have occurred many times in the past. After all - droughts do occur from time to time. Yet some of the draughts that we are experiencing right now are record breaking. Then there are the record rains and snows that result in overflowing rivers. The devastation caused is vast and entire season’s crops are ruined. Tens of thousands of homes and businesses become overwhelmed with water. These events can have a major hit on a countries GDP.

No-body is denying that such dramatic climate events occur, the discussion is more about frequency. A once in a hundred year event that occurs twice in a few years is not something to be trifled with. How on earth are insurance companies going to be able to cope for starters?

The main area of concern has more to do with government and state planning. How are governments going to pay for the increasing number of natural and financial disasters when they are already struggling to pay off previous ones? The quick answer is they can’t. Something is going to give and that something has a lot to do with everyone’s standard of living in the OECD. We are all going to have to make do with much less. (and some more than others)

To be fair, OECD governments have a lot on their plates at the moment. The latest recession now has a name. It is called the great recession. This all means that the first “real” oil shortage has left chaos in its wake economically. As the price of oil went up in 2008, more and more people had less expendable income. They spent less and as they spent less; demand for all manner of goods and services fell including oil. The first cracks starting to appear in America where the boom market in sub prime mortgages had started to take a hit. More than a few banks and financial institutions came under increasing pressure to stay afloat as property prices started to fall dramatically. Some needed to be bailed out, some were left to fail.

Here in New Zealand, our government does not have the luxury of being the world’s biggest economy and therefore can not print money at will. The only option available to our government is to reign in our government debt by balancing the budget. While our government debt as a % of GDP is manageable; this clearly comes at the expense of private debt which is well out of control. The Christchurch earthquake was the last thing our government needed at this delicate time. The current budget deficit has now blown out to scary levels. This “one” off event will set New Zealand back by several years no matter what spin the politicians give it as boosting economic growth in the recovery mode.

UN fights for freedoms of democracy

The United States, France, Britain, Canada and Italy began attacks on targets designed to cripple Muammar Gaddafi's air defenses as the West tries to force the Libyan leader from power. At least some Arab nations are expected to join the coalition.



Who can say for sure what will happen from here. Colonel Gaddafi arrogance knows no bounds.
At the same time this conflict is not anywhere near as clear cut as the western forces would like to portray. The rebels involved with this revolution may not all be sugar coated. And it is important to understand that although Gaddafi may have few supporters in the west; this is not necessarily the case in Libya. Do the rebels really speak for all the people in Libya or simply a rebellious minority? Is the future the rebels envisage going to result in anything better than the status quo of yesteryear which at least resulted in political stability?

After all; a revolution is always going to pit opposing forces against one another. It is fraught with risk and danger. Libya was not ever fated to be another Tunisia or Egypt.

The west is now in an unenviable position where it has taken sides in a conflict that was never going to be straightforward. Although I am hesitant to criticize the UN from taking actions that were morally correct under the circumstances; interfering in a sovereign states affairs is unacceptable unless you intend to apply the some rules of engagement elsewhere.

This is clearly not the case. It would appear that the UN conveniently choses to ignore similar outrageous government attempts to control rebels in other countries. These countries include Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. I dare not mention Tibet or Tiananmen Square of yore because of political sensitivity by the Chinese over these types of issues.

Still on the bright side; any tyrant who opens fires on his own people when they protest for democracy is not a tyrant to mess with. All credit to the UN for standing up for the rights of at least some civilians and not thinking too much about the likely consequences of such actions. These consequences may involve escalating the world into a war of democracy against theocracy. (or more likely the forces of democracy against monarchy, dictators and undemocratic party systems)

major earthquake

A major earthquake in the world’s third biggest economy has put at risk the fragile global economic recovery. The world’s fifth biggest earthquake on record (9.0) has struck off the coast of Japan resulting in a major tsunami with waves of water 10 meters high heading towards the Japanese shore. Vast areas of land are flooded with unbelievable quantities of sea water heading 10 km inland causing total devastation and a great loss of life. The only saviour was that Japan is the most earthquake prepared nation in the world.
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"UPDATE" 3 MONTHS LATER...
Alas the same does not go for nuclear power stations. Turns out they were not earthquake proof.
"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

Japan's 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.

"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"

Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.

"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."

Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive "hot spots" around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.

"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."

Radiation monitors for children

Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.

TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.

In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.

The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.

"There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to children," Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.

Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, but added: "There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese government's 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well."

Gundersen points out that far more radiation has been released than has been reported.

"They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this," he said. "The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."

According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles".

"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."

Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.

The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer.

"These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant," he explained, "One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April."

Blame the US?

In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear reactors over the next decade. In a referendum vote this Monday, 95 per cent of Italians voted in favour of blocking a nuclear power revival in their country. A recent newspaper poll in Japan shows nearly three-quarters of respondents favour a phase-out of nuclear power in Japan.

Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?

Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in Japan.
He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the fact that most of them are of US design.

"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes," Dr Sawada told Al Jazeera. "I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan."

Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US, something Dr Sawada feels is also a large component of the problem.

"Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use," he explained. "The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese government not use this technology yet, but the government accepted to use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power stations, and was thus subjected to US government policy."

As a 13-year-old, Dr Sawada experienced the US nuclear attack against Japan from his home, situated just 1400 metres from the hypocentre of the Hiroshima bomb.

"I think the Fukushima accident has caused the Japanese people to abandon the myth that nuclear power stations are safe," he said. "Now the opinions of the Japanese people have rapidly changed. Well beyond half the population believes Japan should move towards natural electricity."

A problem of infinite proportions

Dr Ramana expects the plant reactors and fuel cores to be cooled enough for a shutdown within two years.
"But it is going to take a very long time before the fuel can be removed from the reactor," he added. "Dealing with the cracking and compromised structure and dealing with radiation in the area will take several years, there's no question about that."

Dr Sawada is not as clear about how long a cold shutdown could take, and said the problem will be "the effects from caesium-137 that remains in the soil and the polluted water around the power station and underground. It will take a year, or more time, to deal with this".

Gundersen pointed out that the units are still leaking radiation.

"They are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount of radioactive liquid," he said. "It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids."

Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how to cool two of the units.

"Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple," he said. "After the earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you're at a point where, if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They've not figured out how to cool units three and four."

Gundersen's assessment of solving this crisis is grim.

"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor."

Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely.

"Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations," he explained. "To do otherwise is simply an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing."

Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan.

"So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water," Gundersen said. "We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come."

Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen's assessment.

"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."

Follow Dahr Jamail on Twitter: @DahrJamail


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In the normal cause of events, disasters such as this can be a boon to local economies in the medium term. (assuming finance is available to recover) The risk is that finance may not be forthcoming. Already natural disasters this year are in the tens of billions of dollars. It is getting to the point where the number of natural disasters begins to overwhelm the ability of insurance companies and re-insurance companies to pay. At the very least insurance companies will need to raise premiums substantially or dramatically reduce insurance cover going forward to stay afloat. This will effectively cut off millions of people from insurance protection against calamities.

When this occurs, the burden falls on governments to pay out when disasters occur. All well and fine assuming governments are either in surplus or able to borrow money from someone. However the financial situation of many governments is hardly what you would call “well and fine”. Japan is in serious financial difficulty with government debt levels already approaching 200% of GDP; the highest level in the OECD. (and not too far behind Zimbabwe)

We appear to be going through a period of incredible natural turmoil in regards to both climate related events and the frequency and intensity of earthquakes. I mean tsunamis were almost unheard of for baby boomers such as myself until not so long ago. It would take a brave man to say that what we are witnessing today is a temporary phenomenon. This begs the question: How on earth is the world going to pay for more natural disasters such as this going forward?

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