news20100115jt

[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

[NATIONAL NEWS]
Friday, Jan. 15, 2010
Dam bidders said needed Ozawa's OK
Plot thickens in Kajima connection
Kyodo News

General contractor Kajima Corp. told a smaller construction company that it needed consent from the office of Democratic Party of Japan kingpin Ichiro Ozawa to become a subcontractor for a government dam project in Iwate Prefecture in 2004, sources said Thursday.

Prosecutors, who Wednesday searched the offices of Ozawa, now DPJ secretary general, and Kajima as well as other locations over accounting irregularities allegedly handled by a former Ozawa secretary, suspect Mizutani Construction Co. donated funds to Ozawa to gain the necessary consent, dubbed the "voice from heaven," the sources said.

Mizutani, based in Kuwana, Mie Prefecture, is taking part as a subcontractor in a project to build the dam's main structure in Iwate's Oshu City in Ozawa's home district. The project was awarded to a Kajima-led joint venture in October 2004.

The prosecutors appear to have been given similar explanations by Mizutani officials during voluntary questioning earlier this month.

Kajima declined comment because the investigation is still under way.

The Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office opened the criminal investigation Wednesday on suspicion DPJ lawmaker Tomohiro Ishikawa, who was Ozawa's private secretary in charge of clerical work at his fund management body Rikuzankai at the time, failed to report 400 million in income in the body's funding report in 2004.

Ishikawa, 36, has told the prosecutors in voluntary questioning that he received the money as loans from Ozawa in early October 2004 and used it for Rikuzankai to buy land. The body reportedly bought a piece of land in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, for about 340 million on Oct. 29, 2004.

The Mizutani officials have also told the prosecutors that the firm handed 50 million in cash to Ishikawa in October 2004 with the aim of taking part in the dam project, according to the sources.

The prosecutors' raids Wednesday were based on the suspicion that the 50 million was part of the funds used for Rikuzankai's land purchase.

In telling Mizutani to "kindly ask for and gain the understanding" of Ozawa's office to be a subcontractor, Kajima cited the possibility that even if it wanted to use Mizutani, the office would see that a different firm got the work, the sources said.

Prosecutors argued during the trial of Ozawa's government-paid secretary, Takanori Okubo, 48, who is charged with accounting irregularities over alleged illegal donations from Nishimatsu Construction Co., that Ozawa's office issued the "voice from heaven" in determining the winners of local public works projects.

While Kajima played the central role in rigging bids for public works in the Tohoku region, Ozawa's office came to have decisive clout from the 1980s in deciding the contractors in Iwate Prefecture, with Kajima arranging bid-rigging after referring to the office, according to the prosecutors' arguments.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said Thursday he has no intention of replacing Ozawa.

Hatoyama, who is the DPJ president, also said he will try his best to minimize the impact of the development on the upcoming regular Diet session that begins Monday.

With regard to criticism that Ozawa has not fulfilled his duty of accountability over the allegations, the prime minister defended the ruling party kingpin, claiming Ozawa has refrained from speaking about the case because prosecutors are still investigating.

"We have come all the way here under the leadership involving Secretary General Ozawa," Hatoyama said.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Friday, Jan. 15, 2010
Prices plunged by record 5.3% in '09
Kyodo News

Wholesale prices fell by a record 5.3 percent in 2009, the largest drop since comparable data became available in 1961, the Bank of Japan said Thursday.

The results of the preliminary report underscore how falling energy costs and sluggish demand have solidified deflation's effect on the economy during the global economic slump.

The BOJ's corporate goods price index stood at 103.0 against the 2005 base of 100, marking its first fall in six years. The 5.3 percent drop is a sharp reversal from the 4.6 percent rise logged in 2008. The previous record was set in 1986, when prices plunged 4.7 percent on lower oil prices and the yen's sharp jump against the dollar following the 1985 Plaza Accord on foreign-exchange rates.

Naokazu Koshimizu, economist at Nomura Securities Co., said the report shows deflation is dragging down the economy despite signs of improvement.

"Although the economy is picking up, production has yet to fully recover and companies still have excesses in supply capacity and employment," he said. "Unless they correct the excessiveness or consumer demand grows sharply, deflationary pressure should continue."

The government reported deflation's return in November.

Contributing the most to price falls in 2009 was oil prices, which plunged after climbing crazily the previous year. Prices were also cut over a wide range of products, such as steel and other raw materials, as companies reduced production and capital investment to cope with sluggish demand amid a global credit crunch.

Oil and coal prices plunged 33.9 percent, in contrast with the 22.8 percent jump the previous year. Prices of nonferrous metal products fell 22.4 percent, chemical products fell 9.3 percent. Prices of electronics components and information and communication devices also declined.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Friday, Jan. 15, 2010
Futenma row may trigger 'Japan passing': experts
Kyodo News

Experts on Japan-U.S. relations are concerned that prolonging the bilateral row over the U.S. Futenma airfield in Okinawa may lead to a situation akin to "Japan passing."

"I think there is a serious danger the current situation will contribute to Japan passing," Kent Calder, director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said at a symposium Tuesday sponsored by Kyodo News and SAIS. The theme of the symposium was "Japan-U.S.: New Governments and New Relations."

Another panelist, Michael Auslin, director of Japan studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, said he feels there is a "strong sense of frustration" among the many U.S. officials dealing with the issue.

But Auslin said such frustration is "good" in a sense, because he thinks it is a reflection of the "continuing importance that is placed on the alliance and on the relationship."

"My concern is that the longer the base issue drags on unresolved . . . it is a natural tendency for the diplomats in Washington to devote less time to it. If they are not getting a return on the time that they are investing, they will simply start putting their energies and their focus elsewhere. That may be elsewhere in Asia, it may be elsewhere around the world," he said.

Apparently to allay concerns over strained bilateral ties, State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Koichi Takemasa stressed in a keynote speech at the beginning of the event: "The cornerstone of Japan's foreign policy is the Japan-U.S. alliance. That will not change even after a change of government."

Parliamentary Defense Secretary Akihisa Nagashima, meanwhile, said Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's promise to settle the issue of where to relocate U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma by May is "firm" and he will work hard to resolve it.

The Futenma issue has emerged as a major sticking point ever since Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan ousted the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party from power last year with a pledge to seek what it calls "more equal" ties with the United States.

news20100115gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Climate change]
Next few weeks vital for Copenhagen accord, says US climate change envoy
> Obama administration to work closely on formal details
> US will not give full ownership of accord to UN
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 January 2010 19.24 GMT

The next few weeks will be critical in deciding whether the Copenhagen accord succeeds in halting global warming, America's top climate change envoy said today.

"We have an accord that is lumbering down the runway, and we need it to get enough speed so it can take off," Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, told an investor meeting at the United Nations in his first public remarks after the Copenhagen summit. "We need to get this up and running."

He said the next year would be critical in fleshing out the details of an accord that - because of the chaos and acrimony surrounding the talks - was only 12 paragraphs long. The first test arrives on 31 January when industrialised countries and the major developing nations make their formal commitments to act on carbon emissions.

Stern said the Obama administration would be working with other countries to try and agree on the institutional structures that will turn the goals of the accord into reality. These include the establishment of a $100bn a year climate fund, action to protect the world's forests, and monitoring of countries' action plans.

He said the accord - though weak - remained the best path to an international treaty that would have the full weight of international law. But, like his deputy Jonathan Pershing, Stern indicated the US would not yield full ownership of the negotiation process to the United Nations.

"Our goal is very simply to design a regime that is going to have the capability to actually help us solve the problem," he said. "One of the frustrations in dealing on the international level is that a lot of focus can be paid to debating whether a particular idea is consistent or not consistent with such-and-such an article of a previous agreement. A lot of attention can be paid to proposals or positions that are not very well tethered to reality. We all need to be focused on setting up a structure, and setting up a regime that can solve this problem."

The frustration of the US and other developed nations with the UN process became clear well ahead of Copenhagen. In the weeks ahead of the summit, the Danes, together with a group of about 30 countries began trying to negotiate a more limited agreement - outside the scope of the UN.

That effort - exposed in the first days of the summit by the Danish text leaked to the Guardian - ultimately backfired, Stern admitted. "That led to a huge uproar, and accusations against the Danish presidency that they had been conducting a secret effort without consulting others," he said. "This had the intent and certainly the effect of undermining the credibility of Denmark."

However, Stern also indicated that the Obama administration had come to power a year ago with doubts about yielding the primary control of climate change negotiations to the UN. "We came in with quite a strong view that we needed to set up a stronger group of countries as well as operating in the larger multilateral arena," he said. "For that reason we took the set of countries that President Bush had initiated, rechristened it and gave it a different mission."

In Stern's view, the summit had already been compromised by a lack of real progress of negotiations conducted within the formal UN structure. "The reality is that the formal negotiating process simply had not made significant progress on the key issues", including setting emissions targets, mobilising a climate fund, technology transfer, and transparency, he said.

He echoed Pershing, , who yesterday suggested the summit had been perilously close to failure in its final hours. "We came within a hair's breadth of collapse," Stern said.


[Environment > Climate change]
Arctic permafrost leaking methane at record levels, figures show
Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame
David Adam, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 January 2010 19.00 GMT Article history

Scientists have recorded a massive spike in the amount of a powerful greenhouse gas seeping from Arctic permafrost, in a discovery that highlights the risks of a dangerous climate tipping point.

Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame.

The discovery follows a string of reports from the region in recent years that previously frozen boggy soils are melting and releasing methane in greater quantities. Such Arctic soils currently lock away billions of tonnes of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, leading some scientists to describe melting permafrost as a ticking time bomb that could overwhelm efforts to tackle climate change.

They fear the warming caused by increased methane emissions will itself release yet more methane and lock the region into a destructive cycle that forces temperatures to rise faster than predicted.

Paul Palmer, a scientist at Edinburgh University who worked on the new study, said: "High latitude wetlands are currently only a small source of methane but for these emissions to increase by a third in just five years is very significant. It shows that even a relatively small amount of warming can cause a large increase in the amount of methane emissions."

Global warming is occuring twice as fast in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth. Some regions have already warmed by 2.5C, and temperatures there are projected to increase by more than 10C by 2100 if carbon emissions continue to rise at current rates.

Palmer said: "This study does not show the Arctic has passed a tipping point, but it should open people's eyes. It shows there is a positive feedback and that higher temperatures bring higher emissions and faster warming."

The change in the Arctic is enough to explain a recent increase in global methane levels in the atmosphere, he said. Global levels have risen steadily since 2007, after a decade or so holding steady.

The new study, published in the journal Science, shows that methane emissions from the Arctic increased by 31% from 2003-07. The increase represents about 1m extra tonnes of methane each year. Palmer cautioned that the five-year increase was too short to call a definitive trend.

The findings are part of a wider study of methane emissions from global wetlands, such as paddy fields, marshes and bogs. To identify where methane was released, the researchers combined methane levels in the atmosphere with surface temperature changes. They did not measure methane emissions directly, but used satellite measurements of variations in groundwater depth, which alter the way bacteria break down organic matter to release or consume methane.

They found that just over half of all methane emissions came from the tropics, with some 20m tonnes released from the Amazon river basin each year, and 26m tonnes from the Congo basin. Rice paddy fields across China and south and south-east Asia produced just under one-third of global methane, some 33m tonnes. Just 2% of global methane comes from Arctic latitudes, the study found, though the region showed the largest increases. The 31% rise in methane emissions there from 2003-07 was enough to help lift the global average increase to 7%.

Palmer said: "Our study reinforces the idea that satellites can pinpoint changes in the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from a particular place on earth. This opens the door to quantifying greenhouse gas emissions made from a variety of natural and man-made sources."

Palmer said it was a "disgrace" that so few satellites were launched to monitor levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. He said it was unclear whether the team would be able to continue the methane monitoring in future. The pair of satellites used to analyse water, known as Grace, are already over their expected mission life time, while a European version launched last year, called Goce, is scheduled to fly for less than two years.

The new study follows repeated warnings that even modest levels of global warming could trigger huge increases in methane release from permafrost. Phillipe Ciais, a researcher with the Laboratory for Climate Sciences and the Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, told a scientific meeting in Copenhagen last March that billions of tonnes could be released by just a 2C average global rise.

More on methane

While carbon dioxide gets most of the attention in the global warming debate, methane is pound-for-pound a more potent greenhouse gas, capable of trapping some 20 times more heat than CO2. Although methane is present in much lower quantities in the atmosphere, its potency makes it responsible for about one-fifth of man-made warming.

The gas is found in natural gas deposits and is generated naturally by bacteria that break down organic matter, such as in the guts of farm animal. About two-thirds of global methane comes from man-made sources, and levels have more than doubled since the industrial revolution.

Unlike carbon dioxide, methane lasts only a decade or so in the atmosphere, which has led some experts to call for greater attention to curbs on its production. Reductions in methane emissions could bring faster results in the fight against climate change, they say.

news20100115gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > World news > Ethiopia]
Ethiopia – country of the silver sickle – offers land dirt cheap to farming giants
Addis Ababa sells vast fertile swaths to international companies in effort to introduce large-scale commercial agriculture
Xan Rice in Bako
The Guardian, Friday 15 January 2010 Article history

This is a country of the bent back and the silver sickle, where virtually all the crops have felt the calloused fingers of the peasant farmer working his tiny parcel of state-owned land. The ox pulls the plough and the donkey the cart, and fertiliser counts as agricultural technology.

Chugging into this picture on a bright green John Deere tractor came Hanumantha Rao, a former sugarcane farmer from India who is at the forefront of a revolution sweeping through Ethiopian farming. He hurried up to a hilltop on his company's farm in Bako, four hours' drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, and swept out an arm to indicate the land he has leased from the government: 11,000 hectares to grow rice, maize and oil palms.

In the fields below, boreholes were being sunk and roads graded. An airstrip will soon allow for a crop-spraying plane. Besides the new tractor Rao had been riding on that morning, there were 30 more on site. That was not many, he insisted, and neither was the farm especially large.

Further west in Gambella, Karuturi Global, the listed Indian horticulture company that employs Rao, is bringing in 1,000 new tractors to work the 300,000 hectares it has leased – making it one of the biggest farms in the Horn of Africa, if not the continent. "It is 120 kilometres [75 miles] wide," Rao said proudly. "Three hours to cross by Jeep."

Ethiopia's great land lease project is moved swiftly ahead. In an effort to introduce large-scale commercial farming to the country, the government is offering up vast chunks of fertile farmland to local and foreign investors at almost giveaway rates. By 2013, 3m hectares of idle land is expected to have been allotted – equivalent to more than one fifth of the current land under cultivation in the country.

The move is part of a wider trend that has seen other African and Asian countries seek to take advantage of high global demand and the cost of crops by offering agricultural land to foreign companies, private equity funds and governments, particularly those of import-dependent Gulf countries.

If done properly, the investments have the potential to increase local food availability and create badly needed jobs. If not – as was the case with the attempt by the South Korean firm Daewoo to lease half of Madagascar's arable land to grow corn for export in 2008, a deal many saw as 21st- century colonialism – they could prove disastrous.

In a food-insecure country such as Ethiopia, where several million people rely on food aid, the idea of offering fertile land to outsiders has raised concerns. But government officials point out that Ethiopia has vast reserves of underused land – 60m hectares of the country's 74m hectares suitable for agriculture is not cultivated – and insist no local farmers will be adversely affected. Esayas Kebede, investment support co-ordinator at the agriculture ministry, said that foreign companies were essential for the move from subsistence to commercial farming, a key part of the country's development strategy.

"There is no crop that won't grow in Ethiopia but we cannot produce quantity and quality. Why? It's a vicious cycle of the lack of capital and technology," he said. "So leasing land is a real opportunity for us."

So too for Karuturi. The Bangalore-based company, which is the world's largest grower of roses, has negotiated an extraordinarily good deal with the government. For its farm in Bako, Karuturi is paying no rent for six years and then only 135 birr (£6.50) per hectare per year for the remainder of the 50-year lease. In Gambella, a remote and sparsely populated region close to Sudan, the rent is only 15 birr per hectare (73p).

The company believes the potential for large profits is so great that it plans to invest nearly $1bn in its Ethiopian agricultural operations, according to managing director Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi. Within eight years, he hopes to be producing 3m tonnes of cereals – mostly maize and rice – a year on the Gambella farm, as well as palm oil and sugar. Some of the produce will be sold in Sudan and Kenya – where the company is in talks with the US Agency for International Development to build grain silos at a border town. Like all the foreign land investors in Ethiopia, the company is free to export as much of its produce as it likes, but Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi said most would be sold domestically, where there is a ready market.

"Ethiopia is a food importer and will continue to be for some time. With the high cost of transportation in Africa, it does not make sense for us to try to export beyond the region."

As with land, labour is also extremely cheap. The minimum wage in Ethiopia is about 8 birr (39p) a day. Karuturi, which hopes eventually to employ 20,000 people on its two farms, says it pays 10 birr (49p) a day and provides meals to its workers.

Rao, general manager of the Bako farm, said there was no shortage of locals desperate for jobs. "People here are very poor. They would work for 1 birr, and no one else pays more than 5 birr. So we are paying double."

Outside the farm gates, the feeling about Karuturi among peasant farmers was mixed. The company's 11,000 hectares were fallow before it arrived – the black clay soil is rich in nutrients but difficult to work without a mechanical plough – but some locals had grazed their cattle there and used to cross the farm to the nearest river, which is no longer possible.

Teresa Agassa, a 38-year-old man in gumboots who works a one-hectare plot, said it was good that some local people now had jobs – even if the wage was too small. But he spoke enviously of Karuturi's tractors.

"They're only for the company's benefit. Maybe there can also be benefits for us – but we will only know in the future."

Ethiopia's farming revolution

In the late 1970s Ethiopia's communist regime nationalised all land, and private ownership remains outlawed. The millions of small-scale farmers work under licence from the state, and most plots are one hectare or less, which has hampered efforts to improve food security. But the centralised tenure system has made it easy for the government to offer hundreds of idle farms to investors at cheap rates. A detailed database contains information on soil types, weather patterns, the nearest rivers, and suitable crops. The agriculture ministry is advertising 1.68 million hectares of land in the Benishangul-Gumuz, South Omo and Gambella regions. The greatest interest has come from India and Saudi Arabia, including Saudi Star Agricultural Development, which is growing 10,000 hectares of rice in Gambella. Firms from other Arab countries, and from China, Japan and the US have also expressed strong interest in leasing land.

news20100115gdn3

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Guardian Environment Network]
Get ready for seven-foot sea level rise as climate change melts ice sheets
The IPCC's 2007 report missed out the melting of the Greenland and West Anarctic ice sheets which would be the key drivers in dramatic sea level rises.
Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 January 2010 11.57 GMT Article history

The reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are balanced and comprehensive documents summarizing the impact of global warming on the planet. But they are not without imperfections, and one of the most notable was the analysis of future sea level rise contained in the latest report, issued in 2007.

Given the complexities of forecasting how much the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will contribute to increases in global sea level, the IPCC chose not to include these giant ice masses in their calculations, thus ignoring what is likely to be the most important source of sea level rise in the 21st century. Arguing that too little was understood about ice sheet collapse to construct a mathematical model upon which even a rough estimate could be based, the IPCC came up with sea level predictions using thermal expansion of the oceans and melting of mountain glaciers outside the poles. Its results were predictably conservative — a maximum of a two-foot rise this century — and were even a foot lower than an earlier IPCC report that factored in some melting of Greenland's ice sheet.

The IPCC's 2007 sea level calculations — widely recognized by the academic community as a critical flaw in the report — have caused confusion among many in the general public and the media and have created fodder for global warming skeptics. But there should be no confusion about the serious threat posed by rising sea levels, especially as evidence has mounted in the past two years of the accelerated pace of melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

Most climate scientists believe melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet will be one of the main drivers of sea level rise during this century.
The message for the world's leaders and decision makers is that sea level rise is real and is only going to get worse. Indeed, we make the case in our recent book, The Rising Sea, that governments and coastal managers should assume the inevitability of a seven-foot rise in sea level. This number is not a prediction. But we believe that seven feet is the most prudent, conservative long-term planning guideline for coastal cities and communities, especially for the siting of major infrastructure; a number of academic studies examining recent ice sheet dynamics have suggested that an increase of seven feet or more is not only possible, but likely. Certainly, no one should be expecting less than a three-foot rise in sea level this century.

In the 20th century, sea level rise was primarily due to thermal expansion of ocean water. Contributions of melting mountain glaciers and the large ice sheets were minor components. But most climate scientists now believe that the main drivers of sea level rise in the 21st century will be the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (a potential of a 16-foot rise if the entire sheet melts) and the Greenland Ice Sheet (a potential rise of 20 feet if the entire ice cap melts). The nature of the melting is non-linear and is difficult to predict.

Seeking to correct the IPCC's failure to come up with a comprehensive forecast for sea level increase, a number of state panels and government committees have produced sea level rise predictions that include an examination of melting ice sheets. For example, sea level rise panels in Rhode Island and Miami-Dade County have concluded that a minimum of a three- to five-foot sea level rise should be anticipated by 2100. A California report assumes a possible 4.6-foot rise by 2100, while the Dutch assume a 2.5-foot rise by 2050 in the design of their tidal gates.

Given the growing consensus about the major sea level rise on the way in the coming century or two, the continued development of many low-lying coastal areas — including much of the U.S. east coast — is foolhardy and irresponsible.

Rising seas will be on the front lines of the battle against changing climate during the next century. Our great concern is that as the infrastructure of major cities in the industrialized world becomes threatened, there will be few resources left to address the dramatic impacts that will be facing the citizens of the developing world.

The ramifications of a major sea level rise are massive. Agriculture will be disrupted, water supplies will be salinized, storms and flood waters will reach ever further inland, and millions of environmental refugees will be created — 15 million people live at or below three feet elevation in Bangladesh, for example. Governments, especially those in the developing world, will be disrupted, creating political instability.

The most vulnerable of all coastal environments are deltas of major rivers, including the Mekong, Irrawaddy, Niger, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Nile, and Mississippi. Here, land subsidence will combine with global sea level rise to create very high rates of what is known as "local, relative sea level rise." The rising seas will displace the vast majority of people in these delta regions. Adding insult to injury, in many parts of Asia the rice crop will be decimated by rising sea level — a three-foot sea level rise will eliminate half of the rice production in Vietnam — causing a food crisis coincident with the mass migration of people.

The Mississippi Delta is unique because it lies within a country with the financial resources to fight land loss. Nevertheless, we believe multibillion-dollar engineering and restoration efforts designed to preserve communities on the Mississippi Delta are doomed to failure, given the magnitude of relative sea level rise expected. Former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said in 2008 that it was an "ineluctable fact" that within the lifespan of some people alive today, "the vast majority of that land will be underwater." He also faulted federal officials for not developing migration plans for area residents and for not having the "honesty and compassion" to tell Louisiana residents the "truth": Someday, they will have to leave the delta. The city of New Orleans can probably be protected into the next century, but only at great expense and with little guarantee that future storms like hurricane Katrina will not inundate the city again.

Pacific and Indian Ocean atoll nations are already being abandoned because of the direct and indirect effects of sea level rise, such as saltwater intrusion into groundwater. In the Marshall Islands, some crops are being grown in abandoned 55-gallon oil drums because the ground is now too salty for planting. New Zealand is accepting, on a gradual basis, all of the inhabitants of the Tuvalu atolls. Inhabitants of Carteret Atoll have all moved to Papua, New Guinea. The forward-looking government of the Maldives recently held a cabinet meeting underwater to highlight the ultimate fate of their small island nation.

The world's major coastal cities will undoubtedly receive most of the attention as sea level rise threatens infrastructure. Miami tops the list of most endangered cities in the world, as measured by the value of property that would be threatened by a three-foot rise. This would flood all of Miami Beach and leave downtown Miami sitting as an island of water, disconnected from the rest of Florida. Other threatened U.S. cities include New York/Newark, New Orleans, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Tampa-St Petersburg, and San Francisco. Osaka/Kobe, Tokyo, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Nagoya are among the most threatened major cities outside of North America.

Preserving coastal cities will require huge public expenditures, leaving smaller coastal resort communities to fend for themselves. Manhattan, for example, is likely to beat out Nags Head, North Carolina for federal funds, a fact that recreational beach communities must recognize when planning a response to sea level rise.

Twelve percent of the world's open ocean shorelines are fronted by barrier islands, and a three-foot sea level rise will spell doom for development on most of them — save for those completely surrounded by massive seawalls.

Impacts in the United States, with a 3,500-mile long barrier island shoreline extending from Montauk Point on Long Island to the Mexican border, will be huge. The only way to preserve the barrier islands themselves will be to abandon them so that they may respond naturally to rising sea level. Yet, most coastal states continue to allow massive, irresponsible development of the low-lying coast.

Ironically, low-elevation Florida is probably the least prepared of all coastal states. Hundreds of miles of high rises line the state's shoreline, and more are built every year. The state pours subsidies into coastal development through state-run insurance and funding for coastal protection. If a portion of those funds were spent adapting to sea level rise rather than ignoring it, Florida might be ready to meet the challenge of the next century. Let's hope the state rises to the challenge.

CONTINUED ON newsgdn4

news20100115gdn4

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Guardian Environment Network]
Get ready for seven-foot sea level rise as climate change melts ice sheets
The IPCC's 2007 report missed out the melting of the Greenland and West Anarctic ice sheets which would be the key drivers in dramatic sea level rises.
Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 January 2010 11.57 GMT Article history

CONTINUED FROM newsgdn3

Despite the dire facts, the next century of rising sea level need not be an economic disaster. Thoughtful planning can lead to a measured retreat from vulnerable coastal lowlands. We recommend the following:

Immediately prohibit the construction of high-rise buildings and major infrastructure in areas vulnerable to future sea level rise. Buildings placed in future hazardous zones should be small and movable — or disposable.

Relocation of buildings and infrastructure should be a guiding philosophy. Instead of making major repairs on infrastructure such as bridges, water supply, and sewer and drainage systems, when major maintenance is needed, go the extra mile and place them out of reach of the sea. In our view, no new sewer and water lines should be introduced to zones that will be adversely affected by sea level rise in the next 50 years. Relocation of some beach buildings could be implemented after severe storms or with financial incentives.

Stop government assistance for oceanfront rebuilding. The guarantee of recovery is perhaps the biggest obstacle to a sensible response to sea level rise. The goal in the past has always been to restore conditions to what they were before a storm or flood. In the United States, hurricanes have become urban renewal programs. The replacement houses become larger and larger and even more costly to replace again in the future. Those who invest in vulnerable coastal areas need to assume responsibility for that decision. If you stay, you pay.

After years of reluctance, scientists and governments are now looking to adaptation measures as critical for confronting the consequences of climate change. And increasingly, plans are being developed to deal with rising seas, water shortages, spreading diseases, and other realities of a warming world.
Get the Corps off the shore. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, more or less by default, is the government agency in charge of much of the planning and the funding for the nation's response to sea level rise. It is an agency ill-suited to the job. Part of the problem is that the engineers' "we can fix it" mentality is the wrong mindset for a sensible approach to responding to changing sea level.

Local governments cannot be expected to take the lead. The problems created by sea level rise are international and national, not local, in scope. Local governments of coastal towns (understandably) follow the self-interests of coastal property owners and developers, so preservation of buildings and maintaining tax base is inevitably a very high priority. In addition, the resources needed to respond to sea level rise will be far beyond those available to local communities.

Responding to long-term sea level rise will pose unprecedented challenges to the international community. Economic and humanitarian disasters can be avoided, but only through wise, forward-looking planning. Tough decisions will need to be made regarding the allocation of resources and response to natural disasters. Let us hope that our political leadership can provide the bold vision and strong leadership that will be required to implement a reasoned response.


[Environment > Seal level]
British coastal cities threatened by rising sea 'must transform themselves'
Hull and Portsmouth could be dramatically remodelled, suggests report
Robert Booth
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 January 2010 Article history

Hull could be transformed into a Venice-like waterworld and Portsmouth into a south coast version of Amalfi, engineers and architects have claimed in a study of options for developing Britain's coastal cities in the face of rising sea levels.

The Institution of Civil Engineers and the Royal Institute of British Architects yesterday warned the future of cities including London, Bristol and Liverpool was at risk from seas which the Environment Agency predict could rise by as much as 1.9m by 2095 in the event of a dramatic melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

The report, Facing up to Rising Sea Levels. Retreat? Defence? Attack?, suggests swaths of Hull and Portsmouth's city centres could be allowed to flood over the next 100 years and large parts of the populations moved out.

In a model that explores managed retreat from the coast in some areas, Hull's historic city centre would be limited to an island reached by bridges and Venetian-style water taxis, while in Portsmouth large parts of Portsea island would be given back to the sea while new "hillside living" developments would be built on densely packed hillside terraces, akin to the towns of Italy's Amalfi coast. "The scenarios we have created are extreme, but it is an extreme threat we are facing," said Ruth Reed, Riba president. "Approximately 10 million people live in flood-risk areas in England and Wales, with 2.6m properties directly at risk of flooding."

Other options include building out into rising waters using piers and platforms to create new habitable space – a strategy known as "attack". In Hull this could involve floating disused oil rigs up the Humber and reusing them for offices, homes and university buildings, while in Portsmouth two-storey piers could be built with the lower tier used for traffic and the top tier used for pedestrian space.

Architect David West, one of the report's author's, admitted the proposals were "blue sky thinking" and uncosted, but said they had the potential to relieve pressure for housing on inland sites. "I think the concept of arriving at Hull as if you were arriving at Venice airport and taking a boat into the city is really exciting."

The proposals were met with scepticism in Portsmouth. "A retreating coastline in this area would have a significant detrimental impact on the internationally designated harbours," said Bret Davies, a coastal strategy manager at Portsmouth city council.

The Environment Agency's coastal policy adviser, Nick Hardiman, warned that extending into the sea was likely to be too expensive and structures were not likely to be sustainable.In the next financial year the Environment Agency will spend £570m on building and maintaining flood defences.

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

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Published online 14 January 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.11
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Parasitic wasps' DNA laid bare
Nasonia wasp genomes should improve agricultural biological control.
Brendan Borrell

Scientists have sequenced the genomes of three species of Nasonia, a tiny parasitic wasp that is increasingly being used by biologists as a model organism. The genomes will help with agricultural biological-control efforts, along with fundamental studies of development and genetics.

"The important thing is there has never been a natural enemy sequenced," says Kevin Hackett, head of biological control at the US Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland. "Conservatively, we get $20 billion in value from biological control in this country alone."

Nasonia females inject their eggs inside developing flies, leaving the young wasps to eat their way out. Studying Nasonia could help to improve the agricultural use of other wasps that behave in similar ways. Trichogramma, for example, is used to control pests on tomatoes, corn (maize) and apples.

The Nasonia genomes indicate that the wasps lack the genes required to synthesize certain amino acids, possibly owing to their exclusively carnivorous feeding habits. That finding could help researchers to develop artificial diets to rear wasps for large-scale pest-control efforts. "That would be an incredible breakthrough down the line," says Hackett.

Move aside, Drosophila

The Nasonia Genome Working Group, which includes 157 authors affiliated with 70 departments or institutions, came together in 2004 — shortly after the draft sequence of the honeybee was published — to push for the sequencing of a second hymenopteran through the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

But Nasonia is not just the 'lab rat' for parasitic wasp studies. John Werren, an evolutionary geneticist at the University in Rochester in New York and one of the leaders of the sequencing project, thinks that Nasonia will advance fundamental genetics research.

The three species can be bred to create hybrids, allowing researchers to identify species-specific genes involved in functions such as host selection. And, like other hymenopterans, male Nasonia are haploid — they have just one copy of the genome — which makes it easier to analyse the genome and to study gene interactions. Finally, the wasps have a key advantage over that laboratory workhorse, the Drosophila fly. RNA interference techniques must be applied cell by cell in Drosophila, whereas in Nasonia they can be applied to all tissue types in the animal, allowing the development of develop high-throughput assays of gene function.

"Until recently, many people were concentrated on flies," says developmental geneticist Claude Desplan of New York University. "Now, with more and more genome sequences available, researchers are using new systems such as Nasonia."

Focus on the ladies

The Nasonia genome, published this week in Science¹, has already provided some biological surprises. For instance, the wasp produces 79 candidate venom proteins, some of which are new to science. Unlike the honeybee, which uses its venoms for pain, the venoms in parasitic wasps are used to control the behaviour of the host for their eggs. These compounds may hold promise as drug candidates.

Curiously, the Nasonia genome contains gene regions originally derived from the Pox virus, and these were transferred from Wolbachia bacteria into the wasp genome. These genes express proteins during many different stages of the wasp's development, demonstrating the importance of horizontal gene transfer in animal evolution.

Richard Stouthamer, an entomologist at the University of California at Riverside, says that he is particularly excited by the possibility of uncovering genes for sex determination. "In biological control," he says, "you want to have more females because they are the ones that are going to go out and kill other insects."

References
1. The Nasonia Genome Working Group Science 327, 343-348 (2010). | Article | ChemPort |


[naturenews]
Published online 14 January 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.12
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Pollutants plucked from air with copper
Fortuitous catalyst discovery offers a new way to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Katharine Sanderson

{{Catalytic copper chemistry might one day help scrub the air of carbon dioxide}
Brand X}

In an accidental discovery, chemists have stumbled on a catalyst that strips only carbon dioxide from the air — ignoring oxygen — and converts it into a useful compound.

The copper-based compound is nowhere near being a practical air-scrubber for removing CO2 — not least because the catalyst takes hours to be recycled to its original state. But its innovative chemistry offers a faint hope that a catalyst could one day selectively and efficiently remove the greenhouse gas from the air, turning it into organic chemicals.

Many catalysts with a structure based around a metal centre — such as a copper atom — are able to grab CO2 from a pure stream of the gas. But when faced with air, they prefer to couple with the more abundant and more reactive oxygen. So the selectivity of the new compound is "completely unexpected", says Elisabeth Bouwman at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who led the team that discovered the catalyst. They publish their results in this week's Science¹.

A catalyst that strips CO2 instead of oxygen from the air is "definitely unusual, probably unprecedented", agrees Cliff Kubiak, an electrochemist from the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work.

Chance discovery

{{The structure of the copper compound, before it reduces carbon dioxide}
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Bouwman's team was investigating compounds that mimicked the activity of biological enzymes. Bouwman took the chemical shell off the nickel centre of one such mimic, and tried wrapping it around copper for comparison. This structure produced a yellow solution, which turned green-blue after sitting in the open air for a few days.

Analysis of the green-blue product showed that it contains a segment called oxalate — made of two CO2 molecules — which form a bridge linking two copper atoms together. This fragment could occur only if CO2, not oxygen, had oxidized the copper compound.

Bouwman says that she doesn't know why the copper complex prefers CO2 to oxygen, but it could be because the oxalate bridge within the molecular structure of the green-blue product is extremely stable.

Back to square one

But the compound doesn't just grab CO2: with a little input of electrical energy, it also acts as a catalyst. The copper complex can be recycled and returned to its low oxidation state, and the oxalate can be pulled off the molecule.

In an electrochemical cell, Bouwman could rip away the oxalate from the copper's grasp by adding lithium ions. The bare copper complex left behind is returned to its original state thanks to an electrode — this adds electrons that the copper is missing after it loses its oxalate fragment.

The cell requires a small amount of electrical energy — 0.03 volts — to drive this process. But this is much lower, for example, than the 2 volts needed to add an electron to CO2 at an electrode (an alternative way of making dissolved CO2 reactive so that it forms useful chemicals).

Once stripped off the catalyst, the oxalate salt can also form the basis of several chemicals that have practical applications. These include oxalic acid — commonly used in many laboratories and in household products such as rust-proofing treatments — and, after chemical conversion, ethylene glycol, which is used as an antifreeze in cars and as a building block for chemical synthesis.

Neat, but impractical

Still, the system is far from being a practical method of cleaning CO2 from the air to combat global warming. "The efficiency of the compound is not good enough," says Bouwman. So far her team has cycled the system just six times in seven hours — and that rate is only achieved in pure CO2 in the laboratory, not in air. An efficient catalyst needs to be capable of tens of thousands of cycles an hour, Bouwman says.

"It is certainly elegant chemistry," says Fraser Armstrong, a chemist from the University of Oxford, UK. But he agrees that the conversion rates are too low to be of use for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

By contrast, large-scale systems to remove CO2 from air — if they ever become practical or affordable — are much more likely to rely on physical membranes that suck in the gas selectively, or on sodium hydroxide scrubbers that chemically trap the gas but that require large amounts of energy to regenerate. Both of these systems — some of which are approaching commercial reality, albeit expensive — simply concentrate CO2 rather than converting it into a useful chemical as Bouwman's electrocatalytic concept does.

Meanwhile, Bouwman has returned to her enzyme studies. But she continues to investigate her chance discovery, wondering if changes in the chemical side groups of the copper molecule might improve the catalyst's efficiency.

References
1. Angamuthu, R., Byers, P., Lutz, M., Spek, A. L. & Bouwman, E. Science 327, 313-315 (2010).