news20100302gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Hacked climate science emails]
US Senate's top climate sceptic accused of waging 'McCarthyite witch-hunt'

James Inhofe calls for criminal investigation of climate scientists as senators prepare proposal that would ditch cap and trade
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 March 2010 17.14 GMT Article history

The US Congress's most ardent global warming sceptic is being accused of turning the row over climate science into a McCarthyite witch-hunt by calling for a criminal investigation of scientists.

Climate scientists say Senator James Inhofe's call for a criminal investigation into American as well as British scientists who worked on the UN climate body's report or had communications with East Anglia's climate research unit represents an attempt to silence debate on the eve of new proposals for a climate change law.

Inhofe's document ends by naming 17 "key players" in the controversy about CRU's stolen emails, including the Britons Phil Jones and Keith Briffa.

"I think this is like a drag net, just to try and catch everyone whose name happens to be on this list. It's guilt by association and I thought those days were over 50 years ago," said Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who is on the list of 17 scientists. "It looks like a McCarthyite tactic: pull in anyone who had anything to do with anyone because they happened to converse with some by email, and threaten them with criminal activity."

Inhofe is also accused of further fuelling a spike in hate mail and politically motivated freedom of information requests in the three months since the emails of climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

Rick Piltz, a former official in the US government climate science programme who now runs the Climate Science Watch website, said Inhofe and others were getting in the way of scientific work. "Scientists who are working in federal labs are being subjected to inquisitions coming from Congress," he said. "There is no question that this is an orchestrated campaign to intimidate scientists."

Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University who is on Inhofe's list of 17, said that he had seen a sharp rise in hostile email since November.

"Some of the emails make thinly veiled threats of violence against me and even my family, and law enforcement authorities have been made aware of the matter," he told the Guardian.

He said the attacks appeared to be a co-ordinated effort. "Some of them look cut-and-paste."

A university investigation largely cleared Mann of misconduct for his connection to the East Anglia controversy. However, a rightwing group in Pennsylvania are demanding further action.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa's Goddard Institute who is also on the list of 17, said he had seen an increase in freedom of information act requests. "In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight," he said. "These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information."

He said Inhofe's call for a criminal investigation created an atmosphere of intimidation. "The idea very clearly is to let it be known that should you be a scientist who speaks out in public then you will be intimidated, you will be harassed, and you will be threatened," he said. "The idea very clearly is to put a chilling effect on scientists speaking out in public and to tell others to keep their heads down. That kind of intimidation is very reminiscent of other periods in US history where people abused their position."

Other scientists on Inhofe's list of 17 admitted they were disturbed by the threat of criminal prosecution.

"I am worried about it, I have to say," said Raymond Bradley, director of the climate science research centre at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is also on the list of 17. "You can understand that this powerful person is using the power of his office to intimidate people and to harass people and you wonder whether you should have legal counsel. It is a very intimidating thing and that is the point."

Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican on the Senate's environment and public works committee, released a document last week suggesting scientists be investigated for breaking three laws and four government regulations.

The document, produced by members of Inhofe's staff, recycles now familiar sceptic arguments about the stolen emails from East Anglia and the mistakes in the IPCC report.

But climate scientists say the report takes the campaign to a new level by threatening criminal prosecution. The report calls for the inspector generals of all US government agencies touching on the environment to investigate the scientists as a first step to possible prosecution.

"The minority staff of the Senate committee on environment and public works believe the scientists involved violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws," the report says.

A spokesman for Inhofe rejected the charges of a witch-hunt. But he said a criminal investigation was warranted and that it should not necessarily be limited to the 17 "key players".

"We are not saying that there are 17 scientists we should be calling criminals," said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Inhofe. "I'm not putting a number on 17."

He added: "The bottom line though is that there was manipulation of data and it appears that they violated a law." "In terms of what these email demonstrate, there are possible criminal violations here with FoIA and other laws."

Senate leaders are expected to release new proposals for action on climate change as early as this week. Environmentalists fear the proposal, crafted by a troika of Democratic, Republican, and Independent senators, would weaken a climate change bill passed by the house last June.

The Washington Post reported at the weekend that the senators could scrap a cap-and-trade bill that was the core of the house bill and bring in more limited measures.

news20100302gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Conservation]
Chinese authorities block reporting of wild Siberian tiger's death

First Siberian tiger found in wild for 20 years raises questions over handling of claims of rediscovered wild animals in China
Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 March 2010 17.08 GMT Article history

The first Siberian tiger cub to be found in the wild in China in at least 20 years has died less than two days after being discovered, the Guardian has learned.

Authorities have covered up the death, which casts a shadow over what is potentially the best conservation news the country has had for decades.

It also raises questions about the handling and timing of the discovery, which comes as China celebrates the start of the lunar year of the Tiger and a major financial push to save the biggest cat on the planet.

Early on the morning of 25 February, Han Deyou, a forester in the Wanda mountains in the northern province of Heilongjiang claimed to have discovered a wild tiger cub trapped in a pile of firewood in his yard.

Afraid of its roars and aggression, he called local police and forestry officials, who fed the captive animal beef and chicken as they waited for wildlife experts from a tiger breeding centre to arrive in the remote area the following morning.

The tiger was anaesthetised with a dart, taken away and detained in the jail of the local public security bureau. Experts confirmed it was a Siberian tiger, weighing 28.5kg and thought to be about around nine months old.

Regional media said the cub had probably sought shelter after being separated from its mother in the unusually deep winter snows.

Local authorities hailed the discovery as an "explosively" important development, according to the Northeast China Net website.

There are only about 20 tigers left in the wild. According to regional media, no cubs have been found since the founding of the People's Republic of China more than 60 years ago, though conservationists say records are unreliable before the 1990s.

Although China's wild tiger population is tiny, thousands of the animals are bred in captivity each year. Forestry bureaus are responsible for conservation and receive the bulk of funds related to this end.

The discovery of the young tiger appeared to show that the animals were still breeding in the wild, the best possible news at the start of a year in which the government, World Bank and conservation groups plan to invest heavily in a new programme to save the biggest cat on the planet.

But the case has been quickly shrouded in mystery, tragedy and secrecy.

Ma Hongliang, the propaganda chief of The East Is Red Forest Bureau, told the Guardian that the cub is dead, but the news has been withheld. He has advised Central China Television and other domestic journalists not to report the death because of possible negative publicity.

He declined to answer questions about the time and cause of death. "Experts tried their best to save the cub," he said. "It was too weak to survive."

The full details of the case have yet to emerge. It could yet prove a sad, but essentially positive indication of the potential for the remaining wild tiger population to breed.

Alternatively, it may raise fresh doubts about eco-fraud among a public that has become cynical about conservation claims. In 2008, forestry officials in Shaanxi province endorsed a photograph of a South China tiger, which suggested the animal – until then assumed extinct – was still alive. It was quickly proved a fake.

The financial incentives for such duplicity are substantial because the existence of wild tigers improves the prospects for tourism and the possibility of conservation funds.

But conservation groups said there was reason to believe the latest case may be genuine.

"From the information we have, I think it might be real," said a conservationist, who declined to be named. "This area has been monitored for a long time. Locals have previously reported seeing a tiger and a pup."

Last year, a dead female tiger was found trapped in a snare. The trapper – a frog farmer – was caught. It is not likely to be the mother of the dead cub because tigers are dependant on their mothers for two years.

But conservationists were upbeat about the prospects for more cubs next year if the mother can avoid snares.


[Environment > Hacked climate science emails]
Phil Jones survives MPs' grilling over climate emails

Commons committee tiptoed round embattled scientist and sidestepped crucial questions
Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 March 2010 19.07 GMT Article history

Gaunt and nervous, but with his ever-smiling University of East Anglia vice-chancellor beside him, Phil Jones survived his grilling by MPs – probably profoundly grateful that he did not have to face questioning from an earlier witness, the equally gaunt but far from nervous climate sceptic, Lord Lawson.

Jones did his best to persuade the Commons science and technology committee that all was well in the house of climate science. If they didn't quite believe him, they didn't have the heart to press the point. The man has had three months of hell, after all.

Jones's general defence was that anything people didn't like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all "standard practice" among climate scientists. "Maybe it should be, but it's not."

And he seemed to be right. The most startling observation came when he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers for probity before publication asked to see details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes. "They've never asked," he said.

He gave a little ground, and it was the only time the smile left the face of the vice-chancellor, Edward Acton: "I've written some awful emails," Jones admitted. Nobody asked if, as claimed by British climate sceptic Doug Keenan, he had for two decades suppressed evidence of the unreliability of key temperature data from China.

But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, "a slightly different conclusion". Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. "It's something we need to consider," he said.

Nor did the MPs probe how conflicts of interest have become routine in Jones's world of analysing and reconstructing past temperatures. How, as the emails reveal, Jones found himself intemperately reviewing papers that sought to criticise his own work. And then, should the papers somehow get into print, judging what place they should have in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he and his fellow emails held senior positions.

But the committee will be hard pressed to ignore the issue after the intervention of no less a body than the Institute of Physics. In 13 coruscating paragraphs of written evidence to MPs, it spoke of "prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law", "manipulation of the publication and peer review system", and "intolerance to challenge ... which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process." Ouch.

Jones's most tenacious adversaries were largely absent from the hearings, however. No sign of Canadian rottweiler mathematician Steve McIntyre, the arch-villain of dozens of the Climatic Research Unit-crew's emails. Or of Keenan, who accused Jones of fraud in a peer-reviewed journal.

And the MPs let Jones have the last word. "I don't think there is anything [in the emails] that supports the view I've been trying to pervert the peer-review process in any way." With that, he was gone.

Fred Pearce is environment consultant for New Scientist

news20100302nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 2 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.98
News
The snake that swallowed dinosaurs

Fossils reveal that some snakes preyed on baby sauropods.
By Matt Kaplan

{{How the dinosaur-eating snake might have looked.}
Tyler Keillor/Ximena Erickson}

Ancient snakes lurked in dinosaur nesting grounds in order to gobble up hatchlings as they emerged from eggs, fossils from western India suggest.

Analysis of a clutch of Cretaceous-period dinosaur eggs shows that bones within the nest belong to a 3.5-metre-long predatory snake, coiled around an egg and near the remains of a sauropod hatchling¹. The find offers a rare glimpse at the feeding behaviour of Cretaceous snakes and reveals a previously unrecognized threat that hatchling dinosaurs likely faced.

The eggs were first discovered in 1987 by Dhananjay Mohabey, who works at the Geological Survey of India. He identified them as Sauropoda, the long-necked group of dinosaurs to which Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus belong, and assumed that the accompanying bones were those of hatchling sauropods.

Twenty-three years later, Mohabey, palaeontologist Jeffrey Wilson at the University of Michigan and a team of colleagues now reveal that some of the bones belong to a predatory snake, which they call Sanajeh indicus.

Evolutionary ecologist Harry Greene at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says the find is "spectacular", as well-preserved snake fossils are so rare, particularly those that preserve substantial parts of the head.

{{The fossil of the snake, curled around dinosaur eggs.}
J. Wilson}

"When Dhananjay first showed me the fossil, I was so stunned when I realized 'this is an articulated Cretaceous snake' that it didn't hit me until a few hours later that 'this is a Cretaceous snake in a dinosaur nest'," says Wilson.

Snake supper

A key part of the investigation came when Wilson and Mohabey uncovered a long-lost piece of the original fossil that provided evidence of the snake's relationship to the dinosaur. "When we found the last piece of fossil matrix and snapped it into place, we could clearly see the snake was coiled around a dinosaur egg — it was incredible," recalls Wilson.

Though Sanajeh was large, the snake's skull structure suggests that it could not open its jaws very far. A wide gape is crucial to large snakes like modern boas and pythons, which crush and eat animals by wrapping their mouths around their prey and swallowing them whole. That Sanajeh could not do this suggests that it was unable to eat the large and hard-shelled eggs that it was coiled around, but instead waited in the nest to eat smaller and softer hatchling dinosaurs.

Palaeontologist Angela Milner at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the research, says the study is the first to report a snake in association with a dinosaur nesting site. Many dinosaurs nested communally to gain safety in numbers. That would be attractive to a range of nest predators such as snakes, says Milner. "Newly emerged hatchlings would have been sitting ducks before they had time to disperse...so it seems Sanajeh hung around the eggs waiting for an easy meal," she says.

Wilson's team say other nests at the same site in India also show the presence of bones of the same snake, suggesting that they regularly preyed on dinosaurs in this way. "This points to a predation pressure on sauropods that we had not really considered before," says Wilson. The dinosaur hatchlings likely grew fast to get themselves too large to be eaten by Sanajeh, he explains.

Like most of the land-based reptiles on the Indian subcontinent that Wilson and his colleagues have studied, the Sanajeh bones show puzzling links to fauna on southern landmasses, such as Africa, Antarctica, Australia and Madagascar.

India was interlocked with these areas in its remote past, but plate reconstructions show the continent became geographically isolated for a long stretch of its northward drift before it connected with Asia 50 million years ago. Despite this isolation, "India's biota retained a strong southern connection — but how that was accomplished remains a mystery", Wilson adds.

References
1. Wilson, J. et al. PLoS Biol. 8, e1000322 (2010).


[naturenews]
Published online 2 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.101
News
Soil bacteria could yield drug to treat roundworm

The natural insecticide Bt treats infections in mice.
By Janet Fang

{{Bt toxin, produced by bacteria, could help battle roundworm infections.}
L. V. Bergman/CORBIS}

A bacterial protein used in a common pesticide kills intestinal parasitic roundworms in mice and may become a treatment option for humans, researchers say.

Intestinal roundworms, including hookworms and whipworms, infect well over one billion people, lowering immune systems for HIV, malaria and tuberculosis and debilitating both physically and cognitively.

The new approach, published today in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases¹, uses crystal proteins from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Organic farmers have used Bt to kill insects for decades, and plants have been genetically modified with Bt genes since 1996 so crops such as corn and potato can produce the crystal proteins, protecting themselves from insects without any pesticides.

"This bacterium is a natural soil predator of nematodes," says author Raffi Aroian from the University of California, San Diego. "The bacterium can kill the worm," he adds, "and it has a great track record for safety around vertebrates."

Hookworms and some other parasitic nematodes have shown signs of resistance to albendazole, the current treatment approved by the World Health Organization. "Compared to the best drugs people have developed to treat human parasitic worms, this natural protein is at least three times better," Aroian says.

Of mice and men

The parasitic worm Heligmosomoides bakeri naturally infects mice and is a common laboratory model organism for studying human diseases caused by roundworms, such as river blindness and elephantiasis. The researchers orally infected mice and waited for the parasites to mature and become reproductively active adults before treating the mice with the crystal protein. A few days after treatment, the mice had 98% fewer parasite eggs in their faecal samples and 70% fewer adult parasites in their intestines compared to untreated mice.

Aroian's previous study² using a type of human intestinal roundworm parasite to infect hamsters showed a 90% reduction in three doses of Bt. "Taken together, the two in vivo studies have shown significant therapeutic activity of a crystal protein against two species of nematode," says Andrew Kotze from the livestock industries division of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in St Lucia, Queensland.

Aroian hopes that these mouse and hamster studies will pave the way to human trials within two to four years. Nearly all of the current drugs to treat nematode diseases were invented for veterinary purposes, he says, and then were approved for use in humans. "Do you ever say to your doctor, give me the best vet drug you have for treating my condition?" he says. "This is the only disease I can think of when that's what we do."

According to Aroian, this treatment can be grown cheaply in large quantities. Bt is grown in fermenters that hold thousands of litres for use as an agricultural spray and to control mosquitoes and blackflies.

The cost to treat one child with Bt would be 28 cents, Aroian estimates. It could be driven down more with optimizations in production, such as making sure more of the protein reaches the intestine without being dissolved in the stomach first. "The issue of protecting the toxin as it passes through the stomach to be released in the intestine will have to be addressed but does not seem to be insurmountable," says Ray Akhurst from the entomology division of CSIRO in Canberra.

Aroian adds, "Even at a quarter a pop, it's a cheap way to treat all those children."

References
1. Hu, Y., Georghiou, S. B., Kelleher, A. J. & Aroian R. V. PLoS Negl. Trop. Dis. 4, e614 doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000614 (2010).
2. Cappello, M. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 15154-15159 (2006).

news20100302nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 1 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.99
News
Ancient polar-bear fossil yields genome

Oldest mammalian DNA sequence reveals link to brown bears.
By Matt Kaplan

A fast evolver, but not fast enough to avoid climate change.Ø. Wiig/University of Oslo's Natural History MuseumDNA from a 110,000–130,000-year-old polar-bear fossil has been successfully sequenced. The genome, from a jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway, in 2004, indicates when polar bears (Ursus maritimus) diverged from their nearest common relative, the brown bear (Ursus arctos).

Because polar bears live on ice and their remains are unlikely to be buried in sediment and preserved, polar-bear fossils are very rare. So even the discovery of a jawbone and canine tooth — the entirety of the Svalbard find — is impressive. But far more important, is that when molecular biologist Charlotte Lindqvist, then at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum and now at the University at Buffalo in New York, drilled into the jaw, she was able to collect intact mitochondrial DNA.

Mitochondria — organelles found in animal cells — have their own DNA and can replicate. And because there are many mitochondria per cell, mitochondrial DNA is easier to find in fossils than the nuclear DNA.

Lindqvist wondered whether this mitochondrial DNA could illuminate the evolutionary history of how and when polar bears diverged from brown bears. To find out, she worked with Stephan Schuster, a molecular biologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, and a team of colleagues to sequence the genetic material she had collected.

Bring the bear necessities to life

The team found that the mitochondrial DNA strands were fragmented and partly degraded. The strands of mitochondrial DNA were broken up and some of the base pairs, such as adenine and cytosine, were altered by decay. Even so, because the DNA was preserved in a region so dry and cold, it was less damaged than is usual for such ancient DNA.

{{The cold and dry conditions where this ancient polar bear jaw and canine were fossilized kept DNA within well preserved.}
Ø. Wiig/University of Oslo's Natural History Museum}

The team used high-throughput sequencing to isolate short fragments of DNA. Because the DNA from many mitochondria was mixed in the fossil, the team got many reads for exactly the same sections. This meant that the researchers could detect and compensate for degradation events.

It is the oldest mammalian mitochondrial genome yet sequenced — about twice the age of the oldest mammoth genome, which dates to around 65,000 years old.

"Many researchers would have thought it impossible to retrieve DNA from a bone specimen as old as this polar bear," says Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen. "The result is a true eye opener — it gives hope to future projects trying to genome sequence truly old bone specimens."

Wherever I wander, wherever I roam

The researchers then compared the fossil DNA sequence with the DNA sequences of modern brown and polar bears. They found that the fossil DNA shared many of the gene sequences found in brown bears and lacked many that polar bears have. This raised the question of whether the ancient bear lived like a polar or brown bear.

A comparative analysis of stable isotopes in the fossil's canine tooth with isotopes collected from the teeth of modern polar and brown bears showed that the fossil bear's diet was similar to that of modern polar bears — mostly marine mammals such as seals and small whales. There was no evidence that the bear had fed on the mix of freshwater fish, land mammals and plants that make up the brown-bear diet. Palaeontologists also excavated fossils of arctic marine animals in the sediment where the bear fossil was found. These indicated that the animal had clearly been living in an arctic marine environment as modern polar bears do and not the inland locations that brown bears prefer.

"Morphologically and behaviourally it was a polar bear, but genetically, it was almost a brown bear. This fossil is amazing since it looks to be pretty much at the exact point when polar bears split from brown bears," says Lindqvist.

The team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the fossil indicates polar bears broke away from the brown bear lineage not more than 150,000 years ago and evolved from being terrestrial predators into their modern niche of ice-dwelling hunters in just 10,000–30,000 years¹.

"This is one of the most exciting things to come up in polar research in the past 20 years," says Ian Stirling, an ecologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. There have been questions about whether polar bears diverged from brown bears a million years ago or more recently, he says, and "it is great to see such strong data clarifying that the divergence is recent".

Yet their history of quick adaptation will do little to help the bears survive global warming. "Extremely fast from an evolutionary perspective is tens of thousands of years, not decades. If warming continues at the high rate that we are seeing today and the bears' ice habitat is destroyed, the species is going to be in serious trouble," says Lindqvist.

References
1. Lindqvist, C. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA advance online publication doi:10.1073/pnas.0914266107 (2010).

news20100302nn3

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 1 March 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/464020a
News
The labours of Fotis Kafatos

Launching the European Research Council was a Herculean effort, says its outgoing president.
By Natasha Gilbert

{{Having battled the red tape of the European Commission, Fotis Kafatos will now focus on his research.}
F. BARON}

Amid the bustle of the life-sciences department at Imperial College London, Fotis Kafatos looks spent. For the past four years, he has nursed the European Research Council (ERC) to life, delivering the first pan-European initiative to fund cutting-edge basic research judged solely on excellence. The struggle has left him satisfied but exhausted. So on 1 March — a year earlier than his term was due to end — Kafatos handed over his presidency of the ERC to Helga Nowotny, a social scientist at the Vienna Science and Technology Fund, and one of the ERC's two vice-presidents. Kafatos plans to devote more time to his research on malaria, which he says has come practically to a standstill.

"I don't begrudge the time I spent on the ERC, but I would be foolish not to step down now — it was consuming me," he tells Nature in an exclusive interview. "If I knew how much time it would take out of my life when I started I might not have done it. But I am happy I did."

Kafatos, together with the other 21 members of the ERC's scientific council, helped to secure the ERC a 7-year €7.5-billion (US$10.2-billion) budget, which has funded more than 1,000 projects worth a total of €1.7 billion. Like many of the world's best research agencies, including the US National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, the ERC selects winners solely on scientific merit. "We delivered to Europe what we promised," Kafatos declares.

Colour begins to creep back into Kafatos's face as he tells of the ERC's other achievements. For instance, it has attracted more than 3,000 distinguished scientists from across the world to review applications. The review panels are "the backbone of our operations. We are very proud of it," he says. The council has also spurred individual nations to spend more money on research. "Ten countries or regions, including Switzerland and Spain, have injected additional national funds for runner-up candidates who were deemed excellent but could not be funded," says Kafatos.

Busting bureaucracy

However, the ERC has had its share of problems. Its first call for proposals from young researchers, in 2007, attracted more than 9,000 applicants, several times more than it expected — it had enough money to fund just 299 projects. "This huge interest could have been a disaster because the success rate was so low. But credit to young researchers, they were not put off," Kafatos recalls.

{“I would be foolish not to step down now.”}

But it was not so much the teething troubles of the young ERC that wore Kafatos down, as the bureaucracy of the European Commission, which is responsible for ensuring that funding from the European Union pot — including the ERC's budget — is spent properly. An overly strict control culture permeates the commission, Kafatos says. "We continuously had to spend energy, time and effort on busting bureaucracy roadblocks that kept appearing in our way," says Kafatos. "At best, this costs us precious energy and resources. At worst it may hamper our zeal to inspire and continuously improve the ERC strategy, it can damage the morale of our staff and discourage the top talented researchers from applying to or reviewing for the ERC."

For example, the commission insists that winners of ERC funding, who already have to provide detailed research proposals, describe the milestones they aim to reach and how, so that their projects can be audited. How successful researchers are in reaching those goals could affect their chances of winning funding in the future. Kafatos says that this rule hampers the freedom of researchers to change their plans in the light of new science after their proposal has been accepted. "This is nonsensical. If you could a priori describe what your success will be, you would not have to do the experiments," says Kafatos. "I am convinced that proper and secure use of public funds can be achieved in a much less domineering system," he adds.

He is not alone. A review led by the former president of Latvia, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, and published in July last year, recommended that the commission make "immediate corrections" to the running of the ERC or risk inflicting a "deadly blow" on the funding body. Kafatos says that a pressing challenge for his successor is to ensure that the commission follows up on the report's recommendations and agrees to a further review in 2011 to consider whether more reforms are needed.

Kafatos also calls for new legislation to establish the ERC as a permanent institution. The ERC currently has a temporary status, raising the prospect, albeit unlikely, that it might not be funded in Europe's next research initiative — the eighth Framework programme, set to begin in 2013. Kafatos hopes instead that the Framework programme will include a "major expansion" of the ERC budget, which would allow the council to launch new funding initiatives, including supporting PhD programmes and institutes of advanced study, similar to the one in Princeton, New Jersey, at which researchers are free to pursue speculative ideas.

Most of all, Kafatos wants the agency he laboured to build to have the freedom to choose how it operates and how it is governed. "We need to build our institution to fit the needs of the mission and not vice versa," he says.

news20100302bbc1

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 05:10 GMT, Tuesday, 2 March 2010
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, The Woodlands, Texas
Ice deposits found at Moon's pole

A radar experiment aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole.

The US space agency's (Nasa) Mini-Sar experiment found more than 40 small craters containing water-ice.

But other compounds - such as hydrocarbons - are mixed up in lunar ice, according to new results from another Moon mission called LCROSS.

The findings were presented at a major planetary science conference in Texas.

The craters with ice range from 2km to 15km (one to nine miles) in diameter; how much there is depends on its thickness in each crater. But Nasa says the ice must be at least a couple of metres thick to give the signature seen by Chandrayaan-1.

Dr Paul Spudis, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, estimated there was at least 600 million metric tonnes of water-ice held within these impact craters.

The equivalent amount, expressed as rocket fuel, would be enough to launch one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years, he told journalists at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

What all these craters have in common are large areas of their interiors that never see sunlight.

Extreme cold

Temperatures in some of these permanently darkened craters can drop as low as 25 Kelvin (-248C; -415F) - colder than the surface of Pluto - allowing water-ice to remain stable.

"It is mostly pure water-ice," said Dr Spudis. "It could be under a few tens of centimetres of dry regolith (lunar soil)."

This protective layer of soil could prevent blocks of pure ice from vaporising even in some areas which are exposed to sunlight, he explained.

{Ice thrown up by the LCROSS impact was in a crystalline form}

In February, President Barack Obama cancelled the programme designed to return Americans to the Moon by 2020.

However, Dr Spudis said: "Now we can say with a fair degree of confidence that a sustainable human presence on the Moon is possible. It's possible using the resources we find there.

"The results from these missions, that we have seen in the last few months, are totally revolutionising our view of the Moon."

Chandrayaan-1 was India's contribution to the armada of unmanned spacecraft to have been launched to the Moon in recent years. Japan, Europe, China and the US have all sent missions packed with instruments to explore Earth's satellite in unprecedented detail.

In Nasa's LCROSS mission, a rocket and a probe were smashed into a large crater at the lunar south pole, kicking up water-ice and water vapour.

Spectral measurements of material thrown up by the LCROSS impact indicate some of the water-ice was in a crystalline form, rather than the "amorphous" form in which te water molecules are randomly arranged.

Water source

"There's not one flavour of water on the Moon; there's a range of everything from relatively pure ice all the way to adsorbed water," said the mission's chief scientist Anthony Colaprete, from Nasa's Ames Research Center.

"And here is an instance inside Cabeus crater where it appears we threw up a range of fine-grained particulates of near pure crystalline water-ice."

Overall, results from recent missions suggest there could be several sources for lunar ice.

One important way for water to form is through an interaction with the solar wind, the fast-moving stream of particles that constantly billows away from the Sun.

Space radiation triggers a chemical reaction in which oxygen atoms already in the soil acquire hydrogen nuclei to make water molecules and the simpler hydrogen-oxygen (OH) molecule. This "adsorbed" water may be present as fine films coating particles of lunar soil.

In a cold sink effect, water from elsewhere on the lunar surface may migrate to the slightly cooler poles, where it is retained in permanently shadowed craters.

Scientists have also reported the presence of hydrocarbons, such as ethylene, in the LCROSS impact plume. Dr Colaprete said any hydrocarbons were likely to have been delivered to the lunar surface by comets and asteroids - another vital source of lunar water.

However, he added, some of these chemical species could arise through "cold chemistry" on interstellar dust grains accumulated on the Moon.
In addition to water, researchers have seen a range of other "volatiles" (compounds with low boiling points) in the impact plume, including sulphur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2).

The results from the Mini-Sar instrument are due to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The team is currently analysing results for craters at the Moon's south pole.

Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 00:22 GMT, Tuesday, 2 March 2010
By Doreen Walton
Science reporter, BBC News
Nose scanning techniques could sniff out criminals

We already have iris and fingerprint scanning but noses could be an even better method of identification, says a study from the University of Bath, UK.

The researchers scanned noses in 3D and characterised them by tip, ridge profile and the nasion, or area between the eyes.

They found 6 main nose types: Roman, Greek, Nubian, hawk, snub and turn-up.

Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance.

The researchers say noses have been overlooked in the growing field of biometrics, studies into ways of identifying distinguishing traits in people.

"Noses are prominent facial features and yet their use as a biometric has been largely unexplored," said the University of Bath's Dr Adrian Evans.

"Ears have been looked at in detail, eyes have been looked at in terms of iris recognition but the nose has been neglected."

The researchers used a system called PhotoFace, developed by researchers at the University of the West of England in Bristol, for the 3D scans.

{The face is modelled by computer so the nose can be analysed in detail}

Several measurements by which noses can be recognised were identified and the team developed recognition software based on these parameters.

"This initial work is nowhere as good as iris identification but the nose has pros and cons," said Dr Evans.

"There's no magic biometric that solves all your problems. Irises are a powerful biometric but can be difficult to capture accurately and can be easily obscured by eyelids or glasses. People can easily cover up their ears, with their hair for example.

"Of course you can have a broken nose or wear a false nose or have plastic surgery but to have nose surgery to change your identity is fairly drastic.

"Irises are very good for recognition but you can put in dilation drops which change the iris completely. No technique is infallible," he said.

The research is based on a study of 40 noses and the data base has now been expanded to 160 for further tests to see if the software can pick out people from a larger group and distinguish between relatives.

Dr Evans hopes the method can be proven to be effective on this larger sample. "The technique certainly shows potential, perhaps to be used in combination with other identification methods," he said.

news20100302bbc2

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 11:06 GMT, Tuesday, 2 March 2010
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
Etched ostrich eggs illustrate human sophistication

Inscribed ostrich shell fragments found in South Africa are among the earliest examples of the use of symbolism by modern humans, scientists say.

The etched shells from Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape have been dated to about 60,000 years ago.

Details are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, who have investigated the material since 1999, argue that the markings are almost certainly a form of messaging - of graphic communication.

"The motif is two parallel lines, which we suppose were circular, but we do not have a complete refit of the eggs," explained Dr Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux, Talence, France.

"The lines are crossed at right angles or oblique angles by hatching. By the repetition of this motif, early humans were trying to communicate something. Perhaps they were trying to express the identity of the individual or the group," he told BBC News.

Symbolic thought - the ability to let one thing represent another - was a giant leap in human evolution, and sets our species apart from the rest of the animal world.

Understanding when and where this behaviour first emerged is a key quest for scientists studying human origins.

Arguably the earliest examples of conceptual thought are the pieces of shell jewellery discovered at Skhul Cave in Israel and from Oued Djebbana in Algeria. These artefacts are 90,000-100,000 years old.

Shell beading from 75,000 years ago is also found at Blombos Cave in South Africa, as well as a number of ochre blocks that have engravings not dissimilar to those at Diepkloof.

{Etched ochre blocks from Blombos}

However, the significance of the Diepkloof finds may lie in their number, which proves such markings could not have been simple doodlings.

"What is extraordinary at Diepkloof is that we have close to 300 pieces of such engravings, which is why we are speaking of a system of symbolic representation," Dr Texier said.

The team, which includes Dr Guillaume Porraz from the University of Tubingen, tried themselves to recreate the markings using pieces of flint.

"Ostrich egg shells are quite hard. Doing such engravings is not so easy. You have to pass through the outer layer to get through the middle layer," Dr Texier explained.

The team's experiments also suggest that the colouration of the fragments is natural and not the result of the application of pigments.

The group was able to reproduce similar hues by baking pieces of shell near a fire.

{Early humans pierced and strung shells together as jewellery}

Professor Chris Stringer, of London's Natural History Museum, said the find was important.

"Here we've got something that we can compare with later material that clearly does have important signalling value in the populations," he told BBC News.

"It's a very nice link between the Middle Stone Age, the later Stone Age and even recent population in South Africa. One question now is whether this is a special site, or as we excavate more sites will we find this material is more widespread?"

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 18:02 GMT, Monday, 1 March 2010
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
UK science 'must meet challenge' of emerging nations

The British government's top scientific advisory body has challenged ministers to maintain the upward trajectory in science spending.

The Council of Science and Technology published a report on Monday that sets out a vision to protect and enhance research excellence in the UK.

The panel said it was vital the competition from emerging powers, such as China and India, was met head on.

But it warned current investment had to be sustained to make this possible.

The UK's public research budget has doubled since 1997 under a 10-year framework (begun in 2004) that should see total science spending top £6bn for 2010/11.

This upward path needed to be continued into the future, said Professor Dame Janet Finch, the council's co-chair.

"Irrespective of whatever government we have in power, we need to ensure there is stability not only of research funding but also stability of purpose, direction and vision," she told BBC News.

"It is essential to do this," council member Professor Alan Hughes added. "Most of our international rivals have invested extremely heavily in boosting their investment in this area."

'Critical mass'

The council's report - A Vision for UK Research - assesses the current status of UK science and considers ways to build on past and current successes.

It acknowledges that UK research is second only to the US by most measures, but warns this position is coming under increasing threat.

The report says government needs a clear vision for investment and needs to maintain that vision across the entire research base - from the sciences right through to the arts and humanities.

It says excellence must continue to be the overriding guiding principle for funding, and that the money should go wherever excellence is found, not necessarily to a prior selection of institutions or centres.

Collaborations will be key to future success, both within the UK and beyond, it believes.

Because Britain is a small country, it will need to make partnerships to achieve the sort of critical mass required to match up to the effort being mounted by some emerging research nations.

It also wants to see funding focused more on the top people, not just on the top projects.

The council says these individuals are in the best position to react and adapt to new opportunities and trends; and the advisors make a number of recommendations on the organisation and funding of PhDs and personal support for scientists.

Translational efforts

In addition, the council would like to see the UK work harder to draw top researchers to the country and then make it attractive for them to stay and pursue their careers long-term in Britain.

And the council believes government needs to improve the links between basic and applied research (although it prefers the terms "upstream" and "downstream"), to maximise the economic returns from scientific endeavour.

{{RECENT ECONOMIC STIMULI}
> US: Doubling basic science spend 2006-16, plus a $21bn R&D boost
> China: $860m R&D investment to help Chinese companies
> Germany: 500m euros for transport research; 900m euros for collaborative R&D in SMEs
> France: 750m-euro boost for higher education and research}

"The more powerful and successful our research base is, the more it is an effective magnet for international mobile R&D to locate in the UK," said Professor Hughes. "And that leads to well being in terms of creation of new activities and jobs in the UK."

The report says it should be easier for researchers to move between academia and business.

Dr Hermann Hauser, the renowned Cambridge science entrepreneur, has been working with the council on this issue.

He commented: "Having worked in the area for a long time now, it is clear there is only one method for transferring knowledge out of R&D departments into companies, and that is by transferring people. Knowledge has feet and walks out of laboratories into company research organisations."

To make this happen, he favours setting up "intermediate organisations", along the lines of the German Fraunhofer Society, which support translational activity with funding from both the private and public sectors.

Responding to the council's report, Nick Dusic for the Campaign for Science & Engineering said: "The report lays out a strong case for continued investment in science engineering during this economic downturn and through the forthcoming election. And it's extremely important that all the political parties respond to the recommendations in this report and set out their vision for science and technology."

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

news20100302bbc3

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 19:31 GMT, Monday, 1 March 2010
MPs quiz 'climategate' scientist

MPs have quizzed the scientist at the centre of the "climategate" scandal, the first time he has been questioned in public since the row erupted.

Professor Phil Jones used his appearance before the science committee to say that he had done nothing wrong.

Earlier, critics told the MPs that the stolen e-mails, which appeared on the internet in November, raised questions about the integrity of climate science.

Lord Lawson called for scientists to be more open about their methodologies.

In November, more than 1,000 stolen messages between scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), based at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and their peers around the world were posted on the web, along with other documents.

Climate "sceptics" have claimed that the stolen data show that some researchers, including Professor Jones, have attempted to manipulate data in order to strengthen the argument that human activities are responsible for warming the planet.

They have also criticised Professor Jones for failing to make raw data and methodology available for public scrutiny, despite numerous Freedom of Information requests.

Question of trust

"The Freedom of Information Act should not have been brought into this," former Chancellor Lord Lawson of Blaby, a longstanding critic of climate policy, told MPs.

{The e-mails were stolen or leaked from the University of East Anglia}

"Scientists of integrity reveal... all of their data and all their methods. They don't need Freedom of Information Act requests to get this out of them."

Also giving evidence alongside Lord Lawson was Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

He said that sound science was based on "testability, replication, and verification".

Dr Peiser told the committee: "Of course, if you do not have the data sets or methods then you have to trust the word of a scientist.

"You cannot even see if he has done these calculations directly on the basis of solid data, and this is the core of this problem - it is not about the overall science, it is about the process."

When asked if his organisation was planning to carry out its own modelling, he replied: "We are not in the business of climate modelling."

Professor Jones, who has stepped down as the director of CRU pending the findings of an independent inquiry, told MPs: "We have given them the finished product available from the very beginning but not the raw [weather] station data.

"Most scientists do not want to deal with the raw station data, they would rather deal with a derived product."

When challenged about the contents of one of the stolen e-mails in which Professor Jones told a critic of his work that he would not make information available because the data would only be used to undermine his findings, he admitted that he had written a number of "very awful e-mails".

Professor Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of UEA, told the committee that it was not possible to make the entire international data set available because of a "commercial promise".

He explained that a number of contributing nations - including Canada, Poland and Sweden - had refused to make their segments of data publicly available.

The committee is expected to publish its findings before the general election.


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 00:21 GMT, Monday, 1 March 2010
Gene test aid to cancer treatment

Scientists have developed a gene test which predicts how well chemotherapy will work in cancer patients.

Starting with 829 genes in breast cancer cells, the team whittled down the possibilities to six genes which had an impact on whether a drug worked.

They then showed that these genes could be used to predict the effectiveness of a drug called paclitaxel in patients.

It is hoped the approach, reported in The Lancet Oncology, can be replicated for other cancers and treatments.

The international project, including researchers from Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute, opens the way for breast cancer treatment to be targeted to those who will benefit the most.

To find which genes, if missing or faulty, could prevent the drug from working, they deleted them one by one from cancer cells in the laboratory.

They eventually highlighted the six genes which if absent or not working prevent paclitaxel from properly killing breast cancer cells.

Spare treatment

More than 45,500 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK each year - and it is estimated that around 15% of these women will be prescribed paclitaxel.

The researchers estimate they could potentially spare half of the patients currently receiving this drug from treatment which would not be effective.

Study leader, Dr Charles Swanton, head of translational cancer therapeutics at the Institute, said one of the great challenges in cancer medicine is determining which patients will benefit from particular cancer drugs, which are in themselves toxic and carry severe side effects.

{{The challenge is to apply these methods to other drugs in cancer medicine}
Dr Charles Swanton, study leader}

"Our research shows it is now possible to rapidly pinpoint genes which prevent cancer cells from being destroyed by anti-cancer drugs and use these same genes to predict which patients will benefit from specific types of treatment."

Further studies will now be done to see if the technique can be developed into a simple diagnostic test to be given to patients to help inform doctors about whether or not to prescribe paclitaxel.

He said the challenge will be to apply these methods to other drugs in cancer medicine.

"These could include treatments that are currently deemed too expensive to fund on the NHS - however, in the future, treating only the patients that will benefit from certain treatments will save the NHS money in the long term."

Dr Lesley Walker, Cancer Research UK's director of cancer information, said: "New techniques such as these can enable drugs to be tailored to individual patients, and this could potentially improve cancer survival in the long term.

"Health professionals may in the future be able to use this information to direct treatment to patients most likely to benefit, and avoid giving treatment that is less likely to be effective to patients with drug resistant cancers."

news20100302bbc4

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 10:45 GMT, Monday, 1 March 2010
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News
Ants are first animal known to navigate by stereo smell

Desert ants in Tunisia smell in stereo, sensing odours from two different directions at the same time.

By sniffing the air with each antenna, the ants form a mental 'odour map' of their surroundings.

They then use this map to find their way home, say scientists who report the discovery in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Pigeons, rats and even people may also smell in stereo, but ants are the first animal known to use it for navigation.

{{I get the feeling that whatever task these ants have to solve, they succeed}
Dr Markus Knaden, Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology}

Dr Markus Knaden and colleagues Dr Kathrin Steck and Professor Bill Hansson of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany investigated how the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis navigates around its surroundings.

Each day, individual ants will leave the nest entrance and travel up to 100m in search of food.

When they find some, they return straight home, somehow finding their tiny nest entrance again within a bleak, relatively featureless desert landscape.

Scientists knew the ant uses a sophisticated array of visual cues to find much of its way home.

{{ AMAZING ANTS: FIND OUT MORE}
> A single mega-colony of Argentine ants has colonised much of the world, scientists discovered last year
> When some ants get sick, they perform a heroic act and abandon their nests to die in seclusion, reducing the risk of transmitting disease to the relatives
> Find out more about the estimated 20,000 species of ants that exist in the world}

But Knaden's team has now found that the insect does much more than that.

First, they placed four odours marked A, B, C and D around a barely visible nest entrance.

They then tested the ants by removing and placing them in a remote location, without a nest entrance but with the same four odours.

The ants immediately headed to exactly where their nest should have been, confirming that they use the odours as olfactory landmarks.

When the odours were mixed up, the ants became confused and unable to navigate their way home.

"They had learned the olfactory scenery," Dr Knaden told the BBC.

Ants with one antenna were also unable to navigate using more than one smell, confirming that the insects required two antennae, and an ability to smell in stereo, to find their way around.

Other animals both navigate using smell, homing in on a single odour, and may smell in stereo.

{Sniffing its way home: an ant uses stereo smell to attempt to find its nest entrance, located between A and B}

In 2006 for example, rats were found to smell in stereo, being able to locate the direction of a food source with a single sniff.

Many scientists suspect that pigeons also use smells to find their way home.

But until now, none have been found to do both, using a stereo sense of smell to create an odour map of the surrounding world.

"I more and more get the feeling that whatever task these ants have to solve, they succeed," says Dr Knaden.

"The hostile desert seems to demand a navigation strategy combining every possible navigational cue."

news20100302reut1

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
WASHINGTON
Fri Feb 26, 2010 2:38pm EST
Senior carbon trader leaves JP Morgan as bill stalls

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A head of origination of North American environmental markets at JP Morgan Chase has left the company, a bank spokesman said on Wednesday, as the future of a broad U.S. carbon market looks grim.

Ben Feldman, who had been an executive director in the environmental markets division at JP Morgan, is no longer with the bank, a spokesman said. He would not say if Feldman would be replaced.

JP Morgan hired Feldman from Natsource LLC, a carbon asset management company, where he had worked for seven years.

Feldman had moved to Washington late last year after working in New York.

Feldman's leaving was not a layoff, a source said.

Despite the climate bill being stalled in the Senate as it faces tough opposition from lawmakers in energy-dependent states, JP Morgan has made two recent acquisitions related to the business.

JP Morgan purchased clean energy project developer EcoSecurities late last year. It is now one of the world's largest companies that aggregates carbon offsets.

This month the bank also bought non-U.S. assets of commodities joint venture RBS Sempra from Britain's Royal Bank of Scotland and Sempra Energy in a deal that included carbon assets, the bank said.

(Editing by David Gregorio)


[Green Business]
Peter Henderson - Analysis
SAN FRANCISCO
Fri Feb 26, 2010 2:42pm EST
California governor race key to climate change

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's governor race is shaping up to be a referendum on the most aggressive U.S. plan to cut greenhouse gases in a vote from the trend-setting state that could hobble such efforts nationwide.

The state is a hub for investment in "cleantech," which could be at risk with any policy change, and has a governor and senior congressional representatives who have led President Barack Obama's push for a U.S. climate change law.

The face-off to replace Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in November offers a clear choice on the issue, which for many will come down to whether laws on climate change help the state lead in new 'green' industries or drive firms out of business or out of state in reaction to higher costs.

"It's a pivotal race, certainly for California, but for the rest of the country" too, said incoming Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, echoing the thoughts of many businesses in the U.S. state with the largest population and economy.

Former eBay chief Meg Whitman and Silicon Valley colleague Steve Poizner, the Republicans vying for the job, both would put the 2006 landmark air pollution law on hold. State Attorney General Jerry Brown, the unofficial Democratic candidate, would defend it.

California's 2006 law begins the experiment of creating a market to price carbon, putting a cap on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and letting polluters trade emission permits. It sets new building, automobile and planning rules for efficiency and embraces alternative energy.

An initiative which has just begun gathering signatures to get on the November ballot would suspend the law until the state's double-digit unemployment rate drops to 5.5 percent or less -- which economists say will be years -- and has won Poizner's support.

Whitman, ahead in Republican polls, aims to put key provisions of the law on hold for a year for study.

Brown, a former California governor who supports the law, led Whitman in a January Field Poll by 10 percentage points -- half his lead in an October poll.

OVERREACHING REGULATION OR GROUNDS FOR GROWTH

"Colorado, Utah, Texas, they are competing for our jobs," Whitman said recently. She believes "overreaching environmental regulations" are part of the problem, although she supports a target for the state to get a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, arguing it will create jobs.

Poizner in a statement said the climate change law "sent a message to every business and every manufacturer that it's going to cost you more to do business in ... California."

As attorney general, Brown sued the federal government to force it to regulate greenhouse gases, saying on his website, "I am committed to doing everything in my power to ensure that California meets its greenhouse gas reduction targets."

The prospect of leaving the 33 percent renewable energy target in place and suspending the broader law is sure to create controversy. Companies focused on cleantech, the catchall phrase for technology related to the push to cut greenhouse gases, want both.

Matt Golden, president of building efficiency start-up Recurve, says putting a price on carbon, as the 2006 law will do, is the key to leveling the playing field with dirtier power, and suspending the law would set back the state.

"You throw all this risk into the equation and venture capital firms are banking on us building this new order, this new market. If you stop this evolution, it is going to be a hell of a lot less bankable," he said.

And if California puts its law on hold, the chance of a federal move drops close to zero, he argues.

"I think it might put a nail in the coffin of climate change nationally," he said.

Field Polls show that voters in the state, which has double-digit inflation and faces a new budget gap -- are dissatisfied with legislators and think the state is headed in the wrong direction.

But in a January poll for a non-profit, Field found nearly 70 percent agreed that California could cut greenhouse gases and expand jobs at the same time, and only 12 percent in a separate question said that recent changes to encourage clean energy would take away jobs.

(for more environmental news see our Environment blog at blogs.reuters.com/environment)

(Reporting by Peter Henderson; Editing by Paul Simao)


[Green Business]
OSLO
Mon Mar 1, 2010 11:51am EST
At least 3 more firms probed in Norway CO2 case

OSLO (Reuters) - At least three more firms are under investigation over allegations of tax fraud relating to carbon emissions, Norwegian police said on Monday.

Two companies were known since Friday to be under investigation, but police said on Monday that they were looking into several others.

"We are looking into several companies that have bought and handled CO2 quotas from each other. Their number is in the range of around five, but there can be more," said Asbjoerg Lykkjen, a police lawyer at the finance and environment unit of Oslo police.

Two men have so far been arrested and held. "We don't rule out the possibility that there could be more arrests," Lykkjen told Reuters.

(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche)


[Green Business]
LONDON
Mon Mar 1, 2010 11:41am EST
EU carbon at 2-week high supported by oil, German power

LONDON (Reuters) - European carbon emissions futures rose to a two-week high on Monday, supported by stronger German power and oil prices, traders said.

EU Allowances for December delivery rose 14 cents or 1.08 percent to 13.14 euros ($17.85) a tonne at 0801 GMT, having eased from an intra-day high of 13.25 euros.

EUAs last traded at those levels on February 17. Volume was light at 980 lots traded.

"It seems German power and oil are lending some support, along with the cold weather," an emissions trader said.

German Calendar 2010 baseload power rose 1.20 euros or 2.57 percent to 47.90 euros per megawatt hour.

Oil rose more than 1 percent to top $80 a barrel amid threats by Iran that it could cut off energy supplies to Europe.

Traders warned that the market still needs some external stimulus to give it more direction as it still stuck in range-bound trade.

"The EU's precarious economic position, with the 27-nation bloc skirting a double dip recession, continues to weigh on sentiment and could only change after the release of 2009 emissions in April," said Jean-Francois Cauvet at COER2 Commodities.

In April, data will be released detailing the bloc's emissions in 2009.

Meanwhile, interest is building on the 2012 and 2013 contracts, as the spread has widened, traders said.

Open interest on the Dec-12 contract reached almost 140 million on the European Climate Exchange on Friday, just below the Dec-10 volume, showing that investors are bullish in the long term.

Certified emissions reductions

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news20100302reut2

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
MADRID
Mon Mar 1, 2010 3:21pm EST
Spain eyes doubling renewables output by 2020

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's government on Monday proposed more than doubling production from renewable energy sources by 2020 to just over 20 percent of total energy use, which would meet European Union targets.

"We face a high degree of energy dependence, high price volatility in international energy markets and the challenges of climate change," said an Economy Ministry document containing details of government plans to revive the recession-hit economy.

The government is seeking cross-party consensus on its plans to turn a record 3.6-percent decline in the economy in 2009 into a 2.9-percent increase in 2012.

The document predicted renewables production by 2020 would be the equivalent of 27.9 million tonnes of petroleum, up from 11.96 million tonnes in 2009.

That would be 20.2 percent of Spain's projected primary energy consumption, or just above a target of 20 percent set by the 27-nation European Union.

Total electricity demand was seen rising to 300,186 gigawatt-hours from 246,397 in 2009.

Details of the electricity generation mix showed the government forecast that renewables would have a 22.7 percent share by 2020, up from 12.5 percent in 2009.

Most of the increase was expected to come from Spain's already booming wind and solar power sectors.

Total nuclear power capacity was expected to fall by 460 megawatts, or the amount produced by the aging Garona plant, which the government has ordered to be closed in 2013.

The figures suggest Spain's other seven nuclear power stations will remain open. The Socialist government has said it expects nuclear power to be phased out, but that most plants will run until the 2020s or beyond.

Following are details of government forecasts for Spain's generation mix in 2020, compared to 2009 levels (in megawatts):

SOURCE 2009 2020

Nuclear 7,716 7,256

Coal 11,900 8,130

Fuel oil 6,202 682

Natural gas 24,004 28,500

Hydropower 16,189 16,662

Onshore wind 18,300 35,000

Offshore wind 0 5,000

Solar 4,165 15,685

Biomass 1,067 2,200

(Reporting by Martin Roberts; Editing by David Gregorio)


[Green Business]
Daniel Fineren
LONDON
Mon Mar 1, 2010 3:23pm EST
Spain needs electric cars, links for wind boom

LONDON (Reuters) - Spain needs electric cars and a lot more power links with France to better deal with big swings in wind output and spread the benefits of its clean energy boom across Europe, the head of Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said on Monday.

Spain's 18,700 megawatts of installed wind turbines have supplied more than half of its demand at times this winter, forcing Red Electrica to stop some turbines to keep system stability because a dearth of grid connections prevented the green energy from reaching the rest of Europe.

"The bottleneck is the French network but it's really about being connected to the whole European system," Red Electrica president Luis Atienza told Reuters in an interview.

"The bigger the system the more stable it is and the greater the capacity to compensate for the variability of any of its component parts."

Red Electrica and its French counterpart RTE have agreed to build from early next year the first new grid connection between France and Spain in nearly three decades, doubling the existing transmission capacity.

But it will still be nowhere near enough to efficiently manage the swings in wind power output Red Electrica has to cope with already, with the record of 54 percent of demand met by wind in early November almost 13,000 MW higher than output on calm days when the same turbines have contributed just 1 percent.

"It's a step forward but it's still a very modest step because our level of interconnection in 2014 will still only be 5-6 percent of our peak demand," Atienza said on the sidelines of an energy conference in London.

"Rather than have 1,400 MW that we have now we will have 2,800 MW but because of our wind power variability we will need much more."

While Spain has invested billions of euros over the last two decades on wind turbines to cut carbon emissions and fuel imports, transmission capacity between France and Spain has remained unchanged since 1982 because of public opposition to new lines across the Pyrenees and a lack of French enthusiasm for more.

Spain has succeeded in building two new links with Portugal in the last six years, rapidly bringing capacity between the two up to the same levels as with France, despite the relatively small Portuguese market.

Two more links with Portugal are expected to come into service by 2012, increasing the ability of the Iberian power system to cope with variable wind power output.

But Portugal is not big enough to solve Spain's wind variability challenge, and as long as the Iberian Peninsula remains largely isolated from the rest of Europe Madrid's huge renewable energy push will not meet its full potential to reduce European power sector emissions.

ELECTRIC CARS

Red Electrica faces its biggest problem with high wind power output at night, when demand for electricity drops regardless of how much clean electricity is available from the thousands of turbines dotted around the Spanish countryside.

The company even had to shut down some turbines in the early hours of December 30, 2009, as wet and windy weather caused a surge in green electricity generation at a time of very low demand.

Greater numbers of electric cars charging overnight could help absorb some of the extra output in the years ahead.

The system balancing benefits of electric cars prompted the British government last week to offer to pay 25 percent toward the cost of a new electric car from 2011, although Britain's wind output is still tiny compared to Spain's.

"For us it's even more important because we are now reaching a limit in which for more and more hours, especially at night, we are having difficulty integrating wind power," Atienza said.

"Apart from improving our energy security by displacing oil, improving the air quality of our cities and reduce noise pollution, the electric car is very complimentary to our bet on renewable energy."

Electric cars could vastly improve system efficiency by recharging on windy nights when industrial demand for power is low, but the recharge times must be managed to ensure the load on the system is spread through the night and does not lead to a sudden jump in car charging when demand is already at its early evening peak.

"The worst thing that can happen for the power system is that everyone who has an electric car when they get home they plug it in and it starts recharging at the same time," he said.

(Editing by Jim Marshall)


[Green Business]
NEW YORK
Mon Mar 1, 2010 11:38am EST
SunPower sets 32 MW supply deal with Toshiba

NEW YORK (Reuters) - SunPower Corp said on Monday it has signed a supply agreement with Toshiba Corp to supply the Japanese company with 32 megawatts of solar panels this year.

The deal, for which no financial details were released, will "form the cornerstone" of Toshiba's new residential solar offering in Japan, SunPower said in a release.

SunPower is one of the world's largest producers of the solar photovoltaic equipment that turns sunlight into electricity, and its modules are among the most efficient in the industry.

The Japanese solar market is expected to grow sharply in coming years because of the government's aggressive targets to increase the growth of renewable energy sources by 2020.

SunPower nearly doubled production of its high-efficiency solar cells and panels from 2008 to 2009, with 2009 cell production of approximately 400 megawatts.

In 2010, the company intends to expand production further with new manufacturing operations in Malaysia, the United States and Europe.

(Reporting by Matt Daily, editing by Dave Zimmerman)

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Krittivas Mukherjee
NEW DELHI
Tue Mar 2, 2010 5:54am EST
India moves on U.S. nuclear deal with new law

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's parliament will debate over the next month a new law to limit nuclear firms' liability in the case of industrial accidents, a move crucial for U.S. firms to tap into India's estimated $150 billion nuclear market.

Though the bill faces some political obstacles, particularly from the communists, Indian officials and analysts say it will be endorsed because the government had approached the top opposition party and been assured of its support.

"The political managers of the government have reached out to the opposition and discussed the importance of this bill,

especially in the context of a possible visit by (U.S.) President (Barack) Obama to India this summer," said Robinder Sachdev, president of Imagindia Institute, a New Delhi-based independent think tank.

India's government has offered to tender construction of two nuclear power plants, a business opportunity worth $10 billion, to U.S.-based firms such as General Electric Co and Westinghouse Electric Co, a subsidiary of Japan's Toshiba Corp.

But the liability issue has delayed things, putting U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage over Russian and French companies whose accident liability is underwritten by their governments. The Russian and French have already been awarded contracts.

The 2008 U.S. deal ended the nuclear isolation India had experienced since its 1974 atomic test and gave it access to U.S. technology and fuel, while also opening up the global nuclear market to India.

Two Indian ministers said permission had been sought from the speaker of parliament's lower house to introduce the nuclear bill in the budget session now underway, which runs through May 7.

"The bill will be ratified I think," a minister who asked to remain anonymous told Reuters.

While the government has a majority in the powerful lower house, it needs the support of the opposition Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to ratify the bill in the upper. The bill has been cleared by the cabinet.

Other smaller procedural hurdles remain, such as New Delhi and Washington agreeing a fuel reprocessing pact, after which India will have to sign up to a global convention on nuclear liability.

The issue is sensitive in a country where a gas leak in a Union Carbide factory killed about 3,800 people in 1984, one of the world's worst industrial disasters.

The bill will cap the accident liability of foreign contractors and supplier companies, including those from the United States. The liability of a nuclear reactor operator is likely to be pegged at about $650 million.

India's nuclear sector is state controlled.

The South Asian nation, which relies on imported oil for some 70 percent of its energy needs, says the U.S. nuclear supply pact will help feed energy demands in its expanding economy, while helping combat global warming linked to fossil fuel emissions.

It could also help double nuclear power's share in India's electricity grid to 5-7 percent in the next two decades.

(Additional reporting by Nigam Prusty; Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Jerry Norton)


[Green Business]
Patricia Zengerle
WASHINGTON
Tue Mar 2, 2010 6:02am EST
Obama to pitch "cash for caulkers" in Georgia

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will announce details of an estimated $6 billion program on Tuesday to generate jobs by providing incentives for Americans to make their homes more energy efficient, the latest step in his bid to convince Americans he can ease their economic woes.

The plan, which must be passed by Congress, is intended to prompt Americans to invest in everything from insulation or new windows to overarching energy upgrades of their homes, creating construction and manufacturing jobs, and boosting energy efficiency.

"The current thinking is that the program would be in the range of $6 billion, and we think that would be an appropriate range for a program of this magnitude," said a senior administration official, who asked not to be named in advance of Obama's comments.

Obama will spell out details of the plan during a trip to Savannah, Georgia, the latest stop on his "White House to Main Street" tour, during which he discusses ideas for rebuilding the economy.

With unemployment just below 10 percent, Americans are anxious about the country's finances, nudging Obama's approval ratings to 50 percent or below and potentially dimming his fellow Democrats' prospects in November's congressional elections.

The program involves a range of incentives for consumers, including rebates from stores that sell building materials, companies that install the equipment and utility energy efficiency programs. Consumers could also get rebates for a range of home energy upgrades.

Dubbed "cash for caulkers" after last year's successful "cash for clunkers" automobile trade-in program, the program was first announced in early December. Obama called on Congress to support it in his State of the Union address in January.

RARE BOOST FOR OBAMA AGENDA

Like "clunkers," it will have time limits, although such details would be worked out with Congress. Democrats included the program in a set of job-creation efforts they announced early in February.

"We would anticipate that in the range of 2 to 3 million households would participate," the administration official said. "It's designed to be a short-term program."

The scheme would also offer support for state and local governments to provide financing options for consumers who want to participate. The White House said it expected the program would save consumers $200 to $500 in energy costs per year.

The president's agenda got a rare boost last week when a few Republicans in the Senate joined Democrats to approve a $15 billion package of tax breaks and highway spending that aims to bring down the 9.7 percent unemployment rate.

But Republicans seeking to wrest control of Congress from the Democrats have scored political points by expressing concern that what Obama frames as job creation efforts are overspending to expand the reach of government. The White House must also placate investors nervous about deficit spending as it seeks to stimulate job growth.

Some of Obama's priorities -- notably healthcare and financial regulation -- have been stalled since his fellow Democrats lost their 60-seat "supermajority" in the U.S. Senate in January.

Obama's full itinerary in Savannah has not been announced, but his stops will include Savannah Technical College, a technical and adult education school.

(Editing by Stacey Joyce)

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Pete Harrison - Analysis
BRUSSELS
Tue Mar 2, 2010 4:11am EST
Europe all mouth and no money in green tech race

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Europe's plan to lead the green technology race has a gaping financial hole for the next four years, handing the advantage to rivals China, Japan and the United States.

Even after 2014, when the European Union budget should have been thoroughly overhauled, there is no guarantee that green tech will have triumphed in a battle for funds versus the powerful farming lobby.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso lays out his vision for the next decade on Wednesday, and he is expected to champion green growth as a means of protecting the climate and boosting jobs.

"The market for green technologies is forecast to triple by 2030," says a leaked draft of Barroso's strategy, seen by Reuters. "The EU was largely a first mover in green solutions, but its advantage is being challenged by strong growth in other markets, notably China and North America."

Industry experts say the EU currently has a pot of around 7.5 billion euros ($10.2 billion) available for green tech research.

The number may look big, but it is less than 1 percent of the total current EU budget, which weighs in at 862 billion.

The European Commission estimates 80 billion euros must be raised over the next decade to stay ahead in the green tech race.

Easier said than done.

While China's authoritarian government has little trouble mobilizing research funding, and the United States and Japan have a strong track record, the 27-nation European Union has a convoluted funding process to navigate.

TECHNOLOGY RISK

Industry says it cannot -- and will not -- make the necessary investments on its own.

"A low carbon economy does not come cheap," says Giles Dickson, an EU affairs expert at French engineer Alstom.

"There's a huge commercial and technology risk for companies that spend money on demonstrating technologies that are not yet commercially viable," he added. "Industry will pay most of this bill, but we cannot pick up this bill on our own."

A one-off injection of 400 billion euros will also be needed to roll out that technology on a pan-European scale, he adds.

Many politicians had hoped that the EU's Emissions Trading System, which forces companies to buy pollution permits, would have made traditional fossil fuels so expensive that firms would steadily shift to greener sources.

That change is not happening fast, with the price of permits to emit carbon dioxide hovering at a paltry 13 euros per tonne, and most decision-makers have accepted the need to speed the shift by subsidizing green technology.

BAD RECORD

Funding from national coffers is not seen as a realistic option as the EU's 27 countries emerge from the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.

Furthermore, if European countries were to fund their own research programs they would run the risk of wasteful duplication.

The answer is funding at a pan-European level, and in the long term that means tapping the EU budget.

"The best thing that could happen is to transfer some of the funds that are locked into agricultural support," said Anders Wijkman, a member of the European Parliament until last year.

Agriculture takes up 40 percent of the EU budget, with French farmers accounting for about a fifth of that. But with a new budget looming in 2014, Britain, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands are pushing for change.

The battle is not expected to be easy.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has urged colleagues to embark on an "offensive strategy" to control the debate, and support is expected from Poland, Italy, Spain and Greece.

In Brussels, Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos from Romania and Budgetary Commissioner Janusz Lewandowski from Poland are seen as likely allies.

Ahead of that fight, money is also scarce.

The European Commission launched its flagship "Strategic Energy Technology" funding plan last October with a vision of spending 8 billion euros a year on green tech research -- 5 billion more than current levels.

"There're instruments that can provide around 2.5 billion euros a year, but what they're looking for is 5 billion a year for strategic energy technologies, so there's still a gap," says Jesse Scott of environment think tank E3G.

"When it comes to putting its money where its mouth is, the EU is failing miserably."

(editing by James Jukwey)


[Green Business]
Nicole Mordant
VANCOUVER
Mon Mar 1, 2010 5:23pm EST
Sustainable Energy bets on Ontario solar market

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Sustainable Energy Technologies Ltd, a solar equipment maker that recently relocated to Toronto from Calgary, may soon land its first large-scale orders in its new home province, the world's newest "go-to" region for solar power.

The company, whose shares have risen 150 percent in the past year, also expects to announce a tie-up soon with a top European solar panel maker to supply the Ontario market with thin-film panels carrying Sustainable Energy's power inverters, its chief executive said on Monday.

Inverters are key components of power systems that turn the sun's rays into electricity as they convert the direct current output generated by the solar panels into the alternating current that the power grid runs on.

"We have been approaching the major thin-film suppliers in Europe. ... We have developed substantive relationships with those European suppliers, which are major names in the market place," said Chief Executive Officer Robert Bucher.

"We expect to have an announcement soon on that for the Ontario marketplace," he told Reuters in an interview.

Ontario last October launched the most comprehensive and generous set of feed-in tariffs in North America, piquing the interest of Canadian and foreign renewable energy companies at a time when Europe is starting to roll back its support for the sector.

Ontario's incentives guarantee sellers of electricity produced from the sun and other renewable sources fixed, above-market prices for 20 years, with the rooftop solar industry -- Sustainable Energy's main market -- getting some of the most mouth-watering rates.

"We see Ontario as taking over most of our investment this year and next year even though we will continue in Spain and Greece," Bucher said.

Sustainable Energy, which sells its inverters in Spain and Eastern Europe, is a small fish in a big pond housing competitors like Germany's SMA Solar Technology AG, the world's No.1 inverter company with more than 50 percent of the market.

But the 11-year-old Canadian company, which started off life in the fuel cell industry, has won some fans who like its technology. Unlike most competitors' systems, Sustainable's cuts out the need to have an inverter on every solar panel, which is expensive.

"We definitely think it's the most compelling inverter out there in the market right now," said Khurram Malik, research analyst at Jacobs Securities, a Toronto-based renewable energy brokerage.

Sustainable Energy recently moved its head office from Calgary to Toronto to take advantage of Ontario's lucrative green energy incentives.

It plans to have a production facility up and running in Ontario by the summer producing 60 megawatts of power. It expects to double capacity to 120 MW in 2011.

Bucher expects the first Ontario orders for commercial rooftop systems of 200 kilowatts or higher in the next few days or weeks, a step toward the company's targeted revenue this fiscal year of between C$40 million ($38.4 million) and C$60 million.

That is a massive increase on 2009's revenue of just C$82,443.

Sustainable Energy's stock closed down 1 Canadian cent, or 2.86 percent, at 34 Canadian cents on the TSX Venture Exchange on Monday.

(Reporting by Nicole Mordant; Editing by Frank McGurty)