news20100810gdn

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[guardian.co.uk > Environment > Green building]

The big switch: How Britain's homes could make cost-free emissions cuts
British homeowners can green their properties using government loans – and visit a functioning 'superhome' before committing

Christine Ottery
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 August 2010 10.30 BST
Article history

{The 50th 'superhome' in Welwyn village. Homeowners can visit properties that have been retrofitted using money from government loans. Photograph: Christine Ottery}

With an electricity meter that goes backwards and a roof covered in green plants, Tony's Almond's house is no normal home. The house in Welwyn village, just north of London, is actually a green "superhome" - the 50th in a UK-wide network of demonstration eco-homes now open to the public.

The scheme, operated by charity Sustainable Energy Academy (SEA) and the National Energy Foundation, plans to create a network of 200 superhomes to showcase energy efficiency and renewable energy generation, which will let visitors see for themselves both the challenges involved in making the switch and the financial and environmental savings made.

Following a three-year effort to inspire homeowners to do their own green retrofits, there is now a superhome within 40 miles of 90% of all homes in England and Wales. This year 20,000 people visited these properties, up from 12,000 last year.

At Almond's 1968 five-bedroom detached property, it becomes clear how much work was needed. The roof has been laid with sedum and solar panels to power the hot water and electricity systems, and inside there is 250mm loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, 100mm underfloor insulation, draught-proofing and double glazing.

Since his large 3kWp solar photovoltaic panels were installed in February, the household has had no electricity bill and - through the government feed-in tariff - have earned the household £681.45. Almond estimates further savings on his gas bill from the insulation and solar thermal system after winter. The retrofit as a whole has cost less than £25,000 and the measures have cut his home's carbon emissions by 66%. To qualify as a superhome, a home's emissions must have been cut by at least 60%.

John Doggart, chairman of SEA, says surveys found that 15% of visitors to superhomes go on to convert their own properties: "The reasons people choose to take action are almost 50/50 saving the planet or saving their pocket," he says.

Visiting a home that has had an energy makeover can help people make the decision to invest, says environmental psychologist Paul Stern. "A demonstration makes it more real. Some of the psychology is about human information processing, and this is a kind of a household decision that is unfamiliar and easy to postpone."

The superhomes are one grassroots part of a bigger effort to green Britain's ageing housing stock.

While new homes built from 2016 onwards will be mandated zero carbon by the government, these will represent only a small minority of the UK's homes.

This means that 80% of all homes that will be standing in 2050 will already have been built, which makes retrofitting of existing homes a priority.

The government's "Green Deal" hopes to accelerate this push, offering householders loans of up to £10,000 for energy efficiency improvements and installation of domestic renewable energy sources. The "pay as you save" loans, designed to overcome the upfront financial obstacles such as the average £12,000 price of solar panels, should start in late 2012. Under the scheme, the cost of the loan repayments – which are tied to the property, not the owner – should be outweighed by the savings on householders' energy bills.

"This groundbreaking legislation will allow us to offer consumers the ability to install energy efficiency measures in their homes without any upfront costs or payments. These would be paid back over time through savings on energy bills," says minister for climate change, Greg Barker. The loans were originally proposed by the Labour government, though the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats both say they had suggested similar ideas in the past.

The SEA's Doggart supports the loans but says the government still needs to grasp the scale of investment needed. "This is a significant contribution, but it costs between £15,000 to £25,000 to get a 60% or better carbon saving on old houses, which is what we should be aiming for."


[guardian.co.uk > Environment > Renewable energy]

Chris Huhne urges local councils to lead 'green energy revolution'
Energy secretary lifts ban on the sale of surplus electricity to the national grid as UK aims to meet EU energy targets

Patrick Wintour, political editor
The Guardian, Monday 9 August 2010
Article history

{Huhne announced the plan to allow councils to sell electricity at the LGA conference in June. Photograph: Rex}

Local councils will be allowed to sell renewable electricity to the National Grid from today, with the energy secretary, Chris Huhne, urging them to position themselves at the forefront of a power revolution. Huhne has lifted a ban on the sale of surplus electricity to the grid by councils, which say the scheme could raise £100m a year for cash-strapped local authorities in England and Wales.

At present only 0.01% of electricity in England is generated by local authority-owned renewables. In Germany the equivalent figure is 100 times higher.

The Local Government Association said council-owned wind turbines and solar panels on town halls, council homes, leisure centres and other municipal buildings could be money spinners.

Gary Porter, chairman of the LGA's environment board, said: "This has the potential to cut energy bills, reduce emissions and raise millions of pounds.

"Councils have lots of buildings, from offices and leisure centres to houses and flats, depots and community centres that could be transformed into local green power stations."

Huhne announced the plan to allow councils to sell electricity at the LGA conference in June, and has won praise for acting so quickly.

As things stand, the UK risks missing its EU commitment to produce 15% of energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Huhne said last night: "For too long, Whitehall's dogmatic reliance on 'big' energy has stood in the way of the vast potential role of local authorities in the UK's green energy revolution.

"This is a vital step to making community renewable projects commercially viable, to bring in long-term income to benefit local areas, and to secure local acceptance for low carbon energy projects."

The idea has been promoted most heavily by Woking council in Surrey. The council's chief executive, Ray Morgan, said he welcomed the plan but urged the government to make Ofgem, the energy regulator, go further in lifting restrictions.

news20100810bbc

[Sci/Environment News] from [BBC NEWS]

[bbc.co.uk > News > Science & Environment]

Brain works more like internet than 'top down' company
The brain appears to be a vastly interconnected network much like the Internet, according to new research.

By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
10 August 2010 Last updated at 11:53 GMT

{The way neurons are connected could shed light on how their collective behaviour arises}

That runs counter to the 19th-Century "top-down" view of brain structure.

A novel technique to track signals across tiny brain regions has revealed connections between regions associated with stress, depression and appetite.

The research, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may lead to a full map of the nervous system.

Larry Swanson and Richard Thompson from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, US, isolated a small section of a rat's brain in the nucleus accumbens - a brain region long associated with pleasure and reward.

Their technique hinges on the injection of "tracers" at precise points in the brain tissue. These are molecules that do not interfere with the movement of signals across the tissue, but can be illuminated and identified using a microscope.

Loops not lines

What is new is that the researchers injected two tracers at the same point at the same time: one that showed where signals were going, and one that showed where they were coming from. The approach can show up to four levels of connection.

If the brain has a hierarchichal structure like a large company, as neurology has long held, the "to" and "from" diagram would show straight lines from independent regions up towards a central processing unit: the company's boss.

But instead, the researchers saw loops between differing regions, feeding back to and directly linking regions that were not known to communicate with one another. This is a better fit with the model of vast networks such as the internet.

The region of the brain studied by the researchers displays a network connecting regions associated with stress, appetite and depression.

{One model of the mind describes its powers as arising from a vastly interconnected network}

Such a highly interconnected structure has been hypothesised for some time, and could prove to be a powerful tool in analysing how the brain processes information. But it had not, until now, been demonstrated experimentally.

"You would be amazed at how much of the current experimental neuroscience literature is dominated by 'top down-bottom up thinking', which goes back to the 19th Century, especially in neurology," Professor Swanson told BBC News.

"The bottom line is that no matter what you might think, the circuitry we've shown - that specific set of structural connections - has not been demonstrated before."

The work illuminates just one tiny corner of the vast number of connections present even in a small mammal's brain. But by slightly overlapping one mapped region with another, and mapping that, a far greater picture could emerge.

"This method is repeatable in a sensible way so that neural networks can be followed as far as they go - ultimately to the whole wiring diagram of the brain," Professor Swanson said.

Such a diagram would be boundlessly complex, and the degree to which it could shed light on the more slippery questions of consciousness and cognition is still up for debate.

"We have no idea right now, but the direct analogy is with the Human Genome Project: taking on faith that knowing the complete sequence of human DNA would be a foundation stone for biology, no matter how long the understanding may take to realise in practical terms."


[bbc.co.uk > News > Science & Environment]

Climate change 'partly to blame' for sweltering Moscow
Global climate change is partly to blame for the abnormally hot and dry weather in Moscow, cloaked in a haze of smoke from wildfires, say researchers.

By Katia Moskvitch
Science reporter, BBC News
10 August 2010 Last updated at 08:14 GMT

{Extreme heat and wildfires have led to a blanket of smog over Moscow}

The UK Met Office said there are likely to be more extreme high temperatures in the future.

Experts from the environmental group WWF Russia have also linked climate change and hot weather to raging wildfires around the Russian capital.

Meteorologists say severe conditions may linger for several more days.

{“Birds have very intensive breathing, and such extreme levels of air pollutants have definitely affected them”
Alexey Kokorin
WWF Russia}

The Moscow health department said earlier that the number of people dying daily in the city had reached about 700 - twice the usual number.

Jeff Knight, a climate variability scientist at the UK Met Office, attributed the situation in Moscow to a number of factors, among them greenhouse gas concentrations, which are steadily rising.

The recent El Nino, a climate pattern that occurs across the tropical Pacific Ocean and affects weather around the world, and local weather patterns in Russia may have also contributed to this summer's abnormal conditions.

"The Russian heatwave is related to a persistent pattern of circulation drawing air from the south and east (the very warm steppes)," said Dr Knight.

"Circulation anomalies tend to create warm and cool anomalies: while it has been very hot in western Russia, it has been cooler than average in adjacent parts of Siberia that lie on the other side of the high pressure system where Arctic air is being drawn southwards.

"Some long-term records have been broken - for example the highest daily temperature in Moscow. We expect more extreme high temperatures as the climate changes. This means that when weather fluctuations promote high temperatures… there is more likelihood of records being broken."

{ Levels of air pollutants have exceeded the norm}

The head of the climate and energy programme at WWF Russia, Alexei Kokorin, said the abnormal temperatures soaring to up to 40C increased the likelihood of wildfires around the capital.

And though this summer in Moscow had proven harsh for people and animals alike, it was possible that temperatures would continue to rise over the years to come, he warned.

"We have to get ready to fight such fires in the future because there is a great possibility that such a summer will be repeated. This tendency won't stop in the coming 40 years or so, until the greenhouse gas emissions are reduced," he said.

"In a few decades, fires may affect the main forest regions of Russia. Of course, there are a lot less people living there, but we could lose a lot more forests.

"We can now say that the wave of abnormal phenomena that the rest of the world has been experiencing has finally reached central Russia," Dr Kokorin added.

Temperatures have been record-high for weeks and smoke from wildfires has driven airborne pollutants levels to the worst ever recorded in the capital and the Moscow region.

How peat bog fires spread
1.Peat is formed from decayed vegetation in bogs, moors or swamps.
2.Deliberate drainage or drought can expose peat to air.
3.Peat can then be ignited by wildfires or spontaneously combust. The air flow allows the peat to continue burning.
4.Once alight, the smouldering fire spreads slowly through the peat and can cause the ground above to collapse.

Besides people suffering and entire villages burnt down, Russian wildlife has been hit hard as well.

Greenpeace Russia has criticised the Russian authorities for poor handling of the catastrophe, and mainly for abolishing a centralised woodland fire control system several months ago.

Environmentalists say the number of personnel employed to spot wildfires has been slashed by over a half.

This has greatly contributed to the massive loss of forests and wildlife around the capital, Mikhail Kreyndlin, head of Greenpeace Russia's programme on specially protected natural areas, told BBC News.

"If bigger animals are able to escape the fires, smaller ones, including insects, have perished," he said.

Smog has also been a major issue, he added, especially for birds.

"Birds have very intensive breathing, and such extreme levels of air pollutants have definitely affected them," he said, explaining that it was possible for birds to basically drop dead from the skies.

Dr Kokorin said global warming creates another problem.

"If it gets warmer in the winter and in the spring and hotter in the summer, fauna changes.

{Wildfires have been raging around Moscow for weeks}

"For example, we have never had as many regions in Russia affected by malaria, and the same goes for ticks carrying encephalitis. This is because winters are becoming much warmer, and less and less of these organisms die during the freezing periods."

There have also been reports of freshwater jellyfish, commonly found in warm lakes and rivers in North America, Europe and Asia, fished out from the abnormally warm waters of the Moscow river.