[Top News] from [REUTERS]
[Environment News]
[Green Business | Italy]
Barry Malone
ADDIS ABABA
Tue Mar 30, 2010 2:04pm EDT
Ethiopia dam will not displace 200,000: builder
｛エチオピアのダム建設企業、20万住民の退去を否定｝
(Reuters) - The Italian firm building Africa's biggest hydropower dam in Ethiopia on Tuesday denied allegations that the dam would deprive 200,000 self-sufficient people of a living and make them dependent on aid.
The ethnic rights group Survival International said last week that the dam would disrupt fishing and farming and displace more than 200,000 people, among them the Kwegu and Hamar tribes.
"The project will not cause drought: the dam will not block the flow of water to the river indefinitely, but merely redistribute it during the course of the year," Salini Costruttori said in a statement.
"Activities connected to the local fishing trade will not be destroyed. Agriculture will be able to benefit from a constant supply of water through the year."
The Gibe 111 dam, costing 1.4 billion euros and expected to generate 1,800 megawatts, is one of five Ethiopia is building in a drive to beat power shortages and export electricity. It will almost double current Ethiopian capacity of just under 2,000 MW.
Survival International director Stephen Corry said last week that no respectable body should fund "this atrocious project.
An SI representative who did not wish to be named said then that the dam would ruin the economy of those living near it.
"It will end the annual flooding some rely on to make the land they farm fertile, and for tribes who rely on fishing, it will deplete stocks. They will need aid."
The Ethiopian government has said that people affected by hydropower dams will be compensated or relocated.
Ethiopia is negotiating funding for Gibe 111, whose construction began in 2006, with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the European Investment Bank and the Italian government.
Hydropower supplies about 90 percent of Ethiopia's electricity, and the country plans to spend $12 billion over 25 years on generating plant with the aim of exporting to a continent where shortages are common despite abundant potential resources of solar, hydro and other power.
[Environment News]
[Green Business]
Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA
Tue Mar 30, 2010 10:51am EDT
El Nino to influence climate patterns to midyear: WMO
｛エルニーニョ現象、今年中頃、気候形態に影響：ＷＭＯ｝
(Reuters) - The El Nino warming the Pacific Ocean since June has peaked, but is expected to influence climate patterns worldwide up to mid-year before dying out, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday.
However, the United Nations agency said that forecasting uncertainties meant it could not rule out the possibility that El Nino would persist beyond mid-year.
El Nino, driven by an abnormal warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, can create havoc in weather patterns across the Asia-Pacific region, unleashing droughts in some places and heavy storms in others. It typically lasts from 9 to 12 months.
The most likely scenario is for sea surface temperatures across the tropical Pacific, which rose by 1.5 degrees Celsius at its peak last November-December, to return to normal by mid-2010, WMO said in a statement.
"El Nino is already in a decaying phase. We expect it to fully decay by mid-year and neutral conditions to be established," WMO climate expert Rupa Kumar Kolli told Reuters.
"But this is a period where the predictability of the system is very low. Things could happen very suddenly," he said.
The WMO said that the current El Nino, which can occur every two-seven years, was of a moderate level, "close to or slightly above the typical strength seen in the historical record of El Nino events."
"Even during the decaying phase of the El Nino, expected over the next few months, the conditions associated with a typical El Nino will continue to influence climatic patterns at least through the second quarter of the year," it said.
DRY CONDITIONS
El Nino typically creates dry conditions for western areas along the Pacific Ocean such as South East Asia and Indonesia, and southern parts of western Australia, and wetter than normal conditions in western coastal areas of South America, Kolli told Reuters.
Parts of South Asia experienced drought last year due to a weak summer monsoon season linked to El Nino, and this could happen again if El Nino were to intensify in June, he said.
"That is the typical signature of El Nino," he added.
Warmer sea temperatures along some coastal regions of Latin America had caused higher rainfalls, but these were confined to relatively smaller pockets, and did not wreak havoc, he said.
The last severe El Nino in 1998 killed more than 2,000 people and caused billions of dollars in damages to crops, infrastructure and mines in Australia and Asia.
"Every El Nino is an individual event," Kolli said.
However, the phenomenon, which means "little boy" in Spanish, referring to the Christ child because it is often noticed mostly clearly in Latin America around Christmas, is also linked to a weaker than normal hurricane season in the northern Atlantic, according to the WMO expert.
The opposite cooling phenomenon, known as La Nina, or "little girl," could also start in the middle of this year, but that scenario is deemed less likely.
(To watch a Reuters Insider television's interview with WMO Chief Climate Scientist Rupa Kumar Kolli, click on the link below link.reuters.com/gyt65j )
(Editing by Jonathan Lynn)
[Environment News]
[Green Business | COP15]
Peter Griffiths
LONDON
Tue Mar 30, 2010 7:34pm EDT
Climate unit criticized for stonewalling skeptics
｛クライメイト部門、進行妨害する懐疑派を批判｝
(Reuters) - Scientists at a leading British climate research center had a culture of withholding information from global warming skeptics but did not deliberately manipulate data to support their case, lawmakers said on Wednesday.
In the first official report into the theft of emails from the unit last year, a British parliamentary committee said the messages did not contradict the mainstream scientific view that man-made emissions have contributed to rising temperatures.
Thousands of emails exchanged between scientists were published on the Internet days before world leaders met in Copenhagen for climate change talks last December.
The government has acknowledged that the ensuing row dented public confidence in the evidence underpinning man's role in raising global temperatures.
Campaigners who doubt the science behind man-made global warming said the messages showed researchers hid, exaggerated or fiddled the data to support the consensus view.
Parliament's Science and Technology Committee rejected that assessment of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), but sharply condemned the unit for withholding information requested by outsiders under Britain's freedom of information laws.
"The culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure, particularly to climate change skeptics, we felt was reprehensible," Committee Chairman Phil Willis told a news conference.
Professor Phil Jones, head of the unit, was cleared of dishonestly fiddling the data to strengthen his evidence.
"The scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact," the report said. "We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus."
The committee found nothing sinister in Jones' use of the words "hide the decline" and "trick" in two emails about temperature changes that attracted the most public attention.
"Hide the decline" was not an attempt to conceal data but was scientific shorthand for discarding erroneous data, the committee concluded. Similarly, Jones intended "trick" to mean a neat way of handling evidence, rather than anything underhanded.
The university has set up two separate inquiries into the email affair and British police are investigating the hacking.
(Editing by Noah Barkin)
[Environment News]
[Green Business | Italy]
Barry Malone
ADDIS ABABA
Tue Mar 30, 2010 2:04pm EDT
Ethiopia dam will not displace 200,000: builder
｛エチオピアのダム建設企業、20万住民の退去を否定｝
(Reuters) - The Italian firm building Africa's biggest hydropower dam in Ethiopia on Tuesday denied allegations that the dam would deprive 200,000 self-sufficient people of a living and make them dependent on aid.
The ethnic rights group Survival International said last week that the dam would disrupt fishing and farming and displace more than 200,000 people, among them the Kwegu and Hamar tribes.
"The project will not cause drought: the dam will not block the flow of water to the river indefinitely, but merely redistribute it during the course of the year," Salini Costruttori said in a statement.
"Activities connected to the local fishing trade will not be destroyed. Agriculture will be able to benefit from a constant supply of water through the year."
The Gibe 111 dam, costing 1.4 billion euros and expected to generate 1,800 megawatts, is one of five Ethiopia is building in a drive to beat power shortages and export electricity. It will almost double current Ethiopian capacity of just under 2,000 MW.
Survival International director Stephen Corry said last week that no respectable body should fund "this atrocious project.
An SI representative who did not wish to be named said then that the dam would ruin the economy of those living near it.
"It will end the annual flooding some rely on to make the land they farm fertile, and for tribes who rely on fishing, it will deplete stocks. They will need aid."
The Ethiopian government has said that people affected by hydropower dams will be compensated or relocated.
Ethiopia is negotiating funding for Gibe 111, whose construction began in 2006, with the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the European Investment Bank and the Italian government.
Hydropower supplies about 90 percent of Ethiopia's electricity, and the country plans to spend $12 billion over 25 years on generating plant with the aim of exporting to a continent where shortages are common despite abundant potential resources of solar, hydro and other power.
[Environment News]
[Green Business]
Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA
Tue Mar 30, 2010 10:51am EDT
El Nino to influence climate patterns to midyear: WMO
｛エルニーニョ現象、今年中頃、気候形態に影響：ＷＭＯ｝
(Reuters) - The El Nino warming the Pacific Ocean since June has peaked, but is expected to influence climate patterns worldwide up to mid-year before dying out, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday.
However, the United Nations agency said that forecasting uncertainties meant it could not rule out the possibility that El Nino would persist beyond mid-year.
El Nino, driven by an abnormal warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, can create havoc in weather patterns across the Asia-Pacific region, unleashing droughts in some places and heavy storms in others. It typically lasts from 9 to 12 months.
The most likely scenario is for sea surface temperatures across the tropical Pacific, which rose by 1.5 degrees Celsius at its peak last November-December, to return to normal by mid-2010, WMO said in a statement.
"El Nino is already in a decaying phase. We expect it to fully decay by mid-year and neutral conditions to be established," WMO climate expert Rupa Kumar Kolli told Reuters.
"But this is a period where the predictability of the system is very low. Things could happen very suddenly," he said.
The WMO said that the current El Nino, which can occur every two-seven years, was of a moderate level, "close to or slightly above the typical strength seen in the historical record of El Nino events."
"Even during the decaying phase of the El Nino, expected over the next few months, the conditions associated with a typical El Nino will continue to influence climatic patterns at least through the second quarter of the year," it said.
DRY CONDITIONS
El Nino typically creates dry conditions for western areas along the Pacific Ocean such as South East Asia and Indonesia, and southern parts of western Australia, and wetter than normal conditions in western coastal areas of South America, Kolli told Reuters.
Parts of South Asia experienced drought last year due to a weak summer monsoon season linked to El Nino, and this could happen again if El Nino were to intensify in June, he said.
"That is the typical signature of El Nino," he added.
Warmer sea temperatures along some coastal regions of Latin America had caused higher rainfalls, but these were confined to relatively smaller pockets, and did not wreak havoc, he said.
The last severe El Nino in 1998 killed more than 2,000 people and caused billions of dollars in damages to crops, infrastructure and mines in Australia and Asia.
"Every El Nino is an individual event," Kolli said.
However, the phenomenon, which means "little boy" in Spanish, referring to the Christ child because it is often noticed mostly clearly in Latin America around Christmas, is also linked to a weaker than normal hurricane season in the northern Atlantic, according to the WMO expert.
The opposite cooling phenomenon, known as La Nina, or "little girl," could also start in the middle of this year, but that scenario is deemed less likely.
(To watch a Reuters Insider television's interview with WMO Chief Climate Scientist Rupa Kumar Kolli, click on the link below link.reuters.com/gyt65j )
(Editing by Jonathan Lynn)
[Environment News]
[Green Business | COP15]
Peter Griffiths
LONDON
Tue Mar 30, 2010 7:34pm EDT
Climate unit criticized for stonewalling skeptics
｛クライメイト部門、進行妨害する懐疑派を批判｝
(Reuters) - Scientists at a leading British climate research center had a culture of withholding information from global warming skeptics but did not deliberately manipulate data to support their case, lawmakers said on Wednesday.
In the first official report into the theft of emails from the unit last year, a British parliamentary committee said the messages did not contradict the mainstream scientific view that man-made emissions have contributed to rising temperatures.
Thousands of emails exchanged between scientists were published on the Internet days before world leaders met in Copenhagen for climate change talks last December.
The government has acknowledged that the ensuing row dented public confidence in the evidence underpinning man's role in raising global temperatures.
Campaigners who doubt the science behind man-made global warming said the messages showed researchers hid, exaggerated or fiddled the data to support the consensus view.
Parliament's Science and Technology Committee rejected that assessment of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), but sharply condemned the unit for withholding information requested by outsiders under Britain's freedom of information laws.
"The culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure, particularly to climate change skeptics, we felt was reprehensible," Committee Chairman Phil Willis told a news conference.
Professor Phil Jones, head of the unit, was cleared of dishonestly fiddling the data to strengthen his evidence.
"The scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact," the report said. "We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus."
The committee found nothing sinister in Jones' use of the words "hide the decline" and "trick" in two emails about temperature changes that attracted the most public attention.
"Hide the decline" was not an attempt to conceal data but was scientific shorthand for discarding erroneous data, the committee concluded. Similarly, Jones intended "trick" to mean a neat way of handling evidence, rather than anything underhanded.
The university has set up two separate inquiries into the email affair and British police are investigating the hacking.
(Editing by Noah Barkin)
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