Japan firms to work on solar-powered ship

The race to go green has taken to the high seas with two Japanese companies saying they would begin work on the world's first ship to have propulsion engines partially powered by solar energy.
Japan's biggest shipping line Nippon Yusen KK and Nippon Oil Corp said solar panels capable of generating 40 kilowatts of electricity would be placed on top of a 60,000 tonne car carrier to be used by Toyota Motor Corp.
The solar panels would help conserve up to 6.5 percent of fuel oil used in powering diesel engines that generate electricity at any given moment.
Solar panels for an average home usually generate 3.5 kilowatts of electricity.
The system is expected to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1-2 percent, or about 20 tonnes per year, said Hideyuki Dohi, general manager at Nippon Oil's energy system development department.
Nippon Yusen will invest about 150 million yen ($1.4 million) in the solar panel system to be designed by Nippon Oil.
Solar panels capable of generating several kilowatts of electricity have been used on large vessels before but their use has been limited to power for the crew's living quarters.
Damage to the panels from salt and vibration remain hurdles to be overcome.

Rising rivers threaten more misery in India

PATNA, India (Reuters) - Rising rivers in eastern India swamped new areas and destroyed homes on Tuesday affecting more than two million people, as frustrated villagers beat up officials and others remained glued to weather radio bulletins.
The Koshi river in the eastern state of Bihar has broken its mud embankments in several regions, swamped farmlands and destroyed homes in one of India's poorest regions.
The river broke a dam in neighbouring Nepal, worsening the floods caused by heavy monsoon rain, Bihar officials said.
Rains have killed more than 1,000 people in South Asia since the monsoon rains began in June, mainly in India's states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh but also in Nepal and Bangladesh.
In Bihar, thousands have taken refuge on embankments and on roads and mounds in the state.
Locals in the state call the Koshi the "sorrow of Bihar" for its regular floods and its ability to quickly change course.
"The Koshi river has changed its course and nearly 20-25 lakh (two and half million) people of the areas have been affected," Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of the state said after aerial survey of the flood situation.
Some experts blame the floods on heavier monsoon rains caused by global warming.
Last year, floods in eastern India and Bangladesh killed around 2,000 people. Millions of people were affected by floods and officials fear that similar disasters would become more frequent amid global climate change.

North Korea to suspend nuclear disablement

North Korea said on Tuesday it will stop disabling its nuclear facilities and consider restoring the Yongbyon reactor that can make material for atomic bombs, accusing the United States of violating a disarmament deal.
"We have decided to immediately suspend disabling our nuclear facilities," the North's KCNA news agency quoted a foreign ministry official as saying.
"This measure has been effective on August 14 and related parties have been notified of it," the official said.
Analysts said that given North Korea's deep reluctance to give up its nuclear weapons program -- the one powerful negotiating card it has with the outside world -- its latest move was no big surprise.
"North Korea is trying to muddle through and delay as much as possible," said Lee Dong-bok, a senior associate at the CSIS think tank in Seoul. "At the same time, this is a last ditch effort trying to somehow influence U.S. presidential politics."
The KCNA announcement coincided with the start of the U.S. Democratic Party's convention to choose its presidential candidate.
It also came just after Chinese President Hu Jintao, whose government is the nearest the reclusive North has to an ally, flew out of Seoul after two days of talks with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. Lee came to office earlier this year with a promise to get tough on the North if it did not move towards giving up its nuclear weapons ambitions.
"I think the timing of the Hu Jintao visit to South Korea was very depressing to the North Koreans," Lee Dong-bok at CSIS said.

Does morality need a bigger role in climate talks?

Morality needs a bigger role as a spur to a talks on a new U.N. treaty to slow global warming, according to a group of Christians I spoke to today in Accra, Ghana.
They were lobbying delegates at 160-nation talks to do more to combat climate change. For the story, click here
Around a table with me in a crowded conference hall in Ghana, they argued that economic and political arguments for action are simply not enough to solve an issue that is already affecting people’s livelihoods, especially in Africa, the poorest continent.
So should ethics and morality have a bigger role in working out international treaties? Or are there risks, for instance of opening the door to differing religious views of how far humans should be stewards of creation?

After 5 years of war, Iraqis desperate for water

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - At a communal water station in a Baghdad slum, a young boy's skinny arms fly up and down as he uses a bicycle pump to coax water from the dry ground.
His efforts produce a languid stream that will tide over his family -- and the families of the children waiting near him to fill their cooking pots -- until the next day.
This is a daily ritual for millions of Iraqis who lack access to sufficient clean water and proper sewage five years after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
Water and sewage are perennial challenges in this arid country, where the overhaul of decrepit public works has been hindered by years of war and neglect.
Nearly a billion liters of raw sewage is dumped into Baghdad waterways each day -- enough to fill 370 Olympic-sized pools.
The United Nations estimates that less than half of Iraqis get drinking water piped into their homes in rural areas. In the capital, people set their alarm clocks to wake them in the middle of the night so they can fill storage tanks when water pressure is under less strain.
New investments in water and sanitation are only slowly bearing fruit even as Iraq seeks to capitalize on a dramatic drop in violence over the past year.
Iraqi and U.S. officials have been working to refurbish existing water plants, distribution lines and sewage works, but they say major infrastructure improvements will take years.

Ocean "Plastic Soup"

Scientists investigate ocean 'plastic soup'
By Radio Australia's Barbara Heggen
Posted Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:40am AEDT

Scientists have also reported a similar mass in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica [File photo]. (AAP Image)
Scientists from the University of Hawaii are planning to conduct a comprehensive study of a giant floating plastic mass in the North Pacific Ocean.
Reports of the floating rubbish dump first emerged back in 1997 when an American sailor discovered it.
He then established a marine research foundation to raise awareness of the pollution. Now there are a number of scientists who have become alarmed at the situation.
It has become known as the "Pacific plastic soup" and stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, right across the north Pacific to near the coast of Japan.
Basically it is a massive concentration of floating plastic debris that results from swirling underwater currents.
The plastic originates from countries around the Pacific Rim, like Australia, the US, China and Mexico.
Because there are vast stretches of the ocean that are never travelled by any vessels, it is thought there are probably more of these plastic soups around the world.
Mass near Antarctica
It is already been reported by Chilean scientists that a similar mass exists in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.
Anyone who has witnessed the North Pacific mass is shocked at the enormity of the problem.
Professor David Karl, an oceanographer from the University of Hawaii, is planning a comprehensive range of research strategies.
"Certainly we can say that the accumulation rate exceeds the removal rate in the open ocean, because the degradation rates of plastic are so small," he said.
"So this phenomenon is increasing, I think it's fair to say, over time.
"Now whether it's twice the size of the continental United States or whether it's of the size of your hometown, it really doesn't matter.
"There's plastic out there and somebody should be out there studying its impact.
He says a research cruise is planned later this year from Honolulu to Los Angeles in California.
"That is the research crews where we're going to devote some of our valuable research time on that ship to try to look for this plastic heap," he said.
"If we can get accurate coordinates then perhaps we might even be able to see it by planes that are flying over or by Earth orbiting satellites, or by ships of opportunity, such as trade ships.
"It's likely they just go right through this and would not even know it, because they are not out on the deck looking for this stuff.
"But maybe we could put observers on their ships or some kind of a camera system or some kind of a detection system so that we could start to map this feature."

No Fish by 2050

Research announced today shows that, if present fishing practices are allowed to continue, there will be no viable ocean fishing in just another 40 to 50 years. As this ScienCentral News video explains, the research, published this week in the journal Science is the result of four years of work by a dozen scientists from all over the world.
Fishing Records
The researchers studied fishing records worldwide and found that there's been a major decrease in the number of the ocean's fish and that the decrease is accelerating. According to the report's lead author, Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, "When I saw it, I was chilled, I was really shocked because, I didn't expect it to be so soon."
Worm is blunt with his assessment, saying, "We see very clearly the end of the line. It shows that we're going to run out of viable fisheries, out of all seafood species by the year 2050; so within our lifetimes, certainly within the lifetimes of our children."

Worm says the problem is commercial fishermen are overfishing the world's oceans, and doing so in a way that is harming the ocean's ecological balance. He points out that fishermen accidentally catch and kill large numbers of commercially undesirable sea life, what fishermen call bycatch. Even though humans don't eat these, fish do. Worm adds other fishing practices, including dragging large nets along the bottom of the ocean floor, can damage the ocean's environment, especially fragile coral reefs.
image: National Environmental TrustHe says the study shows, "That this is threatening the productivity and stability of ocean ecosystems over time." He says that, in turn, means the numbers of fish caught will vary more and the remaining fish will have less ability to survive further stresses such as warmer oceans or pollution.
To reach this conclusion, a group of scientists from the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Sweden worked for four years pouring over 50 years worth of fishing records. In some cases they went much further back. Worm explains, "We've looked at a thousand year time period of 12 coastal regions worldwide, seeing how species were lost from those regions and what the consequences were." They also examined small controlled studies where researchers removed species of fish and watched what happened.

"What really surprised me and all of my co-authors," says Worm, "was that the answer we got from the variety of sites was always precisely the same." Without the missing species, says Worm, "we were losing the productivity and the temporal stability of the ecosystem, meaning that it was delivering less goods and services over time…and this delivery was less reliable, more variable over time."



"What really surprised me and all of my co-authors," says Worm, "was that the answer we got from the variety of sites was always precisely the same." Without the missing species, says Worm, "we were losing the productivity and the temporal stability of the ecosystem, meaning that it was delivering less goods and services over time…and this delivery was less reliable, more variable over time."

According to Worm, "We showed that we're about one-third down the trend. There's two-third to go, but since it's an accelerating trend, we only have another 40 or 50 years now."
Not all marine biologists agree that the decline will have such a strong impact on the amount of seafood available for people to eat. Among them is Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington. He says his studies show overfishing can depress fish stocks to just 20 to 40 percent of prior levels and still be very productive, losing only about 15 percent of the potential yield. He says, "Now, to me that's not a crisis. I defy you to find many things in life where you get 85 percent of maximum."
Hilborn agrees that there are many areas in the world that are in trouble because of overfishing, but he says the problem is sometimes overstated. He points to the ban on fishing some species of fish along the west coast of the United States. He explains, "There are six stocks that are overfished, and they collectively add up to 1.5 percent of the total potential biomas of the west coast of the United States. In other words, they're a trivial portion of the food producing capacity of the west coast, and we're effectively losing nothing on the west coast by overfishing."
Worm says the study also offers some hope. In an additional study, the researchers combed the records of marine reserves and places where fishing of some species has been banned. He said those areas quickly started recovering. He says this shows, "If … areas are sufficiently protected, we'll see recovery of ocean species and with it, the stability and productivity of the ocean ecosystem."
Worm is not advocating a ban on fishing, instead he says, "We have to get more intelligent about what we take out of the ocean and what we put into the ocean. … If we do this right, we can continue fishing as we were for hundreds of years, (but) if we continue with the destructive practices we've been employing, we will only have a few decades left."
This research was published in the November 3, 2006 issue of Science and was funded by The National Science Foundation, The University of California and The University of California, Santa Barbara.