The Peakist

Calculated Earth is a collaborative effort by Malcolm Burke and Jonathan Burke and arises out of a piece of background research work that lead  them to the many freely available topographical data sources on the net.

The maps and animations are plotted using the June 2006 ETOPO2v2 data set from the US National Geophysical Data Centre.

The maps simply show graphically the selected height across the ETOPO2v2 dataset without interpretation or adjustment. So landlocked areas of the world that are below the selected level will show as being flooded regardless of being without a connection to the sea. No adjustments are made for tides.

Considering the flooding currently plaguing England, plotting the first few metres of sea level rise on this site should make you think about the scale of disaster we are facing if the polar caps continue melting.
http://calculatedearth.com

· Analyst argues wind farms and biofuels are not green
· Report’s look at negative aspects aims to end ‘taboo’

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Wednesday July 25, 2007
The Guardian (more…)

Howard Kunstler wrote ‘The Long Emergency’ on the premise that in the near future our lives will change dramatically due to a confluence point of simultaineous global problems. The primary issue here being peak oil. A secondary issue he touched on was climate change, to which many are attributing this summer’s uncharacteristic weather patterns.

I believe this is the first micro effects of a confluence of problems that will directly effect the standards of living in the western world.
” In the 40 years between 1950 and 1992, the area of planted arable land increased by 14.5 per cent from 611 million hectares to 700 million hectares; in the same period, grain output rose from 692 million tons to a staggering 1,920 million tons, an increase of 177.5 per cent…….. The ability of agriculture to produce far greater quantities food this century than in previous centuries can be attributed to four factors: advanced plant breeding techniques, the use of intensive irrigation, the availability of fertilizers on a commercial scale, and the development of plant protection products. Applied together, these four technologies have produced a remarkable outcome: although there has been an enormous increase in world population during the twentieth century, and although there are still parts of the world where people are suffering from malnutrition, nowadays, starvation is no longer a common cause of death, as it was in the last century. Nevertheless, because the population of the world continues to rise, 680 million people - or 12 per cent of the world’s population - could be chronically undernourished by 2010, according to FAO projections. This means that the demands on agriculture to be both productive and sustainable are increasing. ” source EFMA

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In the 2006 budget the UK Government introduced the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO)- a requirement on transport fuel suppliers to ensure that, by 2010 5% of all road vehicle fuel is supplied from renewable sources, bringing the UK roughly in line with the 2003 EU biofuels directive. In the US, with federal subsidies for bioethanol production, and in the EU with targets to be met, biofuels are big business. A recent study by the Worldwatch Institute concluded that, for Europe to provide for 5% of its transport fuel needs, a wholly unrealistic 36% of its agricultural land would have to be dedicated to biofuels. While currently British Sugar supplies much of the feedstock for UK biofuels, most of it blended with supermarket forecourt petrol, there is no way to meet the modest 2010 biofuel target utilising crops from European land. Instead the targets will be met with imports of biodeisel and ethanol - both of which currently present huge enviornmental problems and to greater or lesser extent displace the CO2 emissions that are the raison d’etre of the RTFO from European tailpipes to the US grain belt and Indonesian palm oil plantations.

Sasha Lilley reports for CorpWatch on the reality of the “green fuel” ethanol:

“The town of Columbus, Nebraska, bills itself as a “City of Power and Progress.” If Archer Daniels Midland gets its way, that power will be partially generated by coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. When burned, it emits carcinogenic pollutants and high levels of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming. Ironically this coal will be used to generate ethanol, a plant-based petroleum substitute that has been hyped by both environmentalists and President George Bush as the green fuel of the future. (more…)

To prevent massive pollution and slow its growing contribution to global warming, China will need to make advanced coal technology work on an unprecedented scale.
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Study finds enough electric capacity to ‘fill up’ plug-in vehicles across much of the nation

If all the cars and light trucks in the nation switched from oil to electrons, idle capacity in the existing electric power system could generate most of the electricity consumed by plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. A new study for the Department of Energy finds that “off-peak” electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of the country’s 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics. (more…)

Meet the world’s top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane,or even George Bush: it is the cow. A United Nations report has identified the world’s rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs. (more…)

Dear Friends:
Over the past 10 years, we at Oilwatch have been building a strong and active network of resistance to the negative impacts of fossil fuels activities on peoples and their
environment. With member organizations from over 50 countries, we are dedicated to developing global strategies for the communities affected by the oil operations and of
supporting their processes of resistance in the struggle against those activities. (more…)

Beneath our seas, reserves of frozen methane hold more energy than all other fossil fuels put together. But can we get at them without causing environmental meltdown? Ed Caesar reports
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Wild promises abound, but can the simplest element in the universe really power our homes, fuel our cars and reduce our contribution to global warming? PM crunches the numbers on the real hydrogen economy.

BY Jeff Wise
Published in the November, 2006 issue, Popular Mechanics

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· State withdraws approval for Shell’s Sakhalin project
· Gazprom rumoured to want half of BP venture

Terry Macalister and Michael Mainville in Moscow Tuesday September 19, 2006
The Guardian

Shell and BP were facing legal wrangles and upheaval in Russia last night, raising doubts about the involvement of foreign companies in the country’s oil and gas sector. Government approval for Shell’s $20bn Sakhalin project was withdrawn and state-owned Gazprom was reported to be trying to buy half of the TNK-BP joint venture.

Russia’s Natural Resources ministry said it had revoked the environmental approval for the major Sakhalin-2 scheme in the far east of Russia to “satisfy the arguments of the prosecutor’s office” leaving the future of the scheme in doubt. (more…)