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Household chemicals' 'cocktail effect' raises cancer concerns for watchdog

The Guardian - Fri, 2012-05-11 02:54
Phthalates, PCBs and parabens should be used with greater caution, claims environment agency – but ban not recommended

Common chemicals found in household products, cosmetics and medicines may be causing cancers, fertility problems and other illnesses including diabetes and obesity, according to a study.

Europe's environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, has warned that products containing endocrine disrupting chemicals should be treated with caution until their true effects are better known. However, it stopped short of recommending a ban of any specific products. A few such chemicals have already been banned, but many are still in widespread use.

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Heartland Institute compares belief in global warming to mass murder | Leo Hickman

The Guardian - Fri, 2012-05-04 20:03
US thinktank launches poster campaign comparing Unabomber and Osama Bin Laden to those concerned about global warming

It really is hard to know where to begin with this one. But let's start with: "What on earth were they thinking?"

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based rightwing thinktank notorious for promoting climate scepticism, has launched quite possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.

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Nuclear power is only solution to climate change, says Jeffrey Sachs

The Guardian - Fri, 2012-05-04 02:02
Earth Institute director says urgency of problem and immaturity of renewable energy industry leave little option but nuclear

Combating climate change will require an expansion of nuclear power, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Thursday, in remarks that are likely to dismay some sections of the environmental movement.

Prof Sachs said atomic energy was needed because it provided a low-carbon source of power, while renewable energy was not making up enough of the world's energy mix and new technologies such as carbon capture and storage were not progressing fast enough.

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The cargo bike – somewhere inbetween the courier and the truck | Peter Walker

The Guardian - Wed, 2012-05-02 16:00
The rise of the cargo bike makes perfect sense: it's nippy enough for narrow streets, and weighty enough to take 400kg

It is a familiar, unpleasant but seemingly inescapable part of modern city life: streets full of diesel-belching vans or lorries on delivery runs, either stuck in jams or else creating them as the driver double-parks to dash into a building. The solution? Roll forward the humble bicycle, or at least its close cousin.

The idea of cycle freight replacing the ubiquitous truck might seem initially fanciful, but it is an increasingly serious idea, one being presented to transport ministers from several dozen countries at a major conference starting on Wednesday.

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Living Buildings & Sustainability Assessment Training. SSEE Qld update.

Newsletters QLD - Tue, 2012-05-01 03:19
Living Buildings & Sustainability Assessment Training. SSEE Qld update.
Categories: Newsletters QLD

Ten of Britain's rarest wild flowers – in pictures

The Guardian - Wed, 2012-04-25 21:19
Nature writer and broadcaster Sarah Raven and Andy Byfield at Plantlife identify 10 of Britain's most endangered wild flowers.

Don't miss your 108-page guide to 50 of Britain's wild flowers, an exclusive excerpt from Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers (Bloomsbury), free this Sunday 29 April with the Observer Continue reading...
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Sainsbury's slimline toilet roll to wipe 140 tonnes from carbon emissions

The Guardian - Fri, 2012-04-20 19:45
Supermarket launches new roll with 11mm shaved off cardboard tubing, meaning about 500 fewer lorry trips a year

With each Briton getting through an average of 50 toilet rolls a year, the carbon footprint created by supplying it is huge.

Makers including Andrex have made rolls last longer by increasing sheet numbers. But Sainsbury's is set to try something new: shrinking the inner tube.

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Damien Hirst's butterflies: distressing but weirdly uplifting

The Guardian - Thu, 2012-04-19 05:30
Patrick Barkham loves watching butterflies zip along the hedgerows. So how would he feel seeing them live and die as exhibits in Damien Hirst's Tate Modern retrospective?

Butterflies made Damien Hirst's career and this is how he repays them: in a stark, white, windowless room in Tate Modern, hundreds of insects pull themselves from their pupae only to die there a few days later, surrounded by gawping tourists.

For some visitors to Hirst's blockbuster retrospective, it is not the rotting cow's head surrounded by flies, the sheep in formaldehyde or the giant ashtray filled with cigarette butts that makes them feel queasy. It is the installation in Room 5, where tropical butterflies futilely flit around the boxy space, eventually falling to die on the floor, where they are promptly scooped up by security staff.

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F1 fuel-saving flywheel to be fitted to London's buses

The Guardian - Wed, 2012-04-18 23:17
Go-ahead to fit technology, developed by Williams F1, to six prototype buses – with fuel savings estimated at up to 30%

A fuel-saving flywheel first developed for use in Formula One racing cars, but abandoned before it could be used due to a regulation change by the sport's administrators, will soon be retrofitted to a handful of London buses.

Six prototype buses owned by Go-Ahead, one of the UK's largest buses operators, are currently being fitted with the flywheels for a trial beginning later this year in and around Putney, south-west London.

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How wildlife is thriving in the Korean peninsula's demilitarised zone

The Guardian - Fri, 2012-04-13 21:20
The forces that lock humans out of the DMZ have allowed other species to thrive. Could a remnant of violent conflict become the symbol of a greener, more peaceful future?

• In pictures: wildlife in the DMZ
The world's most dangerous nature reserve

A thin green ribbon threads its way across the Korean Peninsula. Viewed from space, via composite satellite images, the winding swath clearly demarcates the political boundary between the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Its visual impact is especially strong in the west, where it separates the gray, concrete sprawl of Seoul from the brown, deforested wastes south of Kaesong. In the east, it merges with the greener landscapes of the Taebaek Mountain Range and all but disappears.

From the ground, the narrow verdant band manifests as an impenetrable barrier of overgrown vegetation enclosed by layers of fences topped by menacing concertina wire and dotted with observation posts manned by heavily armed soldiers. That a place so steeped in violence still teems with life seems unimaginable. And yet, the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, is home to thousands of species that are extinct or endangered elsewhere on the peninsula. It is the last haven for many of these plants and animals and the centre of attention for those intent on preserving Korea's rich ecological heritage.

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Iceland's volcanoes may power UK

The Guardian - Thu, 2012-04-12 03:59
The energy minister is to visit Iceland in May to discuss connecting the UK to its abundant geothermal energy

The volcanoes of Iceland could soon be pumping low-carbon electricity into the UK under government-backed plans for thousands of miles of high-voltage cables across the ocean floor.

The energy minister, Charles Hendry, is to visit Iceland in May to discuss connecting the UK to its abundant geothermal energy. "We are in active discussions with the Icelandic government and they are very keen," Hendry told the Guardian. To reach Iceland, which sits over a mid-ocean split in the earth's crust, the cable would have to be 1,000 to 1,500km long and by far the longest in the world.

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Is the EU taking its over-fishing habits to west African waters?

The Guardian - Mon, 2012-04-02 23:01
The UN says EU trawlers are out-muscling 1.5 million fishermen, who themselves warn west Africa could 'become like Somalia'

Mauritania's waters are crowded. Twenty-five miles out to sea and in great danger from turbulent seas are small, open pirogues crewed by handfuls of local fishermen, taking pitifully few fish. Also here within 50 miles of us are at least 20 of the biggest EU fishing vessels, along with Chinese, Russian and Icelandic trawlers and unidentifiable pirate ships.

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SSEE April technical session Toxins in the Environment

Newsletters QLD - Sat, 2012-03-31 02:48
SSEE April technical session Toxins in the Environment
Categories: Newsletters QLD

World water day – in pictures

The Guardian - Fri, 2012-03-23 11:44
Photographs from around the world on the day marked by the UN to focus attention on the importance of freshwater and the sustainable management of resources Continue reading...
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Appetite for shark fin soup 'causing decline of blue sharks in UK waters'

The Guardian - Sat, 2012-03-10 02:06
Study says blue shark population off UK coast is targeted by fisherman using 'wall of death' method, before being sent to Asia

The demand for shark fin soup in Asia is probably the major cause of the alarming decline of blue sharks off the British coast and much of the Atlantic, the authors of a new study claim this week.

Scientists from the UK and Portugal have tracked the ocean predators to busy fishing grounds, where they believe they are being deliberately targeted by fishermen with "walls of death" from long-line fishing that can stretch as long as 100km.

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How do we know how warm or cold it was in the past?

The Guardian - Thu, 2012-03-08 02:04
This Q&A is part of the Guardian's ultimate climate change FAQ

See all questions and answers
Read about the project

Scientists today measure the Earth's surface temperature using thermometers at weather stations and on ships and buoys all over the world. Such thermometer records cover a large fraction of the globe going back to the mid-19th century, allowing scientists to determine a global average temperature trend for the last 160 years.

Before that time not many thermometer records are available, so scientists use indirect temperature measurements, supported by anecdotal evidence recorded by diarists, and the few thermometer records that do exist. Scientists must rely solely on indirect methods to look back further than recorded human history.

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Too many deer for too few people – a self-defeating study of the Highlands | George Monbiot

The Guardian - Fri, 2012-03-02 23:00
A paper by the Scottish Gamekeepers' Association argues in favour of deer-stalking by the rich on the grounds that it is uneconomic

I've read too many daft reports in the course of this job, but I don't remember any as self-defeating as this. This morning the Scottish Gamekeepers' Association launches its study on the economic importance of red deer to Scotland's rural economy. It succeeds in demonstrating the opposite of what it sets out to prove.

The association represents people working for the big estates of Scotland, which are visited at certain months of the year by a small number of exceedingly rich people, who come to shoot stags or grouse.

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SSEE - Technical Session Peak Resources

Newsletters QLD - Fri, 2012-03-02 06:29
SSEE - Technical Session Peak Resources
Categories: Newsletters QLD

Does building turbines use more energy than they produce?

The Guardian - Wed, 2012-02-29 19:00
The average windfarm produces 20-25 times more energy during its operational life than was used to construct and install its turbines

Critics of wind energy often claim that the energy used to construct a wind turbine outweighs the energy produced during its lifetime in operation. This is not correct. An evidence review published in the journal Renewable Energy in 2010, which included data from 119 turbines across 50 sites going back 30 years, concluded that the average windfarm produces 20-25 times more energy during its operational life than was used to construct and install its turbines. It also found that the average "energy payback" of a turbine was 3-6 months.

A life-cycle analysis published in 2011 by Vestas, a Danish turbines manufacturer, of a 100MW onshore windfarm consisting of 33 3MW turbines concluded, unsurprisingly, that the siting of the turbines is crucial in maximising the energy return ratio. "Doubling the distance to the grid from 50 km to 100 km typically increases [negative]

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Fishing skippers and factory fined nearly £1m for illegal catches

The Guardian - Sat, 2012-02-25 04:26
Police uncover 'serious and organised' criminality in £63m scam to breach European fishing quotas

An inquiry into the UK's largest fishing scandal has uncovered "serious and organised" criminality by Scottish trawlermen and fish processors in an elaborate scam to illegally sell nearly £63m of undeclared fish.

Three large fish factories and 27 skippers have pleaded guilty to sophisticated and lucrative schemes to breach EU fishing quotas, in what one senior police officer described as "industrial level" deception.

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