Next month [July 2011], four enormous steel skeletons, the last of the 12 segments of the bridge, will be shipped 6,500 miles from Shanghai to San Francisco before being assembled on site.

The bridge, which will connect San Francisco to Oakland on the other side of the bay, is a sign of how China has moved on from building roads and ports in Africa and the developing world and is now aggressively bidding for, and winning, major construction and engineering projects in the United States and Europe.

After building forests of skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai, showpiece buildings like the Bird's Nest stadium and the Guangzhou Opera House, and a high-speed rail network that is the envy of the world, Chinese construction companies are flush with cash and confidence. This week, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, lobbied David Cameron to give the contract for the UK's new high speed rail link to a Chinese company.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8602786/New-San-Francisco-bridge-

By analysing the ice, the team, led by the University of Copenhagen, hoped to get an insight into how hot it was during the Eemian period, and how the planet coped.

Drilling through almost 3,000 metres of ice layers, they measured temperatures, greenhouse gas concentrations using air samples trapped in the ice, and took a closer look at how sea levels rose when the planet was warming.

Dr Rubino says the team found that the last interglacial period "was eight degrees warmer than today."

"Eight degrees warmer is a big difference and it's actually bigger than it was previously thought to be," he said.

As many as three tornadoes have hit Queensland coastal towns, as the state is battered by severe weather and flooding caused by the remnants of cyclone Oswald.

One tornado hit Bargara, east of Bundaberg around 1pm and a second passed through Burnett Heads to the city's north-east at 4pm local time, while there were reports of a third tornado at Coonar, 20km to the south.

Emergency Services Minister Jack Dempsey, who lives in Bundaberg, said 150 homes had been damaged at Burnett Heads.

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/weather/tornadoes-hit-three-queensland-coastal-towns-20130126-2ddcm.html#ixzz2J3yeRysv

Anyone who doubt that global warming is happening should have their heads examined... Presently January is running at about 3 degrees Celsius above average in Sydney... The present humidity is savage and the heat record a few days ago (45.8 in the city and 46.5 in the sunburnt suburbs to the west and the airport) has left a trail of carbonised plants, not just on the day, but some plants that suffered enough on the day are now showing signs of major damage, a few days later... The next instalment isn't going to be pretty...

Last week, a much discussed new paper in the journal Nature seemed to suggest to some that we needn’t worry too much about the melting of Greenland, the mile-thick mass of ice at the top of the globe. The research found that the Greenland ice sheet seems to have survived a previous warm period in Earth’s history — the Eemian period, some 126,000 years ago — without vanishing (although it did melt considerably).

But Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box isn’t buying it.

At Monday’s Climate Desk Live briefing in Washington, D.C., Box, who has visited Greenland 23 times to track its changing climate, explained that we’ve already pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide 40 percent beyond Eemian levels. What’s more, levels of atmospheric methane are a dramatic 240 percent higher — both with no signs of stopping. “There is no analogue for that in the ice record,” said Box.

And that’s not all. The present mass-scale human burning of trees and vegetation for clearing land and building fires, plus our pumping of aerosols into the atmosphere from human pollution, weren’t happening during the Eemian. These human activities are darkening Greenland’s icy surface, and weakening its ability to bounce incoming sunlight back away from the planet. Instead, more light is absorbed, leading to more melting, in a classic feedback process that is hard to slow down.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/humans-have-already-set-in-motion-69-feet-of-sea-level-rise/

I know what this mean and I have furiously blogged about this for a while, now I leave it to you to understand...

CARLSBAD, N.M. — Just after the local water board announced this month that its farmers would get only one-tenth of their normal water allotment this year, Ronnie Walterscheid, 53, stood up and called on his elected representatives to declare a water war on their upstream neighbors.

“It’s always been about us giving up,” Mr. Walterscheid said, to nods. “I say we push back hard right now.”

The drought-fueled anger of southeastern New Mexico’s farmers and ranchers is boiling, and there is nowhere near enough water in the desiccated Pecos River to cool it down. Roswell, about 75 miles to the north, has somewhat more water available and so is the focus of intense resentment here. Mr. Walterscheid and others believe that Roswell’s artesian wells reduce Carlsbad’s surface water.

For decades, the regional status quo meant the northerners pumped groundwater and the southerners piped surface water. Now, amid the worst drought on record, some in Carlsbad say they must upend the status quo to survive. They want to make what is known as a priority call on the Pecos River.

Rachel Maddow takes a look at a catastrophic fracking failure at a site in Hemp-Hill County, Texas.

A team of federal and university geologists have linked a series of unusual earthquakes, including a destructive 5.7-magnitude shocker, to oil-drilling wastewater-injection wells in Oklahoma.

The earthquakes occurred near Prague, Oklahoma, in 2010. The largest quake left two people injured, destroyed 14 homes, damaged a federal highway and was felt as far away as Milwaukee, according to a Columbia University release.

Columbia geologists partnered with the US Geological Survey to produce the report, which revealed a "potential" link between drilling wastewater injection and the massive earthquake.

The wells suspected of causing the earthquakes were in operation for at least 18 years, and the seismic events indicate that there can be decades-long lags between drilling wastewater injection and seismic events, according to the report.

The injection-well operations linked to the earthquakes were relatively small and involved filling oil wells with waste fluids, but over the years, pressure in the wells increased and eventually lubricated a known seismic fault.

"There's something important about getting unexpectedly large earthquakes out of small systems that we have discovered here," said Geoffrey Abers, a co-author of the study.

Abers said the team's observations indicate that the risk of humans inducing large earthquakes from even small injection activities is "probably higher" than previously thought.

The findings come at a time when geologists are reporting an uptick in minor earthquakes across the country linked to unconventional hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." Fracking has facilitated an oil- and gas-drilling boom across the country, and the process produces large amounts of liquid waste that is most often injected into underground wells for disposal.

In the last four years, the number of earthquakes in the central United States spiked by 11 times compared with three decades prior, the authors of the Oklahoma study estimate.

The wells suspected of causing the massive quake in Oklahoma were not disposing of unconventional fracking waste, but the report raises new concerns about the long-term impacts of underground drilling-waste disposal.

Oklahoma state officials have not officially determined the source of the earthquakes. In response to the report, a state geologist said the findings could link the wells to earthquakes, but the Oklahoma Geological Survey still suspects that they were naturally occurring, according to the Columbia University release. Well operations continue at the site.

Every day, the oil and gas industry injects two billion gallons of liquid waste into any number of 144,000 underground wells, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Earthquakes related to wastewater injection are rare, but in recent years, fracking-waste-injection wells have been linked to earthquakes in several states, including Ohio, Alabama, Arkansas and California.

Between the spring of 2011 and early 2012, a fracking-waste-injection well caused more than a dozen minor earthquakes near Youngstown, Ohio, including one 4.0 magnitude earthquake that was felt for miles.

A Truthout investigation found that Ohio regulators permitted operators of the Ohio well to raise its maximum injection pressure twice, once shortly before and once again after the well-caused two initial earthquakes on March 17, 2011.

The Ohio well has been shut down and state regulators have worked to reform their injection-well policies.

Injection Well Linked To Destructive Earthquake In Oklahoma, Raising New Fracking Fears

Human health – and that of other animals and even plants – is likely to become an ever more pressing public issue as temperatures rise with global warming, cities grow and populations age.

Until recently, public health authorities would issue a warning whenever the temperature was likely to exceed a certain level.

However, heatwaves are also related to the conditions people are accustomed to. To reflect that, the Bureau of Meteorology last year pioneered a heatwave service that predicts the severity of coming heatwaves based on both how far temperatures are likely to deviate from historical averages but also taking into account the previous month's weather.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/as-shepherds-watched-it-got-hotter-and-hotter-20141223-124o27.html

After allowing for all climatic factors from earth wobbles to the fact that we should be going towards an ice age, as noted until 1959 when engineers were planning to build a huge dam between Newfoundland and Iceland by 1984, the only major culprit left for us to observe "warming" of the surface of this planet is CO2 in the atmosphere.

Science is very precise on this annoying fact. Burning coal, gas and petroleum products that produce CO2 are creating this problem. In the last million years, nature's variations of CO2 were limited to a maximum of 300 ppm in the atmosphere, this in step with a warming of between 6 and 10 degrees Celsius during cool period when the level of CO2 was around 180 ppm. 

Presently, human activity — humans having discovered a "cheap fuel source" in "fossil fuels" — has been adding at least 100 ppm onto the maximum CO2 recent (+1My) natural levels. Fossil fuels fuels are the remnant of greater activity on the planet when it was warmer and then cooled, killing off some of life on earth. We are exhuming the dead bodies of trees in coal and exhuming the dead bodies of animals in oil, and gas is also part of this decomposition of living organisms. This coalification, this gasification, this oilification happened mostly in sinks that were eventually covered with mud, sand and stones that eventually stratified. This "fossil fuel" carbon has not been part of the atmospheric equation for millions of years... 

Now as we release this EXTRA carbon as CO2, it is replicating past aeons of the planet when the temperature was warmer towards hotter. One can expect that when the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere goes beyond 450, that the climatic conditions will be changing dramatically. With 400 ppm of CO2 now present of the atmosphere we can expect a gradual heating towards 9 degrees Celsius by 2250... Should this level of CO2 continue to rise as we add approximately about 1 to 3 per cent of CO2 in the atmosphere per year, when this level reaches 500 ppm in the atmosphere, temperature on the planet could go more than 15 degrees Celsius than present. This is not science fiction. This is only strong possibility already marked for about 3 to 4 degrees rise by 2100... 

Have a happy season and please do you best to convince our governments to do far more to reduce emissions of CO2, methane and other warming gases. Read articles from top.

Upon winning the Nobel Prize, immunologist J. Michael Bishop reflected on his journey in a facetiously titled book, How to Win the Nobel Prize. Bishop acknowledged not only that he had “no formula for winning the Nobel Prize” but that he couldn’t have written “an instruction manual for pursuit of the prize,” even with the benefit of hindsight.

Bishop’s befuddled account of his own success is part of a broader misperception—that scientific brilliance is the province of solitary geniuses so unusual in their profiles and curiosities that such brilliance is impossible to predict or engineer.

Yet exceptional scientists, distinct as they may be, are products of a larger context. True, scientific achievement requires a baseline level of genetic aptitude. But it seldom emerges absent a particular kind of cultivation. When great scientists come to the fore, their success is not a fluke; it’s a testament to the broader social forces that provide the “appropriate foundations for genius to appear and shine.”

Nobel Prize winners offer a useful sample to assess trends in scientific achievement. They constitute a unique database, a broad sample cutting across time and countries. The criteria for the prize have remained relatively constant, and the choice of recipients has been, by and large, non-contentious.

The backgrounds of Nobel laureates show that scientific innovation stems from social ecosystems that cultivate three key attributes: cognitive ability, achievement-oriented cultural values, and research collaboration among top scientists.

For the United States, this creates a dilemma. The ability of American institutions to produce and attract top-tier talent provides the country with a distinct advantage over its national competitors. However, the “narrow cultural base” that produces Nobel scientists provokes egalitarian unease that could erode the United States’ willingness to invest in its scientific elite.

Cognitive Ability

Nobel prize winners in science almost invariably register IQs within the top 1 percent of the bell curve. By one estimate, the average Nobel laureate in chemistry has an IQ of 136; in physics, 143; and in physiology or medicine, 147. Double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling is rumored to have had an IQ of 170. Luis Alvarez, Richard Feynman, and William Shockley scored under 140 on IQ tests, but theirquantitative abilities were considerably higher than their verbal skills.

If a high IQ and quantitative ability (both partly heritable) are prerequisites to win a Nobel Prize in science, this helps explain why Nobel Prize winners in science are predominantly firstborn sons with upper class fathers.

The fathers of Nobel scientists are overwhelmingly from professional and business families. A plurality of science Nobel laureates are the children of either university professors or doctors. This trend is consistent with research findings that the top 10 percent of male college professors have IQs above 120.

Highly intelligent, upper class fathers are well situated to preside over the types of stable households from which Nobel science laureates tend to emerge. Whereas a disproportionately high percentage of Nobel laureates in literature come from “disturbed” childhoods—marked by such tragedies as the loss of a parent or financial impoverishment—only a small fraction of science laureates experienced any remarkable form of “disorder and early sorrow.” Nor have they typically suffered from physical disability or “serious or prolonged illness” as children. This may be related to the association between high childhood IQ and longevity—an important factor given the ongoing increase in the mean age of science Nobel laureates. Unlike other domains, where peak achievement is prevalent well before middle age, 93 percent of Nobel Prize-wining scientific breakthroughs have come from researchers above age 26. In physics, the mean age of Nobel Prize winning achievement has climbed to 48 years. Those who can avoid the declines in health and cognition that inhibit scientific productivity have a growing advantage in pursuit of the prize.

Firstborn sons, who are more likely to become science Nobel laureates than younger siblings, may benefit in particular from the undivided parental attention of distinguished fathers. Eldest sons generally have an IQ three points higher than their closest sibling. Three points, even without other environmental enrichment, is the “difference between a high B average and a low A”—one, as the New York Times, puts it, with a “cumulative effect that could mean the difference between admission to an elite private liberal arts college and a less exclusive public one.”

Nor are first-born sons constrained by cognitive limitations—rooted in brain size,structure, and function—that face first-born daughters. Among the top 2 percent of scorers on intellectual aptitude tests, there are almost twice as many males as females. This ratio, according to a 2007 paper in Intelligence, largely accounts for “sex differences in intellectual eminence”—as measured by gender gaps in Nobel Prize winners and other distinctions. Only two women since 1900 have won the Nobel Prize in physics, and just four have won in chemistry. (Two were from the Curie family—Marie and her daughter Irene.)

Achievement-oriented Cultural Values     

Beyond raw cognitive ability, Nobel science achievement is inspired by a particular culture of achievement. Telling are the commonalities among the three U.S. ethnic groups overrepresented among science laureates: white Protestants, Jews, and Asians.

Between 1900 and 1977, about 60 percent of American Nobel laureates in science came either from New York City or the Midwest, largely due to the disproportionate achievements of their respective Jewish and Protestant communities. Since then, Asian-Americans have garnered a greater share of prizes. Of the 20 American physicists to win a Nobel Prize in physics in the 21st century, East Asians, who represent less than 4 percent of the U.S. population, have won 15 percent of prizes.Three science Nobel prizes have been won by Indian-Americans, a minority that did not arrive in the United States in large numbers before the immigration reforms of 1965 and still makes up less than 1 percent of the population.

Cognitive ability may be part of the equation. In a 2009 study of white American IQ differences by denomination, Episcopalians registered an average IQ of 113, compared to Roman Catholics at 107. And in 2015, the Asian-white divide on the SAT grew to 78 points, a gap that is even wider between whites and outlier Asian groups such as Indian-Americans.

These IQ gaps alone, however, cannot explain the full extent to which the aforementioned groups are overrepresented. Sociologist Gerhard Lenski reported in the early 1960s that Protestant scientists were about six times more productive than their Catholic counterparts—a difference reflected in the fact that Protestant societies have generated considerably more science Nobel laureates than Catholic ones. Jews, comprising less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population, have won 21 percent of Nobel Prizes in chemistry and 26 percent of prizes in physics and physiology or medicine. And Asian-Americans in recent years have dominated in competitions that historically have produced Nobel laureates. Since 2009, Asian-American teenagers have won about half of all top prizes in the Society for Science and the Public’s “junior Nobel Prize”—a competition from which twelve alumni have gone on to win the Nobel Prize. At the Bronx High School of Science, the alma mater of more Nobel Prize winning scientists than any other secondary school,more than 60 percent of students are Asian.

In their 2014 book on the rise and fall of U.S. cultural groups, Yale Law School professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld found a common pattern underlying Protestant, Jewish, and Asian success in the United States. All three groups were defined by a “triple package” of three tendencies: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control.

The Episcopalian establishment created in the United States the ultimate “triple package” nation. America became a country “convinced of its exceptional destiny, infused with a hard work ethic inherited from the Puritans, seized with a notorious chip on the collective shoulder vis-à-vis aristocratic Europe, and instilling a brand-new kind of insecurity in its citizens—a sense that every man must prove himself….” Even as the “achievement syndrome” of America’s Protestant elite weakened, its historic legacy intersected with new “triple package” cultures such as Jews and Asians, fueling, in professor James Flynn’s words, “achievement beyond IQ.”

Research Collaboration

Regardless of their baseline capabilities and cultural influences, even the most talented scientists need to acquire a tremendous amount of human capital before they can make Nobel-worthy contributions. Not even the most precocious scientists have been able to produce Nobel prize-winning research before the age of 19.

The reason is that Nobel Prizes in science recognize a particular type of achievement—voluminous research published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. By identifying scientists who rank in the top 0.1 percent by citations and write “multiple high-impact reports” over at least two decades, Thomson Reuters hascorrectly predicted 43 Nobel Prizes over the last 14 years.

Nobel scientists tend to emerge from regions with the institutions and “group research power” necessary to produce groundbreaking publications. American dominance in Nobel Prize-winning science reflects the fact that since the early 1920s, the United States has been the world’s only “scientific center”—defined as a country that produces more than a quarter of the world’s scientific achievements in a respective period. Within the United States, just a few elite research universitieshave produced a disproportionate share of Nobel laureates in science. Notable among them has been the California Institute of Technology.

Even as scientific talent has expanded around the globe, the United States has benefited disproportionately because its institutions have continued to draw and facilitate collaboration among the world’s top-tier researchers. Only 25 American immigrants won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physicals between 1901 and 1959, but that number jumped to 79 between 1960 and 2016. Forty percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science since 2000 were immigrants and all six American winners in science last year were immigrants.

Can the United States Maintain Its Lead?

If cognitive ability, achievement-oriented culture, and research collaboration remain the main ingredients for scientific progress, the United States will need to navigate a delicate set of political issues if it hopes to preserve its lead. Group disparities among Nobel science laureates sit uncomfortably in a society with an egalitarian, assimilationist ethos.

On the gender front, American society has doubled down on its quest for gender equality. Affirmative action has produced parity in the ratio of men and women getting PhDs in the sciences. STEM diversity programs are receiving multi-million dollar federal grants. And as Christina Hoff Sommers documents in The Atlantic, boys across the ability spectrum are languishing in school systems defined by instruction modalities better suited for the cognitive profiles of girls. These initiatives have continued in the face of overwhelming evidence that social engineering cannot override the biological drivers that deter women from making both the initial investments as well as the long-term sacrifices needed to prevail in the competitive world of scientific academia. Indeed, even against the backdrop of greater social equality, sex differences on the right tail of the quantitative reasoning distribution have actually increased over time. In the realm of science reasoning, for example, males in the top 5 percent of ability, as measured by SAT and ACT scores, are showing evidence of “increasing advantage.”

America’s egalitarian anxieties are also apparent in the country’s ambivalent attitude toward Asian-American success. This is a group uniquely poised to achieve breakout success in scientific research. The United States has provided Asian immigrants and their children with opportunities that would be all but impossible in other countries with fewer resources and less meritocratic cultures. But so too has an undercurrent emerged in American society that Asian achievement threatens, as White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon has put it, the integrity of America’s “civic society.”

Academic administrators at elite universities prefer the term “diversity,” but as Ron Unz has described in these pages, they effectively use the same rationale to discriminate against Asian-Americans in zero-sum admissions processes. They have done so despite losing out to Caltech in Nobel scientific achievement, where, in the relative absence of affirmative action, the student body has become over 40 percent Asian.

America’s assimilationist culture meanwhile could erode the “ethnic capital” that inspires Nobel Prize winning achievement. A case in point is the high rates ofacculturation, culminating in intermarriage, that pervade “triple package” cultures in the United States. The rate of non-Orthodox Jewish intermarriage is 5 percent in Israel and 40 to 45 percent in Britain and France. By comparison, the rate is 58 percent in the United States—a nation where Pew found that only 9 percent consider rising interracial marriage rates to be a “bad thing for society.” From the standpoint of Nobel class science, even a slight increase in intermarriage rates among Ashkenazi Jews could alter the global distribution of Nobel talent given how overrepresented they are on the far right of the bell curve. Whereas only 4 per 1,000 northern Europeans have an IQ over 140, the rate is 23 per 1,000 among Ashkenazi Jews.

The challenge for the United States is to reconcile its liberal aspirations with a hard reality about scientific achievement: In the elite class of researchers that can reasonably hope to attain eminence, neither innate talent nor advantageous cultural influences are distributed equally among groups.

Pratik Chougule is an executive editor at The American Conservative. Follow him on twitter @pjchougule. He can be reached via email [email protected]. Sign up for his email list here.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/will-american-science-st...

Read from top. Politicians are idiots. IQ is strongly related to curiosity, imagination and understanding of what is observed. Women are at a disadvantage in number because most social conventions, including religious myths, limit the curiosity and the scope of observations for women. This status will change, but it will need the eradication of the religious belief disease.

After a decade of the American fracking industry burning through hundreds of billions of dollars more than it earned, this industry previously dominated by shale drilling specialists is entering a new phase. The oil majors — a group of multinational companies that typically have divisions throughout the oil supply chain — now are investing heavily in fracked oil and gas operations.

The latest development is Chevron acquiring shale oil and gas company Anadarko for $33 billion. One of Chevron’s current “human energy” ads uses the catchphrase “We do difficult.” Which is good for Chevron if the oil major hopes to profit off this investment, because making money on U.S. shale oil has proven very difficult for the current players.

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/04/18/oil-majors-distraction-failed-finances-fracking

Read from top.

One would guess that should the shale industry fail, the whole of the US oil industry would suffer. So it's a it like "mates supporting those in trouble..."

A billionaire businessman has launched court action against Origin Energy over its plan for gas exploration on a Northern Territory cattle station.

• Retail magnate Brett Blundy and his business partners are alleging Origin Energy failed to carry out adequate stakeholder engagement
• Amungee Mungee station owners are seeking to halt government approval processes
• Origin Energy says it wants to work constructively with station owners

Retail magnate Brett Blundy's company BB Retail Capital and co-owners Bullwaddy Pastoral Co are accusing the gas company of not properly consulting them about the environmental risks associated with the planned "test fracking" operation.

They're seeking to stop the NT Government from approving test fracking on part of the station, in the first case of its kind for the Territory.

Mr Blundy has invested millions of dollars into buying and developing several NT stations includingAmungee Mungee, near Daly Waters, 600 kilometres south of Darwin.

In 2013, he invested $6.5 million for the 320,000-hectare station. He also owns two other nearby cattle stations, OT Downs and Mungabroom.

The station hosted Origin Energy's first test well in 2016.

That generated the gas industry's excitement about the Beetaloo Basin region, and predictions the area contains enough gas to power Australia for 200 years.

But since the Territory Labor Government's three-year moratorium on fracking was lifted in April, the relationship has soured.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-23/billionaire-businessman-takes-on-...

"Enough gas to power Australia for 200 years?"... I love this kind of prediction when we more or less know that within 10-15 years, global warming will force us go to zero CO2 emissions and that "gas" (methane) itself a warming gas, will produce CO2 when burned. Let the belching of the cattle do the damage instead...

Meanwhile in WA:

The body that runs the national wholesale electricity market is forecasting demand for electricity from households and businesses in WA will fall for the first time as the extraordinary uptake of solar panels reshapes the power system.

• "Operational consumption" of power is set to fall almost 4 per cent by 2027-28
• At the same time, the share of homes with solar panels is set to top 50 per cent
• The change highlights the financial problems facing power retailer Synergy

In its latest report on the south-west wholesale electricity market, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said it was no longer expecting the use of power drawn from the grid to increase as the state's population grew.

Instead, AEMO said it was forecasting demand — or "operational consumption" — to fall almost 4 per cent between 2019–20 and 2027–28, bucking long-held assumptions that link power use to an economy's size.

At the heart of the operator's latest forecast is the "extraordinary" take-up of rooftop solar power, with more than one in four homes in the south-west grid now having a solar system.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-23/wa-electricity-demand-set-for-fir...

Not to forget geothermal energy in the region:

Stirling Leisure Centres, Perth — picture by Gus Leonisky.

Read from top.

How climate change is affecting what we grow and eat

Farmers and scientists are finding new ways to keep food on the table as rainfall patterns move and heatwaves increase.

By national regional and rural reporter Jess Davis and weather reporter Kate Doyle with graphics by Brett Tweedie

Longreach grazier Peter Whip runs cattle on country that neighbours the desert.

The climate there has always been variable. Dry times are a familiar foe and big variations in rainfall are all too common.

That makes it hard to pinpoint how climate change is directly affecting him.

But there is one measurement that illustrates it all too well — days over 35 degrees Celsius.

"There's a noticeable increase in days over 35," Mr Whip says.

"And the reason that's important is because once you get over 35 degrees, that's when the temperature starts to make an impact on cattle."

read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-17/how-climate-change-is-affecting-what-we-grow-and-eat/11303450

Read from top.

Small-amplitude earthquakes are caused by the activity of a geothermal subsidiary of Fonroche, an Agen company. The case is complex.

The geothermal branch of the Agen-based company Fonroche has gained notoriety in Alsace and probably would have done without it. It is the cause of low-magnitude earthquakes, which therefore stirs the subsoil and the spirits on the surface.

Monday, November 9 in the evening, a new seismic shock of magnitude 1.8 on the Richter scale occurred at 11:45 p.m. north of Strasbourg, thus informs "Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace", which includes information from the national network seismic monitoring.

Again, this is an "induced event", in other words caused by human activity.

This earthquake follows four other induced tremors recorded in the region, in an area near the deep geothermal site operated by Fonroche in Reichstett and Vendenheim in the Bas-Rhin, on Thursday 5 and Sunday 8 November, Tuesday 27 and Wednesday October 28.

The company founded by Yann Maus and whose credo is the development of renewable energies (its subsidiary on solar lighting and biogas is based in Agenais while the geothermal subsidiary is based in Pau) was singled out. during the first seismic events of October 27 and 28.

The company has admitted that the tracing activities (injection of water into the basement) it was carrying out were at the origin of these earthquakes which caused no damage.

However, ironically, these tracing tests were demanded precisely to verify whether other earthquakes perceived a year ago in November 2019 (including a shock of 3.9 magnitude) had been induced by its activities, which Fonroche disputes.

Operation at standstill

In a press release sent to AFP the day after the earthquake on Sunday, the company also noted that "the magnitude 2.2 seismic event was measured this Sunday [...] around 12:30 pm in the perimeter of the deep geothermal power plant in Vendenheim while the operation is still stopped and the tracing test on the conditions of circulation of geothermal water suspended since October 27”.

Fonroche explained in a press release during the previous earthquake that "this event of magnitude lower than the accepted quake threshold of human sensory perception (2.6) could however be felt depending on the location."

On October 27, it was then determined that stopping the injection of water into the well in accordance with the test protocol had caused the rock to retract, resulting in a seismic movement at the surface. And to suggest that "the most probable hypothesis would be a continuation of the adjustment of the rock following the event of last week".

A lithium deposit

Asked by "Les Actualités d'Alsace", Jean-Philippe Soulé, Managing Director of Fonroche Géothermie, deplored this situation caused by the tracing tests: "Obviously, we are not happy to generate this seismicity and these tremors are a bad news".

Jean-Philippe Soulé notes, however, that it is far too early to conclude that there is a proven link between Fonroche's activity and the earthquakes observed a year ago.

Finally, it should be remembered that the stake concerning the continuation of Fonroche's activity in Alsace is not neutral since, not content with working on the use of geothermal water to heat the equivalent of 100,000 homes, the company founded by Yann Maus discovered in the depths of the Bas-Rhin a lithium deposit likely to guarantee France self-sufficiency in this matter. 

https://www.sudouest.fr/2020/11/10/une-filiale-de-la-societe-agenaise-fonroche-fait-trembler-la-terre-en-alsace-8062786-4344.php

Translation by Jules Letambour

Read from top, especially