Simon Sturdee Yahoo News 4 Dec 08;
POZNAN, Poland (AFP) – "Hey DJ! Play that funky music!" might be one of the more unusual rallying cries for saving the planet. But the "Mini Sustainable Club" featured at the 12-day UN climate conference here has a purpose. Their disco show is one of many wacky ideas on display for cutting mankind's carbon footprint and adapting to the ravages of climate change.
Also on display are fog-catchers from Cape Verde, a model of a "no-waste city" with zero carbon emissions, hydrogen-powered cars, air conditioning driven by sea water, biofuels from algae and a solar station for drying sewage sludge.
They are some of 120 concepts, some of them already in operation, on show as the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) seeks to get the ball rolling for a new global climate change pact in a year's time.
Once inside the Dutch-made "club for two people", pounding music starts up and, as you dance, the spring-loaded floor converts your movements into electricity, setting off arrays of disco lights powered by your exertions.
If you really go for it -- AFP didn't -- a mirrored ball on the ceiling lights up.
"I don't know if it will be popular," one bemused dancer said as he emerged.
In a corner of the 7,000-square-metre (75,500-square-feet) exhibition hall is an orange pod, rather like a ski lift, housing a Polish inventor with a sky-high idea to "revolutionise" public transport in cities.
Similar to the planned ULTra (Urban Light Transport) pilot scheme at London's Heathrow airport, MISTER Ltd's pods, suspended 10-15 metres (30-50 feet) in the air, would each transport up to five or so passengers, whizzing them along a rail.
"If we replaced London's metro system with such a system we would be able to carry all of the metro traffic with only a quarter of the capacity for about a 20th of the cost ... and energy-wise about one-tenth," inventor Ollie Mikosza told AFP.
"Because it is such a jump in thinking, it is ignored as impossible," he lamented.
"But I cheer myself up that cars and aeroplanes were likewise doomed to failure by the horse lobbies... Progress is made by people who are dismissed as lunatics."
With climate change forecast to make water ever scarcer, technologies on show propose transforming water vapour in the air into quantities that can be drunk or even irrigate crops.
One such gizmo comes from a firm called Dutch Rainmaker, which uses windmills to blow air onto a compression cooling system that then condenses the water vapour.
Another is distinctly more low-tech but highly effective: fog-catchers that are already providing more than 90,000 litres (20,000 gallons) of water per year to people in the Serra Malagueta Mountains in the Cape Verde islands, off West Africa.
Fine mesh netting suspended in a wooden frame "catches" the fog and the resulting droplets trickle downwards to be collected and used to water plants or purified for drinking, Zuzanna Armada from the exhibition says.
Activating a tiny spray from a machine, she explains: "This is fog. It collects raindrops, 'fogdrops' actually ... It's very simple and it's very cheap."
But climate change is not just a threat, it is already a reality, and the exhibition also showcases technologies that help communities around the world cope with floods and droughts.
One such is the "hanging gardens" of Bangladesh, where rising sea levels could devour 17 percent of the country's total area by 2050, according to the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The project, already in place for 250 families, is also very simple: growing vegetables in pots on bamboo platforms above the reach of polluted, salt-water floods.
A futuristic design is the "Waterboxx", made by Dutch firm AquaPro BV, a container that collects rainwater and condensation in which a young tree can be grown in areas left infertile by creeping desertification.
It doses out each day the amount of water that the sapling needs, prevents it from overheating and protects it against rodents.
"It's probably not that useful here (in Poland)," Armada concedes, with an eye on the grey skies outside.
