Volunteers needed at Pasir Ris Garden
from The Green Volunteers by Grant W.Pereira
Seahorse on oil-slicked Tanah Merah!
from wild shores of singapore
Dredging next to Cyrene Reef until Jun 2011
from wild shores of singapore
Bitten by Bittern fever
from Life's Indulgences
Prof. Peter Ng recognized as the “Most Prolific Freshwater Decapod Taxonomist to Date” at the 21st International Senckenberg Conference 2010, from Raffles Museum News
Consortium led by Hin Leong Trading looking to invest in US$6-8b greenfield project
Ronnie Lim Business Times 22 Dec 10;
(SINGAPORE) The Republic could soon see its long- awaited, fourth world-scale refinery. Expected to cost a massive US$6-8 billion, the planned greenfield project will help boost the status of the global oil refining and trading hub here - the third largest after Houston and Rotterdam.
A consortium - led by Singapore's biggest local oil trader Hin Leong Trading, and comprising one of China's top four national oil companies and also possibly a European partner - is currently studying the investment, BT has learnt.
Formed just a few months back, the group is apparently looking at establishing a 300,000-500,000 barrels per day (bpd) refinery on Jurong Island.
Capacity-wise, this will place it between the 290,000 bpd Singapore Refining Company (SRC) facility (equally owned by PetroChina and Chevron) and Shell's 500,000 bpd Bukom refinery.
ExxonMobil's 605,000 bpd facility is the largest here.
Given the space constraints on Jurong Island, BT understands that the consortium hopes to build the project on land that is available next door to Hin Leong's S$750 million Universal Terminal (UT) in the island's Meranti sector. The synergies with the UT facility will provide the refinery greater operational efficiency.
UT's 2.28 million cubic metres of storage will also give the project immediately available tankage (both for crude oil feedstock and refined products) as well as jetties for very large crude carriers (VLCCs) and product tankers.
Sources said the high- tech refinery is meant to produce 'green' transportation fuels like ultra-low sulphur gasoline and diesel, as well as other products including naphtha.
The green fuels will cater to a growing market segment which the older Western refineries are unable to serve adequately, while naphtha will help feed the increasing petrochemical investments here.
ExxonMobil's US$5 billion second petrochemical complex will, for instance, be starting up by mid-2011 - bringing Singapore's total ethylene production from four crackers here to 4.1 million tonnes per annum (tpa).
The Economic Development Board (EDB) has been trying to promote another refinery investment here to help provide naphtha feedstock for a targeted six million tpa of ethylene production.
Senior Minister of State (Trade & Industry and Education) S Iswaran has also earlier indicated that with new rival refining hubs emerging, Singapore needs to expand its existing refineries or attract new ones to maintain its share of global refining capacity.
'This is necessary to provide the critical volume of export-oriented refining throughput, creating the liquidity needed to anchor oil trading and price discovery activities here,' he said.
The planned refinery project is clearly the next stage in integrated Hin Leong Trading's plan to become a leading Asian oil major. Along with oil trading and lubricants blending, Hin Leong also operates an international tanker fleet of 70 tankers including a dozen new VLCCs, under Ocean Tankers.
It has apparently managed to rope in one of the big four Chinese national oil companies into the project, but no name was disclosed.
As PetroChina (which has a 35 per cent stake in UT) already has a half share in the SRC refinery here, this suggests that one of the others - SinoChem, Sinopec or CNOOC - could be involved in the refinery.
BT understands that memoranda of understanding for the refinery have been signed, with the consortium likely to comprise 2-3 partners. The consortium intends to embark on front-end engineering design shortly once it gets the nod for the investment, including from the authorities here.
NES breaks ground for waste re-utilisation plant
Ronnie Lim Business Times 22 Dec 10;
WASTE recycling firm NewEarth Singapore (NES) - which counts mainboard-listed Beng Kuang Marine and Tuas Power among its partners - broke ground yesterday on its new $15 million waste re-utilisation plant at Tuas.
The facility will transform industrial waste into environmentally-safe construction and reclamation materials such as bricks and paving blocks.
Employing its patented 'crystallisation technology', NES will, for instance, collect coal bottom ash from Tuas Power's $2 billion biomass/clean coal plant starting up in end-2012 for this purpose.
The generating company is the majority 60 per cent stakeholder in the joint venture company NewEarth Pte Ltd which owns the technology. NewEarth Pte Ltd's other partner is Water and Environmental Technologies (a subsidiary of SGX-listed Beng Kuang).
NewEarth Pte Ltd, in turn, partnered MPA Ventures (part of the Maritime and Port Authority) and Surbana International Consultants to form NES which is building the plant.
The NES plant will be able to handle up to 85,000 tonnes per annum of industrial waste such as dredged marine clay, sludge, slag and ash collected from petrochemical, maritime, chemicals, manufacturing and other industries here. These will be treated before being converted into environmentally-safe construction products such as building bricks, paving blocks and synthetic aggregates.
Lim Kong Puay, the president and CEO of Tuas Power, said: 'NES offers a unique solution to companies that are seeking a safe and environmentally responsible means of waste disposal, by treating and converting their waste into products that can be used in road works, general construction and reclamation.'
He added: 'Tuas Power's biomass-clean coal cogeneration plant . . . will also be making use of the services of the NES facility. NES will be collecting coal bottom ash from the plant and converting it into synthetic aggregates that have applications in the construction industry, thus making our Tembusu Multi-Utilities Complex an environmentally-sustainable project.'
At the groundbreaking, MPA CEO Lam Yi Young said that through its Maritime Innovation and Technology Fund, MPA has been involved with NewEarth's crystallisation technology 'right from the beginning - from inception, to R&D, to test-bedding, till its successful completion and move towards becoming a valuable business proposition'.
The technology is a five-year joint R&D effort among the various parties including NewEarth, MPA, Surbana and Nanyang Technological University.
It will be 6th kiosk here; Trans-Cab's owner aims to expand network
Christopher Tan Straits Times 22 Dec 10;
BY THE middle of next year, owners of 5,500 or so compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles plying here - half of them cabs - can top up at one more refuelling station.
This will bring their number in Singapore to six.
Union Energy, which runs Trans-Cab, Singapore's second-biggest cab company, has secured a 100,000 sq ft site in Tampines Street 92 to build a CNG station - its second since opening a 76,000 sq ft facility in Old Toh Tuck Road a little over a year ago.
The company, owned by businessman Teo Kiang Ang, has also made a bid for rival Smart Taxis' two CNG stations in Mandai and Serangoon.
Although discussions on the purchase of Smart's stations have stalled, Mr Teo said that 'if the price is right, we can talk again'.
If he is eventually successful in his bid, he will practically have a monopoly of the CNG refuelling market.
There are only two other small refuelling kiosks - in Jalan Buroh and on Jurong Island, both operated by joint ventures between Singapore Petroleum Company and Sembcorp Gas.
CNG is considered to be environmentally friendlier than petrol and diesel because it produces less carbon and other emissions. It is also cheaper, costing around $1.40 a kg. One kg of gas is equivalent to 1.3 litres of petrol, which today costs $1.90 a litre.
CNG is currently duty-free. But even if a duty of 20 cents a kg is phased in from 2012, as has been announced, it is likely to still be cheaper than petrol.
Mr Teo did not want to reveal his offer price for Smart's stations, saying it was confidential.
Mr Johnny Harjantho, managing director of Smart, also declined to shed light on why the deal fell through.
When asked why he is selling the stations, Mr Harjantho said: 'I am a businessman, so whoever makes me an offer, I will look at it. I'm here to make profit.'
Trans-Cab's Tampines refuelling station will also house a taxi workshop that will help it cope with a fast-expanding fleet.
Mr Teo said half of his fleet of about 4,000 taxis run on diesel, and the other half on CNG. 'I'm expanding for the future,' he said.
Recently, he also said that he was aiming to grow his cab fleet - second only to ComfortDelGro's 15,600 - to 8,000 by 2014.
But he added a qualifier yesterday: 'If the situation allows, we will,' he said, referring to the escalating certificate of entitlement (COE) prices.
COE prices - which have trebled from a year ago to more than $47,000 for cabs - are expected to have a significant impact on larger operators because they usually have a bigger pool of ageing cabs to replace.
ComfortDelGro spokesman Tammy Tan, however, said her company's fleet is relatively young.
'We are watching COE prices closely and may slow the replacement of our fleet if the increases persist,' she said. 'We have no plans at this point to increase rentals.'
Smart's Mr Harjantho said COE prices are not the only problem cab companies are facing.
'COE is No. 1, but we are also finding it hard to manage insurance costs,' he said.
Insurance companies are generally reluctant to cover taxis because of their relatively high accident claims. Those which do often impose a high 'excess' - an initial amount the insured is liable for before the insurer pays.
'Our excess is $5,000 a cab,' Mr Harjantho said, adding that insurance-related expenses cost Smart 'millions of dollars' each year.
Wildlife saved
Adib Povera New Straits Times 22 Dec 10;
BUKIT KAYU HITAM: Some 1,800 protected animals, including 196 king cobras, were saved from ending up in the cooking pot in Thailand.
This followed the seizure by state Customs Department officers from an unattended lorry at the Bukit Kayu Hitam duty-free zone complex here on Monday.
Department director Ishak Ahmad said the officers laid an ambush for about two hours before checking the Kedah-registered three-tonne lorry at about 6.40am.
They found 912 turtles, 710 monitor lizards and snakes stashed in plastic sacks and rattan baskets in the lorry.
Several large empty fruit baskets, made from bamboo, were cleverly stacked in front of the sacks and baskets to prevent them from public view, especially Customs officers.
The lorry, had pulled up at the complex and passed all checks when it went through the checkpoint to enter Thailand after midnight.
However, it could not enter Thailand since the border gate is only open between 6am and midnight daily. The driver then parked the lorry by the roadside about 10 metres away from the border gate.
Reptiles escape the cooking pot
G.C. Tan The Star 22 Dec 10;
BUKIT KAYU HITAM: Over 1,800 endangered reptiles meant for the cooking pot were rescued by the Customs Department here.
Acting on a tip-off, the department personnel seized 475 hill tortoises, 437 freshwater tortoises, 710 monitor lizards and 196 cobras and king cobras from a lorry that was parked near the Malaysia-Thai duty free zone at about 6.40am on Monday.
The reptiles were kept inside blue sacks, plastic bags and plastic baskets and were hidden between heaps of empty fruit baskets and 20 boxes of sawn logs meant for carving.
State Customs director Ishak Ahmad said the lorry had passed through the Malaysian immigration checkpoint and had queued to enter the Thai checkpoint that opened at 7am.
“We believe the reptiles that weighed 4,300kg were bound for restaurants that sell exotic dishes.
“The smugglers thought they could fool us by hiding the reptiles in the front part of the lorry and loading the empty fruit baskets and logs behind,” he told reporters at the Customs store here yesterday.
Ishak said the department laid an ambush at the lorry that was left unattended.
“We moved in after two hours when there was no sight of the driver or conductor,” he said, adding that it was the biggest seizure of wildlife by the department this year.
The lorry, the reptiles worth RM24,000, and the 20 boxes with sawn logs worth RM6,000, would be handed over to the state Wildlife and National Parks Department for further action, he said.
Customs seize tonnes of reptiles in Malaysia
TRAFFIC 24 Dec 10;
Bukit Kayu Hitam, Malaysia, 24th December 2010—As 2010 draws to a close, Malaysian Customs officials report their largest contraband seizure of the year after they confiscated 4.3 tonnes of reptiles from a lorry parked near the Malay/Thai border.
Working on a tip-off, the Customs officials confiscated a haul comprising over 1,800 monitor lizards, snakes and freshwater turtles and tortoises which were concealed amongst empty fruit boxes and timber on 20th December.
All of the specimens are listed in Appendix II of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) meaning that any international trade in them requires the appropriate permits.
“TRAFFIC highly commends the Customs officers responsible for this seizure. However, the scale of this haul underlines the fact that the illegal trade of protected wildlife in Malaysia remains a serious problem”, said Chris R. Shepherd, Deputy Director of TRAFFIC Southeast Asia.
“Without the commitment of Customs and enforcement bodies alike across the network of ASEAN countries the illegal trade in endangered species will continue, threatening the future survival of wild animals and plants.”
Among the animals seized were 18 Brown Tortoises Manouria emys and 10 Yellow-headed Temple Turtles Hieremys annandalii, both of which are classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, as well as over 400 Giant Asian Pond Turtles Heosemys grandis, which are listed as Vulnerable.
Globally, many turtle populations are under siege as they are being removed from the wild at an unsustainable rate, threatening the future survival of many taxa within this enigmatic group.
These three species, as well the Bengal Monitor Varanus (nebulosa) bengalensis, which was also seized, are protected in Malaysia according to the Wildlife Protection Act (1972).
Under Malaysia’s newly passed Wildlife Conservation Act (2010), which is yet to be implemented, all species in this seizure are protected and individuals caught hunting or trading them could face hefty punishment.
With the increase in wealth and concomitant spending power of many Asian nations in recent decades the demand for wild meat—the likely fate awaiting these animals in this seizure—has increased substantially.
Malaysia along with its ASEAN neighbours is a major source area for illegally traded wildlife in international trade. Given that wild animals are internationally trafficked by land, air and sea, this seizure highlights the important role that Customs authorities play in the war on illegal wildlife trade.
Following this seizure the majority of animals were auctioned off to wildlife dealers while the remainder, those protected in Malaysia, were handed over to the Wildlife and National Parks Department.
New Straits Times 22 Dec 10;
LANGKAWI: Thanks to a group of some 100 volunteers from various agencies and non-governmental organisations, the waters at this idyllic tourist destination are fast becoming clear of jellyfish.
During a day-long outing, they helped to collect the deadly sea creatures during a gotong-royong at Pantai Chenang here yesterday.
Organised by the Langkawi Development Authority, 200 box jellyfish of various species, including the common Carybdeid Morbakka, were caught by the group using the common fishing nets.
Langkawi Recreational Club president Datuk Mansor Ismail said the event would be held regularly to make Langkawi waters jellyfish-free and safe for tourists.
“A total of 150 cases involving stinging by jellyfish were reported this year.
“The move (to remove) should trigger more frequent collaborative effort between various agencies as well as the public.
“Perhaps, catching the jellyfish can be turned into a competition to popularise it.”
Universiti Sains Malaysia marine biology unit officer Sim Yee Kwang, who supervised the event, said samples of the caught jellyfish would be sent to the university laboratory for further research.
He said the jellyfish’s presence in Langkawi waters was not alarming compared with other areas in the peninsula, such as in other parts of the Straits of Malacca.
Noor Hazwan Hariz Mohd New Straits Times 20 Dec 10;
MALACCA: The state is hoping for the Federal Government's approval for the longest sea-crossing bridge connecting the peninsula with Dumai in Sumatra.
Chief Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Ali Rustam said the proposed 127.93km highway costing US$12.75 billion (RM40.1 billion), is expected to take 10 years to build.
He said the proposal had been submitted to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, while the Governor of Riau, Rusli Zainal, will secure Jakarta's approval for the bridge to be built on their side.
"This is a very big project, and once completed, the bridge will be the world's longest sea-crossing bridge, which will connect our country with Indonesia.
"And it will definitely open new business opportunities between both countries.
"I hope that the governments of both countries will give the green light to this project.
"I think it should not be a problem as the project will be privately-funded," he said after a Roll-on Roll-off (RoRo) Port Construction Meeting with Riau deputy governor Emrizal Parkis at Majestic Hotel in Melaka Tengah here on Sunday.
The RoRo port construction is another state government project to provide ferry service for passengers and vehicles between Malacca and Dumai.
Ali said the bridge will be built by Straits of Malacca Partners Sdn Bhd, with financial support guaranteed by China Exim Bank and other financial institutions.
He said the bridge will give easier and cheaper means of travel to tourists and citizens of both countries.
Straits of Malacca Partners managing director Datuk Lim Sue Beng said the project involves the building of a 48km-long bridge connecting Malacca to Pulau Rupat; an 8km bridge connecting Pulau Rupat to Dumai; and 71.93km-long highway.
Lim said highway would be four lanes (two on each side) and two emergency lanes (one on each side), built according to normal highway specifications.
Once the approval is given, the parties involved are likely to require four years of thorough research and planning.
The design of the bridge is being put together by Hyunan Provincial Communications, Planning, Survey & Design Institute (HNCDI) of China
The biggest ships could pass through as it will be 76m above sea level during high tide, with travelling time estimated to be about an hour.
It will have two stay-cable bridges and one suspension bridge -- both the longest in the world.
The Jakarta Post 22 Dec 10;
Thailand-based gas and oil producer PTT Exploration and Production (PTT EP) has promised to pay compensation for damages caused by an oil spill in the Timor Sea as long as Indonesia has sufficient evidence to support its claim.
“We will pay as long as it can be proven by evidence agreed by both parties,” executive vice president Luechai Wongsirasawad told reporters in Jakarta on Tuesday.
He added that his company acknowledged the economic and social impacts of the oil spill on the Indonesian fishery industry.
Earlier, Indonesia demanded Rp 23 trillion (US$2.58 billion) in compensation for the damages resulting from the oil spill, which was caused by a blowout at the Montara platform off the northwest coast of Australia on Aug. 21 last year. The spill affected nine Indonesian regencies around the Timor Sea, reportedly polluting 70,341 square kilometers of water and coastline.
An analysis by the Environment Ministry showed that pollutants in the Timor Sea had exceeded the tolerable levels set by the Indonesian government as an impact of the oil spill caused by PTT EP Australasia, a subsidiary of PTT EP.
Local fishermen’s catches also reportedly dropped, while thousands of tons of shallow-water fish and whales were found dead due to the spill of up to 500,000 liters of crude oil a day into the Timor Sea.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) said marine life and coral reefs, along with mangrove ecosystems, would need two and 10 years respectively to recover.
Wongsirasawad said that in a meeting in Singapore last weekend, both the Indonesian negotiation team and his company agreed to prioritize the case to resolve the impacts of the spill on the fishery industry.
As the first step, he said, his company would conduct a joint survey with the Indonesian government around Rote Island in East Nusa Tenggara, claimed to be worst hit by the incident, to find out the extent of the oil spill entering Indonesian waters.
“We have agreed that the oil spill came to Indonesia’s waters, but we have yet to agree on what extent it reached the shores,” he said. A recent study conducted by the Australian government and funded by
PTT EP concluded that the oil slick did not reach Australian or Indonesian shorelines.
“The study shows that the nearest point reached was 91 kilometers from Rote Island, while Indonesia’s study indicates that it reached 51 kilometers from the island,” he said.
Wongsirasawad also said that his company and the Indonesian government would calculate resources impacted by the oil spill at the end of February next year.
“Upon completing these stages, we will calculate the economic losses that we should pay,” he said, adding that currently his company had not yet allocated any budget for initial compensation for direct losses suffered by local fishermen. (lnd)
Earlier, Indonesia had demanded Rp 23 trillion in compensation for the damages resulting from the oil spill.
Virginia Morell ScienceNow 21 Dec 10;
It would be hard to confuse Africa's forest elephants and savanna elephants. Forest elephants, found in dense West African forests, have longer, straighter tusks and round, not pointed, ears. They're also 1 meter shorter and weigh half as much as the savanna elephants, which range from South to East Africa. Yet for years, scientists have classified the two as the same species, arguing that they were slightly different populations that mingled on the edges of the forest.
A new genetic analysis, however, finds that forest and savanna elephants are as different from each other as modern Asian elephants are from ancient mammoths. The findings, which split the elephants into two species, could improve the conservation of African elephants overall, say researchers.
The study is not the first to analyze the elephants' DNA. In 2001, researchers compared the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of forest and savanna elephants and reached much the same conclusion. (mtDNA is inherited only from the mother and is found in mitochondria, the cell's energy factories.) And a subsequent study of the forest and savanna elephants' nuclear DNA showed that the two had diverged more than 3 million years ago. Both studies concluded that forest and savanna elephants are separate species, but they did not sway all taxonomists, who felt that certain data suggested that some forest and savanna elephants shared a recent maternal ancestor.
Many studies use mtDNA to determine whether a species designation is valid. But mtDNA has its limitations. It represents only a small fraction of an animal's genome (the rest is nuclear DNA), and because it is transmitted only from the mother, it reveals just the genetic history of females.
To resolve the debate, an international team of scientists once again compared the animals' nuclear DNA. But this time, they analyzed large amounts of nuclear DNA sequences from one individual of each of the three existing elephant groups (Asian elephants, African forest elephants, and Africa savanna elephants), and from two elephant species that recently became extinct (a mammoth and a mastodon). It's the first time that scientists have sequenced a mastodon's nuclear genome and the first time that the five species' nuclear DNA has been compared.
"It was a big challenge to extract the DNA sequences from the fossil mammoths and mastodons and then to line these up with DNA from the modern elephants," says Nadin Rohland, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the study's lead author.
The results, published online today in PLoS Biology, should finally convince the skeptics, the researchers say. They corroborate the previous nuclear DNA findings and show that savanna and forest elephants separated between 1.9 million and 6.7 million years ago. Asian elephants and wooly mammoths began diverging then, too.
The study also reveals that the species have surprisingly different amounts of genetic diversity. Savanna elephants and wooly mammoths have very low diversity, whereas the genetic diversity of forest elephants is very high; Asian elephants fall in the middle. The differences likely reflect the elephants' social behaviors, says Alfred Roca, a conservation geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and one of the study's authors. "In savanna elephants, the large males dominate the matings. Apparently, based on what we see, the wooly mammoths had a similar type of male competition" for matings.
The team thinks this explains the previous mtDNA results, which suggested that some forest elephants shared a maternal ancestor with savanna elephants as recently as 500,000 years ago. Because the savanna males are larger, they likely outcompete the forest males in the areas where the two groups of elephants overlap, effectively erasing their deeply divergent genetic history.
If the report's conclusions are accepted by the African Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation Nature (IUCN), the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) may be split into two species: L. africana, for those living on the savanna, and L. cyclotis, for those in the forest. Right now, the two are classified as subspecies: L. africana africana and L. africana cyclotis.
"This is wonderful work and a major step forward in our understanding of the relationships of elephants," says Robert Fleischer, geneticist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "It's an absolute tour de force, with immediate consequences for the conservation of elephants," adds conservation geneticist Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
That's because poachers are decimating the forest elephants, says Samuel Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. Although African elephants are listed as an endangered species, with between 500,000 and 600,000 left in the wild, some African countries continue to push for legalizing trade in ivory tusks. If forest elephants, which number approximately 20,000 are recognized as a separate species, they may garner more protection. "[They] might have a fighting chance," he says.
Diane Skinner, a spokesperson for the African Elephant Specialist Group in Nairobi, Kenya, says that the group will review the new study. But for now, the forest elephant's status remains unchanged.
Africa Has Two Species Of Elephants, Not One
Julie Steenhuysen PlanetArk 22 Dec 10;
Instead of one species of elephant, Africa has two, researchers said on Tuesday, confirming suspicions about the two distinctly different looking pachyderms.
Using gene sequencing tools, teams from Harvard, the University of Illinois and the University of York in Britain have shown that instead of being the same species -- as scientists have long believed -- the African savanna elephant and the smaller African forest elephant are distant cousins, having been largely separated for 2 million to 7 million years.
"What our study suggests is forest and savanna elephants are very distantly related to each other and not just subspecies or populations of the same species," said Alfred Roca of the University of Illinois, who worked on the study published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Biology.
The teams compared the genetic code of modern elephants from Africa and Asia to DNA taken from two extinct species -- the woolly mammoth and the American mastodon.
"The surprising finding is that forest and savanna elephants from Africa -- which some have argued are the same species -- are as distinct from each other as Asian elephants and mammoths," David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who worked on the study, said in a statement.
Africa's forest and savanna elephants are vastly different in size. The savanna elephant is roughly double the weight of the forest elephant at six to seven tons and measures about 11.5 feet tall at the shoulder -- about 3 feet taller than the forest elephant.
Even so, many scientists had thought the two populations of elephants came from the same species, in part because they mated and produced offspring.
Not so, says Professor Michi Hofreiter, an expert in ancient DNA from York.
"The divergence of the two species took place around the time of the divergence of the Asian elephant and woolly mammoths," Hofreiter said in a statement.
"The split between African savanna and forest elephants is almost as old as the split between humans and chimpanzees.
"This result amazed us all."
Roca said comparing the genetic sequence of the mastodon -- a very distant cousin of the other species -- allowed the researchers to see where in evolution the elephants split.
"The forest and savanna elephants proved to be as genetically distinct from each other as the woolly mammoth from the Asian elephant," Roca said in a telephone interview.
On a practical basis, the study means that conservationists will need to think about the two species differently.
"For the last 50 years, all African elephants have been treated as the same species. In fact, they are so different you really have to come up with a different conservation plan for each of the two," Roca said.
(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
Seeing double: Africa's 2 elephant species
University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences EurekAlert 21 Dec 10;
Contrary to the belief of many scientists (as well as many members of the public), new research confirms that Africa has two—not one—species of elephant. Scientists from Harvard Medical School, the University of Illinois, and the University of York in the United Kingdom used genetic analysis to prove that the African savanna elephant and the smaller African forest elephant have been largely separated for several million years.
The researchers, whose findings appear online in PLoS Biology, compared the DNA of modern elephants from Africa and Asia to DNA that they extracted from two extinct species: the woolly mammoth and the mastodon. Not only is this the first time that anyone has generated sequences for the mastodon nuclear genome, but it is also the first time that the Asian elephant, African forest elephant, African savanna elephant, the extinct woolly mammoth, and the extinct American mastodon have been looked at together.
"Experimentally, we had a major challenge to extract DNA sequences from two fossils—mammoths and mastodons—and line them up with DNA from modern elephants over hundreds of sections of the genome," says research scientist Nadin Rohland of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
According to David Reich, associate professor in the same department, "The surprising finding is that forest and savanna elephants from Africa—which some have argued are the same species—are as distinct from each other as Asian elephants and mammoths."
Researchers only had DNA from a single elephant in each species, but had collected enough data from each genome to traverse millions of years of evolution to the time when elephants first diverged from each other.
"The divergence of the two species took place around the time of the divergence of the Asian elephant and woolly mammoths," says Professor Michi Hofreiter, who specializes in the study of ancient DNA in the Department of Biology at York. "The split between African savanna and forest elephants is almost as old as the split between humans and chimpanzees. This result amazed us all."
The possibility that the two might be separate species was first raised in 2001, but this is the most compelling scientific evidence so far that they are indeed distinct.
Previously, many naturalists believed that African savanna elephants and African forest elephants were two populations of the same species, despite the significant size differences. The savanna elephant has an average shoulder height of 3.5 meters whereas the forest elephant has an average shoulder height of 2.5 meters. The savanna elephant weighs between six and seven tons, roughly double the weight of the forest elephant.
DNA analysis revealed a wide range of genetic diversity within each species. The savanna elephant and woolly mammoth have very low genetic diversity, Asian elephants have medium diversity, and forest elephants have very high diversity. Researchers believe that this is due to varying levels of reproductive competition among males.
"We now have to treat the forest and savanna elephants as two different units for conservation purposes," says Alfred Roca, assistant professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois. "Since 1950, all African elephants have been conserved as one species. Now that we know the forest and savanna elephants are two very distinctive animals, the forest elephant should become a bigger priority for conservation purposes."
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This research was funded by the Max Planck Society and by a Burroughs Wellcome Career Development Award in Biomedical Science.
'African Elephant' Actually Two Separate Species
Jennifer Welsh livescience.com Yahoo News 22 Dec 10;
Everyone is taught that there are two species of elephants - the African and the Asian - but new research is suggesting this isn't the whole truth. The "African elephant" is actually two species, as evolutionarily different as lions and tigers are from one another.
"It's really a remarkable degree of divergence between the two," said study leader Alfred Roca of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The forest and savanna [elephants] are as different as the Asian elephant and woolly mammoth."
Roca and his collaborators discovered the evolutionary discrepancy by analyzing DNA of the living elephant species and two of their extinct evolutionary cousins, the woolly mammoth and mastodon. The study is published in this week's issue of the journal PLoS Biology, and is the first sequence of these extinct animals' nuclear genomes, which is the DNA that resides in the nuclei of cells and gets passed down to offspring by both parents. (By contrast, mitochondrial DNA hides out in the energy-making structures of cells and is only passed down by females.)
The species, which can be divided by their habitat into the forest elephant and savanna elephant, seem to have separated several million years ago, about the same time that humans diverged from chimps. They probably diverged for the same reason too, Roca said. [Images of forest elephant and savanna elephant]
"The thing that caused them to split was climate change - Africa became drier and the forest retreated," Roca told LiveScience. "These are the same factors that lead to the divergence between humans and chimpanzees."
The forest elephant is smaller, and is sometimes referred to as the "dwarf African elephant," standing at about 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) high compared with the savanna elephant's 11.5 feet (3.5 m), and weighing about half as much. The forest elephant also has straighter tusks and oval-shaped ears.
"It's important to classify the two as different species for the conservation aspects. You would want to develop a separate conservation plan for each one," Roca said. The African elephant is listed as endangered by the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and splitting the population into two different species places the forest elephant in much more dire straits. A little over a fifth of Africa's 500,000 elephants are forest elephants, and their numbers are dwindling quickly as their habitats disappear and poachers kill them for their ivory tusks, Roca said.
The researchers also discovered that the forest elephant is less genetically diverse than the savanna elephant, which Roca thinks is due to the intense competition between males. With male-male fighting, only the strongest would get the gals and so few males would pass along their genes to offspring. The woolly mammoth shows similar low genetic diversity, which may mean they were also competitive, Roca said.
Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, a biologist at the Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History, who wasn't involved in the study, called it a "tour-de-force in the field of paleogenomics" that convincingly refuted earlier, misleading mitochondrial DNA studies of African elephants.
"The confirmation of an old split between forest and savanna elephants is of great taxonomic and conservation significance, as this can allow for species-specific management decisions," Kolokotronis said.
Two recent studies highlight a debate within the world of marine fisheries science over how to interpret available fisheries data
Mike Orcutt Scientific American 21 Dec 10;
The global demand for seafood is high, and over the past several decades the harvesting of wild fish from the oceans has grown into a huge business. In the 1950s most of the world's commercial fisheries were concentrated in the northern Atlantic and Pacific, near the coasts of heavily industrialized nations such the U.S., the U.K. and Japan.
Since that time the industry has expanded rapidly southward, and into deeper waters in search of more fish to satisfy the growing market and to compensate for depleted legacy fisheries.
Between 1950, the year the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) began releasing an annual report of catch statistics, and the late 1980s the global annual reported catch ballooned from around 18 million metric tons to peak at about 80 million metric tons. Since then, the catch has stagnated, dropping to near 79 million metric tons in 2005.
There is no argument the industry's massive growth has vastly affected ocean ecosystems, but the extent to which this disruption has depleted and continues to deplete the sea's biodiversity has become source of a heated debate within the world of marine fisheries science. At the center of the disagreement, which is highlighted by two recently published studies, is a question: What is the best way to measure the ecological footprint of commercial fishing?
The answer is complicated, due to the inconsistent nature of the data from a large portion the world's fisheries, especially those operated by developing nations. But the authors of a new study published December 2 in PLoS One say they have for the first time quantified, on a global scale, the ecological consequences of commercial fishing. They say their results, gleaned by analyzing global catch statistics, reveal that only the expansion into new fishing grounds has maintained seafood supply by making up for devastating destruction of the biodiversity in older fisheries. Now, they say, there is no more room to expand, and current fishing practices are not sustainable.
Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries biology at the University of British Columbia was a co-author of the new paper. Pauly, also the principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, says his group was able to measure biodiversity loss by developing a "'currency,' or common denominator, for the impact of fisheries on ecosystems," necessary because that impact varies depending on which species is harvested.
In previous work Pauly's group divided the planet's oceans into 180,000 individual cells and used catch statistics to determine the amount of every species caught in each cell between 1950 and 2005. Then, they determined the "primary production"—an ecological term referring to organisms at the very bottom of an ecosystem's food web—required to produce all the fish harvested from every cell. In ocean ecosystems primary production comes from phytoplankton. Each fish species needs a unique amount of primary production to survive, depending on their place on the food web. The higher in the web—or, as ecologists say, the higher the trophic level—the more that is required.
In the new paper the authors expressed the primary production required to produce the catch from each cell as a fraction of the total primary production—a value they inferred by analyzing satellite photos to measure pigmentation in the water—in each respective locale. The result is an illustration, say the authors, of the global "ecological footprint" of marine fisheries—one that, given current trends, cannot be sustained.
The limitations of catch data
Not all marine fisheries scientists, however, agree that primary production required is a reliable enough measurement of biodiversity loss.
Care must be taken not to overinterpret the metric, says Kevern Cochrane, the director of the resources use and conservation division of the FAO's Fisheries and Aquaculture Department. "I think it is a useful complement to other ways of looking at the picture," he says, but "it does introduce other uncertainties as well."
These uncertainties stem from the fact that it relies on records of fisheries catches. "If you really want to know what the health of the ecosystem is, it's better to focus on what is actually in the ecosystem, rather than what you get out of it," says Trevor Branch, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington (U.W.) in Seattle. "There are lots of reasons why catches go up and down, irrespective of what's happening in the ecosystem."
Catch data alone do not necessarily reflect abundance, Branch explains, as catches are also driven by additional factors like economics, technology and fisheries management. For example, he cites the U.S. west coast, where "10 or 20 species have by this measure have completely collapsed." In fact, he notes, managers in that area have deliberately cut back on catches of those species. "Now those species are rebuilding, and many of them are not even overfished anymore, but the catches are still low," he says.
Researchers can more comprehensively evaluate an ecosystem by supplementing catch records with surveys of an area's biomass, and models, called stock assessments, which account for all available catch and survey data for individual species. "Wherever you have a scientific stock assessment, or the result of a rigorous scientific survey conducted using acoustic or trawl techniques, you should use that data as well," FAO's Cochrane says.
But stock assessments and scientific surveys are only available from a fraction of the world's fisheries—mainly high-value, intensely managed ones in the waters of developed countries. Often, catch data are the only information available. "It's the most globally available information—it's as simple as that," Cochrane says. He notes that the FAO is engaged in efforts to improve the quality and accuracy of global catch data, and to expand the world's library of surveys and stock assessments.
The "fishing down the food web" controversy
The authors of the new study argue that destructive overfishing by the industry has been masked by spatial expansion. "If people in Japan, Europe, and North America find themselves wondering how the markets are still filled with seafood, it's in part because spatial expansion and trade makes up for overfishing and 'fishing down the food chain' in local waters," said lead author Wilf Swartz, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center, in a statement.
"Fishing down the food chain" refers to a supposed phenomenon in which commercial fisherman, when they first move into a new area, target larger, longer-lived fish until they are depleted, at which point they shift to smaller, less desirable species lower on the food web until all that is left are species near the bottom of the web. Fisheries scientists have accepted this occurrence since 1998, when a landmark study, authored by Daniel Pauly and colleagues and published Science, concluded that the average food-web position of the contents of global catches—known to ecologists as the mean trophic index—was declining.
The mean trophic index has since become the most widely-used indicator of ocean ecosystem health. In 2004 the Convention on Biological Diversity named it one of eight indicators that would be used to monitor progress toward the accord's goal of reducing the rate of global biodiversity loss.
But a study published in Nature November 17, by Trevor Branch and colleagues, found that the decline in the mean trophic index Pauly had observed in 1998 is no longer present in the global catch data. Further, the study cites catch records, stock assessments and scientific surveys to show that in many cases the index does not correspond to the average food-web position of the organisms researchers directly observe in the ecosystem. On the contrary, Branch says, "just under half the time what you get from catches goes in the complete opposite direction from what you get from the ecosystems."
Pauly says the new PLoS One paper "completely invalidates" Branch's Nature paper because the authors failed to account for the spatial expansion described in the former. As fisheries move offshore, he says, they first target large fish high on the food web—just as they did closer to shore. "Hence, moving offshore will mask inshore declines in mean trophic levels."
Branch counters that the expansion paper actually reinforces his study's conclusion that mean trophic index is not a reliable indicator. "Fisheries expansion is just another reason why we shouldn't trust catches," he says. "That was the point of our paper—that we shouldn't be basing our judgment on catches."
The value of the mean trophic index depends on an assumption that is not supported by the available data, says Ray Hilborn, also a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at U.W., although not an author on the Nature paper. In particular, he notes, recent evidence suggests fisheries do not necessarily begin by targeting fish higher up on the food web, but often simply pursue the most economically valuable species, regardless of their position. "If you think about it, what is the most expensive stuff at the market? It's lobsters, scallops, crabs and things like that. It's not yellowfin tuna," Hilborn says.
The (contested) state of marine fisheries
If catch data are not a reliable reflection of what is happening in ocean ecosystems, does that mean Pauly's argument that eventually our oceans will be left only with jellyfish and plankton overblown? Again, the answer is complicated by the inconsistent quality of the available information. But in the places for which there is good data, it appears things are actually improving, says Bill Fox, vice president and managing director for fisheries for the World Wildlife Fund. "For the last decade we have been making great progress—certainly in the U.S., northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand and many developing countries as well—in terms of improving the sustainability of fisheries," he says.
Hilborn agrees, citing a 2009 study in Science that brought together conservation biologists and fisheries scientists, and compiled multiple data sets—ecosystem models, stock assessments, trawl surveys and catch statistics—to assess the global state of fisheries. This study, on which Hilborn and Branch joined 19 other scientists as co-authors, showed that although the majority of commercial fish stocks for which there are data remain below target thresholds, fishing pressure has been reduced enough to expect that most of the ecosystems studied should be able to rebound to those thresholds.
Pauly, meanwhile, maintains the situation is direr, and compares current fishing practices with a Ponzi scheme. "It has been, throughout, a raid on the capital," he says, and it's happened under the cover of spatial expansion. "The supply has been guaranteed, and has been provided by expansion. When expansion is not possible anymore, how will we guarantee the supply?"
* Says area was created in violation of U.N. conventions
* Lease on island expires in 2016
Jean Paul Arouff Reuters AlertNet 21 Dec 10;
PORT LOUIS, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Mauritius plans to contest the legality of a new marine park around the disputed Chagos islands before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the Indian Ocean islands' prime minister said on Tuesday.
Britain leased the archipelago's biggest island, Diego Garcia, to the United States in 1966, paving the way for the construction of a huge airbase which required the forced removal in the 1960s and 1970s of some 2,000 Chagossians.
The displaced islanders have waged a long legal battle for the right to return. In early December, Mauritius said it planned to summon Britain's top diplomat in the country after a leaked U.S. cable suggested the park was a ploy to stop uprooted islanders returning home.
"The marine protected area was created in violation of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and is not compatible with the rights of Chagossians," Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam told a news conference.
He said a statement of claim had been sent to British Foreign Secretary William Hague.
"Mauritius requests the arbitral tribunal to declare ... that, in respect of the Chagos Archipelago, the Marine Protected Area is not compatible with the 1982 Convention, and is without legal effect," he said.
Britain gave the green light to what is now the world's biggest maritime reserve in April, in a move praised by environmentalists. [ID:nLDE6301QN]
Diego Garcia became an important base for the United States during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, acting as a launch pad for long-range bombers.
The U.S.-British lease for Diego Garcia expires in 2016. (Editing by George Obulutsa and Mark Trevelyan)
Mauritius challenges British marine park in court
Yahoo News 21 Dec 10;
PORT-LOUIS (AFP) – Mauritius has filed a protest with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea over Britain's creation of a marine park around the Chagos islands, the Indian Ocean state's prime minister said Tuesday.
Navinchandra Ramgoolam argues that Britain's environmental project is in fact designed to prevent the return of the refugees it evicted decades ago to turn the islands into a military base.
"The marine reserve was created in violation of the 1982 (United Nations) Convention on the Law of the Sea, of which both Mauritius and the United Kingdom are signatories and which is incompatible with Chagossians' rights," Ramgoolam said.
The statement of claim was filed with the Hamburg-based tribunal on Monday and a copy handed to British Foreign Minister William Hague.
In the claim, a copy of which was seen by AFP, Mauritius argues that Britain is not qualified to set up a marine reserve.
"Only the Republic of Mauritius can declare declare an exclusive economic zone, in line with clause 5 of the 1982 convention" on the law of the sea, Ramgoolam told reporters in the the capital Port-Louis.
Ramgoolam said the statement explains how Britain detached the Chagos archipelago from Mauritius, from where it was administered, just a few years before the 1968 independence.
Mauritius, where some 2,000 Chagossians were resettled after their eviction in the 1960s and 1970s, still claims sovereignty over the archipelago.
The group of islands is also known as the British Indian Ocean Archipelago.
In April, Britain approved the creation of the world's largest marine reserve around the Chagos islands, in a move that angered Mauritius.
"By creating the protected marine area, Great Britain did not take into account Mauritius' rights and those of the Chagossians it shamefully evicted from Chagos," Ramgoolam said.
He claimed that London never tried to strike an agreement with Mauritius or any relevant regional body over the project.
"We know the real reason for the marine reserve: preventing Chagossians from returning to Chagos," the premier added.
A US diplomatic cable recently revealed by WikiLeaks purportedly quotes a British official as saying the marine park would ensure no "Man Fridays" could settle on the Chagos islands.
The main island, Diego Garcia, is now populated by an estimated 1,700 US military personnel, 1,500 civilian contractors and around 50 British personnel.
Prachi Pinglay BBC News 22 Dec 10;
Thousands of residents from 18 villages located near the site of Mumbai's planned second international airport are angry and confused.
Unable to comprehend the design and scale of this $2bn (£1.3bn) dollar project, all they know is that they are opposing it until they are assured of jobs and satisfactory compensation.
Developers last month finally won environmental clearance - one of the last stages before final planning approval - to build another airport for the western city that is India's commercial centre.
The Navi Mumbai Airport site - which would be located 40km (25 miles) away from Mumbai's existing air hub - has been under consideration since 2000.
Promises, promises
But the public-private partnership project has stalled because of stiff protests from environmental groups.
They say the diversion of a river to make room for the runway will also involve destroying mangroves.
Villagers are demanding better compensation and a job guarantee scheme in return for the remaining 20% of land needed if the project is to be successfully completed.
The first phase of the airport is scheduled be complete by the end of 2014 - with a passenger load of 10 million people a year.
By 2030 the airport would be able to handle 60 million passengers annually, say planners.
But Kamlakar Mhatre, one of the 3,000 families who face being resettled, is not happy.
"We do not trust Cidco," he says, referring to the City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra, which is behind the development.
'At our cost'
Mr Mhatre says the corporation reneged on a promise to give his family jobs when they gave up land in the 1980s for another project.
One of the most common challenges for such developments is finding work for the farmers who lose their land and livelihoods.
Because many of these people have limited skills and education, few of them get good jobs and many end up as labourers.
RC Gharat, who is part of the protest group, says they are demanding training for villagers to avoid ending up in unskilled work.
"The nation and state's development cannot be at our cost," he says.
"We want locals to be employed in all possible jobs and the necessary training to be provided."
The initial design involved diverting two rivers to make way for parallel runways, in addition to the destruction of mangroves in more than 90 hectares and the razing of a 95m (311ft) hill.
Legal action
Developers say that plan has been altered to avoid diverting one of the rivers, and to provide for the creation of a mangrove park in the vicinity.
Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has now approved the project.
"Instead of going back to the drawing board and adding at least two to three years more to the assessment/land acquisition process, I decided to accept the proposals in good faith and to ensure that the environmental concerns are fully addressed," he said.
But environmentalists - who have lodged a petition at Bombay High Court to stop the development - reject this claim.
Mangrove expert Vivek Kulkarni described the decision to go ahead as akin to "amputating the hand given by nature and trying to grow it on your back".
"Creating parks is not going create an ecosystem," he said. "Officials talk about the need for an airport and minimising the damage. But this is hypocrisy.
Experts also say the new airport is not well linked to different parts of the over-populated city and will put tremendous pressure on infrastructure.
Saturation point?
One study warns that a combination of population growth and an expected increase in air traffic means the new airport could hit saturation point by 2030.
But Cidco spokesman Mohan Ninawe says all concerns will be addressed.
"The distance between the two runways has been reduced to avoid diverting one of the rivers," he said.
"We will give a good package to people. Jobs will be given as per skills and knowledge."
He also says road transportation has already been planned, and that the airport will also be well connected to the city by Metro Rail and the Trans Harbour Link.
Mr Ninawe said that several other infrastructure projects are in the pipeline to ease traffic in India's financial capital.
For now, the airport project seems grounded by the standoff between the developers on one side and their opponents on the other.
Michael Perry PlanetArk 22 Dec 10;
The strongest La Nina weather event in nearly half a century, resulting in heavy rains and flooding which has damaged crops and flooded mines in Australia and Asia, may be at its peak, the Australian weather bureau said.
"Long-range models surveyed by the bureau suggest that this La Nina event may be at its peak and will persist through the southern hemisphere summer," the Bureau of Meteorology said in its weekly tropical climate note on Tuesday.
"La Nina conditions continue to dominate across the tropical Pacific. All climate indicators...remain above La Nina thresholds," it said.
Normal seasonal output patterns for wheat, rubber, coffee, soy and palm oil, among others, have been upended in Australia and Asia due to heavier-than-normal rains.
Wet weather in key rubber hubs of Thailand and Indonesia has propelled prices of tire-grade rubber more than 30 percent higher since the weather anomaly emerged, while palm oil gained by more than half. Coffee harvests have been delayed in Indonesia and Vietnam.
Australia has cut its sugar export forecast by a quarter and downgraded expectations of the amount of high-quality wheat available for export.
La Nina-driven wet weather has also impacted iron ore and coal mining operations in Indonesia and Australia, where heavy rains have flooded mines and interrupted transport, also impacting China which is the top customer.
"The 2010 event has contributed to north Australia's wettest September-November period on record," said the weather bureau, adding Australia's monsoon season had arrived two weeks earlier than normal.
The bureau said the risk of La Nina-fueled cyclones developing off Australia's east and west coasts remained at a "moderate level."
Cyclones force Australia each year to temporarily shut down its offshore oil and gas operations off the northwest coast and sometimes flood inland iron ore mining areas.
Australia's cyclone season is between November and April, but it is yet to experience the first storm of the season.
(Editing by Balazs Koranyi)
La Nina blamed for weather upset, but climate link unclear
Claire Snegaroff Yahoo News 6 Jan 11;
PARIS (AFP) – Experts pin the floods that have ravaged northeastern Australia on a weather phenomenon known as La Nina but are cautious whether the peril could be amplified by climate change.
La Nina, or "girl child," is the counterpart of El Nino, or "boy child," together comprising a pendular swing of extreme weather that affects the Pacific Rim but can be disruptive as far as the coast of southern Africa.
El Nino occurs when the trade winds that circulate surface water in the tropical Pacific start to weaken.
A mass of warm water builds in the western Pacific and eventually rides over to the eastern side of the ocean.
The outcome is a major shift in rainfall, bringing floods and mudslides to usually arid countries in western South America and drought in the western Pacific, as well as a change in nutrient-rich ocean currents that lure fish.
Eventually, El Nino peters out, sometimes when a cold phase -- La Nina -- starts to dominate.
At that point, the reverse happens: countries in the eastern Pacific face drier weather and those on the west, such as Australia's Queensland, get drenched.
"2010 began with El Nino conditions in the Pacific followed by a rapid transition into La Nina during (the southern hemisphere's) autumn," Australia's Bureau of Meteorology says on its website.
"(...) By July, La Nina conditions were well established and most areas of Australia experienced very much above average rainfall. The second half of the year (July to December) was the wettest on record for Australia."
In the 20th century, scientists identified 25 moderate or strong El Ninos and 17 episodes of La Nina. The toll to human life and property, in droughts and floods, has sometimes been huge.
The back-and-forth cycle -- formally known as the El Nino/La Nina-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO -- occurs every two to seven years.
Because sea temperature plays such an important role, some climate experts are keen to determine whether man-made global warming might make it more frequent or vicious.
Prudence, though, is the watchword. ENSO is a complex mechanism and reliable oceanographic data reaches back only a century or so, which is minute given that climate history spans billions of years.
"There is no consistent indication at this time of discernible changes in projected ENSO amplitude or frequency in the 21st century," the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) crisply announced in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.
In an interview with AFP, Baylor Fox-Kemper, an oceanographer at the University of Colorado, explained: "Many models indicate that there is a link between El Nino and climate change, but they don't agree as to what that change should be.
"Furthermore, El Nino is so noisy [a term meaning complex] that it takes many centuries of data to be sure that a change has occurred.
"Since we have only a limited amount of trusted real-world data, we are unable to validate which of these models is closest to the truth."
Others say that despite the unknowns, logic dictates that global warming is bound to have an impact on ENSO.
"With a warmer world, one would expect the atmosphere to hold more moisture, so that when it does rain, it is heavier," said New Zealand specialist Jim Salinger.
"So La Nina rainfall events are expected to be more intense... (although) at this stage, it is not known whether La Nina events will become more frequent."
Fidelis E. Satriastanti Jakarta Globe 21 Dec 10;
After being named three years ago as the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, Indonesia has published a report challenging the data.
The Second National Communication for the period 2000 to 2005, released by the Environment Ministry on Monday, is a report on greenhouse gases that must be submitted by parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The report says Indonesia emitted at most 1.38 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) a year during this period.
That is significantly lower than the previously accepted figure of 3.01 gigatons of CO2e in 2005 stated in a 2007 report published by local environmental consultancy Pelangi Energi Abadi Citra Enviro and funded by the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development.
The Peace report put Indonesia third worldwide after the United States, with 6 gigatons, and China, at 5.02 gigatons.
Sulistyowati, an assistant deputy for climate change impact control at the Environment Ministry, said the official SNC report should be the only reference for Indonesia’s CO2 emissions.
“This is the official document on greenhouse gas inventory for Indonesia,” she said.
“We will submit this to the UNFCCC as the national report, so this is the only document we will refer to when discussing emissions in the country. Previous reports no longer apply.”
The SNC report also gave much lower figures for the proportion of CO2 released from land use change and forestry, which includes peat fires.
The Peace report said an estimated 85 percent of the country’s emissions, or 2.56 gigatons, came from land use change and forestry, while the SNC put it at just 649 megatons in 2000 and 674 megatons in 2005.
It also said peat fires contributed only 172 megatons of CO2e in 2000 and 451 megatons in 2005.
These figures are also much lower than those from a 2009 report by the National Council on Climate Change, which said CO2 emissions from land use change and forestry in 2005 amounted to 1.88 gigatons, 55 percent of which came from peat fires.
The authors of the SNC report said these large discrepancies appeared to be due mainly to differences in estimates of land use change and forestry emissions.
Dadang Hilman, one of the report’s lead authors, said the methodologies used in the SNC report and previous reports were different and so the findings could not be compared.
He said estimates based on a count of forest fire hot spots in Kalimantan could skew the final figure higher than it really was, while extrapolating the results from a limited number of ground checks in Kalimantan to cover the whole of Indonesia could lead to an overestimate.
livescience.com Yahoo News 21 Dec 10;
Rivers may be a significant source of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, scientists now find.
Their calculation suggests that across the globe the waterways contribute three times the amount of nitrous oxide to the atmosphere as had been estimated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations scientific body charged with reviewing climate change research.
They found that the amount of nitrous oxide produced in streams is related to human activities that release nitrogen into the environment, such as fertilizer use and sewage discharges.
"Human activities, including fossil fuel combustion and intensive agriculture, have increased the availability of nitrogen in the environment," said Jake Beaulieu of the University of Notre Dame and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Cincinnati, Ohio, and lead author of the paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Much of this nitrogen is transported into river and stream networks," Beaulieu said. There, in a process called denitrification, microbes convert the nitrogen into nitrous oxide (also called laughing gas) and an inert gas called dinitrogen.
The finding is important, the researchers say, because nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change and destruction of the stratosphere's ozone layer, which protects us from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. Compared with carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide is 300-fold more potent in terms of its warming potential, though carbon dioxide is a far more prevalent greenhouse gas. Scientists estimate nitrous oxide accounts for about 6 percent of human-induced climate change.
Beaulieu and colleagues measured nitrous oxide production rates from denitrification in 72 streams draining multiple land-use types across the United States. When summed across the globe, the results showed rivers and streams are the source of at least 10 percent of human-caused nitrous oxide emissions to the atmosphere.
"This new global emission estimate is startling," said Henry Gholz, a program director for the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.
"Changes in agricultural and land-use practices that result in less nitrogen being delivered to streams would reduce nitrous oxide emissions from river networks," Beaulieu said.
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