Poorly Maintained Dolphin Pens At Awana
from Natura Gig
Crocodile, Otters, excitement, etc.
from Trek through Paradise and Swans and Plants
Common Tailorbird singing
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Documenting seabirds that pass through Singapore
from wild shores of singapore
The Beetles
from My Itchy Fingers
Edward Scissorhands tree
from Ubin.sgkopi
I have tonnes of water at my door but none in my pantry - Queensland floods
from Water Quality in Singapore
Straits Times Forum 15 Jan 11;
RESORTS World Sentosa, in its reply on Monday ("Resorts World Sentosa committed to wildlife conservation"), cited examples of its commitment, but has not got to the point.
The point is that it is cruel to capture wild dolphins and confine them to tiny, restricted areas.
It must be emphasised that "tiny" here is compared to the vast open spaces of the ocean, where the dolphins naturally roam. A dolphin school roams large distances in its search for food and this behavioural pattern is entrenched in its DNA. To, therefore, confine the dolphin to a relatively tiny space is a form of cruelty and completely against its natural behaviour in its natural habitat.
Cruelty is not justified by business profit.
Dudley Au
Grace Chua Straits Times 15 Jan 11;
FROM July, public housing residents in Pasir Ris and Tampines will get their recyclable waste collected daily from bins at every block.
At present, the 660-litre bins are scattered throughout housing estates - one for every five blocks - and they are cleared weekly.
Last week, waste collection firm Veolia Environmental Services was awarded a seven-year contract for enhanced waste and recycling collection services in the neighbourhood.
Pasir Ris-Tampines is one of the nine geographic sectors for waste collection in Singapore. When waste collection contracts for the other eight sectors come up for renewal over the next two years, residents in these areas will also get more bins and more frequent pick-ups.
The National Environment Agency (NEA) said the enhancements were based on public feedback collected in 2009 from 8,300 respondents across public and landed housing, trade premises and town councils.
In the survey, people asked for collection of recyclables and refuse to be more prompt, more bins and better education on how and what to recycle.
Among other improvements to be implemented from July are quieter rubbish trucks and enclosed trash compactors to prevent street overflow and smell. Trucks will also be fitted with Global Positioning Systems to monitor their schedules and make collection more efficient.
People who live in landed homes can also get their garden waste picked up if they want it composted. And their recyclables will be collected every week, up from every fortnight.
All these will cost slightly more: $8 a month compared with the $7.35 that HDB residents now pay as part of their conservancy fee.
The NEA said the improvements will also help residents recycle more. By 2018, the recyclables collected in Pasir Ris and Tampines are expected to triple in weight.
The 10 Pasir Ris and Tampines residents The Straits Times spoke to were evenly split about the efficacy of the new measures.
Tampines resident Lynn Lim, 39, welcomed the new provisions but added that people need more education on what should go into recycling bins. 'Otherwise the recycling bin becomes a garbage bin.'
At Pasir Ris, housewife Peggy Gan, 44, said she saw no need to increase the frequency of collection. She added that she uses the recycling bins only twice a year because they are too far away.
'If you want people to recycle, at least make it convenient,' she said.
Singapore is stepping up recycling efforts in a bid to stop the offshore Semakau landfill from filling up too fast.
In 2009, the country generated more than 6 million tonnes of waste and recycled just 57 per cent of it. It aims to push the recycling rate to 65 per cent by 2020 and 70 per cent by 2030.
And early last year, the NEA also asked for experts to study whether measures such as levies for waste disposal, container refund schemes or mandating of certain premises to separate recyclables like food waste and glass can work to get people to change their habits.
Additional reporting by Neo Wen Tong
Yahoo News 14 Jan 11;
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – Malaysia plans to set up a large enclosed natural habitat for captive tigers, a senior wildlife official said Friday, an ambitious proposal that has raised concerns among conservationists.
The authorities say the reserve will provide a good home for tigers rescued from poor living conditions, but campaigners argue the focus should be on protecting the animals in the wild.
"It is still at the preliminary stage. It will be an enclosed area big enough for the big cats to roam," a wildlife and national parks department official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"Tigers in the park will be fed and it will be a tourist attraction."
A final decision on the programme, which will be located in peninsular Malaysia, will be made by the end of the year, the official said.
The plan was prompted by the discovery of 27 captive tigers living in poor conditions in a zoo in southern Malacca state, the official said.
He played down fears of poachers raiding the tiger park, saying it would be "enclosed and guarded."
But William Schaedla, regional director of TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, which monitors trade in wildlife, urged the authorities to concentrate on battling poaching rather than breeding tigers.
"TRAFFIC Southeast Asia agrees that something must be done to care for the tigers that are casualties of poaching and conflict. However, the facilities undertaking these efforts should avoid becoming factories for more captive tigers," he said.
"Captive tigers would not have the ability to feed themselves or a fear of humans, and so cannot be returned to the wild. Also, this will not prevent tiger extinction in the wild," he added.
Schaedla said the priority should be to protect tigers in the wild where they still face a serious threat.
Last year WWF-Malaysia said tribesmen in Malaysia were being paid by syndicates to trap wildlife, including critically endangered tigers, to meet demand from China.
Conservationists have called for a war on poachers who are undermining Malaysia's ambitious goal to double its population of wild tigers to 1,000.
In the 1950s, there were as many as 3,000 tigers in Malaysia but their numbers fell as the country opened up more land for agriculture.
Emman Cena Philippine Daily Inquirer 14 Jan 11;
MANILA, Philippines—The country is all set to embrace a futuristic undersea project to rival those in Maldives, Dubai and Fiji, according to a Filipino team of developer and architects, which is set to build an underwater resort hotel in Palawan.
Dubbed as the Coral World Park, this multibillion-peso project will set the record as Asia’s first underwater resort development and the biggest undersea living in the world once the project is completed by 2013.
Picture this: You wake up to a picture perfect view of frivolously swimming manta rays and fishes or hold a meeting in a restaurant submerged in the pristine waters. Say what? All this isn’t science fiction according to an all-Filipino team behind the project.
Taking the helm is Singapore-based businessman Paul Moñozca, who is known for his advocacies of helping Filipino sports teams and the overseas remittance business. Partnering with Moñozca is renowned eco-architect Jose “Pinggoy” Mañosa, who will take charge of the architectural design of the Coral World Park.
“It’s high time we brought sustainable development underwater because there have been similar projects elsewhere in the world that have been proven successful,” Moñozca told Inquirer Property in an exclusive interview Wednesday.
He cited global warming and the rising water levels as factors that pushed him to look into the possibility of exploring the readiness of the country for this kind of revolutionary development.
Pegged at some $150 million, the undersea structure takes pride in its 24 undersea suites or pods called “Anemones,” which are submerged 60 feet below sea level with a fascinating 270-degree view of the sea. The 15-foot-high Anemones will be built by a US firm that specializes in submarines.
Several units of these Anemones will be open for public viewing at reasonable rates while majority are for ownership. Each 50-square-meter Anemone (the size of two-bedroom condo unit) can be customized per owner’s preference. It can be used as a private villa, a receiving or entertainment room that could cater to as many as 15 people.
Filipino ingenuity
How can one move from one pod/suite to another? The Coral World Park will be built with submarine technology. The mode of transport will be through glass bottom mini-submarines to be powered by the first mobile hydropower system, which generates up to 1 megawatt of electricity. This will use a patented water recycling and pressure chamber invented by an all-Filipino team of engineers, Moñozca said.
“The project will show to the world Filipino ingenuity as 80 percent of the project will be run and manned by Filipinos, from engineers to architects down to personnel,” Moñozca said. When completed, the proposed underwater habitat will be the biggest in the world.
Also part of the futuristic project is a 50-bedroom onland boutique hotel complete with amenities like casinos, spa, business center and an underwater restaurant to be named “Starfish,” which could seat as many as 200 people in its 600-square-meter dining area. A seahorse-shaped science center aptly called “Seahorse Science Center” will be built for tourists and will serve as the park’s marine observatory and conservation center showcasing the richness of marine life in the Philippines.
The project is expected to pour in billions of investments and will help create thousands of jobs for the people in Palawan and neighboring provinces.
Conservation tourism
Funding will come from Moñozca’s Monaco-based group, which counts investors from the United States, the Middle East and Russia. As an aggressive venture in ecotourism business, the project also aims to replenish the coral reefs in the area and would advocate conservation tourism in the country.
Moñozca related that everything has been in the planning stage since last year. He identified a group of islands in Coron as the site for development owing to its perfect geography, clear and cove-protected waters and rich marine life. The islands of Palawan hardly experience earthquakes and are not prone to visiting typhoons that occasionally hit the country.
The construction is set to start soon and will be completed in two years, according to Mañosa, who said this would be “my biggest project so far in my professional career.” Mañosa is behind some of the biggest projects like the San Miguel Building constructed in the 1980s and the Brent International School.
“I was overwhelmed myself when the project was offered to me. Even my family is excited about this; my grandchildren are asking when they could visit the underwater resort,” Mañosa said.
The group dispelled fears of security as the whole resort will be tightly guarded. The proponents also envision a cashless system of transaction as everything will be made via specially issued bracelet cards similar to the function of a credit card.
The group promised strict adherence to protect the environment and the biodiversity of Palawan. They said no marine life will be harmed during the course of its construction to its operations.
ScienceDaily 14 Jan 11;
An 18-year study of Kenya's coral reefs by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of California at Santa Cruz has found that overfished reef systems have more sea urchins -- organisms that in turn eat coral algae that build tropical reef systems.
By contrast, reef systems closed to fishing have fewer sea urchins -- the result of predatory fish keeping urchins under control -- and higher coral growth rates and more structure.
The paper appears in the December 2010 issue of the scientific journal Ecology. The authors include Jennifer O'Leary of the University of California at Santa Cruz and Tim McClanahan of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
The authors found that reefs with large numbers of grazing sea urchins reduced the abundance of crustose coralline algae, a species of algae that produce calcium carbonate. Coralline algae contribute to reef growth, specifically the kind of massive flat reefs that fringe most of the tropical reef systems of the world.
The study focused on two areas -- one a fishery closure near the coastal city of Mombasa and another site with fished reefs. The researchers found that sea urchins were the dominant grazer in the fished reefs, where the predators of sea urchins -- triggerfish and wrasses -- were largely absent. The absence of predators caused the sea urchins to proliferate and coralline algae to become rare.
"These under-appreciated coralline algae are known to bind and stabilize reef skeletons and sand as well as enhance the recruitment of small corals by providing a place for their larvae to settle," said Dr. Tim McClanahan, WCS Senior Conservationist and head of the society's coral reef research and conservation program. "This study illustrates the cascading effects of predator loss on a reef system and the importance of maintaining fish populations for coral health."
The study also focused on the effects of herbivorous fish -- surgeonfish and parrotfish -- on coral reefs. While these 'grazing' fish did measurably impact the growth rates of coralline algae in reef systems, they also removed fleshy algae that compete with coralline algae. Overall, reefs with more sea urchins grew significantly slower than ones with more complete fish communities.
The authors also found that the grazing effect was stronger and more persistent than the strong El Niño that devastated coral reefs throughout the tropics in 1998 (the study extended from 1987 until 2005). The study shows that managing coral reef fisheries can affect coral reef growth and improving the management of tropical fisheries can help these reefs to grow and persist in a changing climate.
"The survival of coral reefs is critical for hundreds of millions of people who depend on these complex systems for coastal protection, food, and tourism revenue around the globe," said Dr. Caleb McClennen, Director of WCS's Marine Program. "This study demonstrates the importance of improving fisheries management on reefs so that corals can thrive, safeguarding some of the world's most fragile marine biodiversity and strengthening coastal economies."
Critical support for McClanahan's work was provided by the Tiffany & Co. Foundation.
Yahoo News 15 Jan 11;
ROME (AFP) – The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation on Friday unveiled new guidelines aimed at reducing fishing discards that threaten in the long-term many fisheries and the livelihood of millions of fishermen.
The guidelines cover all types of bycatch including discards, referring to fish that are caught accidently and then thrown back into the sea either dead or dying.
Bycatch may also include endangered species, juvenile fish, turtles, seabirds, and dolphins, and currently may be in excess of 20 million tonnes a year, the Rome-based UN agency said in a statement.
"These are the first guidelines to cover all species encountering fishing gear," said FAO fishing technology expert Frank Chopin.
"The guidelines extend the principles of fishery management to all species and all areas of concern."
The guidelines agreed by fisheries experts from 35 countries who met at the FAO last month were another important step towards applying an ecosystem approach to fisheries management, he added.
Chopin also said care had been taken so that the guidelines would not place an undue burden on poor artisanal fishermen and on developing states.
"The guidelines emphasize doing an assessment of the situation first to see if there is a problem. The social, economic and biological impacts of applying these guidelines need to be studied in each case," he said.
The FAO said the guidelines would be presented for endorsement to the Committee on Fisheries at the end of the month.
Fisheries experts agree on first global guidelines on reducing fishing discards
Problem may involve over 20 million tonnes of fish and other animals annually
FAO 14 Jan 11;
14 January 2011, Rome - The first global guidelines for bycatch management and reduction of fishing discards were released today by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. They now go to the Committee on Fisheries for endorsement when it meets in Rome at the end of the month. The guidelines were agreed by fisheries experts from 35 countries who met at FAO last month.
The guidelines cover all types of bycatch including discards, that is, fish that are caught accidently and then thrown back into the sea either dead or dying. Unmanaged bycatch and discards threaten the long term sustainability of many fisheries and adversely affect the livelihoods of millions of fishers and fishworkers.
Bycatch may also include endangered species, juvenile fish, turtles, seabirds, dolphins and so on. Depending on the definition used, current bycatch may be in excess of 20 million tonnes a year. In some countries, bycatch has an economic value and is consumed, making it hard to estimate the scale of the wastage.
"These are the first guidelines to cover all species encountering fishing gear," said FAO fishing technology expert Frank Chopin. "The guidelines extend the principles of fishery management to all species and all areas of concern. Although the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries refers to bycatch and discards, these guidelines elaborate more clearly how countries should address bycatch and discard problems in practice". He noted that the bycatch guidelines had been requested by the countries themselves and are another important step towards applying an ecosystem approach to fisheries management.
The guidelines cover bycatch management planning, improvement of fishing gear, fisheries closures, economic incentives to facilitate uptake of measures, monitoring, research and development, building the capacity of states to follow the guidelines and other relevant issues.
Chopin said care had been taken so that the guidelines would not place an undue burden on poor artisanal fishers and on developing states. "The guidelines emphasize doing an assessment of the situation first to see if there is a problem. The social, economic and biological impacts of applying these guidelines need to be studied in each case," he said.
Richard Black BBC News 14 Jan 11;
As floodwaters in the Queensland capital Brisbane begin to recede, scientists are casting their eyes out to sea and wondering whether the region's greatest natural feature, the Great Barrier Reef, will be scarred by the experience.
This is the world's largest reef system - in fact, the largest thing on Earth made by living organisms, stretching for 2,600km along the coast.
Its myriad of islands and tendrils teem with fish, also supporting dugongs, dolphins, turtles and shellfish - and because of all that, a tourist trade worth several billion dollars per year.
The flood waters emerging from Brisbane itself are not a major concern, as the reef lies further north.
But northern rivers are also seeing flow rates way above normal.
As the water floods into the seas west of the reef, it inevitably freshens the environment around the reef; which is not good news.
"Freshwater kills corals, and there is nothing we can do about it," says Katharina Fabricius, principal research scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Queensland is a heavily agricultural state. And this means that the floodwater brings with it another threat.
Pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers and sediment - mud - are washed off the farms, into the rivers and then onto the reef.
The fertilisers do in the sea what they do on land - stimulate the growth of plants.
But here, that is a problem, as the marine plants cover growing coral, choking it to death.
The sediment also hurts the reef, blocking sunlight and covering the coral fronds.
This run-off degrades the reef at the best of times; but in flood conditions, it becomes much more serious.
"The young corals are highly sensitive to exposure to organically enriched sediments," Dr Fabricius tells BBC News.
"That retards the ability of reefs to recover from the freshwater damage.
"My own research has also shown that increasing levels of nutrients can lead to more seaweed - up to a five-fold increase - and reduce coral biodiversity, with half of the coral species potentially lost from the exposed sites."
Local issue
The sites at highest risk are reefs close to the shore and close to the mouths of rivers discharging floodwater.
For example, the Keppel group of islands lies about 10km from the shore, in the path of water rushing from the mouth of the Fitzroy River.
Scientists monitoring coral there say they have already seen indications of coral damage, but that is is too early to tell how big the impact is likely to be.
As the floodwater spreads further from land, it dissipates in the seas - but can still have major consequences.
"The waters discharging from the Fitzroy River are moving hundreds of kilometres north and 50-100km offshore," says Michelle Devlin, a coral reef ecologist from James Cook University in Townsville.
"There is the potential for large areas of the reef to experience river plume water, with potentially damaging levels of nutrients, sediments and pesticides."
Recovery hopes
On their own, the floods would not necessarily be a significant threat.
The region has had them regularly down the years. 1991 saw major damage to inshore coral - but it recovered.
"The 1991 flood was extremely hard for the reef - pretty much most of the corals were wiped out down to about six to eight metres of depth, and it took about 10 years for them to recover," says Alison Jones from Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, through which the Fitzroy flows.
"But they recovered magnificently; we're very spoiled here in terms of the amount of coral and the speed at which it can grow and recover."
However, what concerns scientists most is that this is just one more hit for an ecosystem that is already struggling to cope with many long-term threats.
These include overfishing, climate change, disease, chronic pollution and shipping.
"The problem is that all forms of disturbances, loads of sediments/nutrients/pesticides, as well as bleaching events from warming seawaters, more intense cyclones and more frequent outbreaks of coral predators such as the crown-of-thorns starfish, all increase in frequency and intensity," says Katharine Fabricius.
"This gives the reefs often not enough time to recover before they get hit again."
The crown-of-thorns starfish is a good example of how the various threats interact.
It eats coral polyps, the organisms that actually build reefs.
Overfishing of one of its few predators, the giant triton, allows the starfish population to expand. Meanwhile, in at least one reef system, fertiliser run-off has stimulated the growth of algae, which has provided predators with an alternative food.
Reefs stressed by climatic factors, pollution and disease will be less resilient to attack by the voracious starfish.
Climate of concern
It is likely to be several weeks at least before scientists are able to gauge the true scale of the flood's short-term impacts.
The continuing threat of bad weather means that travel to the reef is constrained.
And it will be some time - the exact period dependend again on weather - before all of the flood's cargo has travelled through the multifarious fronds of the reef system.
The hope is that it will prove to be a one-off hit from which corals, fish and everything else can recover.
The long-term threats, though, remain, despite recent initiatives to reduce agricultural run-off, constrain shipping and fishing, and tackle the crown-of-thorns.
Climate change is likely to hit reefs in the middle of the tropics harder and faster than the Great Barrier Reef.
Neverless, along with ocean acidification also caused by carbon dioxide emissions, it remains the most significant issue for the region, with a 2007 report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority concluding:
"Projections of future sea temperatures suggest that coral bleaching could become an annual phenomenon in the course of this century, threatening to undermine the physical and ecological foundations of this diverse and productive ecosystem."
Karen Kissane Brisbane Times 15 Jan 11;
SOME areas of Queensland are so flood-prone they should never have been built on and should be declared no-go zones, with residents bought out and moved out, according to an international disaster expert.
"We shouldn't regard this [flood] as freakish," said Professor Ed Blakely, who ran the recovery of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina and was involved in New York's after 9/11. "We should assume they are going to occur because of climate change. They are becoming increasingly frequent and far more devastating."
He warned it was also time to examine the need for Queenslanders to "retreat from the coast" to escape rising sea levels. "It will take 60-75 years, so we have got to start now," he said. "It's very important for us to see not just this incident but the long-term trend and learn from it and plan for it."
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Professor Blakely said he had warned a conference of a flood like the current one: "I warned people in Brisbane before hurricane Katrina that this could happen. I had all the CSIRO data that showed a flood that looked very much like the flood that happened. They scoffed."
Professor Blakely, nick-named "the master of disaster", is professor of urban policy at Sydney University.
Queensland authorities have for some time been examining the state's future under climate change, with the CSIRO predicting an increased intensity of extreme rainfall events such as the current floods.
A global rise in weather-related disasters such as the Queensland floods was confirmed by Andrew Glikson, an earth and paleoclimate scientist with the Australian National University.
"Cyclones have increased twofold over the past 20 years. Floods have increased threefold," he said.
He said climate scientists were careful never to point to a single event as evidence of climate change but to examine medium and long-term trends. "It's happening now, and it's happening faster than some of the climate-change scientists have dared to predict," he said.
Chief executive of the Queensland Local Government Association, Greg Hallam, agreed many people were living in areas that should not have been settled. "There are councils that certainly would like to remove housing but can't. It's such an expensive business, beyond councils' means.
"Councils don't build on flood plains now, but where people have got a use right, that's a legal right to build. Councils can't stop them. The state has to legislate to take away people's planning permits, or the Commonwealth has to fund [a buyback]. I think this epoch event will raise all sorts of issues about how we do all sorts of things."
Given the rising sea levels forecast under climate change, a retreat from Queensland's coastline was the best thing to do "because we can't afford to defend every inch of the coast", said Catherine Lovelock, professor of biological science at the University of Queensland and a contributor to that state's Climate Adaptation Initiative.
She said engineering defences such as sea walls and levees were expensive and not always successful. "If you can't defend a suburb or town, logically you would say that you should let them go.
"Planned withdrawal is one idea but it has to be thought through very, very carefully …
"Which government is going to stick their neck out and say, 'I'm sorry, all of you in Graceville, you are going to have to walk away from your properties that are worth around $300,000 each?'"
Yahoo News 14 Jan 11;
MADRID (AFP) – British economist Nicholas Stern said the price of fighting climate change is now higher than he estimated in a 2006 study that earned him a 400,000-euro (530,000) Spanish award on Friday.
Stern won the BBVA Foundation award for measuring the economic cost of climate change, notably in his 2006 Stern Review which found it made more economic sense to combat climate change than to do nothing.
The economist's "advanced economic analysis" quantified the impacts of climate change and provided "a unique and robust basis" for decision-making, said the jury in the Frontiers of Science Award.
It "fundamentally changed the international climate change debate and stimulated action," the jury said in a statement.
The Stern Review found world economic growth would contract by at least 20 percent if no action is taken, while a switch to a low-emissions economy would cost about one percent of global outpout a year.
Informed of the award on the eve of the announcement, Stern said he would revise the figures in his study if he was writing it now, according to statement by the BBVA Foundation.
"The cost of cutting back emissions is more than we estimated, but that is because the consequences of climate change are already here," the economist was quoted as saying.
"Emissions are rising rapidly, and the capacity of the ocean to absorb carbon is less than we thought. Also, other effects, particularly the melting of the polar ice, seem to be happening much faster. We need to take more drastic steps, so the costs will inevitably be higher."
Countries should still rise to the challenge, he said.
"Climate change economics is the next industrial revolution. The countries who invest now in this new growth market will gain the advantage of a first mover. Those who don't risk being left behind."
China and some European countries including Spain had "woken up to the benefits" and taken steps to foster a low-emissions economy. Stern said. But the United States and other rich countries were advancing more slowly.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, established in 2008, recognize research and artistic creation.
David Fogarty PlanetArk 14 Jan 11;
Tropical cyclones are expected to cause more damage in the United States and Asia but it could be more than a century before insurers can point to climate change as a factor in losses from storms, scientists say.
In a study that focuses on the predicted threat to the United States from Atlantic hurricanes, researchers say their findings also apply to other regions hit by tropical storms, such as Australia, China and India.
"Disaster losses will continue to increase because of increasing exposure in terms of population and insured assets, irrespective of the trajectory of global climate change and its affect on tropical cyclone activity," John McAneney, director of Sydney-based Risk Frontiers and one of the authors, told Reuters.
This made it hard to detect if climate change was changing the behavior of storms, though climate scientists expect tropical cyclones to become stronger, even if the overall number of storms declines in some regions.
Underscoring the risks, major reinsurer Munich Re says there were 950 natural catastrophes last year, 90 percent of which were weather-related events such as storms and floods.
"This total makes 2010 the year with the second-highest number of natural catastrophes since 1980, markedly exceeding the annual average for the last ten years (785 events per year)," Munich Re said in a statement earlier this month. The overall losses totaled about $130 billion of which about $37 billion was insured.
McAneney and fellow researchers Ryan Crompton of Risk Frontiers and Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado, studied a range of computer climate simulations that projected future tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic.
They then estimated how long it would take for a clear climate change impact on what are called normalised losses from U.S. tropical cyclones. Such losses are adjusted for known changes in population, wealth and inflation.
Their study is published in the latest edition of the journal Environmental Research Letters and is an attempt to assess the climate change risk to insurers.
Climate scientists say a warmer world will trigger greater extremes of droughts, bushfires, floods and storms, placing crops, mining operations and coastal cities at greater risk.
McAneney's Risk Frontiers is an independent research center at Sydney's Macquarie University that studies and models catastrophe risks in the Asia-Pacific and prices these risks for insurance and reinsurance firms.
LOSSES DOUBLING
Based on the current study, McAneney said the time scales for a climate change signal to emerge for Atlantic hurricanes were between 120 years and 550 years depending on the global climate change model used.
He said the economic cost of U.S. hurricane losses had roughly doubled every 10 to 15 years but added such losses could be explained by more people and industry in the path of storms as well as increasing wealth.
"There may well be a climate change signal present but it is simply overwhelmed at present by the magnitude of the change in societal factors and the large year-to-year volatility in the losses. We do not expect this situation to change soon," he said.
He also pointed to studies that show a large increase in losses in coastal regions of China and parts of India that can be blamed on increasing population and wealth.
"And given the projections of growth in China and elsewhere in the region we would expect this trend of increasing disaster losses to continue," he said in emailed remarks.
Australia, and particularly Queensland state, was also vulnerable.
"We would expect broadly similar results in the sense that disaster losses will continue to be largely driven by increasing exposure along the coast, particularly in Queensland," he said.
The state's rising population and expanding coal mining, agricultural and tourism sectors made future storm losses likely. And the state is also only part-way through the November-April cyclone season that forecasters say will be above-average in the number of storms.
"If we truly want to reduce disaster losses, then we should be focusing on better land-planning decisions and improved building codes," McAneney said.
(Editing by Miral Fahmy)
Yahoo News 14 Jan 11;
NEW DELHI (AFP) – India experienced its hottest year on record in 2010, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Friday, blaming the rise in temperatures on global warming.
India's mean annual temperature during 2010 was 0.93 degrees Celsius (33.6 Fahrenheit) higher than the long term (1961-1990) average, according to the Annual Climate Summary of India during 2010.
"Indians experienced the worst summer in the last one century, and this was a definite result of global warming," IMD spokesman B.K. Bandyopadhyay told AFP on Friday. The country's weather records began in 1901.
The study also said that that the 2001-2010 decade was the warmest since the records started, with a temperature averaging 0.40 degrees Celsius (32.7 Fahrenheit) higher than that of the previous decade.
"We are still trying to examine the key reasons responsible for the drastic rise in temperatures and ways to control it," the spokesman added.
Experts on climate change warn that without action the planet's rising temperatures could unleash potentially catastrophic change to the earth's climate system, leading to hunger, drought, storms and massive species loss.
In late 2009, India announced a plan to reduce the growth of its greenhouse gas emissions by becoming more carbon efficient. It aims to cut the emissions generated per unit of GDP by 20 to 25 percent by 2020 compared with 2005.
Last year a study from India's environment ministry said that annual greenhouse gas emissions had increased by 58 percent from 1994-2007, driven by higher industrial activity, energy production and transport.
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