The Dappled Planet

It was intriguing to read an article in the Washington Post today by Joe Achenbach. He echoes the sentiments of The Dappled Planet - remove the global warming hysteria and you still have a planet beset by environmental disasters which are man made - and contributing more to some of the catastrophe’s out there than climate change.

We recommend you read the article for a slightly humerous take on the climate change hysteria (and if the article has been removed, here is a PDF version of it…)

August 2nd, 2008 | Tags: diasaster, environment, global warming, land, man-made, management, popualation | Category: Disasterous Solutions, global warming | Leave a comment

Hybrid cars are being toted as the savior of the transportation industry in the US but there are a number of issues that The Dappled Planet feels are not being as people rush to bang the drum of converting to hybrid cars. So before you rush out and try to buy one of these cars, can someone please answer these questions????

Where are they?

America apparently churned out 5.5 million cars/year in 1998, Japan churned out 8 million cars and Germany 5.3 million cars. Numbers might have increased slightly in Japan and decreased in the US (at least, according to all those people who have been laid off near Detroit) so lets say a cosy 20 million cars are being produced a year. That means it would take 30 years to replace all the ‘old cars’ on the road!

True, you can argue production is ramping up in China and India, but even so, is it likely manufacturers globally will exceed 50 million cars a year (which would bring the replacement time down to 6 years). But… That would only be assuming tomorrow, every car manufacturer in the world switched to producing hybrid-only cars - anyone see that happening?

In actuality, ever since the Toyota Pruis grabbed celebrity Hollywood’s attention and hybrid cars became a recognised ‘name,’ it had only produced a million cars by May 2008 and in March this year, announced it was planning to ramp up production of the Prius to 1 million cars/year in the next 2-3 years!!! 1 million cars per year??? That’s not much when there are 600 million cars needing to be ‘replaced!’
(Editors note: Computer crashed… Can’t find Toyota Press Release 2nd time around - so not sure if this figure is US only or global).

So the reality is, the ordinary pre-hybrid car is around for quite a while, even with other manufacturers (Honda… Ford… Chevrolet…) also starting - starting - to introduce hybrid cars.It’s going to be a long time before they usurp the ordinary car - both on the road and in production!

Recyling At present, there are 600 million cars on the road (and probably a whole lot more rotting by roadsides and in scrapyards etc…). If we were to all jump on the US publicity bandwagon and blindly dash out and buy a hybrid car, where are we going to put all those old nasty, CO2-emitting cars? Larger scrapyards??? Big holes in the ground? Will efforts be made to recycle the steel, electrical and battery components (yes, even the petrol-driven cars have a battery in them to get them going…)? If we dig pits and bury them, what about chemicals etc leaking out of them and leaking into our water supply as they decay? Does that not make finding a burial place for ‘old’ cars the same exercise as carbon sequestrian and nuclear waste? If nothing else, there is a budding entreprenuerial opportunity here for someone to offer to recycle cars - for a price!

Affordability On average, fuel efficient cars cost about $10,000 more than the average car. The average compact car in the US costs about $15,000. The average Toyota Prius Hybrid costs around $45,000. You can easily add another $10,000 for all the other fuel (and carbon) efficient European models for sale in Europe. The average person in Asia makes, well, a whole lot less! Can the afford these hybrids???

So, even if everyone in the developed world was able to obtain a hybrid car, it will be a lot longer before people in the developing world will be available to afford these cars. Also, sadly, this pushes the bar that little bit higher as they struggle to gain a comfotable existance.

Footprint Most interestingly… It turns out it takes a lot of unsual metals and thus more energy to make the hybrid cars, and the net result is by the time you ‘pay off’ all the fossil fuel used to make these cars, you might be better off buying a 2nd hand car or even the Californian arch-enemy, the Hummer! So the fuel efficiency may dazzle you in a hybrid car (after you paid $10,000 more for a mid-sized car) but for the first 100,000km, you will be still paying back the extra damage you did to the environment and energy consumed making the vehicle…

Upgrading Does anyone aside from us get the impression if you just wait for the next model car, it will have even better technology and be even more fuel efficient? Does this sound familiar??? Let’s see… Oh yes! Computers! Goodness, how tiring to have another product thrust upon which costs us a years wages and will be even bigger and better in 6 months or 2 years time!

Worse… We can sense a ‘beta vs VHS war looming.’ The hybrid technology still uses petrol at the end of the day and at the same end of the day, the world is running out of petrol. Cars need to be developed which do NOT run on petrol and they are being developed as we speak. So by the time your hybrid car reaches the end of its life in (say) 7 years time (or when you are up for some very expensive new batteries!), the odds are there will be cars out there with far superiour fuel efficiency, maybe using a different technology and no one will want your pathetic 45mpg car (See Tata motors and their 100mpg car)?

Let’s hope this does not lead to a similar situation with garbage dumps filling up with cars leaking lethal chemicals in much the same way no one knows what to do with an old computer… (see recycling above)!

About those old cars… Turns out some people are rather partial to their classic old cars… They’d love to be able to convert it to something more fuel efficient. But at present, just converting it to a hybrid will cost $7,000 and probably only improve efficiency by 3mpg. At that saving, it would take about 7 years to pay off your $7,000 investment.

Other companies are starting to come out of the woodwork and say in the future they may have the technology to convert your car to something fuel efficient - but its still a few years off. And if that technology comes at a price beyond the salary of the average Asian or African taxi driver, We’d say its going to be a difficult sell globally. It could be very lucrative though if the option was to sell wide and charge low, as opposed to charge high and sell small…. Not a business model that seems to be in favour right now though!

Energy source And lets not forget that to plug in and charge a car battery merely defers the point source of the energy, and if the energy coming out of your power plug originated in a coal power plant, then you haven’t really cut your CO2 emissions - you just don’t have it coming out of the exhaust pipe on your car anymore -it’s coming out of a power station stack some distance elsewhere….

This is just the result of a first pass on ruminating on the hybrid cars. We’re not against them and also love the fact you can get 45mpg (but feel like holding off until the India’s Tata Motors comes out with its 100mpg car in 2010…).

So do you feel the pressure to go out and buy a hybrid car? And if so, do some of the points raised in this article give you pause to think? We’d be intrigued to hear of other people’s thoughts about hybrid cars!

June 21st, 2008 | Tags: cars, energy, environment, footprint, hybrid, questions, recycling, savings | Category: Transportation | Leave a comment

Oh dear, now another thing is assaulting coral - sunscreen! Since late May, various news sources have been picking up on a study done by the European Commission on sunscreen and tourists. With 78 million people visiting areas of coral reefs each year (according to the World Trade Organisation), about 4,000-6,000 tons of sunscreen gets washed off the bathing tourists.

Blimey! What is a tourist to do? For those from the northern climes, heading down to tropical locations is almost synonymous with sunscreen - whether it is to try and age the skin by turning it browner or prevent any UV rays ever darkening their skin…

And now if we swim around corals, we will add to all the other ways we, the human race, are contributing to them bleaching. Coral bleaching is the process by which the coral expels all the symbiotic algae because of a stress related event such as pesticides from farming, dramatic changes in temperatures and now… sunscreen particles.

Vexingly, the earlier reports quoted the scientists as saying the solution was to wear sunscreen which didn’t contain certain chemicals? Ok. What chemicals? Fortunately waiting a few weeks has meant some journalists have done their homework and we can all now grab a very large pad of paper and write down UV inhibitors known as 4-methylbenzylidene camphor, or 4-MBC, and octocrylene, or OC - although that’s not to say other chemicals won’t effect coral - they just haven’t been tested for. The San Francisco Chronicle gives you some ’safe’ sunscreens - for the US anyway…

Now before we start carefully weighing up whether it is better to give ourselves first degree sunburn in an effort to save the coral, consider this… Coral can thrive at depths as deep as 3000m and as far north as Alaska and as far south as Antarctica. Yes… you could consider heading to the polar regions to swim amongs the coral - although snorkelling might not be an option in the sub-zero water…

And another thing - coral has been around for a good 450 million years or so! Over that 450 odd million years, the world has been 10 degrees warmer as well 10 degrees cooler than it is now. Life in the ocean was nearly wiped out 250 million years ago when warming combined with slowing currents met oxygen wasn’t being distributed to all depths of the ocean. But before you panic and think warming today will cause that - bear in mind the continents were distributed very differently 250 million years ago - in  fact, there was only one continent, Pangea. There was no frozen polar icecap causing the temperature, density and salinity differences that drive today’s ocean conveyor belt. In short, it is IMPOSSIBLE to shut down the ocean conveyor belt today, even with 2 or 5 degrees of warming unless ALL the land masses merge as one and all the ice on Antarctica melted.

So what does this mean so far? Coral has survived climate changes far harsher than anything we can even predict today.

If we start to delve into literature and exciting papers published with science-friendly, public-unfriendly names like “Changes in Zooxanthellar Densities and Cholorophyll Concentration in Corals during and after a bleaching event” (R.J. Jones et al, 1997, Marine Ecology Progress Series 158, pp51-59) that coral of the Great Barrier reef bleached rapidly over a period 8 days when tempertatures rose abruptly (and locally) by 2.5C over 8 days.

Contrast that with the equally science-friendly and public unfriendly titled paper, “Ring bleaching in Southern Carribean Agaricia Agaricites during Rapid water cooling” (D.R. Kobluk and M.A. Lysenko, 1994, Bulletin of Marine Science 54, pp. 142-150) that coral bleached severely when water temperatures dropped by 3C in 18 hours!

In fact, it has been known for well over a decade that coral bleaches in response to changing environmental conditions. It’s a survival mechanism. If the water temperatures suddenly gets warmer or colder or the prevailing chemical conditions change, the coral let go of all their symbiotic aglae that was favourable in the odd environment to allow new and more favourable algae floating in the vast algal and bacterial soup of the ocean to move in and protect the coral in its new environment.

There’s no doubt the chemicals man is dumping into the water are not helpful to the coral, and maybe, there aren’t symbiotic algae floating out there which will assist the coral in adapting to dealing with 6000 tons of sunscreen (spread around the tropical zones of the world one might add) and adding stress to the coral as it is constantly evicting algae to strike up new relations that deal with localised warming, cooling, seasonal pesticide runoff and natural predators.

But it should not go unnoticed that coral have survived a lot worse and the oceans of the world are a vast natural resource to find new algal comrades. And 6000 tons of sunscreen spread around the globe but locally focused on beaches where the coral grows close to white sand beaches is probably not creating quite as much stress as several million tons of pesticide draining into the ocean from farming….

So what do you think you will do now you realise you won’t kill the coral? We at The Dappled Planet will do our best to wear sunscreen which doesn’t contain the most known agents to exacerbate coral bleaching, but we are also not ready to sacrifice our skins for contributing a few grams of sunscreen to the ocean waters.  We have faith the coral will continue to adapt and survive the natural irritants - but we are concerned about pesticides stressing their system!

June 15th, 2008 | Tags: algae, bleaching, change, climate, cooling, coral, pesticide, sunscreen, survival, warming | Category: Animals, Chemicals, global warming | Leave a comment

One of the staff members at The Dappled Planet was alerted to a “Greenhouse Calculator” which is hosted on the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Network’s website. The Greenhouse Calculator is attached to a game called  Planet Slayer,”  and both of them are currently coming under attack(for different reasons) from some conservative souls in Australia, the UK and the USA (well.. we saw it on US TV, but no link yet…).

People object to the game because if you happen to be someone who works in the nuclear or timber industries or (even more commonly) eat meat, well - you are evil! People object to the greenhouse calculator firstly because it portrays all Australians as carbon dioxide producing pigs and secondly because the pig explodes in a bubble of red cartoon blood if you produce to much CO2, so it is too violent for children’s sensitivities. Glenn Beck on his national TV show in the US went on to point out where this type of stuff contravenes 2 parts of the ABCs own broadcasting code of conduct. True… This but this is their website, not TV and last time we checked children’s TV, a pig exploding in a pool of cartoon blood was pretty mild violence.

However, when we tried out the greenhouse calculator, we discovered there was no way to win! And quite frankly, all the things we are vilified for in the media - flying, driving, not using renewable energy in our homes - actually don’t make a whole lot of difference to our carbon footprint at all (according to this calculator remember…). No, its spending that does us all in.

On the first pass through with the calculator, we pretended to be Joe Average - drove an ordinary car, had an ordinary electrical bill, ate a little meat, flew across the country for a family Christmas and quite frankly, the pig representing us didn’t grow much until the Question 10 “How much did you spend last year?” we entered “$25-40,000″ and suddenly the pig blew up to be a quite a portly large pig! (actually, re-running it now to write this, we see it has changed somewhat and been reduced in size…).

Then after sliding the bars in the last question (very confusing for a child of maybe 8 years of age as the calculator seems aimed at) we then clicked on the skull and crossbone button and BOOM! The pig explodes and reveals “You should die at age 5.7″

Good grief - any child old enough to be playing with this calculator has probably just found out they should be dead!

So we reran the game now trying to find out if we cycled or walked to work, blew off the Christmas holiday flight home, ate no meat, powered our home with renewable energy, and lived on less than $10,000/year would it make much difference… Well, depending how you adjusted those sliding bars on the last question, you could live for about 31 years to ‘forever…’

However, after experimenting with several lifestyles, the end conclusion really was, you shouldn’t live past the age of 10 (at best) and nothing really has a big impact on your carbon footprint other than spending money. And if you delve into the ’science’ behind the question, you are informed the average Australian (well, it is an Australian game!) ‘creates’ 1.6kg of CO2 for every $1 they spend (thats 95c American…) which adds up to 16kg of CO2 (if you spend less than $10,000) to in excess of 160 tonnes per year..

But (here’s the killer punchline) - the ecologically sustainable limit is only 3 tonnes (3000kg) of CO2 per year and globally, every human being,  all the poor poeple as well, creates 7 tonnes CO2 per year!

So not only are those poor kids in Australia being told eating meat, flying, driving, living in a house using fossil fuels etc doesn’t really add a whole lot of CO2 to the atmosphere (as if you cared a whole lot at age 8 when you are immortal…), the moment they’ve spend $1,875 ($US1,690)/year they’ve exceeded their annual allowance of CO2 emissions.

So the poor Australian kid on $20/week pocket money (or $1,040/year), is just breaking even with their carbon footprint, but the moment they hit their teen years and get a part time job and increase their spending capacity, poof! They should have died - probably 6 years beforehand…  So in other words for an Australian to live in sustainable manner with regards to CO2 emissions, they can only spend $5/day ($4.75/day). In Australia, that would buy one McMeal or 3 chocolate bars or 4 packets of noodles…

Talk about lowering the standard of living! You wouldn’t be able to afford a roof over your head (thank goodness Mummy and Daddy are paying for that!…) or go more than 2 bus stops on public transportation on $5/day. Meat is beyond the budget so that will quickly put the farming industry out of action, but thats OK because the game Planet Slayer says farmers are evil anyway. So surely there should be some compensation for not having an electrical bill or using any form of transportation other than our feet?

Is this really the message we want to be passing onto our kids?!

June 3rd, 2008 | Tags: abc, australian, blood, broadcasting, calculator, carbon, death, exploding, footprint, greenhouse, network, pig, professor, schpinkee | Category: The Arts, global warming | Leave a comment