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Clinton Global Initiative produces wind power program for Native Americans #green

Read the rest of LOT-EK Unveils Plans for Solar Taichung Cultural Center Made from 1,620 Recycled Shipping Containers Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: "green wall", Ada Tolla, arup, Cargotecture, Design Competition, Giuseppe Lignano, graywater reuse, lot-ek, rainwater filtration, recycled shipping containers, shipping containers, SurfaceDesign, taichung, Taichung City Cultural Center, Taiwan, upcycled shipping containers, vegetated wall, vertical garden

The murder of an environmental activist in Costa Rica has shaken the country’s ecology-minded public and has cast a light on what appears to be the growing overlap between animal poaching and drug trafficking on the country’s Caribbean coast. Early on the morning of May 31, masked gunmen abducted 26-year-old Jairo Mora Sandoval from a [...]

Trash To Cash: Norway Leads The Way In Turning Waste Into Energy #green

When you think of southern California in June there are a variety of things that could come to mind. Sunshine and surfing, deserts and wildfires, Hollywood and San Diego. What does not come to mind, even to a birder’s mind, is an Arctic Loon. Yet, somehow, on 31 May one was discovered on Puddingstone Reservoir, the large man-made lake that is the center of Bonelli Park, a nearly 2,000 acre expanse in San Dimas, just east of Los Angeles. My arrival in southern California didn’t happen until 14 June but the bird had stuck around and was reported daily on the local birding listservs. I was chomping at the bit to get out and look for it and made my first attempt on the evening of my arrival but the bird was not to be found from my vantage point at the lower parking lot next to Sailboat Cove. The large amount of boat traffic on the lake might have had something to do with that. A second attempt was arranged for Sunday morning, 16 June, and I had high hopes of tracking it down. But before we get into that tale let’s examine why, exactly, the Arctic Loon, aka Black-throated Diver, aka Gavia arctica, is such a cool bird to see in southern California in June. First of all, the species only occurs semi regularly in North America in a small patch of Alaska where it occasionally breeds. Most of its range is actually in the Old World so if you want to see one in North America you have to arrange a trip to western Alaska in breeding season, not exactly an easy proposition logistically. And even if you get there your odds of finding one are small. Sometimes the birds that breed in Alaska or in western Siberia somehow end up coming down the west coast on their fall migration and it is the lucky birder indeed who connects with one of them. But by June even if a bird had been staked out all winter it should have left and headed north to breed. That this bird was discovered in late May and has shown no indication of heading north makes it not just a vagrant, but an amazingly oddly behaving one. Anyway, Sunday morning came and I made the quick drive up to San Dimas from my in-laws house in Yorba Linda. It wasn’t even difficult to find the bird actively diving exactly where people had reported it, near some pilings just north of the lower parking lot and just east of the life guard shack. This made me feel better because it meant that when I missed it on Friday it wasn’t because of rank incompetence on my part but because the bird was actually just not there at the time. (Or so I tell myself.) But enough with all of these words. On to the pictures (of what is actually a very bland, basic-plumaged bird). And did I mention that I got video (that is very shaky and with a black chunk missing out of the upper left because I didn’t put my Phone Skope adapter on properly)? Not bad for southern California in June! This was a great addition to my life list and year list and a great opportunity to study a bird that would normally take much more effort to track down. All of the photographs in this post were taken with my Swarovski digiscoping rig.

THERE’S a section on the Heartland Institute’s website pointing readers to “Stuff We Wish We Wrote”. After events over the last year or so, the chaps at the fossil fuel-funded “think tank” might want to add a new section with the title “Stuff We Wish We Hadn’t Wrote”. The Heartland Institute, for those who don’t know, is a Chicago-based group promoting any view or position that argues we shouldn’t do anything about human-caused climate change. They run campaigns, hold conferences, write op-eds in the media and pay contrarian scientists. Right there on the think-tank’s homepage, the group proudly displays a quote from The Economist magazine describing Heartland as “The world's most prominent think-tank promoting scepticism about man-made climate change.” Yet as is the case with most things Heartland says about climate change, things are not always as they seem. Heartland’s boastful quote is taken out of context and comes from this article in The Economist, documenting a spectacular own goal by Heartland. Heartland, The Economist wrote, had lost an estimated $825,000 in funding after running a billboard campaign that equated acceptance of human-caused global warming to the values of serial killer Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski. So when The Economist was describing Heartland as a prominent think-tank promoting climate science denial, it wasn’t doing it in a good way. No wonder then that Heartland didn’t hyperlink the quote. This brings us to Heartland’s most recent example of self-aggrandizing – implying the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) thinks they’re awesome because it translated two of Heartland’s reports, only to be told by aforementioned academy to apologise for misrepresenting what they had actually done. Here are the nuts and bolts of the story. On June 11, Heartland released a statement detailing how CAS had translated two volumes of its NIPCC reports  – Climate Change Reconsidered. The main contributors to the reports, contrarian scientists Craig idso, Fred Singer and Australia-based Robert Carter, were due to fly to Beijing to launch the report, Heartland said. Internal Heartland documents have shown that in 2012, Heartland planned to pay Idso $11,6000 a month for his work on the NIPCC report. Singer was to receive $5,000 per month and Carter would get $1,667 monthly. On June 12, Jim Lakely, Heartland’s communications director, took to the think-tank’s blog - “Somewhat Reasonable” - with unfettered excitement. Under the headline “Chinese Academy of Sciences publishes Heartland Institute research skeptical of Global Warming” Lakely wrote that CAS’s translation now placed “enormous scientific heft” behind the “questionable notion that man is responsible for catastrophically warming the planet”. In a typically restrained and understated manner, Lakely quotes Heartland President Joseph Bast as saying: “This is a historic moment in the global debate about global warming.” Bast then tries to drive a wedge between China and other countries involved in United Nations negotiations to agree a deal to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. China’s previous refusal to sign a deal, Bast claimed, was now justified because CAS had translated the Heartland book and this “indicates the country’s leaders believe their position is justified by science and not just by economics.” Professor Carter told Lakely that Chinese companies would soon leave their Western counterparts in the competitive dust becuase, he said, they were still “hindered by the IPCC’s leaden and outdate global warming ideology”. Climate sceptic blogger Anthony Watts was similarly excitable, running a post with the title “Heartland’s NIPCC report to be accepted by Chinese Academy of Sciences in special ceremony”. That these statements were published on a Heartland blog with the title “Somewhat Reasonable” seems beautifully ironic, given what followed. Presumably finding Heartland’s actions Somewhat Unreasonable, the Lanzhou Branch of the National Science Library of the

This GPS map reveals where your house cats go all day via @ywallin

While en route to Fargo last Saturday, Randy texted me to let me know that he found a Bell’s Vireo. The significance of this sighting goes beyond a “good” bird or a potential lifer for us. Rather, this was the first observation of this bird showing up in our county – ever.  We are beyond its normal range but close enough where one could slip in.  This bird was on Randy’s list of birds he wanted to find for the county records, and he finally found one. Because Randy works for the Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas, a bird conservation project that seeks to document every species that breeds in the state, he needed to establish that the Bell’s Vireo was breeding in our county.  Such a determination would come from multiple observations over a period of days.  Randy did not post this sighting on MOU-Net out of fear that multiple birders would flock to see this rarity.  Birders, in their zest to see such a bird, have been known to play the bird’s song on electronic devices in order to attract it. This could ultimately cause the bird to move away from the area.  Randy’s plan was to post the sighting after five days, but he let a handful of us know about it right away, trusting we’d be mindful of our interaction with the bird. Today I took a break from working around the house to take Evan out to find the Bell’s Vireo.  Right away when we got on site, we heard it singing.  We tried our hardest to see it, but it moved around often and would sing from new locations.  We never did get our eyes on it.  Evan wants to count it anyway.  Considering the rarity of the bird, I think we just might. In our search today we did get a new life bird, the Savannah Sparrow. And then Evan picked up his Clay-colored Sparrow lifer.  I found mine in our yard over a month ago.  Evan gets upset when I find birds he doesn’t, so for the last month he’s claimed multiple times he’s seen one.  He’s been trying awfully hard to turn all kinds of birds into the Clay-colored Sparrow.  He can finally put that bird to rest after this morning. We’ll count the Bell’s Vireo on our life list because it is a special sighting and we did locate it by sound, but I’ll be heading out tomorrow to try to get that picture.  Bell’s or not, it was really cool that Evan got two bonus lifers out of our brief search today.

Yellow-crowned Night HeronThis afternoon after work I took a kayak down the Wekiva River for about an hour to see what I could find for my June Challenge (finding as many birds as you can in one county during the month of June). It was really fun to find a Yellow-crowned Night Heron nest. I saw one adult with two chicks (the photo below shows one pretty clearly and a bump for the second. Unfortunately, these are the best looks I was able to get of the birds--a somewhat cluttered background, but these are the first I've ever seen in Seminole County, so I thought I'd share.Yellow-crowned Night Heron

For the first time, Singapore has started looking at coastal works specifically to protect from rising seas. Hopefully, this will also be an opportunity to incorporate natural regeneration in artificial protective structures. As well as the protection of existing natural shores as a continual source of marine life ‘babies’ and plant seeds and seedlings. Mangroves settling naturally on an artificial seawall at Pulau Hantu. The Building and Construction Authority (BCA), which is in charge of protecting the island nation's coasts, last month called a tender for a coastal adaptation study - the most extensive one done here yet - to come up with a framework to keep low-lying areas safe. The Building and Construction Authority also wants a list of adaptation options, new design-and-maintenance guidelines, an instrumentation and monitoring programme, and suggestions for a coastal flood insurance system. And it wants contractors - who must have technical and engineering know-how - to work with research institutions that have at least a decade of experience and research data in Singapore coastal and biodiversity work. Read more in the full article Singapore takes first steps on plan to protect its coasts, Study to include dealing with rising sea levels and saving low-lying areas by Grace Chua Straits Times 19 Jun 13 More about Singapore and rising seas In Oct 2011, for the first time, it was mentioned that Singapore "will need to raise minimum levels for land reclamation by at least 1m to create an adequate buffer against a potential rise in sea level". This, according to the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources (MEWR). In Mar 2010, a Singapore study revealed that sea levels could rise by between 24 and 65cm by 2100. At that time, the Ministry said existing regulations were sufficient. These included a requirement since the early 1990's for reclaimed land to be built at a height of 125cm above the highest measured tidal level, as a buffer against rising sea levels. Why are rising sea levels a concern for Singapore? Flooding Rising sea levels could flood key economic areas which lie less than 2m above sea level. These include Changi airport, the Central Business District, Marina Bay, Jurong Island, the Western coastline where our container and shipping facilities are located and Semakau Landfill. High value areas like Sentosa Cove are also at risk. Storm surge floods With rising seas, key petrochemical, shipping and shipbuilding facilities on the West Coast could be vulnerable to wave attacks because of seasonal thunderstorms called 'the Sumatras'. These can uproot tall trees and cause a storm surge of high water. Sumatras building up over Jurong Island. In Sep 2012, I learnt from Prof Teh Tiong Sa about the potential impact of storm surge on the artificial Seringat-Kias, and natural shores of Lazarus and St. John's Island. Prof Teh also shared about the extensive work being done to find out more about how rising seas will affect Singapore. But as he emphasises, the eventual outcome is a matter how how we determine baselines, and that designing in preparation for climate change can help us cope with eventual changes. But still, some of the possible outcomes can seem alarming. Salt intrusion into drinking water supplies Rising seas will also threaten Singapore's coastal reservoirs, such as Kranji, Sarimbun and Seletar. Salt water entering these reservoirs will make the water undrinkable. It can take up to two years for the sea water to be flushed out completely by rainwater. Erosion Rising seas will worsen the already serious erosion problems seen on many parts of Singapore's coastline. Serious erosion along the East Coast Park shoreline. More flooding Besides rising seas, climate change may also force Singapore to cope with higher rainfall. This month, the expert panel examining Singapore's flood protection measures said th