Date Posted: 29-Jul-2010

TRADING NATURAL RESCOURCES

The World Trade Organisation wants countries to work together more closely in trade in natural resources.

Natural resources is often seen as exempt from many international commerce rules.

Governments must cooperate more intensively to deal with the challenges for both importing and exporting countries in trade in natural resources, such as export restrictions and import tariffs, according to the annual World Trade Report.

"In a world where scarce natural resource endowments must be nurtured and managed with care, uncooperative trade policies could have a particularly damaging effect on global welfare," the report said.

The report defines natural resources as fuels, forestry, mining and fisheries -- goods that are found naturally and can be used with minimal processing. It excludes agriculture, where products are cultivated not extracted, and industrial goods employing minerals that require a high level of processing.

Trade in such goods in 2008 was $3.7 trillion in 2008, or nearly 24 per cent of total world trade in merchandise goods, a share that has been rising by 20 per cent a year for the last decade, reflecting rising commodity prices.

"I believe not only that there is room for mutually beneficial negotiating trade-offs that encompass natural resources trade, but also that a failure to address these issues could be a recipe for a growing tension in international trade relations," WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said in a foreword to the report.

WTO rules allow countries to restrict exports of natural resources to preserve an exhaustible resource.

Date Posted: 28-Jul-2010

AUS DITCHES CARBON PRICE

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has delayed introducing a price for carbon pollution - angering environmentalists, scientists and business ahead of her bid to secure re-election.

The delay, until 2012 at least, will strain the ruling Labor Party's ties with the Greens Party which are likely to have the balance of power in the upper house Senate afer the 21 August election.

The government and conservative opposition have both promised to cut emissions by five percent by 2020, but the opposition is opposed to carbon trading, which it calls a great big new tax.

Big business and mining companies also oppose carbon trading, saying it would increase their costs and force projects offshore.

Gillard said a trading scheme was essential to reduce carbon emissions, but no decision would be made until a new Citizen's Assembly canvassed community views for the next 12 months.

"Australians have real concerns about making changes that are this big and they need more information," she said. "They are concerned about the impact on jobs and the impact on the prices of goods and services that they rely on, especially electricity."

Economics professor Warwick McKibbin, a board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia, said Labor's climate policy was "extremely disappointing" and delayed action purely for "political advantage."

Date Posted: 27-Jul-2010

CARBON CAPTURE NOT WORKING

Many question remain unanswered as to whether carbon capture, storage and sequestration (CCS), will work to lower global warming.

Professor Gary Shaffer from the Danish Centre for Earth System Science examined a range of CCS methods to determine their effectiveness and long-term impacts.

"CCS has many potential advantages over other forms of climate geoengineering," he said. "However, potential short and long-term problems with leakage from underground storage should not be taken lightly."

The study reveals leakage of sequestered CO2 could cause large scale atmospheric warming, sea level rise and oxygen depletion, acidification and elevated CO2 concentrations in the ocean.

Geological storage of CO2 - either underground or below the ocean floor - may be more effective, but only if leakage can be kept down to 1 per cent or less per 1,000 years.

Dr Peter Cook, chief executive of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies, says Professor Shaffer's figures for geological sequestration mirrors the conclusions reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Dr Cook, who was involved with the IPCC study, says "as long as you have the right rocks to store the carbon in, then sequestration will do what nature does anyway in keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere."

Date Posted: 26-Jul-2010

REDUCING EARTHQUAKE RISKS

Australia researchers are getting more information out of seismic waves to accurately map earthquakes and predict areas at highest risk.

Australian National University seismologist David Robinson says the research is helping scientists better understand earthquakes.

"What we're talking about here is mapping the earthquake faults in the Earth," he said.

Robinson said conventional monitoring triangulates the location of an earthquake using the travel time of seismic waves to a number of different earthquake recording stations.

The speed of seismic waves vary greatly along with the variability of the Earth and this method can provide a high level of accuracy in areas that have a high number of recording stations, but Robinson said in places other than Japan and California this method can only pinpoint the location of an earthquake to within 5 or 10 kilometres.

Date Posted: 25-Jul-2010

AUSTRALIA BANS LASERS

The Australian Government already restricts the importation of handheld lasers, including laser pointers, but there has been a marked increase in the detection of laser pointers through mail and air cargo coming into Australia.

For about $200 a China-based company is selling a hand held laser with a powerful beam, about 1,000 times stronger than many laser pointers.

Some lasers could cause blindness, start fires or be used as a dangerous tool in the hands of people who didn't really know how to use it.

Date Posted: 24-Jul-2010

ASTEROID DUST MYSTERY UNVEILED

The first samples that was captured form an asteroid and brought to Earth could provide answers to stopping them hitting the planet and avoiding a catastrophe.

NASA's Dr Michael Zolensky said the findings of the Japanese led mission could prove crucial. For years the Hayabusa spacecraft has been quietly scooping up dust and rock from a near-Earth asteroid as wide as the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Dr Zolensky, a cosmic mineralogist, was among the international team of scientists that gathered for the landing at the Woomera testing range in South Australia's far north.

He said one of the reasons for doing the asteroid mission was learn what the flying rocks are like.

"How hard it is, is it solid inside? Is it a pile of sand and rock just travelling, like a travelling sand pile? What's it like? Unless you know that you have no hope of making a plan for how to mitigate from a disaster like that."

Scientists have already collected rocks from the moon, gas from the sun and dust from comets, but have never had anything from an asteroid until now.

For a long time scientists have relied on meteorites on Earth to theorise about asteroids, and NASA scientists now helping the Japanese analyse the samples brought to Earth.

Dr Zollensky said: "We had our mission to a comet which, that came back four years ago and we thought we knew about comets. It turned out all we thought we knew about the comet turned out to be wrong. Almost everything we assumed about the comet, about the nature of the comet, what it was like, what the minerals that were there, the rocks that were there, its history, almost all of that was wrong.

"And so we think we know about asteroids, now we're going to find out how much of that is wrong and probably a lot of it's wrong as well."

The captured asteroid samples may also provide answers about the formation of the solar system.

Dr Scott Sandford said asteroid dust could contain the building blocks of life.

"We know from meteorites contain within them a small fraction of material which is even older than the origin of the solar system. So these were grains that were made in the outflows of dying stars or that were processed in interstellar dense clouds and that's only later got in a clump of dust and gas and ice that was collapsing to form our solar system."

"So there's the possibility that when we get these samples back that they'll be materials in there that not only date back to the formation of our solar system but are in fact older than our solar system."

Date Posted: 23-Jul-2010

CLIMATE CHANGE FIGHT LOST

Scientists have declared the fight against climate change has been lost and that more severe global warming is inevitable.

That's the consensus of the first international conference on adapting to climate change opens on Australia's Gold Coast.

Scientists at the conference agreed that if the world does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions world temperatures will rise on average by about four degrees celsius.

And even if countries kept their pledges at the Copenhagen climate conference to cut back their emissions the world on track to about three degrees of warming.

All that is left is for the world to start seriously considering how to live with these rises in temperatures.

The heat is now off to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which means that the impacts of climate change will unavoidable in the coming decades.