Sunday, December 22, 2013

Most fascinating city car of 2013: Toyota i-ROAD - BBC.com



Toyota’s i-ROAD is hardly the first attempt at a leaning three-wheel runabout. 

 Mercedes-Benz unveiled its functionally similar F300 Life-Jet in 1997, and General Motors displayed the very clever Lean Machine way back in 1982. But the i-ROAD city car – Toyota calls it a personal mobility vehicle – is different in a very noteworthy way: It’s headed for production.

 The fully enclosed tandem two-seater, unveiled as a concept car at the Geneva motor show in March, measures just 33.5in wide, about half the width of a conventional automobile. Power comes from a pair of 2.7-horsepower electric motors, one in each of the front wheel hubs. Those wheels are articulated to allow the entire vehicle to lean into corners, motorcycle-style, for maximum stability. Toyota claims the 662lb i-ROAD can cover 30 miles on a full charge, and because a smaller electric car means a smaller battery, its lithium-ion array will recharge in just three hours, plugged into a conventional household outlet. In October, Toyota announced that it would build a production version of the i-ROAD. Yes, quantities will be modest and availability will be limited to Japan, but the move has global significance. In urban environments where, increasingly, every inch matters, Toyota’s commitment to small and smart city transportation is a very big deal indeed.

Friday, December 13, 2013

Nevasca rara cobre Jerusalém

 

 
 

Neve cobriu o Domo da Rocha e a mesquita de Al-Aqsa. Foto: Dusan Vranic/AP
JERUSALÉM - Uma nevasca de rara intensidade cobriu de branco Jerusalém e parte da Cisjordânia ocupada, nesta sexta-feira, congestionando a cidade e deixando centenas de veículos presos em vias intransitáveis.

As autoridades israelenses disseram que 50 centímetros de neve caíram desde quinta-feira, e a meteorologia prevê que a neve deverá continuar se acumulando ao longo do dia.

"Em meus 54 anos, não me lembro de uma visão assim, tanta quantidade eu não consigo lembrar", disse Nir Barkat, prefeito de Jerusalém.

A população foi orientada a não sair de casa, mas a reunião do secretário de Estado dos EUA, John Kerry, com o primeiro-ministro Benjamin Netanyahu, em Jerusalém, está mantida na sexta-feira.

A Rádio Israel disse que todas as rodovias que dão acesso à cidade estão interditadas, e que 500 pessoas retiradas de veículos presos na neve estão abrigadas em um centro de convenções. A queda de árvores deixou milhares de pessoas sem luz, segundo a rádio. / REUTERS

Monday, December 9, 2013

End of an Era in Coal Country, Utah








A Part of Utah Built on Coal Wonders What Comes Next


By NYtimes

End of an Era in Coal Country, Utah: The Carbon Power Plant, the state’s oldest coal-fired power plant, is set to close by April 2015, a result of new stricter federal pollution regulations.
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PRICE, Utah — For generations, coal has been the lifeblood of this mineral-rich stretch of eastern Utah. Mining families proudly recall all the years they toiled underground. Supply companies line the town streets. Above the road that winds toward the mines, a soot-smudged miner peers out from a billboard with the slogan “Coal = Jobs.”

But recently, fear has settled in. The state’s oldest coal-fired power plant, tucked among the canyons near town, is set to close, a result of new, stricter federal pollution regulations.
As energy companies tack away from coal, toward cleaner, cheaper natural gas, people here have grown increasingly afraid that their community may soon slip away. Dozens of workers at the facility here, the Carbon Power Plant, have learned that they must retire early or seek other jobs. Local trucking and equipment outfits are preparing to take business elsewhere.
“There are a lot of people worried,” said Kyle Davis, who has been employed at the plant since he was 18.
Mr. Davis, 56, worked his way up from sweeping floors to managing operations at the plant, whose furnaces have been burning since 1954.
“I would have liked to be here for another five years,” he said. “I’m too young to retire.”
But Rocky Mountain Power, the utility that operates the plant, has determined that it would be too expensive to retrofit the aging plant to meet new federal standards on mercury emissions. The plant is scheduled to be shut by April 2015.
“We had been working for the better part of three years, testing compliance strategies,” said David Eskelsen, a spokesman for the utility. “None of the ones we investigated really would produce the results that would meet the requirements.”
For the last several years, coal plants have been shutting down across the country, driven by tougher environmental regulations, flattening electricity demand and a move by utilities toward natural gas.
This month, the board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the country’s largest public power utility, voted to shut eight coal-powered plants in Alabama and Kentucky and partly replace them with gas-fired power. Since 2010, more than 150 coal plants have been closed or scheduled for retirement.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the stricter emissions regulations for the plants will result in billions of dollars in related health savings, and will have a sweeping impact on air quality.
In recent weeks, the agency held 11 “listening sessions” around the country in advance of proposing additional rules for carbon dioxide emissions.
“Coal plants are the single largest source of dangerous carbon pollution in the United States, and we have ready alternatives like wind and solar to replace them,” said Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, which wants to shut all of the nation’s coal plants.
“We have a choice,” he said, “which in most cases is cheaper and doesn’t have any of the pollution.”
Coal’s downward turn has hit Appalachia hardest, but the effects of the transition toward other energy sources has started to ripple westward.
Mr. Eskelsen said Rocky Mountain Power would place some of the 70 Carbon facility employees at its two other Utah coal plants. Other workers will take early retirement or look for different jobs.
Still, the notion that this pocket of Utah, where Greek, Italian and Mexican immigrants came to mine coal more than a century ago, could survive without it, is hard for people here to comprehend.
“The attack on coal is so broad-reaching in our little community,” said Casey Hopes, a Carbon County commissioner, whose grandfather was a coal miner. “The power plants, the mines — they support so many smaller businesses. We don’t have another industry.”
Like others in Price, Mr. Hopes voiced frustration with the Obama administration, saying it should be investing more in clean coal technology rather than discarding coal altogether.
Annual Utah coal production, though, has been slowly declining for a decade according to the federal Energy Information Administration.
Last year, mines here produced about 17 million tons of coal, the lowest level since 1987, though production has crept up this year.
“This is the worst we’ve seen it,” said David Palacios, who works for a trucking company that hauls coal to the power plants, and whose business will slow once the Carbon plant closes.
Mr. Palacios, president of the Southeastern Utah Energy Producers Association, noted that the demand for coal has always ebbed and flowed here.
“But this has been two to three years we’re struggling through,” he said.
Compounding the problem, according to some mining experts, is that until now, most of the state’s coal has been sold and used within the region, rather than being exported overseas. That has left the industry here more vulnerable to local plant closings.
Cindy Crane, chairwoman of the Utah Mining Association, said demand for Utah coal could eventually drop as much as 50 percent. “For most players in Utah coal, this a tough time,” said Ms. Crane, vice president of PacifiCorp, a Western utility and mining company that owns the Carbon plant.
Mr. Nilles of the Sierra Club acknowledged that the shift from coal would not be easy on communities like Carbon County. But employees could be retrained or compensated for lost jobs, he said, and new industries could be drawn to the region.
Washington State, for example, has worked with municipalities and utilities to ease the transition from coal plants while ensuring that workers are transferred to other energy jobs or paid, if nearing retirement, Mr. Nilles said.
“Coal has been good to Utah,” Mr. Nilles said, “but markets for coal are drying up. You need to get ahead of this and make sure the jobs don’t all leave.”
For many here, coal jobs are all they know. The industry united the area during hard times, too, especially during the dark days after nine men died in a 2007 mining accident some 35 miles down the highway. Virtually everyone around Price knew the men, six of whom remain entombed in the mountainside.
But there is quiet acknowledgment that Carbon County will have to change — if not now, soon.
David Palacios’s father, Pete, who worked in the mines for 43 years, has seen coal roar and fade here. Now 86, his eyes grew cloudy as he recalled his first mining job. He was 12, and earned $1 a day.
“I’m retired, so I’ll be fine. But these young guys?” Pete Palacios said, his voice trailing off.
Clifford Krauss contributed reporting from Houston.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Displaced by Hurricane Sandy and Living in Limbo, Instead of at Home





Before Hurricane Sandy, Kathryn Fitzgerald lived with her young daughter, Megan, in a modest three-bedroom house in Long Beach, N.Y. But after the storm, their house was torn down.

Since then, they have lived in rental apartments and Megan, now 9, attended an unfamiliar school in another town for a while as her mother appealed for enough aid to rebuild the life they had.
When inspectors arrived at Ms. Fitzgerald’s house in November 2012, they pronounced her house “substantially damaged,” meaning that more than half of its value had been destroyed overnight. But her homeowner’s insurance policy did not cover flood damage.
She had a federally subsidized flood insurance policy, but the company that wrote it offered her just $71,000. She appealed, arguing that her three-bedroom house had been worth more than double that, but her appeal was denied. She appealed again, and was again denied.
Lacking the wherewithal to start overhauling her house and believing that it was too vulnerable to another big storm, Ms. Fitzgerald paid $11,500 to have it torn down. Now she owns a sandlot surrounded by a fence bearing a sign that warns against trespassing.
“This has been a horrendously hard year for me,” she said. “If I don’t think of this in a way that is going to relieve the anger and upset, then I’ll just go back to crying every day.”
More than a year after one of the country’s largest-ever disaster recovery efforts began, Ms. Fitzgerald is among the more than 30,000 residents of New York and New Jersey who remain displaced by the storm, mired in a bureaucratic and financial limbo.
Imposing on relatives and draining their savings while pleading for assistance from a dizzying array of government agencies, they say they fear they will never get home.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had provided $1.4 billion in direct aid to victims of the storm and $7.9 billion in flood insurance payouts, and that the Small Business Administration had made $2.4 billion in low-interest loans to homeowners and businesses. What it did not announce was that less than half of the people who sought emergency money received any, as an analysis by The New York Times of FEMA data shows, or that in many cases flood insurance covered only a fraction of the losses.
According to the analysis by The Times, in the areas in and around New York City that were hit hardest by the storm, almost half of the people who received assistance from FEMA got less than $5,000. Most of that money was intended to cover housing and other emergency costs immediately after the storm.
Hurricane Sandy was a storm like no other in the history of New York. It left more than 100 people dead and caused enormous structural damage that will take years to repair.
FEMA has received claims for nearly 16 million square feet of drywall, 56,000 furnaces and water heaters and enough paint to cover 43 million square feet.
But the most the agency gave in “individual assistance” to any single homeowner was about $36,000. The agency’s representatives instructed homeowners to file claims on their flood insurance policies, if they had one, and to apply for loans from the Small Business Administration, if they qualified. But as those first, small installments ran out, the frustration of negotiating with insurers added to the stress of being displaced.
“I think flood insurance underpayments is the single biggest reason for why the rebuilding hasn’t really taken off,” said Benjamin R. Rajotte, director of the Disaster Relief Clinic at the Touro Law Center in Central Islip, N.Y. “Frequently, people are coming in saying they received half or less of what it would take to rebuild their house, not even to raise them up but just to rebuild.”
Officials at FEMA, which oversees the national flood insurance program, said that adjusters had incentive to cover all eligible losses, but that some policyholders might be disappointed at receiving money for what things were worth, rather than what it would cost to replace them. Those with complaints may appeal the decisions.
Many residents of the region were also surprised to have claims denied for damage to the foundations of their houses because the damage was deemed to have resulted from “earth movement,” not storm flooding.
Some of those displaced, like Rochelle Grubb of Far Rockaway, Queens, had no insurance at all against a flood.
Ms. Grubb, 41, a special-needs teacher at Public School 256 in Queens, had allowed her flood insurance to lapse before her house on Beach 101st Street was inundated by the fast-rising water.
In early December, she said she had been tutoring and her husband, Timothy, had been working overtime to come up with the $270,000 they estimated it would cost them to rebuild. 

(Page 2 of 3)
They said they expected it would be more than a year before they could return to their house, but they do have flood insurance now. Ms. Grubb said she had to buy it to qualify for a $135,000 loan she received from the Small Business Administration. 


“It’s 101 Street but we all called it One Hundred and Fun Street,” she said, referring to her close-knit neighbors. “Now when we see each other, we’d just hug and cry. And we’re like, when, when, when?”
‘Too Much Red Tape’
FEMA officials say that their primary goal is to provide emergency aid in the days and weeks after a disaster strikes — the first splash of what is known in Washington as the cascade of federal assistance.
The process of obtaining full compensation for losses is designed to involve several steps and to frustrate efforts to take unfair advantage, as some were accused of doing after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, government officials say.
Standing beside Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in Manhattan in late October, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that more care was being taken to minimize fraud. “We’re not just sending checks willy-nilly,” he said.
The biggest chunks of federal aid for residents come not from FEMA but from HUD, which received $16 billion from Congress to dole out in grants to state and local agencies. That money was part of a total federal allocation of about $60 billion in recovery money.
So far, New York City and the States of New York and New Jersey have received more than $10.2 billion of that money. But they have handed out only a small fraction of it.
By the anniversary of the storm on Oct. 29, New Jersey had spent about $230 million of its grants, but New York City and New York State had made very few payments through their rebuilding programs, known as Build it Back in the city and New York Rising on Long Island.
Robert Smith, 64, a retired New York Police Department detective, said he had nearly given up hope on receiving enough money to rebuild the cottage he shared with his wife in the Broad Channel section of Queens. “FEMA has been totally insensitive to what I consider our basic needs,” said Mr. Smith, who has been living with his wife in their cabin upstate.
As for the Build It Back program, he said he had talked to dozens of homeowners in Broad Channel and none had received any money from that program. “It’s close to 15 months later and the only thing we’re getting is a bureaucracy and promises,” Mr. Smith said. “I want nothing more than to go back to live in Queens, or buy me out.”
Caswell F. Holloway IV, the deputy mayor overseeing Build It Back, said city officials waited until HUD had made its second allocation to the program before telling applicants how much they might receive.
The state’s New York Rising program kicked into high gear this October, sending out 4,200 letters that promised $450 million to homeowners and families on Long Island. A second mass-mailing, in November, promised payments to an additional 350 recipients.
In late October, the announcement of the latest portion of federal money spurred Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York to declare that “the aid spigot is now open, money will be flowing.” He conceded that “in Year 1, we all agree, the aid flowed too slowly” and said that there was “too much red tape.”
Only a few of those payments have been made so far, but state officials said on Friday that they had asked HUD to allow them to send more than $650 million directly to 6,666 homeowners before the end of the year.
Garrett J. Kaiser, a heavy equipment operator who lives with his wife and two children in Patchogue on Long Island, became one of the first beneficiaries of the state’s program this week.
Mr. Kaiser, 37, and his family lived for months in a camping trailer in their next-door neighbors’ driveway after the nearby bay rose up and filled their single-level house with two feet of water.
After the storm, he set about tearing out the soaked Sheetrock almost immediately, then had the structure raised seven feet. He personally rebuilt much of it, dipping into his family’s savings before he started receiving installments of insurance proceeds that totaled $115,000. In late October, he was one of the first applicants to the New York Rising program to sign the final paperwork to close a deal.
The promised payment of $38,000 would cover all of the expenses that FEMA and flood insurance did not, he said last month. He added that he had heard of people receiving promises of as much as $250,000 from New York Rising and that everyone he knew who had applied to the program was satisfied. 


(Page 3 of 3)
“Now I feel blessed that the storm hit because I have a wonderful new home,” said Mr. Kaiser, who has gone into business elevating other homes in flood-prone areas. “I’m staying forever.” 


On Wednesday evening, Mr. Kaiser had not yet received any money from New York Rising. But after an inquiry from a reporter about the delay, Mr. Kaiser said the full $38,000 was deposited in his account on Thursday.
An Uneven Recovery
Conni Freestone and her boyfriend, David Fagan, have been sleeping on air mattresses in a rented bungalow they have shared with Ms. Freestone’s ailing, 63-year-old mother in Toms River, N.J.
They had been living in her mother’s home in nearby Point Pleasant when the hurricane drove water from a creek into the garage and main floor of the two-story house. The flood ruined most of the instruments used by Mr. Fagan’s band and the equipment Ms. Freestone used as a freelance photographer. But the flood insurance on the house did not cover those contents.
Ms. Freestone had been frustrated by the slow response of FEMA to their many appeals for help and found out only after pestering Gov. Chris Christie in public that the agency had estimated the damage to the house at less than $7,000. (An aide to Mr. Christie investigated and discovered the low estimate.)
That sum amounted to a fraction of the $83,000 a local contractor said the repairs would cost. The family had been paying for his work out of equity withdrawn from the house, which was their main asset.
Much of that work, including electrical wiring, proved shoddy, Ms. Freestone said, and the family was afraid to move back in. With mold climbing the new drywall, they decided to sue the first contractor and find another. But they had received just $55,000 from their insurance policies, so they kept asking for more help as the anniversary of the storm came and went.
“I felt like I was begging,” Ms. Freestone said of her frequent appeals to FEMA and state agencies. “When I did suck it up and begged, I got shot down. I’m used to being the volunteer, not the one asking for help.”
The disparities in recovery from Hurricane Sandy are on stark display in Long Beach, N.Y., on the block of modest homes where Ms. Fitzgerald and Megan lived next door to a couple, Anne Walsh and Penny Ryan. Their two-story houses, which stood side by side on lots of just 1,800 square feet, suffered similar damage when the floodwaters rose above their floorboards.
But Long Beach officials did not declare Ms. Walsh and Ms. Ryan’s house to be “substantially damaged.” And that determination has made all the difference.
Unlike Ms. Fitzgerald, they were cleared to fix up their home without having to elevate it off the ground. So now Ms. Walsh and Ms. Ryan return from work in New York City to a pin-neat living room with a gleaming floor made of Brazilian teak.
Within weeks after the waters receded, Ms. Walsh, a nurse, and Ms. Ryan, a public school principal, had dipped into their savings to pay a contractor to start tearing out and replace the ruined floors and walls. All told, they said, they had spent about $200,000 to restore their home — considerably more than they recouped through FEMA, flood insurance and a $26,000 grant from New York Rising.
“We went from having a comfortable lifestyle to being totally in debt,” said Ms. Ryan, 50.
Ms. Walsh said she thought it would take five years for the neighborhood they cherished to come fully back to life. Some houses still sit dark and boarded up, others are being raised several feet to avoid another flooding.
Ms. Fitzgerald had held out hope that the New York Rising program would come through with a grant big enough to bridge the wide gap between what she received from her insurance companies and what it would cost to build a house from scratch so close to New York City.
When she finally got her answer from New York Rising, Ms. Fitzgerald said she was “wrecked” by “bitter disappointment.”
The state had calculated that her house could be rebuilt for $160,000, so they subtracted the $84,000 they say she had received from other sources since the storm and awarded her $76,000. She said that she thought it would cost closer to $250,000 to rebuild.
And she has already spent some of her insurance proceeds to pay for demolition and plans and permits for a new house, leaving her with far less than what she needs to rebuild.
“I’m not looking for anything fabulous,” Ms. Fitzgerald said, choking back the frustration of not knowing if she and her daughter would ever get back to Delaware Avenue. “I love that block,” she said. “I want to build back.” 


Thursday, December 5, 2013

European storm and tidal surge cause evacuations and travel chaos


By  BBC.com
A major storm has hit northern Europe, leaving at least four people dead or missing, causing transport chaos and threatening the biggest tidal surge in decades.
Dozens of flights were cancelled or delayed in the Netherlands, Germany and Scotland, while rail services were shut down in several countries.
One of Europe's longest bridges - connecting Sweden to Denmark - closed.
Tens of thousands of homes were also left without power as the storm hit.
Winds of up to 228 km/h (142 mph) battered Scotland, where a lorry driver was killed when his vehicle was blown over near Edinburgh. At least two other people were injured by falling trees.
Police have confirmed reports that a man has been killed by a falling tree in Nottinghamshire, central England.
Pedestrian struggles against the wind in Rotterdam The storm has affected people across northern Europe, including Rotterdam where those venturing outside received a buffeting.
Emergency workers attend the scene of a fatal truck accident as a lorry sits on top of two cars near Bathgate, ScotlandIn Scotland, a lorry driver was killed when his vehicle blew over.
Firefighters fortify an embankment in Cuxhaven-Sahlenburg, northern GermanyPreparations for a tidal surge are going on across several countries. Here, firefighters fortify an embankment in Cuxhaven-Sahlenburg, northern Germany.
Two sailors were reportedly swept overboard from a ship 22 km (14 miles) off the southern Swedish coast, and air-sea rescue services failed to find them.
A storm surge is due later on Thursday, coinciding with high tides in many areas.
Britain's Environment Agency said tidal surges could bring significant coastal flooding, and the Thames Barrier was being closed to protect London.
British authorities said they had evacuated homes in Great Yarmouth, eastern England, adding that it could be the biggest storm surge for 60 years.
In the low-lying Netherlands, the Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier has been closed off for the first time in six years. Dutch authorities said they had issued the highest possible flood warning for four areas in the north and north-west of the country.
The BBC's Anna Holligan reports on heavy winds in the Netherlands
Germany reinforced emergency services in and around the northern port of Hamburg and cancelled lessons at several schools.
Flights cancelled
The storm was causing transport chaos throughout northern Europe.
Dutch airline KLM cancelled 84 flights from Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, while about 20 were cancelled at Hamburg airport.
Weather presenter Matt Taylor explains how a storm surge happens
Flights from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen airports in Scotland were also cancelled.
Rail travel was badly affected, with all train services in Scotland cancelled because of debris on the lines and damage to equipment, and services in northern England were also hit.
The Oeresund road and rail bridge between Sweden and Denmark - which links the Danish capital Copenhagen with the Swedish city of Malmo and features in the hit television series The Bridge - was due to close from 1500 GMT.
Railway lines in Sweden and Denmark were closed, while Germany's national railway, Deutsche Bahn, warned of likely disruption across a swathe of northern Germany.
Ferries to Germany from Sweden and Denmark were cancelled.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Panel Says Global Warming Carries Risk of Deep Changes



An aerial view of damage caused by a mountain pine beetle infestation in Montana. A new report by the National Research Council cited climate change as playing a "significant role" in the recent infestations across North America.


At the same time, some worst-case fears about climate change that have entered the popular imagination can be ruled out as unlikely, at least over the next century, the panel found. These include a sudden belch of methane from the ocean or the Arctic that would fry the planet, as well as a shutdown of the heat circulation in the Atlantic Ocean that would chill nearby land areas — the fear on which the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow” was loosely based.
In a report released Tuesday, the panel appointed by the National Research Council called for the creation of an early warning system to alert society well in advance to changes capable of producing chaos. Nasty climate surprises have occurred already, and more seem inevitable, perhaps within decades, panel members warned. But, they said, little has been done to prepare.
“The reality is that the climate is changing,” said James W. C. White, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who headed the committee on abrupt impacts of climate change. “It’s going to continue to happen, and it’s going to be part of everyday life for centuries to come — perhaps longer than that.”
While most climate scientists believe the human release of greenhouse gases has made immense changes in the earth inevitable, they hope many of these will happen slowly enough that society can adapt.
The document the panel released Tuesday is the latest in a string of reports to consider whether some changes could occur so suddenly as to produce profound social or environmental stress, even collapse. Like previous reports, the new one considers many potential possibilities and dismisses most of them as unlikely — at least in the near term.
But some of the risks are real, the panel found, and in several cases have happened already.
It cited the outbreak of mountain pine beetles in the American West and in Canada. The disappearance of bitterly cold winter nights that used to kill off the beetles has allowed them to ravage tens of millions of acres of forests, damage so severe it can be seen from space.
Likewise, a drastic decline of summer sea ice in the Arctic has occurred much faster than scientists expected. The panel warned that Arctic sea ice could disappear in the summer within several decades, with severe impacts on wildlife and human communities in the region, and unknown effects on the world’s weather patterns.
Among the greatest risks in coming years, the panel said, is that climate change could greatly increase the extinction rate of plants and animals, essentially provoking the sixth mass extinction in the earth’s history. The panel said many of the world’s coral reefs, a vital source of fish that feed millions of people, already seemed fated to die within decades.
Another risk, judged to be moderately likely over the coming century, is that rising heat in the upper ocean could result in reduced oxygen in the deep. The worst-case scenario would be the creation of huge zones with too little oxygen for sea creatures to survive, with unknown consequences for the overall ecology of the ocean, the panel said.
It considered the possibility that a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, believed to be especially vulnerable to a warming ocean, would greatly increase the rate of sea level rise. It found that risk, in the near term, to be “unknown but probably low.”
The National Research Council is a nonprofit group in Washington that frequently oversees studies on major scientific questions; this study was commissioned by several government agencies.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Emissions of Methane in U.S. Exceed Estimates, Study Finds - Dangerous



NYtimes:

Emissions of the greenhouse gas methane due to human activity were roughly 1.5 times greater in the United States in the middle of the last decade than prevailing estimates, according to a new analysis by 15 climate scientists published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The analysis also said that methane discharges in Texas and Oklahoma, where oil and gas production was concentrated at the time, were 2.7 times greater than conventional estimates. Emissions from oil and gas activity alone could be five times greater than the prevailing estimate, the report said.
The study relies on nearly 12,700 measurements of atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008. Its conclusions are sharply at odds with the two most comprehensive estimates of methane emissions, by the Environmental Protection Agency and an alliance of the Netherlands and the European Commission.
The E.P.A. has stated that all emissions of methane, from both man-made and natural sources, have been slowly but steadily declining since the mid-1990s. In April, the agency reduced its estimate of methane discharges from 1990 through 2010 by 8 to 12 percent, largely citing sharp decreases in discharges from gas production and transmission, landfills and coal mines.
The new analysis calls that reduction into question, saying that two sources of methane emissions in particular — from oil and gas production and from cattle and other livestock — appear to have been markedly larger than the E.P.A. estimated during 2007 and 2008.
One of the study’s principal authors, Scot M. Miller of Harvard University’s department of earth and planetary sciences, said its higher estimates underscore methane’s significant contribution to rising temperatures.
“These are pretty substantial numbers we’re dealing with, and an important part of greenhouse gas emissions,” he said on Monday. “Our study shows that there could be large greenhouse gas emissions in places in the country where we may not necessarily have accounted for them.”
Methane made up only about 9 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, the E.P.A. said; carbon dioxide is easily the most prevalent gas. But methane is much more potent. Even though it rapidly breaks down in the atmosphere, its contribution to global warming is 21 times greater than carbon dioxide’s over a 100-year period.
The E.P.A. and Europe’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research largely agree on how much methane is discharged annually in the United States. At the most basic level, both arrive at estimates by assigning an average discharge to each category of methane emission, such as landfills, and multiplying the average by the number of sources in each category.
The latest analysis differs from those estimates because it relies on actual measurement of methane concentrations. Nearly 5,000 air samples were collected from 10 huge communications towers spread across the country — some on mountaintops, others more than 1,000 feet high — and some 7,700 more from an aircraft monitoring program, both programs run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy.
The data did not directly identify the sources of methane discharges. But the researchers were able to infer those sources through a range of techniques. In areas associated with oil and gas production, for example, the amount of airborne methane could be correlated with measurements of propane, another gas that serves as a sort of marker for oil and gas activity.
The study concluded that livestock produced roughly twice as much methane during the reporting period as the European database estimated. Most striking, the analysis reported that oil and gas operations in a north-south swath of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas may have produced five times more methane — and, combining all sources of discharge, the three states may have been responsible for a quarter of all man-made methane discharges in the United States.
Mr. Miller cautioned that both estimates were subject to large margins of uncertainty; the methane from oil and gas activity could be as small as 2.3 times the European estimates, or as great as 7.5 times. The reason, he said, is that the potential for inaccuracy rises as the area being surveyed or the category of emissions grows smaller.
The same caveat applies to the few regions where the study found that methane discharges were smaller than European estimates: the Appalachian coal belt, southern Illinois and western Kentucky, and New York City, for example. Some of those spots were also in areas where monitoring of airborne methane was infrequent or absent.
That said, the study’s overall conclusion that methane emissions were 1.5 times E.P.A.’s latest estimates is statistically accurate to within about 5 percent, Mr. Miller said.


Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Primeiro ônibus a bateria começa a circular em São Paulo



SÃO PAULO - A nova geração de ônibus da cidade de São Paulo terá seu passo inicial - ou melhor, sua viagem de lançamento - na sexta-feira, 22. É quando o primeiro ônibus movido a baterias da capital começa a circular nas ruas paulistanas. De fabricação chinesa e batizado de e-Bus, o coletivo conta com 504 células de fosfato de ferro para ser alimentado - e não usa nada de combustível fóssil, o que o impede de lançar poluentes no ar, como a maior parte da frota atual, movida a diesel. Ele também não depende de fios para circular por aí, como os trólebus, pois é carregado na garagem, antes de sair.


Inicialmente, a São Paulo Transporte (SPTrans), empresa da Prefeitura que gerencia o sistema de ônibus, fará o e-Bus circular sem passageiros, e utilizará 81 bombas de água de 50 kg cada um para simular o peso das pessoas em carregamento máximo. O coletivo tem autonomia para percorrer até 250 quilômetros. Segundo a Secretaria Municipal dos Transportes, em média, um ônibus da cidade hoje anda 230 quilômetros durante um dia.
Por três meses, o veículo rodará em itinerários de linhas da zona sul e da região central, apenas para ser testado em desafios tipicamente locais: ladeiras íngremes, anda e para constante do trânsito, asfalto nem sempre tão liso. O e-Bus foi cedido para os testes pela BYD, montadora que o produziu, e está sob responsabilidade da viação MobiBrasil, em uma garagem no bairro de Pedreira, na zona su da capital paulista.
A autorização para o elétrico circular foi concedida pelo Departamento Nacional de Trânsito (Denatran) na quarta-feira passada - o veículo chegou ao Brasil em outubro, um mês após uma delegação da SPTrans visitar sua fábrica na China.
"Ele vai 'suar' na nossa mão, vai ter que mostrar a que veio", afirma o diretor de Operações da SPTrans, Almir Chiarato, acrescentando que, por enquanto, não há custo nenhum para a Prefeitura. Contudo, a chinesa BYD já procura um terreno para se instalar no Estado, com vistas a futuros negócios no País. "Daqui, planejamos expandir os negócios para a América Latina", diz Hercílio Becker, gerente de Pós-Vendas da empresa.
A Prefeitura, de fato, avalia adotar ônibus a bateria, mas ainda não estabeleceu uma meta. De acordo com Chiarato, a ideia é usar esse modelo de veículos em linhas mais rápidas e curtas. "Com a restruturação da rede, vamos ter muitas linhas de 30 e 35 minutos, onde este tipo de carro é ideal", diz ele, referindo-se à reorganização das linhas de ônibus que a SPTrans começou a colocar em prática neste ano.
Na semana passada, o Estado participou de uma viagem do ônibus dentro da garagem. O veículo chama a atenção pelo silêncio, na comparação com os movidos por motor a combustão. Há três conjuntos de bateria: um sobre as rodas dianteiras, outro sobre as traseiras e um sobre o teto do veículo. O carregamento é feito por meio de pequenas entradas na lateral, onde são encaixados cabos ligados a um carregador. O processo de carga dura 5 horas, quando as baterias estão completamente descarregadas.
Passageiros. Em meados de março de 2014, mais dois ônibus a bateria chegarão da China já com as especificações feitas pela Prefeitura, o que os tornará aptos a rodar com passageiros. Esses coletivos, explica João Carlos Fagundes, superintendente de Serviços Veiculares da SPTrans, passarão a circular em itinerários de avenidas como a Cupecê, na zona sul. "Vamos colocá-los em linhas cheias, justamente para ver a sua capacidade operacional."
O ônibus que já está em solo paulistano tem a configuração interior original de fábrica, ou seja, em conformidade com a legislação da cidade de Shenzhen, na China, onde foi produzido. Para os próximos dois poderem andar com passageiros em São Paulo, a SPTrans fez uma lista de 25 itens a serem alterados, entre os quais a colocação de vidros basculantes (que podem ser abertos e fechados pelos próprios usuários) em todas as janelas, a reconfiguração dos assentos e a retirada do ar-condicionado.
O e-Bus é testado em outras grandes cidades do mundo. Em Nova York, alguns veículos já estão circulando nas ruas, assim como em Los Angeles, ambas nos Estados Unidos. Em sua cidade natal, Shenzhen, existem mil desses ônibus no sistema de transporte público desde 2010.
Em Bogotá, na Colômbia, o sistema de corredores expresso Transmilenio em breve passará a contar com veículos elétricos a bateria articulados. Becker, representante da BYD no Brasil, não informou quanto custa para se produzir cada ônibus a bateria.
"Eles ainda são mais caros que os ônibus convencionais, mas essa iniciativa é muito positiva", afirma o urbanista e consultor de Engenharia de Tráfego Flamínio Fichmann. Para ele, a tendência é que o preço dos ônibus elétricos caia acentuadamente nos próximos anos, o que deve ajudar a Prefeitura a atualizar a sua frota, deixando-a bem mais limpa.
O especialista destaca ainda que, frente aos trólebus, que também não emitem poluentes, os ônibus a bateria são mais vantajosos, já que a rede aérea dos trólebus é custosa para ser mantida. "Essa é a aposta certa da Prefeitura." A fabricante promete que cada veículo tem vida útil de 30 anos, embora as baterias tenham que começar a ser substituídas após uma década de uso. Um dos pontos fracos é que, em caso de apagão, os ônibus precisam de geradores para serem recarregados.
A cidade tem atualmente cerca de 15 mil ônibus, dos quais 190 são trólebus.

Monday, November 18, 2013

Sul da Flórida enfrenta perspectivas sinistras no aumento do nível do Mar - South Florida Faces Ominous Prospects From Rising Waters



MIAMI BEACH — In the most dire predictions, South Florida’s delicate barrier islands, coastal communities and captivating subtropical beaches will be lost to the rising waters in as few as 100 years.

Further inland, the Everglades, the river of grass that gives the region its fresh water, could one day be useless, some scientists fear, contaminated by the inexorable advance of the salt-filled ocean. The Florida Keys, the pearl-like strand of islands that stretches into the Gulf of Mexico, would be mostly submerged alongside their exotic crown jewel, Key West.
“I don’t think people realize how vulnerable Florida is,” Harold R. Wanless, the chairman of the geological sciences department at the University of Miami, said in an interview last week. “We’re going to get four or five or six feet of water, or more, by the end of the century. You have to wake up to the reality of what’s coming.”
Concern about rising seas is stirring not only in the halls of academia but also in local governments along the state’s southeastern coast.
The four counties there — Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach, with a combined population of 5.6 million — have formed an alliance to figure out solutions.
Long battered by hurricanes and prone to flooding from intense thunderstorms, Florida is the most vulnerable state in the country to the rise in sea levels.
Even predictions more modest than Professor Wanless’s foresee most of low-lying coastal Florida subject to increasingly frequent floods as the polar ice caps melt more quickly and the oceans surge and gain ground.
Much of Florida’s 1,197-mile coastline is only a few feet above the current sea level, and billions of dollars’ worth of buildings, roads and other infrastructure lies on highly porous limestone that leaches water like a sponge.
But while officials here and in other coastal cities, many of whom attended a two-day conference on climate change last week in Fort Lauderdale, have begun to address the problem, the issue has gotten little traction among state legislators in Tallahassee.
The issue appears to be similarly opaque to segments of the community — business, real estate, tourism — that have a vested interest in protecting South Florida’s bustling economy.
“The business community for the most part is not engaged,” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami land-use lawyer and Chamber of Commerce board member who attended the Fort Lauderdale conference. “They’re not affected yet. They really haven’t grasped the possibilities.”
It will take a truly magnificent effort, Mr. Pathman said, to find answers to the critical issues confronting the area. Ultimately, he said, the most salient indicator of the crisis will be the insurance industry’s refusal to handle risk in coastal areas here and around the country that are deemed too exposed to rising seas.
“People tend to underestimate the gravity here, I think, because it sounds far off,” said Ben Strauss, the director of the Program on Sea Level Rise at Climate Central, an independent organization of scientists. “People are starting to tune in, but it’s not front and center. Miami is a boom town now, but in the future that I’m very confident will come, it will be obvious to everyone that the sea is marching inland and it’s not going to stop.”
The effects on real estate value alone could be devastating, Dr. Strauss said. His research shows that there is about $156 billion worth of property, and 300,000 homes, on 2,120 square miles of land that is less than three feet above the high tide line in Florida.
At that same level, Dr. Strauss said, Florida has 2,555 miles of road, 35 public schools, one power plant and 966 sites listed by the Environmental Protection Agency, such as hazardous waste dumps and sewage plants.
The amount of real estate value, and the number of properties potentially affected, rises incrementally with each inch of sea-level rise, he said.
Professor Wanless insists that no amount of engineering proposals will stop the onslaught of the seas. “At two to three feet, we start to lose everything,” he said.
The only answer, he said, is to consider drastic measures like establishing a moratorium on development along coastal areas and to compel residents whose homes are threatened to move inland. 

 Local officials say they are doing what they can. Jason King, a consultant for the Seven50 Southeast Florida Prosperity Plan, an economic blueprint for seven southeastern counties over the next half-century, said it proposed further replenishing of beaches and mangrove forests, raising roads, and building flood-control gates, backflow preventers and higher sea walls. 


Here on Miami Beach, a densely populated 7.5-square-mile barrier island that already becomes flooded in some areas each time there is a new moon or a heavy rain, city officials have approved a $200 million project to retrofit its overwhelmed storm-water system, which now pumps floodwaters onto the island when it should be draining them off, and make other adjustments.
“The sky is not falling, but the water is rising,” said Charles Tear, the Miami Beach emergency management coordinator, who stood at an intersection at the edge of Maurice Gibb Park, just two feet above sea level, that floods regularly.
Mr. Tear said he and other city officials were focused on the more conservative prediction that the seas will rise by five to 15 inches over the next 50 years.
“We can’t look at 100 years,” he said. “We have to look at the realistic side.”
James F. Murley, the executive director of the South Florida Regional Planning Council, was similarly unmoved by the more calamitous predictions.
“We’re not comfortable looking at 2100,” he said, noting that for planning purposes he adhered to a projection that foresaw two feet of sea-level rise by 2060.
Whatever the specifics of the predictions, the Miami Beach city manager, Jimmy L. Morales, said he and his staff had to consider whether “we should adopt more aggressive assumptions” about the effects of climate change.
Officials here are seeking advice from the Netherlands, famous for its highly effective levees and dikes, but the very different topography of Miami Beach and its sister coastal cities does not lend itself to the fixes engineered by the Dutch.
“Ultimately, you can’t beat nature, but you can learn to live with it,” Mr. Morales said. “Human ingenuity is incredible, but do we have the political will? Holland sets aside $1 billion a year for flood mitigation, and we have a lot more coastline than they do.”

Doenças tropicais negligenciadas, um problema global - 4. Qual é o papel das mudanças climáticas no alastramento das doenças tropicais? dw.com

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