These newly discovered volcanoes range in height from 100 to 3,850 m, with the highest almost as tall as Switzerland’s 3,970-m Eiger mountain.

These active peaks are concentrated in a region known as the west Antarctic rift system—which stretches 3,500 km from Antarctica’s Ross ice-shelf to the Antarctic peninsula.

According to geologists, this huge region is likely to dwarf east Africa’s volcanic ridge—currently rated as the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world.

However, the activity of this range could have worrying consequences, glacier expert Robert Bingham was quoted as saying to the Guardian.

“If one of these volcanoes were to erupt it could further destabilise west Antarctica’s ice sheets,” Bingham warned.

“Anything that causes the melting of ice, which an eruption certainly would, is likely to speed up the flow of ice into the sea,” he said.

“The big question is: how active are these volcanoes? That is something we need to determine as quickly as possible,” he added.

The Edinburgh volcano survey, reported in the Geological Society’s special publications series, involved studying the underside of the west Antarctica ice sheet for hidden peaks of basalt rock similar to those produced by the region’s other volcanoes.

Presently, volcanism is seen in regions, including Iceland and Alaska, that have recently lost their glacier covering. The same could happen in west Antarctica, where significant warming in the region caused by climate change has begun to affect its ice sheets.

If they are reduced significantly, this could release pressure on the volcanoes that lie below and lead to eruptions that could further destabilise the ice sheets and enhance sea level rises that are already affecting our oceans, Bingham noted.

IANS

Picture courtesy: Alamy

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The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at a sea worm called Nereis virens whose jaw has a texture similar to gelatin, but if the environment varies, the material — described in a study published in the journal ACS Nano — may adopt the hardness of dentin or human bones.

“The jaw of Nereis virens is composed of a protein that contains large amounts of histidine, an amino acid that interacts with the ions of the environment and makes it more or less flexible depending on the environment in which it finds itself,” said co-author of the paper Francisco Martín-Martínez.

“It’s a hydrogel made from a synthesized protein, similar to the one that makes up the jaw of this worm and which gives it structural stability and impressive mechanical performance. When we change the ions of the environment and the salt concentration, the material expands or contracts,” added Martín-Martínez.

The team found that at the molecular level, the structure of protein material is strengthened when the environment contains zinc ions and certain pH indexes. The Zinc ions create chemical bonds with the structure of the compound. These bonds are reversible, and can form or break at convenience, making the material more dynamic and flexible.

Martín-Martínez explained that the material’s ability to contract and expand makes it especially suited to creating devices that work as muscles for so-called soft robots, which are made of polymers.

It could also be used in the development of sensors that do not need to use external power supplies and control devices for complex electronic systems, he said.

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The 90 cities in an international network of megacities committed to tackling climate change – called C40 – will need to raise $375 billion by 2020 for low-carbon transport, buildings and other infrastructure, the group says.

Even more is needed worldwide to keep global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as agreed under the Paris climate deal which took effect last year.

“If we don’t fix this infrastructure problem, then cities will grow far beyond the 1.5 degree pathway they need to be on,” said James Alexander, C40’s city finance programme director.

“The scale of action that’s required is absolutely enormous,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The C40 network includes London, Paris, Mexico City, Washington and Cape Town. Some 70 percent of its cities are already seeing the effects of climate change, a rise from 50 percent just two years ago, Alexander said.

Low-carbon projects in cities are too small, too risky and lack a track record in attracting finance, Shirley Rodrigues, London’s deputy mayor for environment and energy, told an international meeting of city officials and investors this week in London.

“These are issues that are very common to all cities,” she said. “We need to bring down the cost of finance, we need to unlock more public and private investment … and increase the use of innovative green finance mechanisms such as green bonds.”

Some investors are ready to put billions of dollars into environment-friendly infrastructure, but need more long-term stability and incentives.

“The equity wants to play. It’s not earning anything at the moment in a low interest-rate environment,” said Esme Lowe, managing director of property at Impax Asset Management, an investment firm managing and advising on $6.8 billion.

But investors need the stability that comes with joined-up thinking and predictable action by governments, he said.

“Governments tend to change the rules so regularly,” he added. “If you want … equity at scale from pension funds and other investors, they need to have consistency and confidence that the returns aren’t going to be taken away from them.”

Major long-term investors like pension funds will also deploy faster and at larger scale if there are more incentives like tax benefits or capital allowances, he said.

Cities in developing countries need the skills to turn ideas and big visions into finance-ready bankable projects, C40’s Alexander said.

Because many green technologies are new, they bring an inherent risk for investors, he added.

“Cities need to start working with the financial sector to create the innovative mechanisms that can help de-risk these projects,” he said.

ELECTRIC BUSES

In Latin America, Mexico City is planning to create the region’s first electric bus fleet.

It needs to raise private investment to pay for this – electric buses are triple the price of diesel ones – but the main challenge is organising the different groups involved, said Gustavo Jimenez Vera, senior project advisor at GIZ, who is working on the project.

Most operators own just two or three buses each, so to attract private investment they have to form a single company, he said.

“The money, I think, is there. You just need to make sure you’re creditworthy to get it,” he said.

Creditworthiness is a major challenge for cities in countries with poor credit ratings, which make it harder and more expensive for them to attract money from capital markets.

Cape Town, for example, will likely find it tougher to entice investors after South Africa’s credit rating was cut to junk status this week by agency S&P, said Kevin Jacoby, Cape Town’s chief financial officer.

“Even if their financial situation is much healthier than the national government’s, (cities) will be affected by the macro situation,” said Naoko Ishii, CEO of the Global Environment Facility, which is looking at how to help cities borrow money more cheaply.

Another source of cash is major development finance institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. But cities seeking loans from them have to be guaranteed by their national government, Ishii said.

Seattle is using taxation – including property, sales and motor vehicle taxes – to help fund its infrastructure projects, said Scott Kubly, director of transportation in the U.S. city.

“You can have all the creative financing in the world, but if you don’t have the funding to pay (it) back… then it’s not going to do you any good,” he said.—The Thomson Reuters Foundation

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Toxic particles in the air cause nearly a million premature deaths in the country every year, according to earlier research.

“Climate change increases occurrences of weather conditions conducive to Beijing winter severe haze,” a team reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.

In Beijing and other major northern cities, the number of days each year with weather tailor-made for extreme smog rose from 45 to 50 in the period 1982-2015 compared to the previous three decades, a ten-percent jump, the study found.

The trend is set to worsen if warming continues unabated.

Persistent episodes of health-wrecking haze would become another 50 percent more frequent — and last nearly twice as long — during the second half of this century, the scientists found.

The main danger, experts agree, is particle pollution, especially toxic, microscopic flecks smaller than 2.5 micrometres in diameter — about 40 times thinner than a human hair.

The burning of coal, along with vehicle emissions and dust, are the main sources of these ultra-fine specks, which can cause severe respiratory problems and increase the risk of heart disease.

Small enough to enter human cells, they can also affect the immune and nervous systems.

In major cities across northern China, the number of days with “severe haze” jumped from 12 to 18 to 25 during the winters of 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Severe haze days happen when the concentration of small particles exceeds 150 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

In January this year, a thick blanket of sun-dimming haze settled over the Beijing-Tianjin basin — home to more than 100 million people — for eight consecutive days, causing tens of thousands to flee cities and vent their anger on social networks such as Weibo and WeChat.

For several days running, the density of particles 2.5 micrometres or less was higher than 500 micrograms per cubic metre, more than three times the danger threshold set by the World Health Organization.

“I would rank air pollution as the number one or number two concern of ordinary people in northern cities in China,” co-author Hong Liao, a researcher at Nanjing University’s School of Environmental Science and Engineering, told AFP.

A report by China’s environment ministry last year showed that 265 of the country’s 338 biggest cities failed to meet new health standards for small-particle pollution in 2015.

The perfect storm of geographic and weather conditions that favour lung-searing smog include sharp temperature differences between the lower and upper atmosphere, faint winds, and certain patterns of atmospheric flow.

The researchers, led by Wenju Cai of the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, combined these elements to create a “haze weather index”, which they matched against 60 years of weather records.

Averaging across 15 climate models, they also calculated a sharp increase in the number of smog-inducing days from 2050 to 2100.

After a particularly bad episode in January 2013 — which sparked protests and caused $3.4 billion (3.2 billion euros) in health and production losses — the Chinese government took sharp measures to reduce air pollution, but with limited success.

“In spite of stringent emission controls, severe haze days in Beijing have continued to increase, as clearly seen over the past three winters,” Renhe Zhang, a researcher at Fudan University, said in a commentary also published in Nature Climate Change.

“A global effort to slow down global warming is also urgently needed to decrease the risk of heavy air pollution in Beijing,” he added.

The problem is not confined to China. In 2013, nearly a million untimely deaths in India were also attributed to fouled air, not including so-called household air pollution, mainly from primitive cook stoves.

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Scientists who study the algae say the microscopic organisms are thriving in new conditions brought about by climate change, and displacing the zooplankton that underpin the local food chain, threatening the entire marine ecosystem.

Khalid al-Hashmi, a marine biologist at the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, wrinkles his nose as the research vessel nears the bloom. “Sea stench,” he says, referring to the algae’s ammonia secretions. “It’s here, you can smell it.”

He signals the boat to stop as it speeds beneath a gigantic rock arch off the coast of Muscat, the capital of Oman, an arid sultanate on the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The captain kills the engine and drops anchor into a slick of bright green muck surrounded by crystal-clear blue water.

The swarms of microscopic creatures beneath the surface of the Gulf of Oman were all but invisible 30 years ago — now they form giant, murky shapes that can be seen from satellites.

Across the planet, blooms have wrecked local ecosystems. Algae can paralyze fish, clog their gills, and absorb enough oxygen to suffocate them. Whales, turtles, dolphins and manatees have died, poisoned by algal toxins, in the Atlantic and Pacific. These toxins have infiltrated whole marine food chains and have, in rare cases, killed people, according to the U.N. science agency.

In the Great Lakes of North America, Thailand and the Seychelles, the algae bloom green. In Florida they are red, in the North Atlantic they are chalky white, and in Puget Sound they are orange. The Irish call it the “sea ghost,” and the Taiwanese refer to the blooms as “blue tears.”

NASA uses satellites and floating robots to monitor the blooms, said Paula Bontempi, the manager for ocean carbon and biology projects at the U.S. space agency. “It’s like a Van Gogh painting,” she said, referring to satellite images of swirls of chlorophyll spiraling across the world’s oceans. “Absolutely beautiful.”

It’s less attractive up close, where it can be “almost guacamole-like” in some lakes. “It smells bad, it looks bad,” she said.

The satellite technology has enabled scientists to link the algae to higher levels of air and water pollution in recent decades, but Bontempi said questions remain. “We know that our Earth is changing,” she said. “It may be in a direction we might not like.”

Scientists based at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University trace Oman’s blooms to melting ice in the Himalayas. Less ice has raised temperatures in South Asia and strengthened the Indian Ocean’s southwest monsoon. As this weather front moves across the Arabian Sea every year, it churned up oxygen-poor water thick with nutrients that have fueled the rise of a 1.2-billion-year old algae called noctiluca scintillans.

For the past 15 years, observatory biogeochemist Joaquim Goes, al-Hashmi and biological oceanographer Helga do Rosario Gomes have tracked blooms in the Arabian Sea using boats, satellites and remote sensors.

Goes said the blooms have caused a “short-circuiting of the food chain,” endangering other marine life.

“Normally these things happen slowly, usually we talk about tens of hundreds of years. Here it’s happening overnight,” he said. “The transformation is happening before our eyes.”

The algae blooms pose a number of threats to Oman, whose fishing and trading ships have plied these waters for centuries.

Thick blooms reduce visibility, making it difficult for divers to repair undersea gas infrastructure. It can also clog the intake pipes of the desalinization plants that produce up to 90 percent of the country’s fresh water.

Fishermen call Oman’s marine research center when they spot blooms.

Marine ecologist Ahmad al-Alawi adds these reports to four decades of observations before comparing them with satellite images of the swirling chlorophyll. He says the blooms are growing bigger and lasting longer, displacing the zooplankton at the bottom of the local food chain.

The algae has attracted more whale sharks — a major draw for divers — but many tourists have cancelled their trips at the sight of the green, murky waves, said Ollie Clarke, a dive instructor at the Bandar al-Rowdah marina near Muscat.

It also poses a threat to the country’s fisheries. An outbreak of a different kind of algae in 2008 led to the beaching of 50 tons of oxygen-starved fish, which rotted up and down the coast, al-Alawi said.

The researchers have found cause for both despair and hope by studying a live noctiluca culture in their lab: The blooms will likely spread as the Indian Ocean continues to absorb greenhouse gas emissions, but could be contained if they are sprayed with fresh water. Goes and Gomes hope to develop an early-warning system for Oman modeled on one operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Florida

But Saleh al-Mashari, who learned to sail and fish as a boy in the small coastal village where he still lives, and who now captains a researcher vessel, said the damage is already done.

“The fish are migrating,” he said. “They can’t get enough air here.”—AP

Image: AP

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More than 2,500 cities have issued plans to cut carbon emissions to the United Nations since late 2014, setting an example to almost 200 nations that reached a Paris Agreement in December 2015 to fight global warming.

Although there are no officially collated statistics available, many city targets are more ambitious than those set by governments under the Paris accord, which imposes no obligations on cities, regions or companies to define goals.

Just over half the world’s population lives in urban areas, meaning municipalities will help to determine whether the historic shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energy agreed in Paris succeeds or fails.

But as many cities become more assertive, governments are reluctant to cede control.

“Cities are starting to encroach past their boundaries on policies at a national level,” said Seth Schultz, director of research at the New York-based C40 climate group that includes most of the world’s megacities, from Tokyo to Los Angeles.

“There will be more and more conflicts,” he said, over defining policies to curb local air pollution and help wider aims to limit droughts, mudslides, heat waves and rising seas.

The trend is clearest in rich cities, which are more able to cut emissions to meet the demands of affluent, environmentally-conscious voters than fast-expanding cities such as Bangkok, Nairobi or Buenos Aires.

One example of the growing friction: Oslo, where left-wing authorities are at odds with Norwayâ€s right-wing government over their push to more than halve the capital’s greenhouse gas emissions within four years to about 600,000 tonnes, one of the most radical carbon reduction intentions in the world.

The plan for the city of 640,000 people includes car-free zones, “fossil-fuel-free building sites”, high road tolls and capturing greenhouse gases from the city’s waste incinerator.

In a sign of city power, a 2016 study projected that climate plans by cities and regions could cut an extra 500 million tonnes of annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 – equivalent to the emissions of France – beyond cuts pledged by governments.

“The benefits are very local in cities – less air pollution, better public transport,” said Niklas Hoehne, one of the authors at the NewClimate Institute think-tank in Germany.

DIESEL POLLUTION

But that doesn’t always sit well with central governments. Many of Oslo’s green ideas are anathema to voters of the populist right-wing Progress Party, which together with the Conservatives forms the coalition government.

Deputy Mayor Lan Marie Nguyen Berg said the government was delaying Oslo’s plan for new road tolls which reach 58 crowns ($7) for diesel cars in rush hour.

“The Transport Ministry is dragging its feet”, by demanding large, new road signs to explain the varying costs and to modify computer systems to register passing vehicles, she said.

Norway’s Transport Minister Ketil Solvik-Olsen, of the Progress Party, said the ministry was cooperating. Berg “is making an invalid argument,” he said.

Still, a Nov. 4 letter from the ministry obtained by Reuters told the Norwegian Public Roads Administration to design a national computer system for the environmental road tolls rather than one just for Oslo – the only city that wants the system.

The letter said the extra work would delay the project by three months, until October 2017.

“That’s convenient for the Progress Party,” one government official said, because national elections are due in September and the party will not be associated with unpopular tolls. The city has also been slow to submit detailed plans.

BUSES VS TRAINS

Cities in other parts of the world also face hurdles as they step up actions to press on with their own targets for carbon emissions that often exceed their governments’ goals under the Paris accord.

In Australia, Sydney is in a dispute with the national government in Canberra because the city wants to generate more electricity locally, without paying high charges for using the national grid, Lord Mayor Clover Moore said.

Sydney is now a local energy generator through its solar initiatives but has to pay “the same charges as a remote coal or gas station that exports its power hundreds of kilometres,” she said.

But the government’s Australian Energy Market Commission said in December that Sydney’s plan for “local generation network credits” would be too costly to implement. It cited an estimate of A$233 million ($176.12 million) in extra costs for consumers by 2050.

Moore dismissed the findings, saying credits would mean a fairer system overall.

And Copenhagen Lord Mayor Frank Jensen said colleagues “in cities around the globe are demanding more legislation … to transform our cities to be more green”.

He complained that fees paid to the government for electricity from the national grid used by green buses in Denmark – often under city control – were too high compared to those for trains that are controlled by the government on a countrywide network.

TRUMP FACTOR

Perhaps nowhere in the world is the difference between government and city more stark than in America.

U.S. President Donald Trump rejects the scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and said during his election campaign that he would “cancel” the Paris Agreement and favour domestic fossil fuel production. But Trump’s plans are unclear – the president has since said he has an “open mind” about Paris.

On Thursday, Scott Pruitt, the new head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said he is unconvinced that man-made carbon dioxide is the main driver of climate change, a conclusion widely embraced by scientists.

If Trump relaxes standards for clean air, power plants or vehicles “there would be a greater burden on cities to implement programs to fill the gaps,” said Amy Petri of the office of sustainability in the Texas city of Austin.

That would make it hard for Austin to reach its goals to cut emissions by 2020, she said. Still, mayors in 12 big U.S. cities including Austin, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston this week reaffirmed a commitment to the Paris deal.—Reuters

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The workshop was part of efforts to achieve the Dubai Plan 2021 to transform Dubai into a sustainable city with environmental elements that are clean and healthy, as per the requirements of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNCCC.

The workshop was held at Raffles Hotel, Dubai, and focuses on stages 1 and 2 of installing photovoltaic (PV) panels on the rooftops of Dubai Ports World, and the building of a 31 megawatt solar power plant, as per the UNCCC gold standard.

In adherence with the directives of Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, to reduce carbon emissions and develop a green economy, and to support the long-term national ‘A Green Economy for Sustainable Development’ initiative, DEWA takes priority in reducing carbon emissions, as a main element of its strategy.

“DEWA adopts the best international practices across all operations to reduce carbon emissions. The consultation workshop was held as part of DEWA’s efforts to establish framework and develop operations to reduce carbon emissions as part of daily activities, while consolidating partnerships between the public and private sectors,” said Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of DEWA.

“DEWA is committed to supporting and implementing the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050, to transform the UAE into the city with the lowest carbon footprint on Earth. DEWA also supports global efforts to limit the effects of global warming. In June 2016, the UNCCC announced the launch of the UAE Solar Power Programme by DEWA, in collaboration with Dubai Carbon, to enhance the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in all ongoing solar projects.” added Al Tayer.—WAM

Image: Alamy

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