What are the chances of an earthquake > 5 hitting your home in the next 5 years?

Go to this site and check it out – my home in Rhayader has a 2.5% chance over the next 5 years – on that basis I could wait 200 years for one to turn up!

Follow this link

You may need to add your country (in my case UK) to get an answer.

Saving money on sewage treatment

A regular sewage plant for  28,000 people costs about €225,000 a year to run according to figures from Germany. Installing a new form of digester unit (many sewage plants don’t have them) made by IGB, shortened the digestion process from 30-50 days down to 5-7 days. In addition there is reduction in the residue by about 1/3 which reduces disposal cost by €70,000 a year. In addition, sewage plants us a lot of electricity in the process. The biogas produced by the digester can provide enough electricity to reduce costs by a further €100,000 a year. A bit of a no-brainer?

The full article is here.

Antarctic glacier ‘thinning fast’

August 13 2009

Here is the latest on the melting Antarctica

Awra Amba, a village in Ethiopia

This is about an illiterate man, Ato Zumra, who has made his own dream come true

Biodiesal from non-food crops on marginal land that is more productive

Ardent Energy Group has formed a sub-branch in Adis Ababa, Ethiopia to grow jatropha and castor oil plant. A 50-year lease on the land includes permission to operate an oil crushing plant and biodiesel processing facility has been given on marginal land in Western Ethiopia

Jatropha and castor were selected as the first source of oil by AEG due to the resiliency of the plant, its ability to grow in marginal soil conditions and the extremely high-yield of oil to hectare as compared to other crops such as soybean. The ability of jatropha to thrive in harsh climates is also favorable, as the plant will not be competing with land that could otherwise be used for food production.

Further Antarctic melting

Click on this map to find the full article.

“The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released,” Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf.

Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice — bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York City — has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs.

Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight

This article from the New York Times implies that 18% of the global warming effect is caused by soot as against 40% from CO2. In areas where there are few vehicles and little electricity, soot from smoky wood fire that are used by nearly everyone in these poor areas for cooking may be having a major impact on polar warming. As you will from elsewhere in this blog, there are many attempts to provide cooking facilities which do not have unpleasant side effects for the users and prevent them having to cut down trees.  Appropriate technological solutions are coming thick and fast and this might have the unforeseeable side effect of reducing polar melting.

A delightful quote from the article ‘Like tiny heat-absorbing black sweaters, soot particles warm the air and melt the ice by absorbing the sun’s heat when they settle on glaciers.’

Cave roof collapse kills teenager

Those of you that did ‘Rocks’ in Janusary? Reemember the red sandstone in Shropshire? Early this   morning some teanagers who were camping in the caves suffered a rockfall. One boy was killed and a girl has servere injuries. For the full article see here

Slum Cooker Protects Environment, Helps Poor

This cooker is a community resource which will burn the rubbish, save the forest and provide hot water for slum dwellers and people on fefugee camps. This one has been set up in  Kibera in Nairobiin Kenya. It has taken a long time to design a cooker that will turn at a high enough temperature to break down the toxins.

Now the Kenyan Red Cross is preparing to install similar cookers in the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps near the Somali border, where cholera has already broken out this year, and at least one European aid organisation is looking at wide deployment.

Juma Ochieng of the Red Cross told Reuters the Community Cooker had benefits for health, sanitation and conservation, and would create employment for young people working to build and maintain the stoves.

To see more look here

Ice shelf collapsing

more about “Ice shelf collapsing“, posted with vodpod