Fundy Ocean Research Centre

From CNW

Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy - FORCE announces Environmental and Community Advisory Teams
EDITOR'S NOTE: For interviews with committee chairs or FORCE, please
contact: Dr. Anna Redden, 902-585-1732; Lois Smith: 902-254-2280.; and
John Woods, 902-497-7346. Names of committee members are at the bottom of
this release.


HALIFAX, Oct. 26 /CNW/ - Nova Scotia's in-stream tidal power project -- the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE) -- announced membership in two key advisory committees today.

The two advisory committees - environmental effects monitoring and community liaison - will provide independent advice to the project from individuals with a range of backgrounds.

"FORCE has an important public purpose and everyone can benefit from the advice of scientists, fishers, residents and First Nations people," said John Woods, chair of FORCE. "The work of the committees will help us direct the project and serve as an important link to the communities that surround the Bay of Fundy."

The Environmental Monitoring Advisory Committee will provide independent expert scientific and traditional ecological knowledge advice on environmental effects monitoring programs at the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE).

Dr. Anna Redden, Director of the Acadia Centre for Estuarine Research at Acadia University and Dr. Donald Gordon, Emeritus Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada will co-chair the committee."The role of the Committee will be to review the environmental effects monitoring programs and available data and make recommendations for monitoring the environmental effects of tidal power technologies in Minas Passage," said Dr Redden.

The Community Liaison Committee will act as a liaison between local organizations, community, and FORCE participants, providing a forum to discuss any issues related to the tidal project and to share timely information as the project proceeds. Lois Smith, Municipal Councilor in Parrsboro, is the co-chair, along with Joe Kozak, representing FORCE.

"This is about keeping everyone in the conversation," said Ms. Smith. "FORCE has international significance, but it's also a local project, and this committee will serve to keep the community actively involved."

Both committees will have representation from fishers, Mi'kmaq, government, technology developers, and FORCE. The environmental monitoring advisory committee will also include members of the academic community. The community liaison committee will also include members of the general public.

Energy Minister Bill Estabrooks welcomed the appointments.

"Tidal technology can play a role in protecting our environment and sustaining our communities," said Mr. Estabrooks. "These committees will help ensure that role is open and transparent, right from the start."

Initial appointments to both committees were made by FORCE, a partnership between developers and the province.



Names of Community Liaison Committee Members, followed by names and biographies of Environmental Monitoring Advisory Committee members:


Community Liaison Committee Members:


Mark Canton, Public; Terri McCulloch, Public; Gerard Cormier, Public; Shawna Eason, CREDA; Frank Hartman, Public; Joe Kozak - Interim Co-chair on behalf of FORCE; Ken Meade, NSPI; NS Mi'kmaq representative, to be named; Ross Robinson, Public; Lois Smith - Parrsboro Town Councilor, co-chair; Cindy Tupper, Parrsboro Harbour Commission; Croyden Woods Sr., Parrsboro Harbour Commission; Croyden Woods Jr., Lobster Fisher; Robert Yorke , Public.


Biographies of EMAC Members


Michael Brylinsky is a Senior Research Associate of the Acadia Centre for Estuarine Research at Acadia University and an Adjunct Professor in the Biology Department at Acadia University. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Brylinsky has worked extensively on various aspects of the biology of the Bay of Fundy ecosystems and communities and numerous other coastal systems in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.


Graham Daborn is an Emeritus Professor at Acadia University and the former Director of the Acadia Centre for Estuarine Research. Dr. Daborn co-chaired the Fundy Environmental Studies Committee (1976-1984) during the early proposals for tidal power development in the Bay of Fundy and led multi-disciplinary research related to tidal power for more than 30 years.


Donald Gordon is an Emeritus Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and he previously worked with DFO for over 35 years. Dr. Gordon's research interests include the effects of benthic organisms on marine sediments, environmental impact assessment, ecosystem modelling, benthic habitat mapping, and environmental effects monitoring. Dr. Gordon co-chaired the Fundy Environmental Studies Committee related to the potential impacts of tidal power developments from 1976 to 1984.


Andrew Hebda is the Curator of Zoology for Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax, and he has been in this position for the over 14 years. Mr. Hebda is a member of the COSEWIC Mollusca Specialist Subcommittee and until 2008, he was a part-time Faculty member at Saint Mary's University.


Ken Meade is the Manager of Environmental Services with Nova Scotia Power Inc. Mr. Meade's responsibilities involves environmental studies and extensive regulatory and stakeholder consultation in the development of water and fish management strategies for hydroelectric systems. He is currently Chair of the Canadian Electricity Association Species at Risk Task Group.


Robert Miller is an Emeritus Scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). Dr. Miller had a 37 year career with DFO as a marine ecologist and fishery scientist and his areas of research interest included performance of baited traps, organization in hard-bottom plant and animal communities, and the distribution of lobster larvae.


Anna Redden is an Associate Professor in Biology at Acadia University, Director of the Acadia Centre for Estuarine Research, and a member of the FORCE Board. Dr. Redden is actively engaged in collaborative research on the potential impacts of tidal power developments on migratory fishes and on sediment-animal relationships in the upper Bay of Fundy.


Michael Stokesbury is currently the Director of Research for the Ocean Tracking Network at Dalhousie University, and as well as an Adjunct professor of Biology at Acadia University. Dr. Stokesbury's research interests focus on fish marine migration and behaviour, and assessment of the impact of coastal engineering projects on the local marine environment.


Mark Taylor is a commercial lobster and scallop fisherman and has fished in the Minas Channel for 30 years. Mr. Taylor is the President of the Heavy Current Fishers Association, and he is also a member of DFO Lobster Advisory Board. Mr. Taylor brings significant local knowledge and understanding of the fisheries, currents and tides in the Minas Channel to the Committee.


Keith Thompson holds a Canada Research Chair in Marine Prediction and Environmental Statistics at Dalhousie University. Dr. Thompson is jointly appointed in the Department of Oceanography and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Dalhousie University. His research interests include shelf and deep ocean modeling, data assimilation, sea level variations and coastal flooding, and the analysis of extremes.

For further information: Ross McLaren, Department of Energy, (902) 424-4536, (902) 456-4212, mclarenr@gov.ns.ca; Beth Caldwell, Minas Basin Pulp and Power, (902) 684-1700, Cell: (902) 680-5378, bcaldwell@minas.ns.ca

Community Stands up for Nurse Practioner

From Nova News Now and Digby Courier

Community stands up for nurse practitioner
by Leanne Delong/Digby Courier
View all articles from Leanne Delong/Digby Courier
Article online since October 20th 2009, 13:36


Island Consolidated School gymnasium was packed last night by residents concerned by loss of the island’s only full time nurse practitioner. Leanne Delong photo View all pictures Community stands up for nurse practitioner
People crowded the doorway of the Islands Consolidated School gymnasium on Monday to sign a petition against the loss earlier this month of nurse practitioner Karen Snider at Islands Health Clinic in Freeport.


Approximately 230 signatures were added to the petition by the end of last night’s public meeting in Freeport.

Islands resident Andy Moir charged that Snider had been disciplined for speaking out against reduced hours for support staff at the clinic, for telling her collaborating physician about it, and for discussing it with fellow nurse practitioners.

She had the audacity to speak up on an issue that affects the area’s health care, said Moir, who co-chaired the meeting.

“If every health professional who complained about the cutbacks that have been made in health over the last 10 or 15 years was released from their job, there would be darn few left,” said registered nurse and Islands resident Joanne Whitenect. “I’m just shocked and appalled they would do this to Karen, I think she is excellent.”

South West Health has said its decision not to renew Snyder’s contract was not because of a clinical issue, but that further explanation would breach personnel confidentiality policies.

Snider moved to the Islands from British Columbia about a year ago to work at the clinic and was still within a probationary period.

“It appears to us it is an injustice to not only the nurse practitioner but to the members of this community because we have in Karen, a nurse practitioner who’s committed to be here until she retires and she’s something that we certainly haven’t seen in a long while,” said Municipality of Digby warden Jim Thurber.

Thurber mentioned how hard it is to keep health care professionals in the municipality.

“Twenty years ago, we had full-time doctors here on the Islands, the Digby hospital had doctors, we had an emergency room open all the time, you could even have babies in Digby,” said Thurber.

When it became difficult to recruit health care professionals, the community worked with the Department of Health and supported the nurse practitioner and paramedic program, he said.

The program has grown over the years and Thurber feels over the past six months to a year, the program has operated at full potential.

MLA Harold Theriault apologized for not being able to attend the meeting through a video message.

“We’re watching this step by step and I guarantee you, that we’ll be getting this vital service for Digby Neck and Islands back in service pretty soon,” he said.

“As far as the district health authority is concerned, Karen is toast,” said island resident Andy Moir.

The warden agreed, and read a letter from South West Health that proposed a meeting with the Islands health liaison committee to discuss health care services at the clinic and recruitment of a full-time nurse practitioner.

One person in the crowd stood up and said Snyder was the best they ever had for health care.

“That nurse has been God’s gift to my family,” said Tiverton resident Wonda Johnston. “I will stand up for her and I will support her because I know the good she has done.”

Tiverton resident John Ivens asked, “This health authority is supposed to have our best interest at heart. So, how are they helping us by getting rid of a resource here that can help everybody on the Island?”

“How does the freedom of information act apply to this situation?” wondered Freeport resident Robert Thurber. “The only other place I know of that you can just get rid of somebody and give no cause to the public is Russia.”

Moir responded by saying it’s a privacy issue and even if Snyder said they could throw her record open, the health authority would still “hide behind the Privacy Act, which says they cannot tell us why they make the decisions they make.”

“I am very upset over what has happened to her,” added Johnston.

ldelong@digbycourier.ca
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Stand Up for Mental Health Comedy Showcase

Digby Clare Mental Health Volunteers presents:
Stand Up For Mental Health
Comedy Showcase
A new attitude on
mental illnesses
Stand Up For Mental Health was featured in the
VOICE Award winning documentary “Cracking Up”
November 3, 7:00 pm
Marc Lescarbot Theatre,
Université Sainte-Anne
November 4, 7:00 pm
Digby Regional High School Theatre
Admission Free, donations accepted

International Day of Climate Change

PLEASE COME take a Chalk around the Common
Who: YOU and other Friends of Halifax Common

What: EVENT promoting 350.org, International Day of Climate Action

When: Friday October 23, 12 noon- 2 p.m.

Less than 1/3 of the Halifax Common's original 235 acres is public
open space.

The disappearance of our Halifax Common is a metaphor for the
degradation of our global Common- MOST URGENTLY our atmosphere &
climate.

We need you to help us draw a chalk line around the sidewalk
perimeter of the entire original Halifax Common to illustrate its
original size.

You can be imaginative and draw sheep & cows or cabbage & corn or
words to encourage governments to act on climate change!

Meeting points for getting chalk and directions are:
1. Robie & Cunard
2. Robie & Jubilee
3. Robie & University
4. South Park & South
5. South Park & Spring Garden
6. Bell Road by Bengal Lancers
7. North Park & Cogswell

For information on the Friends of the Halifax Common and a map see:
http://halifaxcommon.ca/
For information & events on October 24th International Day of Climate
Action see: www.350.org
Sign the Kyotoplus petition: http://kyotoplus.ca to push the
government on climate policy in Canada

Salt Power

From wildsingaporenews.blogspot.com

Two pilot projects are testing the potential of "salt power", a renewable energy that relies on the differing salinities at river mouths to make watts

Adam Hadhazy, Scientific American 19 Oct 09;

In the hunt for alternatives to polluting and climate-warming fossil fuels, attention has turned to where rivers meet the sea. Here, freshwater and saltwater naturally settle their salinity difference, a phenomenon that two pioneering projects in Europe will try to harness to generate clean energy.

This concept of "salt power"—also known as osmotic, or salinity-gradient, power—has been kicked around for decades, and now, proponents hope, technology has advanced enough to make it economically competitive.

On November 24, the world's first large-scale prototype facility for developing a form of salt power called pressure-retarded osmosis is expected to begin fully operating in Norway. "The big reason to build this thing is to answer important questions [about osmotic power], and while we've done a lot of theoretical studies, we need live experience," says Stein Erik Skilhagen, vice president of osmotic power at Statkraft, Norway's state-owned power utility that built the plant. The prototype will have no customers, although the very small amount of electricity it generates will technically be directed into the power grid.

Statkraft's approximately $5-million prototype plant is a converted paper mill in the seaside village of Tofte, about 60 kilometers south of Oslo. The plant's pressure-retarded osmosis setup will place freshwater and brine on either side of a semipermeable membrane that prevents the passage of salt particles but allows water through. Water from the fresh side naturally flows into the salty side, generating pressure equivalent to a column of water 120 meters high. This pressurized water can be used to turn a turbine to make electricity. Statkraft's goal is to yield five watts per square meter of membrane, although current capacity is about three watts. If successful, the utility hopes to build a commercial salt power plant for paying customers around 2015 with a targeted cost ranging from seven to 14 cents per kilowatt-hour (pdf) (at current euro–dollar conversion rates), which at the low end would be competitive with coal and natural gas prices.

To the south in the Netherlands, a Dutch research firm called Wetsus has fired up its own salt power experiment to evaluate what is essentially a saltwater–freshwater battery.

Wetsus, with the collaboration of a spin-off company called Redstack, is pursuing a version of salt power dubbed "blue energy". A pilot-scale installation that is about two times the size of a big American refrigerator is up and running in Harlingen, by the Wadden Sea, says Gert Jan Euverink, Wetsus's deputy scientific director. The technology relies on reverse electrodialysis, wherein a series of fresh and saltwater streams are diverted via underground pipes to opposite sides of two kinds of membranes. These let sodium or chlorine ions—the constituent elements of salt—dissolved in the water to pass into separated freshwater streams. This builds an electrical potential across the membranes, like a battery, and this charge reacts with iron to form an electric current. Joost Veerman, a researcher at Wetsus, says the company aims to get five watts per square meter of membrane, the same result as Statkraft's process.

Neither Statkraft nor Wetsus expects to crank out more than just a few kilowatts—enough to boil water—with their initial experiments. Instead, they plan to demonstrate what could be scalable, commercially viable energy production as well as determine if salt power endangers the health of source-water estuaries. Statkraft estimates salt power's worldwide electricity-generating potential at up to 1,700 terawatt-hours, or about 10 percent of global demand.

Salt power is attractive for several reasons: For one, unlike renewable energy technologies for harvesting solar or wind power, salt systems are not dependent on the weather and could provide baseload (constant, predictable) electricity like that supplied by coal, natural gas and nuclear energy. "The river water is flowing into the sea 24/7, so you have a constantly available source of energy," Skilhagen says. He also points out there are no emissions besides brackish water, which swirls in the river's mouth anyway.

Unlike conventional hydropower, a saline power plant does not require damming off a waterway, and it may require less infrastructure than, say, riverbed-mounted turbines or floating fleets of generators for equivalent tidal and wave power. A salt power plant, including its membrane stacks, turbines, cleaning facilities and offices, could actually be located in a riverside industrial complex's basement, for example, or constructed underground within a riverbank with pipes extending into the waterway, Statkraft's Skilhagen says—a big advantage for incorporating such facilities into already-developed, populated coastal areas.

Membrane design and performance remain the biggest hurdles for both Statkraft's and Wetsus's approaches. The membranes must be made more efficient, durable and resistant to microbial buildup, or so-called biofouling. Pretreating the pumped-in water by filtering out organic matter and river-borne debris helps, but this critical step consumes energy and is expected to be expensive, Skilhagen says, adding that it is too early to know just how expensive.

Accordingly, experts remain cautious about salt power's prospects. "Both these methods are promising and certainly worth researching," says Ari Seppala, a mechanical engineer and thermodynamicist at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland, "but both may still need a breakthrough innovation before commercialization." Seppala sees no physical or chemical showstoppers standing in the way of producing much-improved membranes, although he also points out that a better, membrane-free method could yet be found for exploiting salinity differences to yield electricity.

Another key uncertainty: a salt-power plant's effect on the local aquatic environment. "This is a completely new process that has not been tested on this scale," says Menachem Elimelech, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale University. "I doubt there will be no [environmental] impact at all." If the ecological footprint is minimal and the membrane technology advances, however, he adds that salt power could be a "significant renewable energy option."

Free Dishwasher!

From: Tom Haynes-Paton
Date: Sat Oct 17, 2009 2:31 pm
Subject: FW: Free used dishwasher wants rescuing... tomhaynespaton

Recycling is good. Free used dishwasher wants rescuing from landfill fate....
Tel. Digby 245-2347.
(signed) SPCD

Wind Turbine Dealer Misleads Consumers

Wind turbine dealer misses restitution deadlineText Size: A | A | A
turbine dealer misses restitution deadline Former state Rep. Mark Howland, owner of a Freetown-based wind turbine company that was shut down for misleading consumers, has failed to pay nearly $500,000 in restitution to the state Attorney General's Office.

A consent agreement reached last October set a deadline of Oct. 9, 2009, for Howland of WindTech-Co. to pay $488,000 in restitution. Howland notified the agency on Oct. 8 that he would not be making the payment, said Attorney General's Office spokeswoman Jill Butterworth.

According to the agreement, Howland now owes $638,000 in restitution. The Attorney General's Office has the right to foreclose on his property, although Howland's attorney has asked for additional time to market the property.

Howland lost his former Freetown home at 15 Mohawk Ave. to the bank weeks before it burned in a suspicious fire last November. He owns three parcels of undeveloped land, totaling some 26 acres, off Howland Road in Lakeville.

"The deadline for Mr. Howland to pay the restitution is past due and the Attorney General's Office intends to take whatever action is appropriate to obtain money for consumers entitled to restitution," said Butterworth.

Howland did not return phone calls and e-mail seeking comment Friday.

In March 2007, the Attorney General's Office filed a complaint in Bristol Superior Court and received an emergency court order to shut down WindTech-Co. and place a freeze on Howland's bank accounts.

Howland was accused of violating the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act by misleading consumers, making false and misleading representations in promoting the sale of wind turbines, failing to install turbines paid for by consumers and providing unsafe wind turbine installations. The Attorney General's Office identified more than 160 consumers, many in Southeastern Massachusetts, who were affected by the company's faulty wind turbines.

Under the consent agreement, Howland is prohibited from operating a business involved in the sale and installation of alternative energy systems, specifically wind turbine and hybrid wind turbine/photo-voltaic systems.

David Silvia of East Freetown said he purchased two defective wind turbines from Howland. He said he invested about $16,000 in the systems and has to date received about $1,200 in restitution from the Attorney General's Office.

Silvia said it was "kind of discouraging" to hear that Howland had failed to meet the deadline for the restitution payment.

"I was hoping the money would come through," he said. "I stretched myself pretty thin to do this. I thought it was the right thing for the environment."

After the defective turbines were removed from his property, Silvia purchased a larger turbine from another supplier. He said he has been mostly happy with that turbine and would like to install solar panels to further lessen his carbon footprint. To finance the project, however, he must wait until he receives full restitution.

Setbacks Doubled for Hartsville turbines

Tighter rules on Hartsville wind farm emerge
By Bob Clark
The Evening Tribune

Hartsville, N.Y. -The draft revised wind law for Hartsville is out, but those planning to spend millions developing wind power in the town want a line-by-line review before they know if the project can move forward.
Hartsville town Supervisor Steve Dombert said the new law, presented to the public in written form for the first time at Wednesday night’s meeting, is in response to flaws in the old law that was pushed through with little to no outside support.

Not enough copies of the law were made for distribution for all attending the meeting, Dombert said, so copies were only distributed to town board members, E.ON officials and candidates for town offices in November. None were offered in paper form to local media outlets, but Dombert said an emailed copy would be made available shortly.

The two biggest changes, Dombert said, cover setbacks from property lines and the sound level at non-participating landowners’ homes.

The current law states the sound cannot be higher than 50 decibels at the nearest non-participating property line, but Dombert said complaints in Cohocton and other locations made the town look at adopting different standards.

Dombert said new standards from the American National Standards Institute will be used to measure background and ambient noise at the site, in addition to noise from the turbines themselves. The readings also will be taken from the nearest non-participating home, rather than a property line, Dombert said.

The draft law also increases the turbine site setback from 1,200 feet to 2,460 feet — almost half a mile — and measures from the nearest non-participating property line, not the nearest home as the current law reads. More...



Posted by Solomon's words for the wise at 10/15/2009 09:03:00 PM



5 comments:
Anonymous said...
This took courage. Too bad our Potter County Commissioners caved in and did not stick to their guns on setbacks.
Maybe the township supervisors who passed ordinances that basically encourage these giant turbines will realize how out of step they are now.
Protect your citizens and do not sell out your townships just so a few people who are leasing property for these corporate government welfare machines can pile up the almighty dollars.

Thursday, October 15, 2009 10:03:00 PM EDT
Anonymous said...
sounds like someone did not get any money

Friday, October 16, 2009 8:53:00 AM EDT
Anonymous said...
What is with all the bulls*%t about the windmills in potter county? I have yet to see where or even when there will be any here?Are there any concrete plans?

Friday, October 16, 2009 4:49:00 PM EDT
Anonymous said...
8:53, you are sooooo right, Ha!

Friday, October 16, 2009 6:04:00 PM EDT
Anonymous said...
The Commissioners did not cave in. They made the setbacks more reasonable.

Uranium Mining

Province plans to ban uranium mining

The NDP government announced Wednesday that it will make it illegal to mine uranium in the province -- but had trouble explaining why.
Natural Resources Minister John MacDonell said turning a long-standing ban into law was a response to public concerns. He said he heard some of those concerns while he was chairman of the legislature's resources committee, although he couldn't recall the details.

Read the full story at http://thechronicleherald.ca/NovaScotia/1147691.html

The Climate Change Accountability Act

The Climate Change Accountability Act was originally tabled in October 2006 in the Canadian House of Commons as Bill C-377 by Jack Layton, Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. It passed 3rd reading in that House with the support of caucuses of the Liberal Party of Canada, the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP (the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, voted against it). However, due the 2008 Canadian federal election ending the parliamentary session prematurely, the bill did not achieve royal assent despite reaching the Senate. On February 10, 2009 Bruce Hyer, NDP MP for Thunder Bay-Superior North, seconded by Layton, reintroduced it as a Private Member's Bill, renamed as Bill C-311. The Bill requires the Canadian federal government to set regulations to attain a medium-term target to bring emissions 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, and a long-term target to bring emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. According to the summary, the purpose of this bill is:

"to ensure that Canada meets its global climate change obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by committing to a long-term target to reduce Canadian greenhouse gas emissions to a level that is 80% below the 1990 level by the year 2050, and by establishing interim targets for the period 2015 to 2045. It creates an obligation on the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development to review proposed measures to meet the targets and submit a report to Parliament. It also sets out the duties of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy."[1]



The Climate Change Accountability Act is based on the Case for Deep Reductions report by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy and on guidelines set by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. These are the same emissions targets adopted by the European Union and announced as objectives of U.S. President Obama's New Energy For America strategy. The Bill is noteworthy in that it was the first legislation in the world to pass a democratically-elected parliament which mandated hard emissions reductions for the post-Kyoto Protocol period (after 2012)."


Subject: Climate Action Needed: Pls support Bill C-311

Note: The vote is on Oct. 21 so please write asap!

Notes below from Jan Slakov
"Dear friends,

We know that the world is headed on a course that almost inevitably means we hit "the great unraveling" rather than the "great turning" for the news about climate change is very dire.

It is hard to know how best to act in the face of this knowledge. I would say that, right now, one of the best things we can do is send messages, especially to Liberal MPs, to urge them to support Bill C-311, as many of them did last year. Now some of them are claiming that the economic situation means they need more time... but we all know that if we stall forever, ... well, things will be even worse. (The other really important thing to do is to cut emissions- at home, in our workplaces, our communities- right now, not waiting for any targets to be passed.)

One of my friends has been working very hard on the Bill C-311 effort. She is in regular contact with Bruce Hyer's office, Bruce being the NDP MP who is putting forward Bill C-311 as a private member's bill.

An excerpt from a letter she wrote shows why she cares so much:

"My daughter sometimes cries at night, just before she goes to bed, when the shield of pretending that the world is okay drops away. She knows, as so many don’t, the facts, the truth. She carries the heavy burden of facing a world that is likely doomed to environmental catastrophe, the burden of trying so hard to change this fate and failing. She knows that our politicians are doing virtually nothing to provide for her future or for the future of the rest of the world’s children and unborn. As a youth it is understandably so hard for her to accept this fate or to accept the attitude of the number of people that don’t understand or care.

Do you have any idea of how it feels to have your 17-year-old daughter go to bed crying over such worldly concerns? Yet my pain may well be easier than the pain that many of you on our federal Environment Committee may face in the future – those of you that have young children now or plan to have children."

You can read the entire letter at:


http://westcoastclimateequity.org/?p=3363

******************************************************************************************************
Now, here is the list of some Liberals who would likely help pressure their colleagues on the Environment Committee to stop holding this bill up:

Glen Pearson, Kirsty Duncan, Ken Dryden, Matha Hall Findlay , Carolyn Bennett, Hedy Fry. YOUR MP?

(To get their phone #, just call the Reference Canada # in the blue pages: 1-800-667-3355. In general, you can send e-mails by using this formula: first 5 letters of the last name and the first letter of the first name @parl.gc.ca. So, Glen Pearson would be: .)

And, the members of the Environment Committee are:

Environment Committee Members – for Bill C-311


David J. McGuinty (Liberal)

McGuiDa@parl.gc.ca or mcguida0@parl.gc.ca

(613) 992-3269


Francis Scarpaleggia (Liberal)



(613) 995-8281


Mark Warawa (Conservative)



(613) 992-1157

James Bezan (Conservative)



(613) 992-2032


Peter Braid (Conservative)



(613) 996-5928



Blaine Calkins (Conservative)



(613) 995-8886



Jeff Watson (Conservative)



(613) 992-1812



Stephen Woodworth (Conservative)



(613) 995-8913



Bernard Bigras (BQ)



(613) 992-0423



Christian Ouellet (BQ)



(613) 947-8185



Linda Duncan (NDP)

Duncan.L@parl.gc.ca

(613) 995-7325

** Bruce Hyer's office would appreciate copies of your e-mails. This is one way we can thank them for all the work they are doing! Send messages of support and/or copies to . (Their phone # is (613) 996-4792.)
*********************************************************************************************
It is interesting to see what members of the committee have been saying. I am really impressed with Bruce Hyer. He speaks of personal changes he made, such as putting his car aside and using a bike ("at my age" ... I think in his early 60s) and I believe he is very happy to work in a non-partisan way for our future. (I find it very hard to accept when many politicians use the climate issue mainly to score points off each other, rather than to connect to their caring and DO SOMETHING.)

You can see what they are saying at:


http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=4005941&Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=2








The Bloc québecois has been consistent in its willingness to help all of Canada do something serious on climate change; if you write to them please acknowledge that. (I can send you a copy of a recent exchange I had with their env. critic, Bernard Bigras, if you would like.)

And here is an example of one letter I wrote, this one to the Liberal Env. critic, MP Dalton McGuinty:

subject: If not C-311, what do you propose?

Dear David McGuinty,

I just read over the proceedings from the Environment Committee's
meeting on June 18, when Mr. Hyer was a witness regarding his Private
Member's Bill, Bill C-311.

Like Mr. Hyer, I thank you for voting for the same bill, when it was
brought to a vote in the previous parliament.

I was saddened to see that now you seem to want to hold this bill up,
citing changed circumstances as the reason for that. Certainly, there
are lots of questions that it would be good to find answers for
regarding how we should restructure our economy, so that we do not
destroy the earth's ability to sustain future generations.

But that is no excuse to delay action! One thing that has changed is
that with each day that passes, it becomes more difficult to prevent
runaway climate change and the signs that our predicament is extremely
serious become increasingly more obvious. We do not need more hearings
to understand that we have no time to waste.

I hope you will do everything you can to work collaboratively with other
MPs to ensure that Canada goes to the Copenhagen summit with at least a
commitment to work towards minimal science-based goals, as set out in
Bill C-311.

What other option would you propose?

Can Canadians count on you to work with Mr. Hyer to ensure that this
bill does indeed get passed as soon as possible?

Sincerely,

Jan Slakov
******************************************************

Moratorium on Wind Turbines?

filed: October 13, 2009 • Ontario
Public wants moratorium on wind turbines
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The answer is blowing in the wind, at least for the provincial government.

Local residents aren’t so sure, if a meeting held last week in Walkerton is any indication. And now they’re getting backing from MPP Bill Murdoch, who announced he plans to ask for a moratorium on wind turbines until health impacts are looked at.

The province’s Green Energy Act, passed on May 14 of this year, streamlines the approval process for wind turbine projects. The provincial government is committed to eliminating its coal operated electrical generating plants, and promoting green energy projects is a key part of the plan to make that happen.

There are already two large-scale wind turbine projects in Bruce County, one near Underwood and the other near Ripley. Other projects are planned for both Bruce and Grey.

A substantial number of people living in close proximity to the new wind farms popping up across the province are expressing health concerns, prompting the Grey Bruce Health Unit to hold two public meetings on the wind farm issue. One meeting was in Owen Sound and the other in Walkerton.

The Walkerton meeting at the Victoria Jubilee Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 6 was considerably more subdued than the first meeting in Owen Sound, but the frustration level of the people present for the meeting was apparent.

One person in the crowd of over 100 people seemed to echo the general feeling of those present when she told Dr. Hazel Lynn, medical officer of health, “You are the first government-connected person who’s listened to us.” The comment was greeted with applause from the crowd, a number of whom were from well outside the area.

Dr. Lynn told the audience that while health units do not have the power to take action against the wind turbines, the local health unit is prepared to take the issue to the government. “Rural communities are resilient and inventive,” she said. “We need to work together on this problem.”

The purpose of the Walkerton meeting was to provide information about wind turbines to those who wanted it, and to gather information to take to the government. It also gave people an opportunity to vent their frustration. As with the earlier meeting, there was certainly plenty of it.

The first part of the forum consisted of presentations by keynote speaker Dr. Ray Copes, Dr. Lynn, and Ministry of the Environment representative Rick Chappell. Also on hand was Andrew Barton of the MOE.

During the second part of the meeting, people from the audience were given the opportunity to ask questions to the speakers, and to state their concerns. People were asked to state their views on “what they would change with wind industry regulations” under three headings – community, industry and government. Comments were written on flip charts.

Lynn opened by describing the health unit’s involvement in the wind turbine issue. “Legislation obliges the health unit to investigate complaints and take those complaints to the appropriate government office,” she said.

Next to speak was Chappell, district manager for the MOE’s Grey, Bruce and Huron office. He gave a brief overview of the investigation process.

Copes then gave a scaled-down version of the talk he gave in Owen Sound, this time without the slide presentation.
Copes has been with the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion for three months. Prior to that, he served at the federal level.

The wind turbine issue is new, he said. In 2005-2006, public health units identified water as the key concern, along with food. “There was no mention of wind turbines,” he said. Health units were resurveyed in 2008-2009, and while water and food were still concerns, so were wind turbines.

He noted that the concerns are “10 times higher in Ontario” than elsewhere and suggested the reason was Ontario’s “aggressive” wind turbine program, and the fact that “local processes are not part of the decision making.”

Items looked at in relation to wind turbines were noise (and vibration), electromagnetic fields, shadow flicker as a possible cause of epileptic seizures, mechanical failure and icing, and health and safety.

He noted the most common health complaints are headaches and sleep disturbances. “It’s a well established phenomenon,” Copes said, adding it isn’t just a matter of how loud the noise is, but the quality and nature of the sound, described by one woman in the crowd as a “whump-whump-whump – that’s not a normal sound.”

Among the issues identified as of greatest concern by the speakers and the audience members included:

Is a setback of 550 metres enough? Some areas are looking at setbacks of a kilometre-and-a-half, or two kms. In a rural area, the house may be outside the 550-metre setback, but outbuildings and fields where farmers work all day could be much closer.

Harvey Wrightman, of Kerwood, said people in his area are angry – wind turbines are going to be put up near a school.

Most of those at the meeting seemed to agree that a moratorium on wind turbines is needed until research can be done on the health issues. Carmen Krogh, a retired pharmacist, is part of a group called WindVOICE, a victim support group. There are almost 100 people sick, she said, and some are children.

“They are the canaries in the coal mine,” Krogh said.

Formosa resident Melissa Nichols said she’s in favour of green energy. “But we need to the research first,” she said.
Many of those at the meeting – including the speakers – said they would like to see some sort of third-party investigation done.

The number of wind turbines in an area is one issue that interests Dr. Lynn. Many of the European projects have only two or three in the array, while the wind farms in Ontario have a dozen or more. Also of interest is the size of the turbines.
Gag orders were contentious for a number of people – many complained that those who have wind turbines on their land are not allowed to speak out about any health problems they’re having.

Dr. Lynn said the cost of the turbines compared to the electricity produced and the health risks associated with them, make this a “very expensive way to generate energy. I’d like a review of the cost effectiveness of wind turbines.”

Lack of local input was a common complaint.

“It’s nice of you to hold this meeting, but Dalton McGuinty isn’t listening. People don’t want the darned things,” said Arran-Elderslie Coun. Mark Davis.

Lack of government and wind turbine industry response seemed to be a common complaint. Most of those in the room want answers, and they aren’t getting them they said.

The Walkerton Herald-Times

www.walkerton.com

13 October 2009

Will We Ever Have the Power to Fly a Starship?

Will we ever have the power to fly a starship?
Consider a basic starship design, with a payload of several tens of thousands of tonnes, thus large enough to carry a human community of some hundreds or thousands of people, and propelled by a high-thrust, high-energy rocket engine.

First, we need to estimate what sort of speed we want to cruise at. From both the technical and the social points of view, a speed in the region of a tenth of light speed seems to be both attainable and desirable (note 5).

Assuming that we can find and use sufficiently energetic starship fuel, a rough calculation puts the energy consumption of our starship at about 3.6 x 1023 Joules, or 1.0 x 1014 MWh (note 6).

This is equivalent to about one fifteenth of an Earthpower-year.

By 20th-century human standards, a fifteenth of an Earthpower-year is an outrageous amount of energy. Fuelling one starship would require all other human activity to cease for about one thousand years.

But will this always be so? The Sun generates 1000 times this amount of energy every second. It has done so for billions of years and will continue to do so for billions of years to come.

Suppose that it is possible to store solar energy for subsequent release in a rocket engine to produce thrust -- an obvious suggestion is to store it in the form of antimatter, which is permitted by the laws of physics as at present understood, but is probably about as far in advance of our present-day engineering capacities as building a nuclear-powered rocket would have been for the pioneers of steam (Thomas Newcomen introduced the first viable steam engine at Dudley Castle coal mine in 1712; the Phoebus 2A nuclear rocket, with a power output of 5000 MW, was tested successfully in 1968).

Imagine that a solar power collector could be built with a radius of 638 km, producing solar energy in some storable form such as antimatter. For an advanced space-based civilisation this should be no trouble at all. Let it be placed in orbit near the Sun, at one tenth of the distance of the Earth. It will then collect energy at a rate of one Earthpower, in other words one starship-load per month. This is beginning to look like a profitable industry of the future (say, 300 years hence).

The essential point of this discussion is that an interplanetary-level civilisation will have access to the full power output of its home star. When one appreciates that our present-day civilisation consumes less than one ten-thousandth of an Earthpower and that the total solar power available is more than a billion Earthpower -- and this does not begin to take into account the possibility of clean nuclear fusion using helium-3 mined on the giant planets -- one begins to appreciate the potential for space-based economic growth over the centuries and millennia to come.

One last point. We do not of course know whether a space-based interplanetary civilisation will ever become a reality. Maybe there is some fatal flaw in human group psychology or biology which will forever restrict us to this one planet. Nobody can predict the future. But what we do know is that the only way to find out is to get out there and try to make it work. And we also know that no fatal flaws have emerged so far; quite the opposite, as early predictions that astronauts would become disoriented or sick were resoundingly quashed.

People have lived comfortably in orbiting space-stations for periods of over a year; they have flown successfully to the Moon and back and worked efficiently on its surface. The dangers are understood; the rewards potentially astronomical.

To describe our present-day society -- with all its economic problems, its drug-taking, its famines, its poverty, its wars and its terrorist outrages -- as a society on the threshold of infinite possibilities is to be no more than a hard-headed realist.

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Useful units of energy and power
1 calorie = 4.185 J

1 erg = 10-7 J

1 kW = 8766 kWh/year (and similarly for W and MW)

1 kWh = 3.6 MJ

The energy content of TNT is about 4 MJ per kilogram (various sources consulted).

(J = Joules, of energy; W = Watts, of power, i.e. energy per unit time; kWh = kilowatt-hours; kg = kilograms, MJ = Megajoules.)


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Energy content of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb (the Hiroshima bomb, except that Duncan Steel, Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets (Wiley, 1995), gives that as 13 kilotons) = 80 x 106 MJ.

Energy content of the Tunguska impactor (1908) = between 10 and 20 megatons (Steel, p. 44); 15 megatons = 60 x 109 MJ.

Energy content of most powerful nuclear device exploded by Man = 67 megatons (Steel, p. 59) = 268 x 109 MJ.

Energy content of impact of Fragment G of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter (Scientific American, Oct. 1994, p. 8) is thought to have been at least 6 million megatons = 24 x 1015 MJ.

Energy expenditure of starship which accelerates a 30,000 tonne payload onto an interstellar cruise at a speed of 13% that of light and decelerates it at its destination = 360 x 1015 MJ.

Energy content of the Chicxulub dinosaur-killer = at least 100 million megatons, and probably very much greater (Steel, pp. 56-57), = about 100 million megatons (CCNet, 18 Dec. 2000, item 2), = a force of impact equivalent to an earthquake about 10,000 times stronger than the one that leveled San Francisco in 1906 (CCNet, 18 Dec. 2000, item 3); 100 million megatons = 400 x 1015 MJ.


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One Sunpower = the total power radiated by the Sun at the present epoch = 3.85 x 1020 MW.

Equivalently: one Sunpower = 3.375 x 1024 MWh/year.

The Solar Irradiance = the solar power passing through unit area at the orbital distance of the Earth = 1.368 kWm-2.


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The definition of an Earthpower is not so straightforward. Earth receives energy from two main sources: radiant sunlight and internal radioactivity. About a third of the sunlight falling on Earth is immediately reflected back into space (i.e. Earth's albedo is about 0.33, though varies somewhat depending on the degree of cloud and snow cover); the rest is absorbed into the atmosphere, oceans or land and is eventually re-radiated as heat after driving the climate and Earth's biosphere. Internal radioactive decay heats Earth's interior and drives geological processes such as volcanoes and continental drift, before again eventually escaping to space as waste heat.

I propose the following definitions:

One Earthpower = the amount of sunlight falling on Earth = the Solar Irradiance times the area of the disk of Earth as seen from the Sun = 1.748 x 1011 MW = 1.533 x 1015 MWh/year (as per the calculation given at the top of this page).

The purpose of this unit is to act as a convenient and easily visualised unit of large amounts of power, particularly in the context of the large-scale harvesting of solar power by space-based collectors for industrial use.

One Earthpower-year = one Earthpower sustained for one year = 1.533 x 1015 MWh = 5.52 x 1024 J.


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One Absorbed Earthpower = the amount of sunlight actually absorbed into Earth's atmosphere and surface = approximately two-thirds of an Earthpower, or around 1.0 x 1015 MWh/year. (With the Absorbed Earthpower we might make comparisons between the energy input by the Sun and that input by human industrial activities on Earth, currently around 1011 MWh/year, i.e. one ten-thousandth of an absorbed Earthpower.)

Geothermal power is relatively small. Don Anderson, Theory of the Earth (Blackwell, 1989), gives it as about 1013 calories/second. If he means gram-calories, then this is 4 x 107 MW. John S. Lewis, Mining the Sky (Helix Books, Addison-Wesley, 1996), p.224, gives it as 1028 ergs/year, or 1015 MJ/year. Since 1 W = 1 Js-1, 1 W = 31.5576 MJ/year, and his figure for the geothermal heat flow is about 3 x 107 MW, in reasonable agreement.

Return to contents list.


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Estimate of energy available in the helium-3 reserves of the giant planets
A mature space industrial civilisation will have access to considerable reserves of fuel suitable for nuclear fusion reactors. The reaction of deuterium with helium-3 is especially suitable for power generation, whether in an electrical power plant or for rocket propulsion, since the main branches of the reaction do not produce free neutrons and thus relatively little unwanted radioactivity is created. The only snag is that, whereas deuterium is widely available, helium-3 is virtually non-existent on Earth.

Robert Parkinson MBE gives an estimate of at least ten thousand trillion tonnes (1016 tonnes) of helium-3 in the atmosphere of Jupiter (Daedalus Report, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 1978, p.84). His estimate assumes that 17% of the Jovian atmosphere is helium and that the abundance of helium-3 relative to helium-4 is a cautious one part in 100,000, though he expects the actual abundance to be nearer one part in 10,000.

John S. Lewis points out that helium-3 is just as accessible in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune (Mining the Sky, Helix Books, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ch.13). The longer flight times between these outer planets and the inner solar system would be irrelevant once a regular supply line had been set up, while their lower escape velocities would greatly facilitate lifting the helium-3 collected off the planet and returning it to where it was required. The escape velocities of the four giants are:

Jupiter: 60 km/s;
Saturn: 36 km/s;
Uranus and Neptune: both 20 km/s;
Compare with Earth: 11.2 km/s.
This means that the rocket energy necessary to launch a tonne of helium-3 off either Uranus or Neptune is only about one-ninth that required to launch it off Jupiter, and therefore that Uranus (the nearer of the two) is likely to be the first planet to supply helium-3. Nevertheless, the rocket power required is still considerable, and will demand a nuclear engine. Hydrogen for the return journey (the reaction mass for the nuclear rocket) will not be a problem, since it is the commonest constituent of the atmospheric gas and will be a byproduct of the helium-3 extraction process.

How long does it take to reach the giant planets? For regular flights by automatic spacecraft we cannot rely on the gravitational slingshot effect used by the Pioneer and Voyager probes. Jupiter is only aligned correctly with Saturn once every 19.9 years, with Uranus once every 13.8 years, and with Neptune once every 12.8 years. So our space tankers will probably fly the low-energy Hohmann transfer ellipse between Earth and the outer planet of choice. A complete mission would involve a flight out, a period of time spent in the giant planet's atmosphere extracting helium-3 or loading it from an extractor plant already in place, and a return to Earth (assuming that the helium-3 was to be delivered to Earth). The time for the flights out and back is easy to calculate: it is simply the period of an ellipse whose perihelion is 1 astronomical unit and whose aphelion is the distance of an outer planet (all of which move in almost exactly circular orbits). Those periods are as follows:

Jupiter: 5.5 years;
Saturn: 12.1 years;
Uranus: 32.1 years;
Neptune: 61.3 years.
Given that we may already be within a decade or two of building a practical fusion reactor, these lengthy round-trip times, especially to Uranus and Neptune, plus the time required on site to load up with helium-3, suggest that we could well start right now with a pilot project to bring back the first samples.

How much of the stuff is there? John Lewis considers the atmosphere of Uranus down to a depth where the pressure is 12 atmospheres, and estimates the helium-3 resource to be 16 trillion tonnes (16 x 1012 tonnes).

How much energy will this generate in a fusion reactor? The reaction is 2D + 3He –> 4He + 1p; mass fraction converted to energy is 0.0039 (Daedalus, p.47); burnup efficiency may be around 10% (Daedalus, p.57-60). One tonne of helium-3 in combination with 2/3 tonne of deuterium then yields 5/3 (tonnes) x 1000 (kg per tonne) x 0.0039 (fraction converted to energy) x 0.1 (efficiency = fraction of fusion fuel actually consumed) x 9 x 1016 (speed of light squared) = 5.85 x 1016 J, or 1.85 GWyear.

If current annual global industrial energy consumption is 10,000 GWyear, this is equivalent to the use of about 5400 tonnes of helium-3 in fusion reactors (John Lewis, p.211, makes it 450 tonnes per year, but starts from a power figure of 8500 GW and probably assumes that the fusion fuels can be reacted at 100% efficiency, which is unlikely).

Let us assume that John Lewis's figure for the helium-3 resource of Uranus is accurate (i.e. that atmospheric mixing is only efficient down to a depth where the pressure is 12 atmospheres), and that the resources of the other giants are in proportion with their masses. Then the energy reserves in the atmospheric helium-3 of the giant planets, expressed in years at the present-day rate of use, are as follows:

Jupiter: mass 318 Earth masses, estimated helium-3 resource 350 trillion tonnes, equivalent to 65 billion years;
Saturn: mass 95 Earth masses, estimated helium-3 resource 104 trillion tonnes, equivalent to 19 billion years;
Uranus: mass 14.6 Earth masses, estimated helium-3 resource 16 trillion tonnes, equivalent to 3 billion years;
Neptune, mass 17.2 Earth masses, estimated helium-3 resource 19 trillion tonnes, equivalent to 3.5 billion years.
On the subject of mining helium-3 on the Moon, see John Lewis, p.137-41, for reasons why this is unlikely to become practical.

From Space Age: the Energy Page

Basically, the concentration of helium-3 absorbed into the lunar regolith is expected to be about one part in 100 million, whereas its concentration in the atmospheres of the giant planets seems to be about one part in 100,000, or 1000 times greater. Lunar regolith, being solid, is very much harder to work than atmospheric gases. A lunar helium-3 mine would consume large amounts of electrical power, and also require constant maintenance. The energy advantage of extracting helium-3 is little greater than that of devoting the same effort to collecting solar power and using it directly, with the difference that the helium-3 is a non-renewable resource whereas solar power will continue for billions of years to come. The helium-3 sources of choice are therefore, in Lewis's view, the atmospheres of the outer giants, starting with Uranus.

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Roger Helm's Opinion

October 11, 2009, 4:16 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized
Regular readers of this column are familiar — perhaps sick and tired — of hearing me go on, Cassandra-like, about the energy crisis we’re facing. We’re already paying over the odds for domestic and commercial electricity, as we fund the government’s lunatic dash for wind, and the “Renewables Obligation Certificates” that mean that turbine companies are farming not wind, but subsidies.

And they’ve heard me say over and over that we risk running out of electricity sometime around 2015, as the wind-farm development programme falters; as we fail to build the mainstream baseload back-up capacity we need; and above all as our elderly nuclear fleet is decommissioned, and as Brussels forces us, through its Large Combustion Plant Directive, to close down perfectly good coal-fired power stations to satisfy its climate alarmism.

To be fair, I wasn’t quite a lone voice. Others like Professor Ian Fells of Newcastle University were saying the same thing. But now OfGem itself, the government’s own Quango tasked with regulating the industry (www.ofgem.gov.uk), has issued a report saying much the same things.

They’ve done detailed studies on a range of future scenarios, and they predict that electricity prices will rise in real terms by at least 14% by 2020, and more likely 25%, with a possible worst-case peak of 60%. The £2000 a year household energy bill could soon be with us, pushing further millions into fuel poverty.

If we wanted to go to Dublin, we wouldn’t start from here. Ten years ago, this government should have been looking at long-term energy security, and facilitating a programme of nuclear construction. They should perhaps also have looked at prospects for mining UK Coal in the face of rising prices for imported fuel. They were utterly derelict in their duty. They failed to do these things, and we will all pay the price — literally.

What do we need to do now? Press ahead with new mainstream generating capacity, coal and nuclear, as fast as possible. Abandon the folly of wind power, whilst investing in research and development of potentially viable renewable technologies — tidal power, bio-mass, solar, waste incineration with energy recovery, anaerobic digestion — and of course efficiency and energy conservation. Build major new gas storage facilities, to make us a little less dependant on short-term price fluctuations. Create a tax and regulatory environment to ensure we make the most of our rapidly dwindling North Sea Reserves. But above all, more nuclear capacity. And fast.

Burn Straw for Heat- Denmark

SAMSO, Denmark — The people of this Danish island have seen the future, and it is dim and smells vaguely of straw.

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Jakob Dall for The New York Times
Mr. Tranberg uses a special pump to extract the heat from his cows’ milk, then uses the warmth to heat his brick farmhouse.

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Times Topics: Global Warming
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Jakob Dall for The New York Times
Jorgen Tranberg purchased a wind turbine for $1.2 million, with a bank loan; it now stands in a row of five behind his farmhouse.


The New York Times
Samso residents say they have become energy self-sufficient.

With no traffic lights on the island and few street lights, driving its roads on a cloudless night is like piercing a black cloud. There is one movie theater, few cars and even fewer buses, except for summer, when thousands of tourists multiply the population.

Yet last year, Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island’s sparse sunshine.

By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. “We just met it,” said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders.

In December, when the United Nations-sponsored summit meeting on climate change convenes in Denmark, many of the delegates will be swept out to visit Samso. They will see its successes, but also how high the hurdles are for exporting the model from this little island, a hilly expanse roughly the size of the Bronx.

On a recent visit, Mr. Hermansen recounted, the Egyptian ambassador to Denmark admired all the energy-creating devices the islanders had installed, then asked how many people lived here. When he was told about 4,000, he replied with exasperation, “That’s three city blocks in Cairo!” Undaunted, Mr. Hermansen told him, “That’s maybe where you should start, not all of Egypt, take one block at a time.”

Jorgen Tranberg, 55, agreed. “If there were no straw, we’d have no fuel, but we have straw,” he said, sipping coffee on the 250-acre dairy farm where he milks 150 Holsteins. “Everywhere is different,” he said. “Norway has waterfalls, we have wind. The cheapest is oil and coal, that’s clear.” The farmers, he said, used to burn the straw on their fields, polluting the air. Now, they use it to heat their homes.

Counting only the wind turbines on the island, but not those that the islanders have parked offshore in the Kattegat Strait, the island produces just enough electricity for its needs. (With the offshore turbines it can even export some.) However, its heating plants, burning wheat and rye straw grown by its farmers, cover only about 75 percent of the island’s heating needs, continuing its reliance on imported oil and gas.

The islanders have been inventive. Mr. Tranberg uses a special pump to extract the heat from his cows’ milk, then uses the warmth to heat his house. He has even invested in wind turbines. He purchased one outright for $1.2 million, with a bank loan; it now stands in a row of five just behind his brick farmhouse. He later bought a 50 percent stake in another turbine.

But all that spins is not gold, he soon found out. When a gearbox burned out in one mill three years ago, the repair cost more than $150,000. He did not say how much he makes from selling the electricity.

Energy experts emphasize that it is crucial for the islanders to squeeze energy out of their island without relying heavily on sea-based turbines. Not every region of the world is blessed with an expanse of thousands of miles of ocean at its doorstep.

“Otherwise, it becomes a public-relations exercise,” said Philip Sargent, one of the founders of the Cambridge Energy Forum in England. Yet the experiment could also be useful as a demonstration of technology, he said, or simply to clarify the scale of what is needed, “on densely populated islands like the British Isles.”

Many islanders, like Uffe Bach and his wife, Else Marie, have treated the energy experiment as a profit-making venture. Mr. Bach, 63, who sports a ponytail, is a Johnny Cash fan and boasts that he is the only owner of a Harley-Davidson on the island. He says he did most of the work rebuilding the schoolhouse where they now live, installing a special wood-burning oven to heat the downstairs and laying 1,300 feet of pipe in a field behind the house to pump warmth from the ground to heat the rest of the house.

Ten years ago, the Bachs paid $40,000 for a share in a wind turbine off the south shore, last year pocketing a dividend of $4,700 from the sale of its electricity. Else Marie, 45, said it was only natural for the islanders to embrace the energy project. “People here were poor,” she said. “So they had to think differently.”

On the winding main street of Tranebjerg, whose population of 829 makes it by far the island’s largest town, Jytte Nauntoft, 46, sells appliances in a store that her husband’s family has owned for generations. The islanders, she said, have all the necessary home appliances, like washers and dryers, refrigerators and stoves. Yet, she added, “Electricity is expensive, so they buy the basic models.”

There is no gas, so gas stoves are nonexistent, and the cool climate makes air-conditioners unnecessary. Five years ago, she said, with the help of state subsidies, she and her husband erected a small windmill behind their home, which now supplies almost all their electricity. Like Mr. Bach they use a heat pump to draw warmth from the ground to heat their rooms.

In the bookshop opposite Ms. Nauntoft’s appliance store, Liselotte Andersen, 50, a sales clerk, said “it became natural for us” to embrace the energy project. The project was also crucial, she said, to provide islanders a sense of purpose, and jobs. The island has no high schools, so older children leave for boarding schools or live with relatives off-island after grade school. Many do not return.

Two of Ms. Andersen’s three sons are living off the island. Asked whether she thought they would return, she replied, “We hope some will come back.

“I think the eldest will come back,” she added. “If he found a small farm

David Suzuki Quote

A quote attributed to David Suzuki:

"...wind farms, like any development, need to be sited properly and appropriately placed in areas where they can have the greatest positive effect with the smallest environmental footprint. After all, the whole point of clean energy is to reduce our environmental burden, not make it worse."

David Suzuki

Live Earth Events

Subject: Be part of Global Events on Climate and Water this Month


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Hello ,

Great Photos and Prizes from 'Love, The Climate' Giveaway! Thanks to everyone who participated in the "Love, The Climate" Giveaway! Over the course of ten days we received thousands of entries including hundreds of Flickr photos, Facebook photos and posts, videos, and voicemails giving thanks in advance to those who act to preserve our environment today. It takes the energy of a global movement to help solve the critical environmental issues of our time.

Your incredible photos, videos, and posts shine a positive light on the importance of the Clean Energy and Climate bill that will be voted on in the U.S. Senate in the coming weeks.

Poetic Social Mission -- Moving Stars and Earth for Water

Look up to the stars this Friday for Moving Stars and Earth for Water -- a truly unique event of the Poetic Social Mission, to be carried out from space by Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil and president of the ONE DROP Foundation.

The Poetic Social Mission is the world's first artistic and social mission from space. Seeking to help advance the movement in favor of water for all, this one-of-a-kind global event, broadcast on the One Drop home page Friday October 9, will be a beautiful 2-hour artistic event.

Click here for more info.

October 24th -- International Day of Climate Action
350.org is calling on people around the world to organize an action on October 24 that incorporates the number 350 at an iconic place in their community, and then upload a photo of their event.

The International Day of Climate Action will cover almost every country on earth, the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. Your actions on October 24 will help our leaders realize we need a real solution that pays attention to the science at the crucial UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen in December of 2009.

Click here for more info.

Thanks and be sure to visit LiveEarth.org next week for a special announcement!

Digby Neck- from the Ottawa Citizen

Goodbye, Small Town, North America


Canwest News ServiceOctober 9, 2009Be the first to post a comment
StoryPhotos ( 1 )

Small towns across North America, such as the hamlet of Cayley, Alta., above, are experiencing brain drains into big cities that make life harder for those who stay behind.Photograph by: Lorraine Hjalte, Canwest News ServiceExperts say rural communities are feeding their own demise by encouraging their best and brightest to leave while not nurturing those young people who choose to stay behind. Shannon Proudfoot explains.

An exodus of young people seeking education, adventure and success in bigger cities, combined with economic upheaval that has left little opportunity for those who stayed behind, has resulted in a dramatic "hollowing out" of North America's small communities. And worse, by not adapting to this new reality, small towns are playing a big part in their own demise.

"The big question in a small town is, 'Do you stay or do you go?' " says Patrick Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers University and author of the new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America. "This is the key question, not just for coming of age, but for the town itself: Who do you hold onto and who do you not?"

The book is a collaboration between Carr and his wife and co-author, Maria Kefalas. They spent several months living in and studying an Iowa town of 2,000, tracking who stayed and who left.

Small towns have always encouraged their best and brightest to leave in search of better opportunities, Carr says, and that worked fine a generation ago when agriculture, manufacturing and the auto industry provided stable, decent-paying jobs for those who stayed behind. Those industries have been gutted and small communities are now "colluding" in their own demise by continuing to groom some young adults to leave while neglecting the "stayers" who will be the town's future, Carr says.

"It's this ironic contradiction between rural schools encouraging students to spread their wings, but then basically encouraging kids to leave their communities as a result of being over-educated for what the community has to offer," says Aniko Varpalotai, a professor specializing in rural education at the University of Western Ontario.

Parents who once would have hoped their children would take over the family farm are instead struggling to compete with "mega-farms" and urging their children to get an education and choose a different life, she says.

Agriculture is shifting to fewer and larger corporate farms, Carr says, while a globalized, post-industrial economy has replaced previously reliable and well-paying blue-collar jobs with precarious industries, part-time jobs or unemployment in small towns.

And by continuing to focus resources and attention on the young people bound for post-secondary education, these towns are "under-investing" in those who stay, Carr says, leaving them ill-equipped for the new employment landscape.

Michael Corbett, an associate professor of education at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., has seen similar patterns in his research on fishing communities in the Digby Neck region of Nova Scotia. He tracked about 750 people who left the local elementary school between 1957 and 1998. He found that as commercial fisheries swallowed up family livelihoods, and the western oilpatch jobs that attracted people from the East dried up, education became both the major reason people left and their ticket to success elsewhere.

The population and age structure in Canada's small towns and rural areas reflects this out-migration pattern. More than one-third of city dwellers (36 per cent) are young adults aged 20 to 44, but that group makes up only 28 per cent of the country's rural areas and small towns, according to census figures.

"In the declining areas, it's the younger people that are moving out and, on average, the older generation are staying," says Ray Bollman, a research economist with Statistics Canada who specializes in rural data analysis.

This exodus comes at a price, not just for the shrinking towns, but also for those who feel compelled to leave, Corbett says.

Warner, Alta., faced the closure of its high school nearly a decade ago because of its dwindling population, which slashed property values and threatened to further decimate the village of 300 people just south of Lethbridge. Propelled by a grassroots effort, the community reinvented itself by founding the Warner Hockey School for girls.

Other small towns have taken a page from the Warner playbook, with Vauxhall, Alta., founding a baseball academy and Cardston, Alta., starting up a rodeo school. Now, Warner is also thinking of launching a flight school, says the hockey school's principal, Mark Lowe.

Carr and his wife are convinced that small towns are the canaries in the coal mine for national economies. They could see the shadows of the current recession there seven or eight years ago, he says, and more attention paid to the strain on small towns might have revealed the communities' vulnerabilities.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Kenya- Some Poignant Thoughts about Renewable Energy

Monday, October 5, 2009
Donor Funding: Pseudo Worries About Pseudo Aid?
The parabolic solar cooker, made from an umbrella lined with tinfoil, works well when it comes to heating up water. I'll try cooking with it when I have found a suitable pot with handles and painted it black. Meantime, I wish to demonstrate the 'Cookits' that I bought from Solar Cookers International to an audience that could turn out to be as many as 20 people, far from ideal. I'd prefer very small groups of people but I've agreed to it.

As I am trying to win people over to solar cooking, I'm concentrating on things that people here like to eat. Thankfully, that's quite a small range of fairly basic foods. Tomorrow I hope to cook githeri, a mixture of beans and maize. It will take some time to cook so I'm hoping for 4 or 5 hours of uninterrupted sunshine. I'll have to cook something else that doesn't take so long or my credibility could be open to question.

Actually, the credibility of some Westerner lecturing people in a developing country about renewable energy and sustainable cooking techniques is pretty questionable as it is. Someone recently claimed in an email to me that people in the US have shown great interest in his solar cooker. It's a pity they couldn't show a bit more interest in reducing energy and resource consumption on a national level. And if every American family purchases one of those particular solar cookers, the amount of plastic needed to manufacture them will be phenomenal.

When people ask me if we all use solar cookers in Ireland, I tell them there is not enough sun. This is true, but does everyone there use wind, wave or tidal power? I don't think so. Come to think of it, one of the more dubious gems of wisdom sent from rich countries to poor countries recently is biofuels. In addition to using up scarce land, water and other resources, people here are very unlikely to make much money from such activities. They need food, not biofuels and they need to grow food for themselves, not accept handouts in return for biofuels. Enough land in developing countries has already been destroyed in order to produce cheap raw materials for rich countries.

Questions are now being raised about jatropha production, a biofuel crop that is said to grow in marginal land. Well, they say that about all biofuel crop production. Unsurprisingly, people at the Nairobi Trade Fair last week were promoting jatropha even for farmers with as little as one acre to spare for cash crops. Perhaps just about anything being hawked as good for small farmers by rich countries should be viewed with great suspicion. We in developed countries don't have a great reputation for telling the truth.

Questions are also constantly being raised about the effectiveness of aid, especially now that so many wealthy countries are feeling the pinch from the current financial crisis. Personally, I'm not against all aid or all aid agencies. However, much of the money that is called foreign aid is spent on furthering the economic, strategic and political interests of wealthy countries and corporations. The most important questions should be about how much 'aid' money even leaves the donor country and what (and whom) the money that does leave is being spent on. The idea that developed countries bestow lots of goodies on developing countries and get nothing in return is pure bullshit, but sadly not the biodigestible kind. Sphere: Related Content
Posted by Simon at 5:12 PM
Labels: aid money, biofuels, development, development by omission, renewables, solar cookers, sustainable development

US turbines dismal at 1.3% Energy Production

Unbridled Energy: Predicting Volatile Wind, Sun Utilities Ramp Up Focus on Forecasting When Renewable Fuel Is at a Peak to Avoid Squandering Power That Still Can't Be StoredBy JEFFREY BALL
For more than a century, producing power has been a matter of flipping a switch. Need more electricity? Fire up some fuel. Need less? Dial the flame back down.

Things won't be that easy in a world that gets much of its energy from renewable sources, which come and go at nature's whim. Wind tends to blow hardest at night -- a problem, since people use electricity mostly during the day. Sunshine can lose its intensity in seconds if eclipsed by a cloud -- inconvenient for people who like their air conditioners to run steadily on summer days.


To harness renewable energy more reliably, some companies are experimenting with ways to story energy when the output is high and then distribute it when output is low. WSJ's Jeff Ball reports on the efforts to build a better battery.
Many states and countries are pledging to produce 20% or more of their electricity from renewable sources within about a decade. That will be a major stretch. The recession has severely crimped renewable-energy investment. Proposals to turn over large swaths of desert and coastline to renewable-energy generation are encountering angry opposition. And the drop in fossil-fuel prices has removed much of the public appetite for a big renewable-energy bid. Yet those very pressures are pushing renewable-energy proponents to pursue their goal as efficiently as possible. And so the search for ways to accommodate the vicissitudes of wind and sun continues to shape up as one of today's great technological quests.

A convenient solution would be to overcome wind and sun's intermittence by storing the energy and then dispensing it later, on windless or overcast days. But storage technology is still embryonic.

So the power industry is having to change the way it operates. To adapt its fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure to renewable energy's ebbs and flows, it is trying to forecast them better. Knowing how nature is likely to behave will help the industry better balance different sources of renewable energy, scientists and utility executives say. The goal: maximizing wind, sun and other natural sources when each is at its peak.

The Inconstant Wind
View Interactive

Largely due to the unpredictability of the heavens, the thousands of wind turbines across the country collectively produced 1.3% of actual electricity in 2008.
Currently, every wind farm and solar installation has to be backed up by a nearly equivalent amount of conventional fuel to keep the power grid running. That raises costs.

"We're putting renewables into a system that wasn't designed for renewables," says Paul Denholm, an analyst for the federal government's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Colo.

Wind power is the fastest-growing renewable source of electricity. Buoyed by government mandates and subsidies, wind farms accounted for more than half of all net electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. in 2008, according to the Department of Energy.

But capacity to produce is not actual production. Largely due to wind's unpredictability, the thousands of wind turbines installed across the country collectively produced only 1.3% of actual U.S. electricity in 2008, the department's figures show.

The Bonneville Power Administration, a government-owned utility based in Portland, Ore., taps one of the biggest collections of wind farms in the country. Between January and August, average wind-power production accounted for 12% of average electricity consumption in Bonneville's service area.

From hour to hour, though, wind power swings wildly depending on how things blow at the Columbia River Gorge, where most of the wind turbines in Bonneville's service area are located.

This Tuesday was typically erratic. At 1 a.m., wind farms in the Bonneville service area were cranking out about 1,550 megawatts of power. By 7 a.m., that fell to about 800 megawatts, just as people were waking up and turning on their lights and toasters. That night, once most people were asleep, the wind picked up again. By 11:45 p.m., wind power topped 2,000 megawatts.

Most of the electricity in Bonneville's service area comes from hydroelectric power. To compensate for the volatility of wind, Bonneville tweaks the amount of water it lets through the dams. But that doesn't work for the most extreme shifts in wind. Sometimes, when the wind is blowing hard, Bonneville releases extra water over the tops of dams without using it to generate electricity. Otherwise, electrical wires might get overloaded. And when the wind is so strong that Bonneville can't ditch enough water, the utility orders wind turbines shut off.

"Everything changes with wind," says Bart McManus, a wind expert at Bonneville.

Sudden doldrums can be as troublesome as sudden gusts. That was the problem on Feb. 26, 2008, in Texas, which produces more wind power than any other state.

At 3 p.m. that afternoon, Texas's wind farms, concentrated in the western part of the state, were throwing off about 2,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve about one million households. Then a cold front blew in. By 6:30 p.m. -- when electricity demand typically peaks -- wind production in Texas had cratered to about 360 megawatts.

Exacerbating matters, Texans began turning up their heat -- much of which, in rural parts of the state, comes from electricity.

The operator of Texas's electrical grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as Ercot, scrambled. It cut off power to various industrial customers that, in exchange for payment, had agreed to let Ercot pull their plugs in emergencies.

To avert situations like these, Ercot has hired a company to provide, every hour, a forecast of how the wind will blow at every wind project on the Ercot grid. It requires wind-power producers to install gauges that feed into those forecasts.

Related Reading
A major difficulty in harnessing the wind to generate electricity is that the wind is unpredictable. The Bonneville Power Administration, a utility in the Pacific Northwest, provides a continuously updated readout of wind-power generation in its service area. The readout shows how erratic the wind can be.Texas, one of the nation's top wind-power-producing states, unexpectedly lost a massive amount of electricity when a cold front blew in on the afternoon of Feb. 26, 2008. The Department of Energy explains what happened that day in this report. America's capacity to generate electricity from renewable sources, such as the wind and sun, is growing fast. But renewable energy remains a tiny slice of the overall energy pie, as the Department of Energy shows in this July report.Wind power now provides just 1.3% of U.S. electricity, but it could provide as much as 20% by 2030 if "significant challenges" are overcome, the Department of Energy said in 2008 in a report.The forecasts look not just at temperature, but also at wind speed and direction at the height of wind turbines, an altitude that until now hasn't attracted much interest.

If there were a viable way to store large amounts of renewable energy, Ercot might have been able to tap it on that February afternoon. Investors and the government are backing storage development. One hope is a better battery. Other ideas include systems that would store water in uphill sites or compressing air underground, for later release when electricity is needed.

So far, these are largely experimental. Making renewable energy big, many studies suggest, would require a combination of approaches: investment in high-voltage transmission wires to carry renewable electricity from remote areas to cities; policies to encourage energy efficiency; and coordinated construction of renewable facilities so that one form of energy can fill in when others are dormant. In many places, wind is calmest at midday, when solar power is most available.

For now, better renewable-energy forecasting is important. Today's forecasts remain frustratingly inexact. Just after midnight on Christmas morning, 2007, an unexpected wind surge hit in Colorado, a state with a lot of wind turbines. It sent power production soaring on the system operated by Xcel Energy, a utility that is trying to improve its wind forecasts.

"We were walloped," says Tom Imbler, vice president of commercial operations for Minneapolis-based Xcel. To compensate, Xcel scrambled to dial down some of its fossil-fuel power plants. Those plants "were never designed to ramp up and ramp down at the level we're asking them to" in the age of renewable energy, he says. "We're learning as we go."

Turbines not so Eco-Friendly

Sunday 04th of October 2009
Reports Suggest Wind Turbines Could Kill Wildlife
Posted on: October 2nd, 2009 by Beth Williams
Some reports now suggest that wind power may not be as eco friendly as everyone wants to make it out to be. Sure it helps in terms of cutting down on carbon emissions, but what does it do to the wildlife? Some experts say that these wind turbines could spell out problems for some animals.

As of right now there is no denying the fact that wind turbines are linked to bat and bird morality. The wildlife ecologist and ornithologist, Albert Manville, has claimed that wind turbines cause 440,000 bird deaths every year in the United States. The number of bird deaths is thought to be so high due to the fact that the wind currents, that are needed to make wind turbines turn, are the same wind currents that billions of birds use to migrate across the United States. This adds just another problem for species of birds that are already at risk from habitat degradation.

However, other studies are very quick to point out that, no matter what kind of energy people used, it could possibly put some wildlife in danger. After all, it is worth pointing out that birds and bats do fly right into cooling towers and oil platforms as well. On top of this, the extra carbon emissions that are generated by coal fired generators are, by far, a greater danger to all wildlife, not just birds.

Of course, some of the wind farms that are being put up in the UK are far less dangerous to birds. This goes double for wind farms that are located offshore. Bats, for the most part, do not fly over the ocean very much. It also appears that offshore wind turbines seem to cause a lot less bird deaths.

Geology and Sea Level Change

Examples of the different volcanic flow units and evidence of past higher sea-levels and possible future sea-level rise impacts



Tim Webster, PhD

Applied Geomatics Research Group

COGS, Middleton

timothy.webster@nscc.ca

825 5475



The North Mountain is comprised of three volcanic flow units and was erupted from fissure volcanoes during the Triassic period, 200 Million Years ago. The three volcanic flow units are quite distinct and have variable resistance to erosion. As a result the morphology (shape) of the North Mountain reflects these differences in erodability of the flow units. The lower flow unit (oldest) is exposed along the south face of the North M Mountain and is quite thick, massive with columnar joints and very resistant to erosion. The resistance to erosion of this unit is in part why we have such a steep slope on the north side. The lower flow unit is overlaid by the Middle Flow unit which is comprised of several thin volcanic flows that are highly vesicular (gas bubbles). These air bubbles have been subsequently in filled with zeolite minerals as a result of ground water circulation through the rocks. Stilbite, Nova Scotia’s mineral, is one such mineral that infill’s these voids in the rocks. Zeolites have a unique crystal structure and grow radially outward. The Middle Flow unit is less resistant to erosion and is often referred to as “rotten rock” by local construction operators. The Upper Flow unit overlies the Middle Flow Units and is similar to the lower flow unit in that it is resistant to erosion and often outcrops along the Bay of Fundy Coast.



The flow units have been mapped with the aid of a new remote sensing technique known as LiDAR, Light Detection & Ranging. We use a laser onboard an aircraft to precisely measure the earth’s topography (lay of the land) to an accuracy of 15 cm in the vertical. The measurements are then used to construct a continuous surface known as a Digital Elevation Model (DEM). We then use these DEM in the computer to better visualize the subtle topographic changes of the land surface. As a result we can see the contacts between the flow units and other interesting landforms including raised terraces along the Bay of Fundy that represent higher sea-levels. After deglaciation 12-15,000 years ago, the sea-level rose faster than the earth’s crust rebounded. Evident of this high sea level is found at several locations along the coast in the form of terraces. Recent tide gauge records from Saint John, NB indicate relative sea-level is rising by 22 cm per century. This is a combination of crustal subsidence and global sea-level rise. We have also used these new LiDAR elevation models to map the town of Annapolis Royal and project possible flood limits based on storm surges and future projections of higher sea-levels. The Groundhog Day storm of 1976 was used a bench mark storm and the flood extent was mapped using the LiDAR DEM. Future sea-level rise projections were then used with this storm to predict what areas are at risk if the storm were to reoccur in the future.



The field trip will begin with a presentation of the sea-level history of the area, followed by an explanation of LiDAR and the improvements to topographic mapping that it provides. Flood maps of Annapolis Royal during the Groundhog Day storm and possible future flooding considering sea-level rise will be shown. Maps of the North Mountain will be displayed and the contact between the flow units identified. In addition we will examine these raised beach terraces that have resulted from past higher sea-levels. We will then depart to visit the different volcanic flow units and contacts in the field and the raised terraces along the coast.


Tim Webster, Ph.D.
Research Scientist, Applied Geomatics Research Group (AGRG)
Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS), Nova Scotia Community College



Chair, Halifax Branch, Canadian Institute of Geomatics

Adjunct professor, Acadia University, Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Adjunct professor, Dalhousie University, Dept. of Earth Sciences