fly tipper watch your fly!

Need any more help?

Hey, tipper! We will love to help you cleaning out that old shed of yours! Or is it that this past due old man finally died; and you now need to pimp hat dirty old cottage fast, cheap and furious; just to get it on the market and cash in on your inheritance? Easy money, isn’t it?

Anyway, maybe we are wrong and you just failed to see the consequences. However, we do not need your old rubbish on our land; we do not want it! And I indeed long for telling you that personally!

Abriachan: Tuesday: May 28^th 2013, evening, between 18:00 and 21:00: did anybody come across a pickup or a car pulling an open trailer driving through Abriachan in a rather obvious search for his private landfill site? The load looks very recognisable!

Meanwhile we will take that heap apart and should we find anything…

Carpe diem!

Oil and gas: end of!

... for heating systems in Denmark!

From January 1st, 2013, onwards Denmark has forbidden oil or gas fired heating systems for new builds; for existing heating systems 2016 will be the deadline.

More here and here.

Even though mainstream avoided and avoids this ground breaking news making headline - all over Europe, not only the UK! - there are already sarcastic comments floating around on how tiny Denmark believes it would make a da... bit of a difference, etc.

Stupid, arrogant foolishness; no, it is intentional ignorance!

By the way, any news on the offshore leaks?! No! Wonder why? And then this hits the Italian nail on its cappella:

(c) Harm Bengen, www.harmbengen.de

Carpe diem!

passiv or passive: House or Haus

Many of you have heard about the advantages of "going passive" when it comes to building your new home, house, office, nursery, hospital, workshop, etc.

But that "many of you" does by far not mean "enough"! Here is some more on the subject:






Carpe diem!

while we play stupid games...

... called Euro, Greece, Terrorism or Nuclear...

our human footprint is killing the remains of our habitat. We might not be past-peak-oil but we are definitely past-peak-manhood! Our front gardens are looking good, fresh cut grass, fertilised, nice roses in full blossom; meanwhile the surrounding rest of the planet becomes pretty hostile, the oceans will be amongst the first to go.

A very interesting report on the state of the ocean.org.

Carpe diem!


p.s.:

unprecedented pressure

on planet Earth ... but why it is good news as well!


Johan Rockstrom, Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, gave a TED talk in July 2010:

The drama is, of course, that 200 countries on this planet have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction!

Carpe diem!

the summer is over

Black Forest

Back in the office; the disastrous every days' global news with 75% on climate and weather catastrophes and the rest on wars and bombs limit my expectations; not pessimism, but sober realism.

Not surprisingly EUROland is still hanging in there; soon the € will return making the headlines as none of the immanent problems have been solved; really, not even addressed but are due worsening. Against all negative figures and American kludge the $ will get stronger; difficult to see what will happen to the £ - my best guess is it will get stronger against the € as the £problems are just such while the €problems are unsolvable and an accumulative disease. Wonder how China will cope with doing the splits between its announcement of appreciating its currency while exports need to keep growing fast; it might comfort the big party that their $assets will be very profitable and help buying out the remaining resources for their own good while they watch the real estate bubbles pop.

The US are approaching Double Dip; not funny, Japan and Europe are following right behind, the question will be who will be able to develop an upturn after what very likely will be a long and deep second dip; its line magnified will look like a bouncing ball loosing its momentum while moving downhill. But then, one country alone won't make it anyway.

Upwards it goes with many other figures; unemployment same as CO2; food and commodity indices are influenced by falling yields and high(er) demands which will mix some hard to digest inflationary figures in what will be deflation for mass products and all assets from housing to shares; some call it stagflation - I believe that is just trivialising what will cause the scissors between poor and rich open ever faster and wider.

On top of all the human race faces an unseen change of its biotope; no matter what it is called the human influence by its mass and the unlimited consumption of limited resources is causing massive disruption and destruction. Anchored deep in the alleged human intelligence the deniers of any human influence - caused by +seven billion energy wasters - are democratically allowed to have their say and frivolously (and ignorantly) dispute what the armies of scientists of all faculties come up with on a global scale.

Any optimism left will see hard times with no good news coming in; the bad news about us finally acknowledging that the endless number of ongoing and unsolved and as such unsolvable crunches is just one big overall crisis will hopefully be the first good news. I wonder how long we will have to wait for that to happen.


Carpe diem!

I can see clearly now...

... the oil has come!

you owe him and his to go here

... can see all
... obstacles in my way!

Carpe diem!

no blue, no green

... Sylvia Earle on the importance of our oceans!





Carpe diem!

one winter on tyres

Regular readers have seen it; we had lots of snow up here, probably more than during the last five years all together. When the first blow hit us it was "once in a century", now eight weeks later we were still and again snowed in and it is rather a "once in a decade" affair. The plough might need a companion: a blower!

Having helped out neighbours, the occasional ditch victim and some Formula 1 drifters - those are the ones on pure slick-type tyres blinded by fear and driving on hope - there was plenty of opportunity to discuss the right kind of tyre; one that might make the battle with that white powder, soft or black ice a bit more realistic and a wee more fruitful.

What we call snow tyres is called Winter tyres on the Continent. That explains that "stupid" answer on my question "Why don't you put on snow tyres?" Whoever I asked came back with "Oh, we hardly see snow nowadays!"

Hardly!? See!?

Altering the question to "Why don't you use winter tyres?" made it even worse: "Oh, we don't have Winter tyres in this country!"

Hello?!
Glad, at least nobody questioned the four seasons.

Along with the one season generally referred to as 'Winter' come lower temperatures; in very general terms: those degrees below +7°C are not what regular 'Summer' tyres are made for; they are simply getting too hard, so they work their best from around 18°C upwards getting softer and producing the grip you expect.

The rubber compound of winter tyres, obviously designed to work best in cold rain, on snow and even to some extend (sorry: extent!) on ice is much softer; it is more flexible at lower temperatures (best at -4°C) and offers much more grip than a hardened, in many cases tread reduced Summer tyre.

By the way I: in some European countries you are more or less forced to switch to the appropriate seasonal tyre as in case of an accident, your fault or not, the insurance companies will survey not only how you handled your car but will also check your tyres; should there be any reason to believe that your tyres were inappropriate you will have to come up with 'your fair share' of the damage (cost).

By the way II: there are not many insurance companies nowadays that not serve the UK and parts of Europe, or vice versa. So they are aware of all seasons, anywhere!

By the way III: I am not paid by the tyre industry nor do I hold any shares in same!

In the end it makes drifting much more fun while driving becomes safer and so much more efficient.

Carpe diem!

apropos plastic

Life in a sea of plastic.

Also see here for more on plastic, and plastic in construction.






Carpe diem!

"in the year 2010": rubbish construction

BBC: 'house of the future' is plastic

Please click above BBC link and please watch that video describing our future in plastic houses... it is dated February 24th, 2010; so it definitely is not from the early days of trying to understand what sustainability might be about; this is what a BBC reporter and a construction company come up with today, in the year 2010 ... or have they offered him plastic shares of any kind ...; it begins:

This is a pile of rubbish; a mix of household and industrial waste that would normally go to fill a hole in the ground: utterly useless stuff...

You will see panels made from 'chopped up old television sets' and hear the statement that among others 'those panels will be used to build sustainable houses while at the same time waste is recycled'. The material is explained to be 'substantial', 'waterproof', that 'it doesn't rot' and would have 'a long, long life durability'. Each house would contain 'about 18 tons of 'Thermo Poly Rock', abbreviated most modern into a 'TPR' token, 'recycled waste' that 'otherwise would have gone to landfill'.


This and the rest of that miserable piece of information is either a prime example of how bad journalism has become - was it ever any better? - or, of how desperate that one member of the construction industry is trying to survive our current crisis. And how desperate must those politicians and decision makers of BRE and Carbon Trust be to give their "good names" for this piece of medieval and destructive innovation.

If you need any more you will find it in this BBC article.

I won't go into the details of how pleasant it must be to live in a 18 ton waste plastic house and I won't discuss whether pressing "rubbish" to form panels and hide those behind dwelling walls can really be regarded as a sustainable "recycling" process but I would like to add another video, a trailer of a new movie hitting the theatres soon; it is called 'Plastic-Planet' and describes in German and English the plastic world we live in - all the pictures are bilingual, so don't hesitate to take the time:

I have blogged on phthalates twice before. Ugly chemicals that explain a lot of why and what is going wrong. Plastic is poisonous but also a valuable commodity; it needs to go through controlled recycling processes - not into holes in the ground and not into walls for us to live in.

The above BBC report is what is utterly useless stuff - not that pile of rubbish!

Carpe diem!

climategate: another red herring

It is very easy to be a sceptical or a denier; just takes a line, a "No!", a minute, a second and you are done with the subject; the question remains: is the subject done with us, yet, or will we be caught in the act?

Do we have a cold winter because the changing ratio of cold salt water and waters from melted ice influences the oceanic drifts? And do we have lots of snow as the overall atmospheric humidity is increasing?

James Balog : http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/

I recommend to take the time and watch above video and visit the link; it is not on numbers or lists, temperatures or percentages; it is for your eyes, only.

Carpe diem!

believing is no science

If you come across a serious sceptic that is willing to listen may be this will help to ease the discussion...



Carpe diem!

more data: more thermal energy

The British Med Office has released the latest data on global surface temperatures based on now more than 3,000 land stations; there is no room for scepticism unless it is based on better, i.e. more and more reliable data; anything else is gobble-di-goo.

There are three independent sources that pretty much match:

• Met Office, in collaboration with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UK)
• Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is part of NASA (USA)
• National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (USA)

Carpe diem!

nuclear waste heritage!

source

A couple of weeks ago under the headline "Forever waste" I referred to problems of the salt mine ASSE in Germany used as a final storage for light and medium contaminated nuclear waste. The storage was used from 1965 until 1978; originally declared safe for at least 100,000 years to come soon penetrating humidity, then water questioned its reliability.

As usual all kinds of sources give you a wide range of choices to select your fears from; while BILD.de in October of 2009 - see photo below with a man filling his wee cup - reported that the daily volume of water penetrating certain areas of the salt mine and only such with no nuclear waste stored in had increased from 30 to 100 litres per day - which in buckets sounds not really threatening - other official sources report water volumes of up to 12m³ - avoiding to say "12,000 litres per day"; what a charming and calming difference?

source

Cleaning up in 420 days

Last week it was decided to clean up the place. Roundabout 126,000 barrels filled with nuclear waste, the majority not even labelled, and dumped in deep, now salt water flooded holes will need to be taken above ground (from 750m down) and precisely examined; not decided, yet, is what to do then with the historic waste the majority of which was dumped in 1976 and 1977 when the closure was imminent and all wanted to get rid of then most probably all kinds of nuclear waste; now the commission allows 4.8 minutes for each barrel for transport above ground and thorough examination.

Odd figures always make one sceptical: so they calculated 10,080 hours to do the complete job!? One year equals 8,760 hours, surely they can work in three shifts, so all will be cleaned up within one year and 55 days.

Besides the threat of the water the salt mine is obviously declared structurally unsafe; life spans of 3 to 10 years are given before the risk of collapse is declared acute; no worries, this time the scientists should be a wee more accurate and the tolerance in their guesses might be a bit closer to reality than 100,000 safe years compared to really only just some dozens of years. It remains to be seen whether the tolerances in guessing and throwing the dice will allow for 420 stress-free days for this 4.8 minute per barrel operation.

Would a € per barrel figure not be more interesting?

May be that tells you why the hurry...

source

Yes, this bracket was once straight.

The globe’s stories about finding appropriate sites for storing nuclear waste even on a minimum scale of sustainability are stories of failure, lies and in the best cases belittlement; never over the last fifty years was just one safe place found but billions have been spent and will now need to be invested into old waste – not to talk about the new one.

It is just another lie that alternative energy is expensive and the driver of cost when it comes to sustainable electricity generation and transport; the real cost for R&D and the waste problematic of nuclear power is dumped on us through separate balance positions. But what is cost against the threat of nuclear contamination? Would you like to own a house around Hanover/Germany and drink fresh water?

final storage sites near Hannover, Germany

Carpe 420 dies!