cows have been cleared in greenhouse gas issueR140m drought plan kicks in for Garden Route
By Neil Oelofse
Garden Route Media

Knysna: The government's long-awaited rollout of R140 million in drought-relief funding to Garden Route municipalities started this month, bringing the promise of respite to a region struggling to provide water to support its main income-earner - the tourist industry.

Eden District Municipality disaster management head Gerhard Otto on Monday said the money would be spent on desalination and waste water recycling plants planned for towns along the Garden Route, considered essential to beat the worst drought in living memory.

The relief funding rollout will be completed by May or June, but Knysna spent R16m in advance on the reverse osmosis desalination plant in Sedgefield last year to provide water in time for the December tourist season. More

Cows absolved of stoking global warming gas
By Alister Doyle

Oslo - Grazing by cows or sheep can cut emissions of nitrous oxide - a powerful greenhouse gas - in grasslands from China to the United States, according to a study that overturns past belief that farm animals stoke releases.

Adding to understanding of links between agriculture and global warming, the report in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature said livestock can help to limit microbes in the soil that generate the gas, also known as laughing gas.

"It's been generally assumed that if you increase livestock numbers you get a rise in emissions of nitrous oxide. This is not the case," said Klaus Butterbach-Bahl of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany who was among the authors. More

UN global climate deal impossible in 2010
By Gerard Wynn and Alister Doyle

Bonn, Germany - The world cannot agree a final climate deal this year, outgoing United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer told Reuters on Sunday, saying the focus should be on practical steps to help the poor and save forests.

De Boer was speaking on the sidelines of the first UN talks since a bad-tempered summit in Copenhagen in December fell short of agreeing the full legal treaty many nations had wanted.

Negotiators at the April 9-11 talks in Bonn struggled to find a formula to revive negotiations on a pact to combat global warming and agree a schedule before the next annual ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in November and December. "More

Oz race to clean up oil spill

Sydney - Australian officials raced against the clock on Monday to refloat a massive Chinese ship which grounded and leaked oil at the Great Barrier Reef before high winds and heavy seas rock the region.

Salvage workers were expected to begin the difficult task at about 6.00pm (08.00GMT), with efforts given new urgency as the weather bureau warned strong winds could bring up to three-metre (10-foot) swells on Tuesday.

"Doing nothing at the moment is not an option," said Maritime Safety Queensland general manager Patrick Quirk.

"We would need to try to move that vessel before the swell and the wind increases tomorrow afternoon." More

Name a fossil, win R 75 000

The University of the Witwatersrand is offering a prize of R75 000 to a South African child who can come up with a name for a 1.95 million-year-old fossil of a new hominid species unveiled in the Cradle of Humankind last week.

The university said on Monday that the prize was "a celebration" of the discovery of the juvenile skeleton by nine-year-old South African boy, Matthew Berger, in August 2008.

"In celebration of the discovery of a 1.9-million year old juvenile skeleton in the Cradle of Humankind, by a young South African, Matthew Berger, Wits University and its partners Standard Bank and the Palaeontological Scientific Trust, invite the children of South Africa to name the skeleton," the university said.More

Swiss solar energy powered plane in maiden flight
by Andre Lehmann Andre Lehmann – Wed Apr 7, 10:37 am ET

PAYERNE, Switzerland (AFP) – The Solar Impulse aircraft, a pioneering Swiss bid to fly around the world on solar energy, successfully completed its first test flight in western Switzerland on Wednesday.

"There has never been in the past an aeroplane of that kind to fly. It was a huge question mark for us and it's an extraordinary relief," said Bertrand Piccard, pioneering round-the-world balloonist who co-founded the project.

"Today for Solar Impulse it's an incredible milestone. It gives us confidence for the next flight and for the next missions," he added.

The high tech prototype had lifted off into blue skies at a speed of just 45 kilometres per hour (28 miles per hour) after running a few hundred metres down the runway at Payerne air base shortly before 10:30 am (0830GMT)More

Lift off for Europes climate sattelite

A satellite to study how climate change affects Earth's icecaps finally launched into space Thursday five years after a first attempt failed, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced.

The 700-kilo (1,540 pound) CryoSat-2 module lifted off at 15:57 GMT on a Dnepr rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, separating from the launcher 17 minutes later.

Its mission is to measure changes in the thickness of the vast ice sheets that overlie Antarctica and Greenland, as well as variations in the thickness of the relatively thin ice floating in the polar oceans.

CryoSat-2 replaces the original CryoSat satellite lost in 2005 during a launch failure.
For climate physicists, ice cover is like a canary in a coal mine, providing invaluable early warning of the impacts of man-made temperature rise.

Over the past decade, mounting evidence points to the loss of floating summer sea ice in the Arctic and the breakup of large banks of ice on the Antarctic peninsula as global warming has intensified. More

Energy saving light bulbs change the TV channel

Viewers left completely bemused as their telly regularly changed channel at random have finally seen the light.

The unruly televisions appeared to take on a life of their own until engineers tracked the interference to a remote source: energy saving light bulbs.

The frequency of the flicker of the bulbs interferes with the infra-red sensors on remote control receivers.

Emma Clements and her husband Alistair were intrigued to find their Virgin Media box switching channels at random as well as turning on and off.

They were astonished to find a replacement box did exactly the same thing.
"At first we thought it was the children's sticky fingers on the remote control and that the buttons were sticking," Emma told Guardian Money.

"But the novelty soon began to wear off. With the new box it was worse, if anything."

A Virgin Media engineer suggested it could be related to a Philips energy saving bulb that was in a lamp about 12ft away from the television.

The hunch proved a good one when removing the bulb solved the problem.

A Philips Electronics spokeswoman said the company was surprised that users of the bulbs still experienced the interference.

"Some very early compact fluorescent lamps, shortly after starting, could cause interference with TV controls due to the frequency of operation of the bulb and when placed near a TV," she said.

"The frequency was quickly changed many years ago and we have had no recent reported incidents."

The company said it hopes to examine the bulb that caused the Clements' problems.
Traditional filament bulbs were banned by the EU in 2008 in favour of the more efficient low energy bulbs.

Shoppers rushed to stockpile the old style bulbs as they were phased out, while health campaigners complained the flicker of the efficient bulbs can cause migraines and dizziness.