The melting of the permafrost - another risk of climate change

Percolating through seawater

Among the multitude of impacts of climate change, rising temperatures and increased CO2 emissions, one of the other lesser known results is the release of methane from the permafrost regions of the Northern hemisphere. Research in 2010 in the East Siberian Artic Shelf identified methane concentrations eight times higher than the rest of the Artic Ocean and almost a hundred locations of higher methane release. The unlocking of methane in the permafrost, should it occur at a higher rate due to higher temperatures would lead to a warming in the atmosphere which would be impossible to stop.

Are wind turbines the answer for renewable energy?

Wind Turbine Farm, Bungendore, New South Wales, Australia

An article from New Scientist has raised an interesting question surrounding possible limitations on renewable energy sources other than solar and actually going backward rather than solving one of the critical energy issues.

Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, says that efforts to satisfy a large proportion of our energy needs from the wind and waves will sap a significant proportion of the usable energy available from the sun. In effect, he says, we will be depleting green energy sources. His logic rests on the laws of thermodynamics, which point inescapably to the fact that only a fraction of the solar energy reaching Earth can be exploited to generate energy we can use.When energy from the sun reaches our atmosphere, some of it drives the winds and ocean currents, and evaporates water from the ground, raising it high into the air. Much of the rest is dissipated as heat, which we cannot harness.

At present, humans use only about 1 part in 10,000 of the total energy that comes to Earth from the sun. But this ratio is misleading, Kleidon says. Instead, we should be looking at how much useful energy - called "free" energy in the parlance of thermodynamics - is available from the global system, and our impact on that.

Humans currently use energy at the rate of 47 terawatts (TW) or trillions of watts, mostly by burning fossil fuels and harvesting farmed plants according to Kleidon's calculations. This corresponds to roughly 5 to 10 per cent of the free energy generated by the global system.

"It's hard to put a precise number on the fraction," he says, "but we certainly use more of the free energy than [is used by] all geological processes." In other words, we have a greater effect on Earth's energy balance than all the earthquakes, volcanoes and tectonic plate movements put together.

Like so much of the current research into energy and environmental alternatives, considerable additional data needs to be gathered, but if correct, this model poses a considerable barrier to be overcome if fossil fuel reliance is to be fully replaced by alternative renewable energy sources.

Executive salaries - where greed is not good

With the continuing and argueably expected poor economic conditions worldwide, the focus again has come onto the issue of executive and Board pay given its' scale and magnitude. The various rounds of Annual General Meetings of listed companies means that share/stockholders are presented with remuneration reports detailing the various levels of base pay, bonuses and share options.  A snapshot from Annual Reports reveals the data for CEOs of major Australian Corporations:

• ANZ Bank: $10.86M
• BHP Billiton: $10.84M
• Commonwealth Bank: $8.64M
• Crown: $7.71M
• Macquarie Group: $8.69M
• National Australia Bank: $7.73M
• Rio Tinto: $12.75M
• Westpac: $9.59M
• Woodside: $7.77M

Non executive Board directors of listed companies typically can expect between $200K to $300K in directors fees per company together with share options. But how realistic are these pay levels if the returns to shareholders are stagnant at best or most likely falling at worst (apart from the mining boom in Australia) ?