Abderrahim Qanir - au de la

Saturday, March 5, 2011

EU backs away from 30% emissions target, leak shows

By Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News

The European Commission will not call for tougher targets on carbon emmissions despite analysis showing doing so would be cost-effective.

On Tuesday the commission will unveil a road-map on climate and energy policy.

Its own analysis said that an EU target of a 25% cut by 2020 could easily be met, and would be economically better than the existing target of 20%.

However, a senior diplomatic source has told BBC News that the final version will explicitly urge sticking at 20%.

The news has disappointed climate campaigners who accused heavy industries of "scaremongering".

The commission is also set to recommend that some of the 20% reduction can be achieved through buying emission credits from overseas, rather than entirely through cuts at home.

The analysis - leaked in a draft version of the road-map two weeks ago - said the price of carbon should be maintained through "setting aside" some of the allowances to emit that EU nations will receive for the period 2013-2020.

However, the BBC's source said this would not now be the case.

The door will be left open to adopting a 30% target if there is a new global deal under the UN climate negotiations.

Split ambitions

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The two commission directorates most closely involved in the issue - energy and climate - have been at loggerheads on the EU's ideal scale of ambition.

In the middle of last year, climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard released research showing that the economic slump had reduced emissions so much that the 20% or 30% targets would both be far cheaper to achieve than when they were adopted in 2008.

Emissions from industry, for example, fell by nearly 12% during 2009.

A group of academics calculated that given this fall, meeting the 20% target was tantamount to "business as usual".

Environmental groups have urged that in order to meet its "fair share" of global emissions cuts, and to re-invigorate the UN process, the EU should be contemplating 40%.

But energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger recently declared that going above 20% would lead to the "de-industrialisation" of Europe.

"Yet again it seems the scaremongering tactics of a handful of well connected industrial lobbyists have successfully castrated Europe's climate ambitions," said Baroness (Bryony) Worthington, director of the campaign organisation Sandbag.

"They also fail to mention that many of them are handsomely profiting from the sale of spare emissions permits which leave them largely untouched by requirements to reduce emissions.""The smokestack industries of Europe are wrong when they claim that the only way to meet our targets is through de-industrialisation; investing in new clean energy technologies will actually boost economic activity," she told BBC News.

However, some branches of industry do want tougher targets. Earlier this week, a group of bosses from leading energy companies urged the commission to go for at least 25%.

"As leaders of utility companies we know that the benefits of early action far outweigh the costs of inertia or delayed action," they said.

"Private investors take their signals from such target and... this will deliver more new jobs in innovative environmental and clean technologies and will secure competitive advantage within the borders of the EU."

Short-term worries

Back in 2008, the EU set three parallel targets for 2020:

cutting emissions by 20% from 1990 levels

delivering at least 20% of its energy from renewable sources

increasing energy efficiency by 20%

The bloc is on target to achieve the first two, but not yet the third; and the commission is due shortly to release a document setting out what extra needs to be done to meet it.

Calculations done for the road-map show that if that is achieved on top of the renewables target, emissions will fall 25% from 1990 levels by 2020.

They also show that a 25% cut would set the EU on the most economic pathway to achieving an 80-95% cut by 2050, the agreed long-term goal.

Nevertheless, the BBC's source said, concerns over the short-term impact of such a target meant 20% would be explicitly retained, as would the caveat that international trading could be used to meet it.

Not all of the road-map's wording has been agreed, but the final version is due to be published on Tuesday afternoon.

Member states would then have to ratify it in order for its contents to become official EU policy.

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Lab-grown brain cells should aid research into Alzheimer's

Scientists in the United States have managed to turn human embryonic stem cells into a type of brain cell linked to memory loss in Alzheimer's disease. The research, published in the journal Stem Cells, should help in the development and testing of potential new medicines to treat the neurodegenerative disease which affects around half a million people in the UK.

The researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago managed to coax the stem cells into becoming a type of neuron which dies off early in people with Alzheimer's disease. The cells in question are basal forebrain cholinergic neurons (BFCN), which have a key role in memory function, and their loss is thought to be significant in the early stages of the neurodegenerative condition.

These dishes of cells should provide a near limitless supply of neurons for research. Scientists need to know why these cells - critical for memory function - fail in Alzheimer's disease. It should enable them to test compounds on the laboratory samples in the search for treatments.

One of the authors of the study, John Kessler, chair of neurology at Northwestern University said: "We can literally screen tens of thousands of drugs at a time to find the kind of compound that will keep these cells alive. We can ultimately think about transplanting the cells to help the memory deficit." He said his team had also created the neurons from the skin cells of Alzheimer's patients and from healthy volunteers. He was cautious about when the research might yield treatments but said 10 years appeared "realistic".

The Alzheimer's Society said the study was a "major step forward" but went on to say that further research was needed to find out whether these stem cells actually work in the brain. It urged greater investment in dementia research. The term "major breakthrough" was used on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 although it was made crystal clear that benefits for patients were a long way off.

Another charity, Alzheimer's Research UK was more cautious. It said the prospect of stem cells being used as a treatment for the disease was still a very long way off and there was no evidence yet to suggest this method would be able to help people with dementia.

I confess I worry about the phrases "major breakthrough" and "major step forward". For me, the former should be reserved for something which is a game-changing piece of research, or a new device or treatment which transforms the way we combat a condition. Like many things it's hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. "Major step forward" is problematic unless you also know how many steps there are left to travel on a journey.

It seems to me that this research is another tantalising example of what MIGHT ultimately be achieved through manipulating human embryonic stem cells - the body's master cells.

Being able to generate the neurons which fail in early Alzheimer's and to test agents on them that may promote survival, will be extremely useful. But families affects by Alzheimer's need to know that there are a whole lot of major steps forward still needed before it yields an effective treatment for the disease.

Flood-resistant rice 'also has drought-proof trait'

By Mark KinverScience and environment reporter, BBC News

A gene that increases a rice plant's resistance to floods also boosts its ability to recover from droughts, a study has shown.

Researchers found that the gene, Sub1A, allowed to plants to survive by growing fresh shoots after a period of drought.

Rice is the primary food for three billion people, and more than 25% the world's harvest is grown in areas that experience extreme weather conditions.

Details have been published in the journal The Plant Cell.

"Flood tolerance does not reduce drought tolerance in these plants, and appears to even benefit them when they encounter drought," observed lead author Julia Bailey-Serres from the University of California Riverside's department of botany and plant sciences.

The gene's role in providing rice plants with a higher tolerance of being submerged in water was first identified in 2006, just 12 months after the vital food crop's complete genome was unscrambled.

Professor Bailey-Serres and her team wanted to follow up the discovery of the "flood-proof" trait provided by the presence of the Sub1A gene did not reduce plants' ability cope with other environmental stresses - such as drought.

They reported that the gene served as a point where the pathways of the plant's response to both submergence and drought, resulting in the crop's ability to survive and recover from either kind of extreme weather event.

"Our findings suggest that the plant recovers well from drought and growing new shoots," Professor Bailey-Serres said. "This is something that is also seen with flooding."

Plant breeders have already utilised the gene's flood tolerance traits and transferred it into high-yielding varieties.

The researchers said the next stage of the research would involve scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) plant specimens containing the Sub1A gene in field trials to see if they display a similar trait in natural conditions.

Abderrahim Qanir

Island tool finds show early settlers' diversity

Caches of tools and animal remains from around 12,000 years ago, found on islands off the California coast, have given remarkable insight into the lives of the first Americans.

The finds show fine tool technology and a rich maritime economy existed there.

The tools vary markedly from mainland cultures of the era such as the Clovis.

The finds, reported in Science, also suggest that rather than a land route to South America, early humans may have used coastal routes.

A team studying California's Channel Islands, off its southern coast, has found that the islands show evidence both of differing technologies and a differing diet, even among the few islands.

"On San Miguel island we found a lot of pretty remarkable tools, but the animal materials there were largely shellfish," said Torben Rick, an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

"Over on Santa Rosa, that site was dominated by bird remains and a few sea mammal and fish remains... and no shellfish at all.

"What's interesting about that is it shows us not only were these people out there living a coastal life, but they were taking advantage of the full suite of resources available to them; they had a very diversified maritime economy."

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As more research produces more sites, we will see that the story of the first Americans is not linear and that there will continue to be more surprises”

Tom DillehayVanderbilt University

The tools that the team found hold the greatest surprise, however, in that they differ significantly from those of mainland cultures like the Clovis and Folsom.

Points found on the islands - which could even be arrow-heads - are thin, serrated, and have barbed points that show striking workmanship for the period.

Inland tools had fluted points, and it is known they were used to hunt large animals including the woolly mammoth. The island points were so delicate as to almost certainly have been used for hunting fish. What is more, many of them do not reappear in the archaeological record.

"These are extremely delicate, finely made tools that don't occur later in time," Dr Rick said. "Finding these types of tools at all three of these sites really suggests a similar group of people, in terms of technology and subsistence - and were pretty different from what came later."

Dr Rick said that the evidence supported the idea that the islands were short-term or seasonal encampments, rather than permanent settlements. The team also found a piece of obsidian on the islands.

"The Coso obsidian source [is] on the mainland a couple hundred miles away, so we know they were participating in long-distance exchange networks," he said.

'More surprises'

A long-standing model of human exploration and settlement of the Americas holds that, after reaching North America through the Bering Straits off Alaska, a concerted push southward led early humans including the Clovis culture across inland parts of the continent to South America.

But anthropologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University said that the Channel Island finds were part of a mounting body of evidence against that simplistic story.

"As today, there are cultural continuities but there also is constant change, which is well evidenced by these and other sites being discovered throughout the Americas. As more research produces more sites, we will see that the story of the first Americans is not linear and that there will continue to be more surprises."What they tell us is that there was widespread cultural diversity at the outset of human entry and dispersion throughout the Americas, and that the old, now-dead Clovis first model often misleads us to believe that there was only one major way of first human expansion throughout the Western Hemisphere," he told BBC News.

"As I have published and said before, there were probably many different migrations and many different migration routes overland and along the coastal ways, and this evidence is pointing in that direction too."

However, Dr Rick said that it was too early to upend the larger picture of human migration across the Americas, and that further finds - some of which now lie underwater around the Channel Islands - could shed more light on the story in the future.

"My colleague Jon Erlandson refers to them as 'postcards from the past'," Dr Rick said. "They give us just a brief snapshot of 'hey, we were here and here's what we were doing for a brief period of time'.

"We have to be a little cautious in our interpretations; we're trying to put together a puzzle, and the puzzle may have 150 pieces and we've got five of them. So it's really difficult to get the full picture of what they were doing."

Intellectual Property of BBC News