A bit of Geography related news..........

So, the Geography exam is out of the way now - I hope it went well - and so I can finally move on from writing revision related posts (which I hope were useful) and start writing about some slightly more interesting things. I thought I would quickly outline the things I am planning to write about over the next few weeks, once I have finished the rest of my exams, whilst we don't have any Geography lessons. So, firstly there will be a few book and film reviews that I have been meaning to write for the past month or so followed by some more in depth posts into interesting and easily debatable areas that haven't fitted into the sylabus we have just finished and just some general Geography topics that I don't really know alot about but would like to. I hope it doesn't get too boring or that I start to scare you with my enthusiam but I have been banned by my family from talking about anything remotely Geography related for the next three weeks, until lessons restart, and have been told to write it all on here, so they can be spared from it - I think it is safe to say that they aren't as interested in Geography as I am!

Tonight it is only going to be a short post (I think) from me on a few stories that I have read in the news that have caught me eye........

• Ever since the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill last year, the way in which countries and oil companies are able to respond to such disasters has come under public scrutiny, with many calling for more preparation and better methods incase such a disaster was to occur again. Well, this week, the UK tested its planned repsonse to an oil spill off to the west of Shetland. The exercise, named Exercise Sula, involved the use of oil spill containment booms and planes spraying water to simulate dispersant. The aim of the exercise was to test the responses of the numerous authorities that would be involved in a response to an oil spill. However, perhaps, the greatest obstacle faced by the authorities involved was dealing with the weather conditions. Over the two day exercise, winds frequently reached 50mph and strong waves that prevented the the full extent of the booms, which would be required normally, to be set out whilst the pretend dispersant was been blown everywhere and anywhere. Therefore, this suggests that, perhaps, this is the not necessarily the best method to use in the repsonse to an oil spiil - especially if one was to occur during winter! However, atleast it can be said that we are taking an active role in improving the global preparation for another oil spill which, because we are digging deeper and deeper wells, the probability of such a disaster occuring again is increasing. This National Geographic article would be of interest to anyone who is interested in the regulations in place in the USA about drilling oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico and anything else linked to BP and exploration for oil in this area of the world - While BP Eyes Return to the Gulf, Safeguards Debated .
• I have personally never thought about a possible link between earthquakes and glacial lakes before but apparently the relationship between the two could be disasterous for countries, such as Nepal , which lies at the base of the Himalayas. The Himalayas is a sesmically active region that is covered in glacial lakes which, due to the melting of glaciers, are growing and with an earthquake, predicted, to be overdue, the risk of one of these glacial lakes rupturing threatens to flood huge areas downstream. The epicentre being close a glacial lake, thereby causing it to 'explode', is not the only way in which an earthquake has the potential to rupture these growing lakes. Avalanches and landslides, which can be provoked by earthquakes, can also have a similar effect. For example, in 1985 the glacial lake Dig Tsho, in eastern Nepal, ruptured due to an avalanche and it resulted in the flooding of a nearby HEP plant and much other infrastructure. So, why has this not been a big problem before and why are people only just starting to sound their concerns? Well, the last time a big earthquake occured in the Himilayas was in 1934 and the glacial lakes only really started to appear in the 1950's and they have since grown, therefore have come into closer contact with the most sesmically active areas of the Himilayas. This poses a huge threat for many countries lying at the base of the Himalayas - most of which have large and expanding populations...........
• Switching now to the other side of the globe, to another worrying story. The deforestation rates in Brazil are on an increase with 480 kilometres squared worth of forest being lost over 8 weeks in the Mato Grosso region - a fivefold increase on last year. This increase is believed to have been caused by the uncertainity and the public political disagreements over the forest consevation rules which vary spatially with farmers in the Amazon having to preserve 80% of the forest whilst farmers elsewhere onyl have to preserve 20% - Lets just hope that this new trends does not continue and Brazil reverts back to reducing its deforestation rates which fell to their lowest since the 1980's last year.
• A bit of Geography TV now....... I watch the first episode of Windfarm Wars as part of my revision for the exam and I just caught the second episode on BBC iPlayer. Windfarm Wars is a 4 part documentary that follows the struggle of windfarm developers as they try to persuade the council and locals, in a village near Dartmoor, to allow for the development of a wind farm nearby and they processes they have to go through and the problems and opposition they face. This is the link to the first two episodes if anyone is interested - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=Windfarm%20wars
• China has now acknowledged the problems associated with the Three Gorges Dam and has said that steps need to be taken to help the 1.3 million displaced by the construction of this $40 billion project, protect the environment and prevent any major geological disasters occuring.

• And finally, a quick update on the future of nuclear power. The findings of the initial report commisioned by the UK government was published this week and concluded that there is no need to prevent the further development of nuclear power in the UK because of the events in Japan. Protection against coastal flooding was taken into account in this report as rising sea levels could threaten most of the nuclear power plants in the UK as they are built along the coast but all were found to be suffieciently protected. The situation in Japan is slightly different as the Prime Minister has announced that the country will not build any new reactors and instead, to make up the energy shortfall, greatly increase its use of renewables - especially wind.

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/mg21028136.600/mg21028136.600-1_300.jpg



This blog is likely to be greatly neglected until half term and all my exams are over and so good luck to everyone in the rest of your exams - especially to those of you resitting the skills exam on Tuesday. Encase you havent read Millie's blog recently or seen the FB page, she is running an online revision session on Monday evening at 19:30 - I am sure it will be very beneficial to join in - and so check out her blog for more details.

Buoyant Bangladesh

Do you read National Geographic? Well, if you don't, I would strongly recommed that you do but if you struggle to find the time, I definetly recommend you read the latest article in the year long special series, 7 billion people as it links very closely to not only the population module but also the last section of the coasts module, rising sea levels, that we finished off last week.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/05/bangladesh/belt-text

Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and is 'a place where one person, in a nation of 164 million, is mathematically incapable of being truly alone'. Despite a sharp drop in it's CBR, the population is expected to grow to 220 million by 2050 and, due to trends in sea level, much of the landmass would be permanently underwater - further increasing the population density of this region. Sea level rise is not just something that will affect those in poor, low lying countries like Bangladesh as more than a third of the worlds population live within 62 miles of the sea. It has been predicted that by 2100 there could be as many as 250 climate refugees (related http://geography-student.blogspot.com/2011/02/do-developed-countries-have-moral.html), the majority of which displaced by rising sea levels and as many as 30 million coming from the coast of Bangladesh.

Click on the link to see the full interactive version

Where are these people supposed to go? That is a question being asked by many at present............. India is building a six foot barrier of barbed wire and concrete along its 2,500 mile border with Bangladesh to prevent immigration from Bangladesh. With this option being taking away from those displaced by the encroaching sea, many choose to move to the urban areas further inland which is causing huge problems for cities like the capital Dhaka. It has been predicted that by 2030, 41% of the population will live in urban areas with only 52% having access to sanitation. This predicted scenairo is the perfect breeding ground for disease and crime and would further hold back Bangladesh's development.

However, climate change not only threatens the coast but also the inland communties as, like neighbouring India, the main rivers in Bangladesh are fed by the Tibetan Plateau snowfall and the monsoon rains - both of which have been disrupted by changes to the climate. Although some may consider monsoons to hamper economic progress, my personal experience of them in India made me realise how much people rely on them and plan their year around then - even right down to day to day lives. When I was in India the monsoon arrived late (although when it did finally appear, its presence was definetly felt!) and this uncertainity to when it was going to arrive caused a lot of distruption and worry to the local people who explained that, over recent years the timing of the monsoons has never been as predicted. Adapting to these changes is not easy but, in Bangladesh, many new ideas have been implemented to help people cope with the rising sea levels. These include altering farming practices to enable them to farm on floating gardens and therefore still grow the crops required to survive. Many farmers have totally altered what they grow. Rising sea levels have increased the salinity of farm land and rivers to such levels that rice can't grow, whilst other fields remain flooded for most of the year. Therefore many farmers have changed from growing rice to growing crabs and shrimps in the ponds that have been created and then vegetables on the embankments. Solar-powered school boats have also been introduced so that kids can attend schools even if it floods whilst limiting the potential damage to infrastruture.

So, can the developed world learn from anything from Bangladesh? The attitude that many of the Bangladesh people share towards the problems they face is admirable - they don't complain but just shape their lives around the frequently changing conditions, with many saying they have moved more than 40 times within their life times. I am unsure if as many people in the developed world would be as resilient as many of those affected in Bangladesh have been. They have utilised their limited resources to the best of their ability but this problem is not likely to go away. In the near future, it is likely that Bangladesh will recieve more international aid to help it deal with the effects of climate change because due to the target set, by the developed nations in the Copenhagen conference of 2009, to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 for poor countries who face many problems which they played only a minimal role in creating. However, this is clearly not an problem that can be remedied by money.

Before I end up re-writing the whole article in my own words I had better stop - I have just picked out the main points but the article is honestly a really good thing to read as part of your revision. Although this is after our summer exam keep your eyes open for the July article related to this series which will discuss what it will take to feed 9 billion people in 2045.



Wind farms paid to switch off.....

6 wind farm operators in Scotland were paid nearly £900,000 (in total) to halt their wind turbines for several hours between the 5th and 6th of April because too much energy was being produced and the National Grid couldn't cope. The night in question was a very wet and blustery one and so the turbines were producing a lot of energy, as were the hydro-electric power plants but demand for the electricty they were generating was very low. Storage space for this excess electricty was extremely limited and the power could not be transported to England as the transmission cables lacked the capacity to carry it south. The nuclear power plants in Scotland continued to run as per normal whilst England met its energy needs purely by using fossil fuels.

Scots windfarms paid cash to stop producing energy

At present, wind turbines contribute less than 5% of the UK's energy needs and if situations like this occur again then it will become increasingly unlikely that the UK will meet its target of producing 20% of its power from renewable sources by 2020. I think that not only does this paid switch off demonstrate that renewables can generate a lot of energy but that, perhaps, due to a lack of transmission cables and storage space, the percentage that they can contribute to the UK's energy mix is being restricted. Therefore, if we are to meet the targets, more investment needs to be placed in developing transmission networks and storage space. Storage space is crucial and its development needs to occur along side that of the turbines themselves due to the lack of consistency in the amount of power they produce. I think that this also highlighted the flaws in the subsidy scheme as the average turbine generates power worth around £150,000 but attracts subsidies of £250,000 which only increases consumer bills. Also, in some cases, the compensation offered to cover the switch off was 20 times the value of the power the wind farms would have generated which, to me any, seems a ridiculous - why should wind farms earn more money for switching off the turbines than keeping them on?

A glance at some of the Geography news of the week

I thought I would post some links to some Geography related stories that have been in the news over the past fews days, that may have been overlooked due to frequent reports of the ever changing situation in Japan and the Middle East. Unfortunatley, due to  a mountain of other work to tackle, I don't have time to write about them but they are definetly worth reading if you can find a spare 5 minutes.

China tops global clean energy table. After a recent study compiled by the US Pew Environmental Group, China has remained the worlds leading investor in low carbon energy technology with an investment of £34.1bn in 2010. China is also the world's largest producer of wind and solar power units. Argentina topped the list, in terms of year-on-year growth, as it saw its investment grow by 568% since 2009. The USA, even though their investment increased by 51% slipped behind Germany, to 3rd place. The UK's investment dropped by 70% which means they are now ranked outside the top 10. The drastic drop in the UK's investment has been partly blamed on the uncertainity that was created by the formation of the coalition government. The report concluded that long term certainity, created by national policies and government commitment, was most attractive to investors and therefore countries who offered this, like China, India and Germany, have been most successful in securing and utilising investment for the development of low carbon technology. The low carbon energy sector does not include nuclear power and so statistics surrounding this were not included. Nuclear power attracted $243bn in 2010 which was an increase of 30% since 2009 and an huge increase of 630% from 2004 - it will be interesting though to see if and how investment figures will be influenced by the events in Japan........

UN report: Cities ignore Climate Change at their peril - This article is defintely worth reading as it links energy intensity and climate change to development and the population trends created by development. It also discusses not only the changes, the report concludes, that these trends will have on the environment and the climate but the impacts it will have on water supplies, energy provision, infrastructure, industrial production and public services.

Green Machine: Emissions cuts could save 280,000 lives. Another article that manages to link the energy module to population and it provides some very interesting statistics which am I am sure would be great to include in some essays relevant to the topic. It dicusses the other advantages, apart from the obvious environmental ones, that reductions in carbon dioxide emissions would have - many of which I must admit that I hadn't thought of.

These articles are very helpful if you are wanting to improve the links you can make between the population and energy module - especially the last two - and they all provide little bits of information and data that I am sure would look really good if you could sneak them into longer answer questions.

Can the planet cope with the growing population?

This year the global population will reach seven billion people and it is predicted that by 2045 it could reach nine billion. However, can the planet take the cope?

This month I have read two very interesting articles in two different magazines which have both discussed this very issue. I am sure your Geography teachers have mentioned the article in this month’s National Geographic and if you haven’t had the chance to read it yet, I would as it is truly a great article and it manages to link together practically the whole population module (there is a link to the article and a video on the Facebook page).  As I am sure you all know; population theorists are split into two categories – pessimists or optimists. Malthus (pessimist) created his general law on population growth which stated that ‘it necessarily grows faster than the food supply, until war, disease, and famine arrive to reduce the number of people’ in 1798. It is hard to determine whether or not he is right as there has been a population explosion but, even after repeated famines, droughts and wars in Africa for example, historians believe that the world population has not fallen considerably since the Black Death. Instead the  global population has continued to grow most impart due to technological and scientific improvements which have meant that the average life expectancy has risen from 35 years to 77 years. Ehrlich, another pessimist, predicted (in the 1970’s) that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death”. However this too did not occur on the scale Ehrlich predicted due to the green revolution (introduction of high-yield seeds, irrigation and pesticides and fertilizers meant grain production doubled) and although many people are undernourished mass starvation is rare. Ehrlich was right though in terms of his prediction that the global population would explode as, improvements in medicine, saved many people from dying which suggests that population growth is an inevitable side effect of development.

India is a great example of a country which is trying to develop whilst wrestling with the problems associated with a rapidly growing population. Since 1960, India has gained 782 million people and by 2030 its population is expected to exceed China’s. Like Ehrlich, I too, have visited India and can totally support his statement that explained how, in India, there are people everywhere. Clean water, along with food, is one of the main issues in India and this is likely to only get worse as there is growing concerns in India over the country’s water security as all of India’s important rivers originate in Tibet. Tibet is controlled by China who also has issues with water due to falling water tables and the draining of the Yellow River. Threat to India's water security article

 During my time in India I spent 5 days in a school in Chennai that was run as almost a charity and so was free (to a certain extent). From talking to many of the girls at the school I gained the understanding that education totally altered the way they viewed themselves and their futures. Instead of wanting to settle down and have children they now wanted to further their education and have careers first. Children in India, unlike many in more developed countries, don’t take education for granted as they realise that it is the key to the future. They even have a famous saying, which was written in every classroom, in which they ranked teachers just below God. Personally I agree that education is the key to a better future and, from my knowledge of the DTM, I also think that it is key to development. The fertility rate in India is falling, which could be linked to the development of sterilization schemes, but I personally think that it is partly due to the fact that children in India, on average, are a lot better educated than their parents. This has changed attitudes and so, slowly, the idea that the number of children determines social status is being replaced by other ideas. Kerala, which has a literacy rate of 96.6%, is an example of a region in India that supports my belief that education is vital as improvements in education have allowed Kerala to have similar basic human development indices to countries in the developed world.

Space for 7 billion people is not an issue as it is believed that you could fit seven billion people standing shoulder to shoulder in the city of Los Angeles. Even if by 2045 there are 9 billion people on the planet, living on the six habitable continents, demographers believe that the world population density will be just over half of what population density is in France today. Space, therefore, is clearly not an issue but can the world feed 9 billion mouths…….

An article in last week’s New Scientist outlined the findings of the five year modelling exercise performed by INRA and CIRAD (French national agricultural and development research agencies) which suggested that ‘we don’t need to starve in order to preserve the environment’. The results of this model suggested that ‘realistic yield increases could feed everyone, even as farms take measures to protect the environment, such as preserving forests or cutting down on the use of fossil fuels’. To be able to feed 9 billion people the INRA said that waste needs to be prevented as on average, the model calculated that the rich waste up to 800 calories worth of food a day.

New Scientist article - we can feed 9 billion people

 The UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers also released a report this week that sided with a more optimistic view of how we can solve the issues created by population growth. The report says that ‘to sustain our future Earth, even as the population hits 9 billion, we already have all the technical fixes we need’. The report claims that the only things preventing this are politics and economics. The report uses the examples of how “market failures” are preventing low carbon energy technologies being used and how, they believe, we produce enough food already to feed 9 billion people but that 2/3 fails to reach mouths, to support their report. In terms of providing water the report says “Forget large dams: increased water storage should come from recharging aquifers with treated waste water and floodwaters”. The report recognises that, as population grows, urbanisation will increase and so slums will become more of an issue but instead of demolishing them the report says that they need help to improve as otherwise they will just return.

New Scientist article - Housing 9 billion

Personally I am undecided on whether or I would class myself as a population pessimist or optimist as I agree with parts of both Malthus’ and Boserup’s argument as GM crops and renewable energy sources are examples of how we are developing solutions to problems caused by population growth but, on the other hand, what would the size of global population be if countries had not experienced loss through famines, droughts, wars and natural disasters?

On a totally different note, I think the A2 students are about to start a climate module and in the same edition of the New Scientist there was an interesting article on climate predictions and how they are formed. It also explains why predictions differ so much and change frequently. I was surprised to discover how much bearing clouds have on whether or not countries will face warming or cooling as some clouds (high, thin ones) tend to stop more outgoing radiations (low thins ones would have the opposite effect and cool the climate). Also that both the size of a clouds water droplets and the holes within the cloud greatly affect a clouds ability to reflect incoming radiation. Even if you are not studying climate I think it is an interesting read for anyone doing Geography (to view the article online go to this link http://www.newscientist.com/search?doSearch=true&query=casting+a+critical+eye+on+climate+models , click on the first article and then you have to register to see it but it’s free to do so).

I am really sorry about the length but I didn’t realise quite how much I had written until I had finished it.  I promise I will try and make them shorter in the future…..