Spirits Dancing

My flight path into Adelaide yesterday went over the area where the once mighty River Murray now trickles into Lake Alexandrina and the sea, and where an ecological disaster has been unfolding over the past decade of drought. Ironically, only minutes further on I saw this  ‘Jesus lives‘ spelt out by lopping down trees. Join the dots, people.

Then I was delighted to glimpse of a large teddy bear on a bicycle on the grass between the Adelaide Airport runways as we landed! Apparently his name is Buck, he’s been around for 27 years, and his attire changes every now and then to reflect local interests. This time he was celebrating the Tour Down Under which took place in January.

Tags: adelaide airport, buck, jesus lives, Murray lower lakes, teddy bear

This suggestion of a seagull skeleton is a prop for a new play I’m working on, but I rather like it as an object for itself. It’s given me some ideas for making some stranger ones when I get some time later.

By coincidence, today I happened across Chris Jordan’s photographic collection Midway: Message form the Gyre, a photographic documentation how albatross chicks on Midway Atoll ban in the middle of the Pacific Ocean often die because they end up being fed heaps of plastic junk. It’s shocking – only look if you are feeling strong.

Tags: albatross, bird, make, prop, skeleton

These penguin masks, being worn outside the UN Framework of Climate Change Conference in Bali last November, interested me because I liked the way the coarse gauze was so effective, while not hiding the faces. The photo is taken from our newspaper at the time, via Associated Press.

I’ve always thought a cool way of making a penguin character would be to have a head mask, but then wear a tuxedo as the rest of the costume, letting people make the penguin suit connection themselves. However no-one has ever taken me up on the suggestion!

We turned our lights off for Earth Hour tonight. It was a beautiful clear starry night.

Tags: bodysuits, climate change, earth hour, masks, penguin suit, penguins, puppetry, puppets

These days images are often shown at funerals. It is usually grainy old family photos looping on a roll-down portable screen. Imagine, instead, the church having a HDTV, and that you can stream chosen image feeds to it from your computer. If family and friends wanted to, they could contribute feeds that would become part of the source material for the screen display. This is one great use I can see for Dave Winer’s new product,  FlickrFan.

Used in a more private setting, its easy to see it being useful for family photo viewing and so on. I have reservations about it being used as a way to provide an ambience in one’s living room. I find image (and especially moving image) too arresting to treat as part of the background in a social situation, unless I’m inured to the footage. So it might either highjack conversation, or at the other extreme become like muzak. I also worry if it will be pitched by some as a great solution to having an acre of black flat screen in your lounge.  I think those big flat screens chew up a lot of energy, and to have them running a screen saver all the time only increases the energy usage. As far as the planet is concerned we have to be learning to turn things off more, rather than keeping them on in the background.

Tags: climate change, flickerfan, funerals

The Walk against Warming on Sunday drew about 9000 people in Canberra. It felt substantially bigger than last year. As yet neither of the major parties are addressing the issue with the seriousness it deserves, which has surprised me in a way. I thought it might be the clincher issue for a Labor victory. The tubeman above was at the side of the crowd, encouraging us to keep industrial relations rights in mind when we vote. This puppet was perhaps, but not conclusively, a John Howard?

I had some fun looking at Flickr for other WaW puppets. By far the most interesting to me were four big puppets at the Adelaide walk: Al Gore, Albert Einstein, Vandana Shiva, and Mikhail Gorbachev. I’d like to know who made them. Here is a selection of others:

• Peter Garret; close-up
• Turtles against climate change
• Death
• Another Howard
• Howard being throttled by polar bear ; and chased
• Seven-eyed sheep
• Coal stacks
• Strange bearish creature

Tags: al gore, climate change, einstein, environment, gorbachev, puppetry, puppets, street theatre, vandana shiva, walk against warming

This guy explains it well.

(via Mary Robinette Kowal)

I’m taken with this lovely leaf logo which belongs to a new green blog Earth2Tech (a new part of the GigaOm blog network) which will focus on the business side of green and clean technology.

And check out the cool Power of Wind ad produced by Nordpol+ Hamburg for EPURON, a renewable energy company based in Germany.

(via Laughing Squid)

Tags: green, power of wind, video

(Illustration credit: Ian Sharpe, Canberra Times)

Michael had an opinion piece about the Great Global Warming Swindle film published in the Canberra Times.

CSIROpod also has a podcast interview with him; here is a direct link.

Tags: cartoon, climate change, global warming, sharpe, swindle

World Unity is crucial to the climate: Michael’s article on climate change as an archetypal tragedy of the commons is in The Age today. Read it – its good stuff!

Tags: climate change, tragedy of the commons

A new analysis by Global Carbon Project scientists shows that carbon intensity in the world economy is increasing. While emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are accelerating worldwide, we are gaining fewer economic benefits from each tonne of fossil fuel burned. A study being published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows that CO2 emissions increased by 1.1 % per year through the 1990s but the rate of increase jumped to 3 % per year in the 2000s.

In Can climate change get worse? it has The Age looks at the implications for Australia from the same data, quoting Dr
Michael Raupach (senior CSIRO scientist and co-chairman of the Global Carbon Project, who led the international research).

The Age: CO2 emissions speed up over 2000: study
AM: Carbon emissions rise at twice the world rate (audio interview and transcript)
SMH: Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions twice world rate

Update:

The CSIRO media release provides a summary of the Australian focus in Background: Australia’s CO² Emissions in the Global Context:

Australia, with 0.32 per cent of the world population, contributes 1.43 per cent of CO² emissions from fossil fuels. In a global context, and particularly in comparison with other developed regions (the USA, European Union and Japan), these emissions rank as follows:

• • Australia’s per capita emissions in 2004 were 4.5 times the global average, just below the value for the USA.
  • Australia’s carbon intensity of energy (amount of carbon burned as fossil fuel per unit of energy) is 20 per cent higher than the world average, and 25 to 30 per cent higher than values for the USA, Europe and Japan. Therefore, the energy efficiency of fossil fuel use is significantly lower in Australia than in these other developed countries.
  • Australia’s carbon intensity of GDP (amount of carbon burned as fossil fuel per dollar of wealth created) is 25 per cent higher than the world average. It is a little higher than the USA and nearly double that of Europe and Japan. Therefore, the overall carbon efficiency of the economy, per unit of fossil fuel used, is about half that for
    Europe and Japan.
  • Over the last 25 years, the average growth rate of Australian emissions was approximately twice the growth rate for world as a whole, twice the growth rate for the USA and Japan, and five times the growth rate for Europe.
  • The rate of improvement (decline) in the carbon intensity of GDP for Australia is lower than in the USA and Europe.

(Disclaimer: Michael is my husband)

Tags: australia, carbon cycle, climate change, global carbon emissions