Tiempo Climate Newswatch

United States President George W Bush says he is "fired up" about renewable energy. "We're close to changing the way we live in an incredibly positive way," he said while visiting the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He downplayed the push to build nuclear power plants and emphasised clean coal, ethanol, hybrid cars, wind and solar power. To achieve the "national goal of becoming less dependent on foreign sources of oil," Bush said "we're not relying upon one aspect of renewable energy to help this country become less dependent. We're talking about a variety of fronts."

"I wasn't satisfied with the federal response," Bush acknowledged, responding to a White House report on the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. "We will learn ... to better protect the American people." The report found numerous failures in the government's response and proposed over 100 fixes, including better communications, improved evacuation plans and first aid training for students. It was concluded that the White House should have recognized problems earlier and moved faster to coordinate federal aid.

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• ENS
• UPI

• USA Today
• Lessons Learned, the White House report

Mangrove plants account for a tenth of the dissolved organic carbon flowing from land to the ocean even though they cover less than 0.1 per cent of the land surface world-wide. The results, which suggest that the mangrove is one of the main sources of dissolved organic carbon in the ocean, stem from a study of the carbon output from a large Brazilian mangrove forest by Thorsten Dittmar at Florida State University in Tallahassee, United States, and his collaborators.

"To understand global biogeochemical cycles it is crucial to quantify the sources of marine dissolved organic carbon," according to Dittmar and his co-authors. "We show that mangroves play an unexpected role in the global carbon cycle." The mangrove root system traps leaf litter, rich in carbon, running off the land and dissolved organic matter is leached into the coastal waters from this sediment. Tides then flush the carbon into the open ocean. The mangrove ecosystem has declined by nearly half over recent decades because of coastal development. The researchers fear that this trend may be cutting off the link between the land and ocean, affecting the composition of the atmosphere and global climate.

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Background

• Science Daily

• On the Web: the Mangrove Ecosystem

According to the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project sea level around the Pacific island of Tonga appears to have risen by about ten centimetres over the past 13 years. Sea level has been rising at all stations monitored, but the rise has been greatest at Tonga, where it averaged 8.4mm per year. The oldest gauge in the Pacific, at Lautoka, Fiji, was installed in October 1992 and shows an average trend of a 2.8mm rise a year since then.

The coordinators of the monitoring project advise caution interpreting the data. "Observed trends in sea level include natural variability, for example, events such as El Niño and effects due to many other atmospheric, oceanographic and geological processes. Longer-term data sets for all stations are required in order to separate the effects of the different signals."

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Background

• Stuff
• ABC Online

• IPCC
• On the Web: Small Island States