Ever wanted to know more about solar energy in our community?

Well now’s your chance!

Yarra Community Solar (YCS) in conjunction with the City of Yarra and YCAN is running a FREE event to share all the ins and outs of solar energy. Come spend a fun 2 hours exploring two local solar–panel sites. Participate in an informative discussion on how they work and learn about the use of this technology in larger community solar projects. Also, we’ll be having some drinks afterwards so if you’re at all interested in volunteering for YCS this will be a great chance to meet the team.
Sunday April 14^th 2:30-4:30pm

Meet at Mark Street Hall – 1 Mark St, Nth Fitzroy (just off Edinburgh gardens)

Drinks 4:30pm onwards

Go to the YCS facebook invite for more details.

Hope to see you there!

From your local community solar project volunteer team:
Mack, Berish, Neil, Jen, Taegen and Kati
communitysolar@ycan.org.au.

ps. YCS just got a write up in The Age - “Bright spark spurs community-owned solar system.” Check it out. It features our very own Taegen Edwards.

slip, slop, slap….& byo waterbottle to cycle or stroll our edible neighbourhoods route through Yarra’s diverse & inspiring mix of streetscape food gardens.

Meet the gardeners and hear about the gardens at these times:

10.30am cnr Ramsden St/Clifton Av, Clifton Hill ( Melways 2C,K3)

Yarra’s first ‘official’ resident-initiated council-permitted street planterbox foodgarden

10.45am Laneway Garden behind Gordon St, Clifton Hill (Melways 2C, J3)

Resident-initiated community garden featuring wicking beds, worm towers, rainwater collection from adjacent roof, community composting system

11.15am Tramstop 22, Foodgarden, Queens Pde nature strip, cnr Grant St, N Fitzroy  (Melways 2C, E3)

Resident-initiated 2008 no-dig garden: espaliered ‘fruiting fence’, herbs, veg, edible flowers

11.45am Street planterboxes, cnr Moor St/Young St Fitzroy nr Fitzroy Town Hall (Mel 2C,B9)

Neighbour-initiated in 2008, recently updated as water-efficient ‘wicking beds’

12.10pm Grub foodvan /GrubHole eatery foodgarden 87-89 Moor St Fitzroy  (Melways 2C,A9)

Watered by onsite tanks, with forecourt & interior foodgardens

From little things big things grow. Edible streetscapes reduce urban ‘heat island’ effect, encourage neighbourly exchange & healthy exercise, offer access to fresh-picked tasty goodness & grow local resilience in a changing climate. Please urge ongoing funding for Yarra’s Urban Agriculture Facilitator to further enable, resource and multiply these community initiatives.

More information here

YCAN will be doing a little gentle surveying at the Sustainable Living Festival this weekend at Fed Square. The theme is cycling and the aim is to encourage Yarra Council to be bold. The survey is just 7 questions and is an easy survey with a receptive audience.

We are able to park a few things like our bags at the Beyond Zero Emissions stall (Thank you BZE). There will be clip boards with the surveys in them and pens.

If you have some time and are intending to go to the SLF, we’d love your help to survey people. Give Mack a call if you can help – 0422 952 554.

Tuesday 19 February, 6.30pm

Richmond Town Hall, 333 Bridge Rd, Richmond

Wellington St is a popular and well connected route in the inner network. With over 400 riders in the 7-9am peak it provides a major transport function and serves as a viable connection from North Fitzroy through to East Melbourne

YCAN has strongly supported a Copenhagen lane on Wellington St as a part of the Bicycle strategy Yarra Council has adopted. We see it as the missing link in getting more people to ride their bikes.

After a long time it is finally coming to a head and Yarra Council will be giving it the thumbs up or down.

Shockingly some people don’t support a Copenhagen lane on Wellington Street. We are sure that they just don’t understand that the entire city is doomed to grind to a standstill if we fail to make it safe for people to get out of their car and on the their bike. Frequently it is faster to ride across the city of Yarra than to drive, but until people feel it is safe, the large shift out of cars and onto bikes that is council’s policy won’t happen.

So come along, bring some friends and support a sustainable, healthier and more liveable city.

This one is from GetUp:

Here’s a couple from Beyond Zero Emissions:

Environment Victoria:

Weldon in The Age

And one we made ourselves!

Climate change clashes with the myth of a land where progress is limited only by the rate at which resources can be extracted.

Five of Australia’s six states are still suffering fires after the counrty’s fiercest heatwave in more than 80 years. Photograph: Kim Foale/EPA

I wonder what Tony Abbott will say about the record heatwave now ravaging his country. The Australian opposition leader has repeatedly questioned the science and impacts of climate change. He has insisted that “the science is highly contentious, to say the least” and asked – demonstrating what looks like a wilful ignorance – “If man-made CO2 was quite the villain that many of these people say it is, why hasn’t there just been a steady increase starting in 1750, and moving in a linear way up the graph?” He has argued against Australian participation in serious attempts to cut emissions.

Climate change denial is almost a national pastime in Australia. People such as Andrew Bolt and Ian Plimer have made a career out of it. The Australian – owned by Rupert Murdoch – takes such extreme anti-science positions that it sometimes makes the Sunday Telegraph look like the voice of reason.

Perhaps this is unsurprising. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal – the most carbon intensive fossil fuel. It’s also a profligate consumer. Australians now burn, on average, slightly more carbon per capita than the citizens of the United States, and more than twice as much as the people of the United Kingdom. Taking meaningful action on climate change would require a serious reassessment of the way life is lived there.

Events have not been kind to the likes of Abbott, Bolt and Plimer. The current heatwave – so severe that the Bureau of Meteorology has been forced to add a new colour to its temperature maps – is just the latest event in a decade of extraordinary weather: weather of the kind that scientists have long warned is a likely consequence of man-made global warming.

As James Hansen and colleagues showed in a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the occurrence of extremely hot events has risen by a factor of around 50 by comparison to the decades before 1980. Extreme summer heat, which afflicted between 0.1% and 0.2% of the world 40 years ago, now affects 10%. They warned that “an important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (3?) warmer than the climatology of the 1951–1980 base period”. An extremely hot outlier is a good description of what is roasting Australia at the moment.

So far Abbott has commented, as far as I can tell, only on the fires: “Our thoughts are with the people and the communities across the country who are impacted by the bushfires,” he says. Quite right too, but it’s time his thoughts also extended to the question of why this is happening and how Australian politicians should respond. He says he’s currently on standby with his local fire brigade, but as his opposition to effective action on climate change is likely to contribute to even more extreme events in the future, this looks like the most cynical kind of stunt politics.

To ask him and others to change their view of the problem could be to demand the impossible. It requires that they confront some of the most powerful interests in Australia: from Rupert Murdoch to Gina Rinehart. It requires that they confront some of the powerful narratives that have shaped Australians’ view of themselves, just as we in the United Kingdom must challenge our own founding myths. In Australia’s case, climate change clashes with a story of great cultural power: of a land of opportunity, in which progress is limited only by the rate at which natural resources can be extracted; in which this accelerating extraction leads to the inexorable improvement of the lives of its people. What is happening in Australia today looks like anything but improvement.

This, I think, is too much for Abbott to take on: as a result he has nothing to offer a nation for which this terrible weather is a warning of much worse to come. Australia’s new weather demands a new politics; a politics capable of responding to an existential threat.

Hurricane Sandy, 2012: Massive and dangerous Hurricane Sandy has grown to record size as it barrels northeastwards along the North Carolina coast. - Jeff Masters, Weather Underground, Oct. 28 2012.

Science paper, 2010: Fewer but fiercer and more-destructive hurricanes will sweep the Atlantic Basin in the 21st century as climate change continues, a new modeling study by U.S. government researchers suggests. - commentary by Richard Kerr on Bender, M.A. et al., 2010. Science, 327(5964), pp.454–458.

Hurricane Sandy, 2012: If ‘Frankenstorm’ pans out to be as powerful and odd as the models currently forecast, then it may be said that this storm will be unique in the annals of American weather history. - Christopher Burt, Weather Underground, Oct. 26, 2012.

Report by the National Research Council, 2010: The destructive energy of Atlantic hurricanes is likely to increase in this century as sea surface temperature rises – “America’s Climate Choices: Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change”, National Research Council, National Academies of Sciences, 2010.

Where I sit in New Jersey, we are preparing for a direct hit from a record-setting hurricane. We all know that no one event can be blamed on climate change. But this freak storm certainly seems to match the warnings we’ve gotten over the past decade. Let’s consider what exactly makes Hurricane Sandy so “freak”, and whether this freakiness may be a harbinger of the new normal.

There are at least three factors making Hurricane Sandy such a threat:

1. Warm sea surface temperatures

Global warming has been raising sea surface temperatures around the world. The water off New England set record highs this year, meaning that Sandy will have more energy to feed from than usual as she churns North.

Sandy will draw energy from the abnormally warm ocean just off the Atlantic coast. Note this is in Celsius. The water off NJ is about 5°F higher than average, and set record highs in 2012. Source: NOAA National Hurricane Center.

Yes, there are natural variations that affect sea surface temperatures, in particular the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. But consider the plot below showing North Atlantic temperature changes from normal. The ~60 year oscillation is clear, but so too is the fact that each peak is stronger than the one before.

North Atlantic sea surface temperature anomalies (°C). Source: Wang, C.&Dong, S., 2010. Geophys. Res. Lett, 37, p.L08707.

2. A “blocking pattern” shoving the storm back on shore

A blocking pattern is essentially when the jet stream gets kinked. The current kink is pushing Sandy back on shore where most hurricanes would keep veering out to sea. A recent analysis showed that blocking patterns like this are more likely thanks to a warming Arctic. As Arctic sea ice keeps melting to new record lows, the darker water absorbs more heat, which it later releases to the atmosphere. The effect of all this is a weaker jet stream more prone to kinking.

3. A merger with a winter storm

Ok, so actually, this one’s not climate related. Ok, so prediction: rising temperatures will give hurricanes warmer oceans to feed from, and more moisture to dump on us, making them more destructive. Observation: we are about to get walloped by what looks to be a history-making storm. Prediction: ocean temperatures will keep rising and blocking patterns will become more frequent. Observation: Hurricane Sandy is feeding off of record ocean temperatures and a kinked jet stream.

Now, it is certainly true that we still don’t completely understand hurricanes. It is true that models are not perfect. It is true that Hurricane Sandy could have happened even without climate change. It is true that climate change doesn’t “cause” an event, just like doping alone won’t win you the Tour de France. And, as always, it is true that we should not draw conclusions from a single event.

So then, is Hurricane Sandy just a freak event, or is she an instructive example of what we should expect more often?  Let’s look at a paper just published in PNAS, which put together a long-term data set of hurricane activity based on storm surges. That means this is not a model – it is empirical evidence from the past 90 years.

We observe that [hurricane activity is greater in] warm years… than cold years and that the relative difference… is greatest for the most extreme events. -Grinsted, A., Moore, J.C.&Jevrejeva, S., 2012. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Climate change is happening, this is why we care.

Origin Energy CEO Grant King is a big supporter of fossil fuels and uses his company’s wealth to lobby government to water down support for renewable energy.

The Renewable Energy Target (RET) is arguably Australia’s most effective emissions reduction policy (far more so than the carbon price). Combined with a drop in electricity demand since 2009, the construction of wind and solar power has helped drop the price of wholesale electricity, which has forced the closure of around 3000MW of coal power in recent months.

The RET is a fixed electricity generation target for the year 2020. Due to falling demand for electricity, what was originally aiming for 20% of electricity production by 2020 has now risen to around 22-25% by 2020.  This of course is great news, but not for the companies that own gas and coal mines and power stations, as renewable energy is out-competing them and they are losing profits.

The RET is now being reviewed by the Climate Change Authority with a preliminary report released today. Origin Energy and Energy Australia (formerly TRUenergy) have been running a campaign to get the RET reduced or scrapped. In a submission to the Climate Change Authority, Origin Energy used dubious figures to claim that the RET was costing consumers large amounts of money. What they really care about of course is their own profits, not the costs for consumers, which renewable energy will help reduce in the medium and long terms.

Origin Energy spends a lot of time greenwashing themselves, running advertisements presenting the company as a supporter of GreenPower and electric vehicles. The truth is that they are doing their best to thwart a transition to a clean energy future.

Considering the urgency of the climate crisis, and the potential that we have already crossed tipping points into runaway climate change (such as the record Arctic sea ice melt this year), it is obscene for companies to be lobbying against renewable energy, and asking for the RET to be reduced. In truth, it should be at least doubled for 2020 with a 100% renewable energy target in place for some time in the 2020s.

We urge all Origin Energy customers to switch retailers and make sure you tell them why when you do. You can also sign this petition which will go to the Origin Energy annual general meeting on 12 November.

100 Hodgkinson St, Clifton Hill 

YCAN in conjunction with the Community Church of St Mark is holding an afternoon of all things sustainable. Think you’ve done everything you can to reduce your footprint? This free event might still be able to teach you a thing or two.

These workshops bring you the latest developments in strategies for sustainable living on the practical, everyday level, and up to date information of bigger picture issues.

Program below. RSVP to Ian 0422 952 554 or email carole@ycan.org.au

]]> http://ycan.org.au/2012/11/workshop-it-green-skills-afternoon-sat-17-nov/feed/ 0 http://ycan.org.au/2012/10/climate-comedy-revue-friday-9-november/ http://ycan.org.au/2012/10/climate-comedy-revue-friday-9-november/#comments Mon, 22 Oct 2012 10:57:18 +0000 MegDL http://ycan.org.au/?p=2783 They can walk daily half marathons, abseil off buildings, plan a 100% renewable energy economy while dumpster diving from their bicycles. And they can tweet. But are climate activists funny?

Join Quit Coal, Climate Action Moreland and Beyond Zero Emissions for a night of champagne comedy for, by and about the climate movement at Brunswick Town Hall – and discover the truth!!

There’ll be drinks, prizes, a special guest appearance by our favourite mining magnate, Twiggy Palmcock… and you can chuck some coal at Ted too!

Some of the money raised will also go to directly helping people affected by climate change through Tulele Peisa, an organisation of the people of the Carteret Islands who are organising their own relocation as their islands are inundated by sea level rise.

When: Friday 9 November, 8pm

Where: Brunswick Town Hall, 233 Sydney Rd

Tickets: $20 full, $15 concession, $30 proactive supporter, $50 Climate Champion!

Bookings: click here