UN turns to social media to raise awareness about Holocaust

The United Nations launched today a Twitter campaign for students in memory of Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager who died in the Holocaust 65 years ago but whose wartime diary has endured to become one of the world’s most widely read books and teaching tools.

Today on New Scientist: 29 March 2010

All today’s stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: drugs from fatty food to plant food, offshore engineering adventures and a brazen internet fraud

Security Council and Ban deplore deadly bombings in Moscow’s subway system

Security Council members and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned this morning’s twin suicide bombings in the Moscow subway system that have killed dozens of people and injured scores more.

UN chief deplores deadly bombings in Moscow’s subway system

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned this morning’s twin suicide bombings in the Moscow subway system that have killed dozens of people and injured scores more.

Final space shuttle flight ‘likely to be 2011′

NASA’s watchdog is pessimistic about the agency’s chances of flying the last space shuttle this year, says Richard Fisher

UN official stresses Iraqi responsibility for election vote count

The process of ratifying the vote count in this month’s Iraqi parliamentary elections is entirely a national responsibility, the senior United Nations official in the country said today, stressing that the UN’s role is only to advise election authorities when requested.

Ahead of donors’ meeting on Haiti, Ban calls for more than $11 billion in spending

The “smart” rebuilding of Haiti after January’s earthquake will require some $11.5 billion of spending over the next 10 years, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today ahead of Wednesday’s international donor meeting on the way ahead for the Caribbean country.

European energy agency could form super-regulator

• Slovenia-based energy agency to start with 50 staff• European regulator seen as essential to push green energy

Terry Macalister
The Guardian, Monday 29 March 2010
Brussels is pressing ahead with plans to establish an energy agency which is seen as a prototype European regulator. The body could eventually restrict national policymaking but could also give important impetus to North Sea wind power and developing a European “supergrid”.
The European commission says it expects the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators to open for business by March next year.
“There is a degree of hope that the work of the agency, while not being a European regulator as such, will get the commitment of national regulators such as Ofgem in the UK … [and] if it is successful then it will become the European regulator,” said Philip Lowe, the EC’s new director general for energy, in an exclusive interview.
The agency is to be based initially in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and will have a staff of about 50, he said. The choice of location has raised eyebrows but Lowe said the agency should be judged on its work, not its whereabouts.
The idea of energy being regulated by Brussels remains a highly charged political issue but members of the European Union are increasingly accepting the need for more international cooperation and integration to achieve energy security and combat climate change.
Britain and other countries are keen to develop a huge network of offshore wind farms but realise they may need to deal with the problem of intermittent power by importing electricity generated from hydro or other power sources through an international supergrid of interconnected networks.
Lowe says European Union member states have so far balked at giving up national sovereignty in energy regulation and their future acceptance of such an idea would be vital before a fully fledged European regulator was put in place.
Under the direction of his boss, European energy commissioner Günther Oettinger, he is convinced countries must work more closely together. New bilateral arrangements between countries and regulators are in place to allow power to move through international pipelines.
“Although in energy as much as any other area of European life, people talk about sovereignty a lot the reality is that all this (putting together of energy grids and other integration) does not work unless there is an acceptance that there are some things best done at European level, some best done at national level and some at local level.”
The British-born bureaucrat says it’s a matter of who is best placed to review any particular aspect of work.
“It is no use asking the European commission to investigate whether Tesco or Morrisons are competing in a certain area. National authorities know far more about land use and planning … but then if you are to deal with a company of the clout of Microsoft then it is something best dealt with here.”
Lowe is happy to make comparisons with competition issues because he has just switched from the competition to the energy directorate.
Some UK groups, such as British Gas, could be suspicious of the new energy director given their criticism of the way Continental markets have been allowed to be dominated by very large, often partly-state-run groups, such as EDF of France.
Lowe dismisses the criticism, pointing out that he and his former competition commissioner boss, Neelie Kroes, investigated these market failures and laid out the steps that needed to be taken. “The accusation we did not do anything is totally wrong,” he said, pointing out that anti-trust legal action continues against various large Continental utilities today.

Steady as She Goes for Ocean’s Conveyor

Europe can rest easy. A new analysis of data from satellites and drifting sensors finds no evidence that the Atlantic portion of the “Conveyor Belt“—the great warm current flowing ultimately from the Pacific toward the frigid far North Atlantic—is slowing. Scientists and the public had worried that global warming might be shutting down the conveyor flow and threatening a big chill for Europe. Now, judging by its behavior, the conveyor appears to be far less susceptible to throttling by climate change than once feared.

Headlines warning of Europe’s coming ice age first appeared 5 years ago. In a 2005 Nature paper, oceanographers analyzed temperature and salinity measurements made during five brief ship surveys between 1957 and 2004. These data suggested a 30% decline in the northward flow of the Atlantic conveyor near 26°N around the turn of the century.

There were many climate scientists who believed that it was quite possible that the North Atlantic Current could shut down, which would have caused a mini ice age for Northern Europe and affected the entire global weather system

But continuous measurements by cable-moored instrument arrays soon revealed fluctuations in conveyor flow in the space of a year that would have swamped the once-a-decade surveys. Signs of an ice age evaporated, at least by scientists’ reckoning if not the public’s.

Physical oceanographer Joshua Willis has now further allayed those fears. Working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, he combined centimeter-accuracy satellite measurements of the height of the sea surface with observations from subsurface, free-floating Argo drifters. He could then calculate the conveyor flow at 41°N. As he writes in a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters, the different approach at a latitude where the flow is much less variable shows “that substantial slowing of the [conveyor] did not occur during the past 7 years.” Judging by the satellite data alone—before the Argo float program got going in about 2002—substantial slowing “is unlikely to have occurred in the past two decades.”

A finding of no slowing is fine by physical oceanographer Carl Wunsch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The satellite-drifter analysis is only the latest evidence against a slowing, he says. And at this rate, he adds, it will likely be decades before the conveyor changes enough to be detected by in situ or satellite-borne instruments.

Source:
Science, “Steady as She Goes for Ocean’s Conveyor“, accessed March 27, 2010

Siemens to build UK wind turbine plant

• £75m wind turbine plant will create hundreds of jobs• Wind power boost to government’s green hopes
Terry Macalister
The Guardian, Monday 29 March 2010
The government will receive another boost to its green manufacturing momentum this week when Siemens of Germany announces plans to create hundreds of jobs in Britain and invest more than £75m in a new wind turbine plant.
The move comes despite claims made today by the EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation, that the UK tax system is still stacked against manufacturing and needs a shake-up if the economy is to become less geared towards financial services.
The Siemens factory has particular significance because it shows Britain can beat off competition from Denmark and Germany to house a plant capable of making a new generation of extra-large blades.
The facility will demonstrate, too, that Britain can be at the centre of the German manufacturer’s worldwide wind ambitions, because Siemens already has a wind power training centre in Newcastle upon Tyne and a global centre for offshore grid connections in Manchester. It is also sponsoring significant research work into renewables at Sheffield and Keele universities.
Siemens declined to comment ahead of an announcement but well placed sources said that a deal had been struck at the highest possible level of government for the company to locate a facility in Britain, probably on the east coast of England.
The decision comes after months of talks – including meetings at 10 Downing Street with the Siemens president, Peter Löscher – and is believed to have been finalised as a result of an important change in the budget last week, which brought public grants for ports to build green manufacturing hubs around them.
The Siemens facility is expected to create 700 direct jobs and perhaps as many as 1,500 more in the supply chain. The plans will be announced only days after GE, the American conglomerate, announced a similar initiative in Britain, with investment of £100m, creating 2,000 jobs.
Mitsubishi of Japan and Clipper Windpower of the US have also announced schemes to make bigger and better blades that could bring down the cost of producing wind offshore.
Big utilities such as E.ON and RWE have won acreage under the Round Three (R3) licensing scheme to develop wind farms many miles off the coast of Britain. But some have warned that the economics remain fragile, given the deep water levels and other factors involved, unless development costs can be driven down.
Alistair Darling announced £60m worth of grants in the budget to develop onshore manufacturing around dock areas, as well as a plan to create a green investment bank that would be capable of taking equity stakes in R3 schemes.
Some of these financial incentives seem to have been enough to persuade Siemens to build in Britain, going some way towards repairing the damage done by Vestas’ decision to close the UK’s only functioning wind turbine factory last summer in the Isle of Wight. There has also been dismay that 90% of the supply contracts for Britain’s biggest offshore wind farm, the London Array, went abroad, many of them to Siemens in Germany and Denmark.
The British wind power industry has estimated that eventually 70,000 green-collar jobs could be created on the back of more than £100bn of private sector investment needed under R3 proposals.
But the report out today from the EEF, entitled “Tax reform for a balanced economy”, says that for UK manufacturing to succeed in the future, a range of reforms to the system of investment allowances will be needed. The engineering sector also wants a cut in corporation tax, an increase in VAT and a return of the top rate of income tax to 40p.
The EEF warns that failure to tackle the tax system will stop the economy from being rebalanced away from the City and encourage companies to move overseas.
“While there have been some helpful changes to the tax regime in recent years, we still lack a coherent tax system that encourages manufacturers to invest and sends the signal that they should be doing it here,” the EEF’s director of policy, Steve Radley, said.
“The next government must think and act differently. In particular, it can achieve much larger benefits from any new measures if its approach is more predictable and transparent.”