It's bark is worse in this light

Eucalyptus saligna forms a continuous hybrid with E. pilularis

The three 50m trees in our backyard are probably slightly towards the saligna end of the spectrum as the branch forks are more open than the pronounced, upright V's of the blackbutts and the perminant bark just covers slightly more than a quarter of the main trunk. The rest of the smooth bark (an infra-red reflecting adaption to frequent fires) sheds annually.
Why the science lesson?:
Our backyard is covered in a substantial layer of bark.

These photos were taken the day after we mowed - less than 24 hrs.

Off on holls down the coast - I'll take some photos for you so you know what you are missing out on.

Any way, Merry Xmas, and a 'appy new one.

Chat next year.

Cheers

Here be Dragons

Back in August 2007 we took the kids for a walk around the STEP track. A year later Annalise is walking better and taking more interest in the environment around her; commentating on the birds, ants, flowers and trees as we walked. The last year has been dry and this time I couldn't find any of the endangered carnivorous sundews (Drosera). There is also noticeably more fallen timber, branches and leaf litter in the Terry's Creak Valley which is going to fuel a ripper of a fire when one eventually comes through.

And we saw a dragon



(apologies for the appalling vid but I'm crap at editing this kind of stuff)
photos

Timber !

I like trees.
So it's sad to see this one go. Where will the Cockatoos sit in the morning and look in our window now?

It's not enough to want to cook my planet -

- now they want to take the sky from me.

Now go buy the wrist band that looks like the sky form the Earth-That-Was.

Shiny

Blue Mountains Fires - the aftermath

With fierce fires still burning in the Victorian high country, Melbourne's hottest December day on record recorded and important Koala habitat being threatened or already lost the SMH has been looking into the management and aftermath of the recent Blue Mountains brushfire.
My feeling is that we should be back burning more in the lowest risk times (winter - before or even during rain) and investing more resources into putting out fires early in the risky times.
It will be particularly sad if any or the enormous Blue Gums die after this fire. They are some of the largest living things on the planet - fire adapted and stunningly beautiful they have seen it all before and should be OK, but if the drought or some other factor prevents their recovery the world will loose one more irreplaceable corner.

The ever readable Barista provides a Melbourne perspective and Flashman has dug up the latest NASA images from space such as this one.

God wants you to ...

... take the bus
Just as well because "Europe is experiencing the warmest autumn since Columbus first sailed to America."

Some (random) thoughts on renewable energy.

Nuclear, solar, wind, wave, geothermal, fusion, tidal, “clean coal”, geosequestration, hydrogen economy, global warming, energy storage, fuel cells.

This is complex stuff. Getting it right will, just possibly, preserve the climate within familiar bounds. Getting it wrong – well who cares somebody else, some future generation will pay the price for our mistakes / greed / apathy, so why should I really care?

One of the problems oft pointed out about many sources of renewable energy is that it is not reliable. The sun does not always shine, wind blow or waves run with the power to generate electricity.

OK, so my question is why not store the energy?
Use wind power to pump water uphill in the snowy scheme. That way your not using off peek coal sourced power to do it, your getting it from a renewable.

Why not use renewable power when it is available to generate Hydrogen from sea water and store it for use in fuel cell vehicles? Wind not blowing?, sun not shining?, that’s ok because you have stored enough Hydrogen to get you through.

No water – no problem, just desalinate using wave energy. Perfect solution – the energy is at the point you want to use it. Use high pressure air forced into a tube by wave action focused using a parabolic wave reflector and you have a very low maintenance source of high pressure air that you can use to push sea water through RO membranes.

Roof tiles with solar cells, passive housing and building designs such as better insulation all make a difference. Anyways lunch is almost over so I’m back to work, but please poke around these links:

http://www.seapowerpacific.com/WHAT-IS-CETO.htm
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn10465
http://www.hie.co.uk/argyll/tidal_power.html
http://www.rise.org.au/info/Tech/wave/index.html
http://www.energetech.com.au/index.htm

Update - 28th
Firstly, sorry for the ramble.
Thanks to 'Brian', presumably Brian Meano, CEO & Founder of Fieldstone Energy, Inc. for his link to on a similar technology which I will drag onto the front page here.
I also caught up with a whole bunch of Radio National podcasts that I'm linking to the transcripts (the podcast get taken down after a month but be quick and you can listen)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

and then there is all this stuff on Ockham's Razor that I've been reeding past my bedtime