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BUSINESS Transformers, but with your house! Parent company claim great ambition for that Zero Energy places them above similar companies The Netherlands have exported their unlikely substitute for building energy efficient houses. Instead of that expense, they take old houses and coat them with insulation and solar panels! The concept is hardly original but if industry takes to it, what can you do? Net Zero Energy has now transferred its refurbishments to two neighbouring countries at least, after a successful and quick 4-year surge of acceptance in the Netherlands. Energiesprong (Energy Spring) negotiates with housing associations, local councils (council estates, often called social housing), and builders and has achieved deals for at least 100,000 homes in each country. The biggest attraction, as the name Net Zero implies, is the carbon neutral retrofit. The parent company claim great ambition for that Zero Energy places them above similar companies. With a cost higher than current energy bills, the idea is that as energy costs rise, the protagonists can all save money in time. Performance guarantees persuade house owners, who all have to agree before a building can be transformed. It’s the IKEA kitchens, fridges, electric cooking and bathroom refits that help in that argument with thee hausfrau. The great volume of demand has managed to attract builders investment in the idea. Financiers also seem strangely inclined to offer help too, so there’s gold in them buildings! Naturally, governments are attracted to the political achievement of greater energy savings nationally. 40% of European carbon emissions derive from heating and lighting in buildings and this renovation can make old housing (99% of the buildings standing) produce the net zero emissions necessary in Credit: © Energiesprong A former ministry in The Hague was the site for a celebratory balloon release on September 29th in the form of a house new-builds. Most maintenance (for 40 years) is normally included in the costs of refurbishing, so the political gain could be lengthy, if the deal lasts as long as the house. Remember that the housing situations chosen may include housing stock, such as 50-year-old buildings that would need massive maintenance anyway. Private housing is less popular at the moment, but the deal obviously works for them too. If the wind used to blow through their windows and doors, some of the converted tenants have commented in the UK that their new home insulates like a tea cosy! If you don’t know what that is, just imagine…. In Holland, the retrofit can take as little as 10 days. EU money is given out for French and English projects, again using that old housing stock. From London to Lille, the outlook for these houses is bright and green. While social banks have been financing the projects in the Netherlands, high street banks will probably now be involved. Tenants pay their old energy bills and rent, until the bill is paid, so all seem to end up happy. Your future is here, housing tenants, so get the neighbours to agree and get in there! – www. earthtimes.org Horse Sense The Yukon horse and the Nevada horse represented the last traces of a North American phenomenon that has perplexed us for generations-the evolution and the loss of recent horse species. The Yukon, Equus lambei resembled Przewalski’s species, Equus ferus przewalskii, while the large Nevada, Equus scotti, is thought to be close to the basic zebra line. This species could even stretch its ancestry to the very early European Equus stenonis, which was also a big species. While some recent horse species evolved in America, then migrated 11mya to Eurasia and Africa, those remaining in their native land area eventually became extinct. The reasons are not hard to imagine. Most of the so-called megafauna died out at the same time, because of climate change in the form of global cooling, grass species change and/ or human disruption. Unfortunately, horse meat was very popular on the menu of early humans in Eurasia, at least, and still is. The modern domestic horse, Equus ferus caballus, the domestic donkey (also found in the wild as the ass), the ass cousin the onager, the tarpan, kiang and zebras are all we have left, with none in North America, save a few remnants of ferals that the ranchers allow from the once-thriving mustangs brought in by the Spanish. Most successful in the wild are the plains zebra, Equus quagga (not the extinct quagga). Strange discoveries may still remain in the opposite direction from Eurasia, which the equines reached via the link area known as Beringia (after the Bering Strait.) In South America, which was already connected via the Panamanian isthmus, Equus andium and Credit: © Shutterstock Looking a little inbred, this herd of Przewalki’s horse are the ideal-more than a simple breed-an actual subspecies that has remained wild (and stubborn) since their speciation 4 other small species are thought to have survived well from the Middle Pleistocene (1mya) to the early Holocene (700,000ya.) They could not have replaced horse species that lived there before them, as it is likely they crossed over when the isthmus formed, around 3 million years ago. The reverse of the usual scientific process is happening here. More often than not, we allow information about wild species to illustrate how domestic species have changed. The rich genetic information we have used from 59 horse genomes in “Horses look back” informs us about how wild species may have evolved. The graphs and detail in that paper give a real feel of the background science. What makes horse sense is that the modern horse species’ teeth, longer legs and neck, one-toed hoof and digestion suit the plains of America, Eurasia, Africa and even the pampas, it seems. We can be grateful that magnificent creatures like these still remain on the planet at all. Many are disappearing fast, as we read. They can be saved with real appreciation of what horses mean to humans, not only in our history, but at an iconic, almost religious level. – www.earthtimes.org 64 november-december, green+.2014
NATURE Mad about Madagascar Science has to struggle with the niches of each individual species Bad news for corals and divers The tomato frog, Dyscophus antongilii, is a near-threatened endemic from Antongili Bay in Madagascar’s north east. The species’ situation is yet another example of gross negligence and lack of understanding, as pet-traders profited from the export of vast numbers from the island. Beautiful and endangered, like all of the unique wildlife of this great natural nature reserve. Jason L. Brown and his fellow researchers from Duke University (and City College NYC), Queens, Belfast and the Technical University of Braunschweig have studied the reptiles and amphibian of Madagascar for years. With Africa possessing some of the most biodiverse hotspots on earth, the large island, although only having 0.5% of the land surface on earth, surpasses its continent in sheer isolated magnificence. The processes that made these endemic species possible have now been recreated using their mixed-spatial model. The patterns of biodiversity from 8,362 records of 745 species were fed in. Using many possible biogeographic movements, the observed patterns seem to have been influenced by many more than one simple diversification process. As the team say, One size certainly does not fit all. The conclusions would be that species richness, endemism and the similarity of different communities can be used to explain the Madagascan situation. The main groups studied in this paper differed from each other in the response they made to their magic environment. For the future, climate change and land use must now be taken into account if we are to save the many critically threatened habitats and species on this extensive natural nature reserve! To help, other researchers are already preparing papers on the unique climate, geology and environment of Madagascar. Just in time, as we tend to lose the forests quickly in the current political climate. Ninety per cent of the animals here are found nowhere else, as you can tell when our stories on Madagascar never fail to amaze our staff, let alone the readers. Large geckos have been our stock-in-trade elsewhere recently, while 50% of chameleon species live here, feeding sometimes on tiny iridescent frogs and reducing their own size to miniscule too. The island situation largely helped the survival of endemic species by remaining stable throughout thousands of years and more. Now, global warming has shifted the goalposts for theses rare animals and plants. Instead of useful models, science The corals of Hawaii, specifically in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, represent the great majority of coral with US jurisdiction. They are represented largely by Porites, mainly P. lobata and P. Kompressa. Montipora and Pocillopora species make up most of the other dominants on the reefs. The loss of many corals in the Pacific Ocean this summer, due to warm sea surface temperatures, is a potential disaster. Recovery is vital. The previous loss of Caribbean corals, and of course the multiple species of animal and plant that need the coral, are explained in this article: Coral Cover’s Deadly Decline. Oahu has been badly hit at numerous points, while, even 1000 miles northwest, mass bleaching has occurred at Lisianski atoll, with lesser events at Midway, Pearl and Hermes atolls. Courtney Crouch is a researcher at Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, so when she calls the situation dire, it’s probably true! 35% of the sites have been bleached. The cause of bleaching has to struggle with the niches of each individual species to investigate how best to preserve both the habitat and their whole environment in the cause of conservation. Without these creatures of the big island, our hopes of maintaining the whole planet become lower and lower. We plunder scientific papers on Madagascar almost daily, but we find gems such as the tiny chameleons (world’s smallest is accepted nowadays as being thermal and this was the warmest summer for 50 years. The algal symbionts within coral are lost after 8 weeks of high-temperatureinduced stress but can return if the bleaching doesn’t continue too long. Unfortunately, it will be October before temperatures lower, so more profound deterioration is possible. El Nino is held responsible, moving the warm water north as the summer progresses. The last time this happened was in 2002 and 2004. Last week, along the windward coasts of Oahu, the Hawaii Department of Land Resources rapid response team examined the damage. Among them administrator Frazer McGilvray reported the corals as appearing, snow white. This entails a moderate to severe bleaching event, needing careful monitoring and avoidance of the corals by ocean users such as divers. Photographs will be needed though, to keep the authorities up-to-date with the situation, day to day. – www.earthtimes.org reptile) on tiny islands in the north: “Miniature chameleon discovered in Madagascar”. This new paper reveals much more on these amazing reptiles and others thanks to the author’s hard work, published in Nature Communications and entitled “A necessarily complex model to explain the biogeography of the amphibians and reptiles of Madagascar”. – www.earthtimes. org green+.2014, november-december 65
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in this issue Ü Tea Team produces
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COVER STORY CLOSING THE DEAL: A Mem
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ENERGY SIRIM introduces new labels
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