The insider’s comments, reported by The Guardian, suggest the IEA has spun its numbers to minimise fears that the globe has already passed peak oil. The official also claimed the US has encouraged the data manipulation.

The 2009 “World Energy Outlook” itself offers several reasons for raised eyebrows. For one, it sets an atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration goal of 450 parts per million as a target for preventing dangerous climate change; leading climate scientist James Hansen and others say the goal must be no more than 350 parts per million. (Levels currently stand at about 387 parts per million.)

Two, the IEA’s projected oil production outlook for 2030 shows roughly two-thirds of crude oil then coming from “fields yet to be developed or found.”

As one commenter on the peak oil website The Oil Drum noted, “That means about 5 – 6 new Saudi Arabias coming on stream … Those numbers seem highly optimistic to me, or more to the point, downright improbable.”

Upon releasing the new “World Energy Outlook,” the IEA noted, “The time has come to make the hard choices needed to combat climate change and enhance global energy security.”

“World leaders gathering in Copenhagen next month for the UN Climate summit have a historic opportunity to avert the worst effects of climate change,” said Nobuo Tanaka, the IEA’s executive director. “The World Energy Outlook 2009 seeks to add momentum to their negotiations at this crucial stage by detailing the practical steps needed for a sustainable energy future as part of a global climate deal.”

Tanaka added: “WEO-2009 provides both a caution and grounds for optimism. Caution, because a continuation of current trends in energy use puts the world on track for a rise in temperature of up to 6°C and poses serious threats to global energy security. Optimism, because there are cost-effective solutions to avoid severe climate change while also enhancing energy security — and these are within reach as the new Outlook shows.”

Comforting words, if the IEA is in fact not being artificially over-optimistic. If it is … ? Tell us what you think the likely scenario might be in the comments section below.

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In presenting the draft National Policy Statements (NPS) for reform, he also set out an ambitious new policy for the transition to clean coal using carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

The UK needs to develop significantly more energy-generating capacity to both meet its low-carbon goals and deal with the intermittency of wind power, Miliband said. One third of that larger future generating capacity must be consented and built over the next 15 years to 2025

While there are already proposals to build more energy infrastructure, more is needed to bring about the shift  to a low-carbon future, the Secretary said. The NPSs include clear direction towards a massive expansion in renewables, a new nuclear programme based around 10 sites assessed as potentially suitable for new build and a programme to demonstrate clean-coal technology.

“The threat of climate change means we need to make a transition from a system that relies heavily on high carbon fossil fuels, to a radically different system that includes nuclear, renewable and clean coal power,” Miliband said. “Change is also needed for energy security. In a world where our North Sea reserves are declining, a more diverse low carbon energy mix is a more secure energy mix, less vulnerable to fluctuations in the availability of any one fuel.”

He continued: “The current planning system is a barrier to this shift. It serves neither the interests of energy security, the interests of the low-carbon transition, nor the interests of people living in areas where infrastructure may be built, for the planning process to take years to come to a decision.

“That is why we are undertaking fundamental reform of the planning system which will result in a more efficient, transparent and accessible process.

“And our new policy framework for clean coal will drive the development of CCS which will be essential for reducing the impact of coal-fired power stations on the environment.”

Miliband said the new system will be faster and fairer for everyone involved:

• Decisions on proposals bigger than 50 megawatts (or 100 megawatts for offshore wind) will be reduced from two years, sometimes much more, to one year.
• Clearer and better opportunities for the public and local communities to have their say.
• Up to £300 million a year will be saved in unnecessary expense incurred by UK industry.

“The course of our country’s future will be set by investments in new energy sources, water supplies, ports, railways and other transport networks,” said Housing and Planning Minister John Healey. “The National Policy Statements do what they say on the tin — they are Britain’s policy blueprints within which the Infrastructure Planning Commission will run a faster and fairer planning system, with fuller public scrutiny of larger developments.

“Instead of major projects going through, three, four, five separate applications, sometimes sequentially, there is now one single consent system, with one full expert and public examination. This includes new steps that require open public consultation before applications can even be submitted.”

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Three UK-based banks began offering new loans to eligible onshore wind farms during a forum in London hosted by Energy & Climate Secretary Ed Miliband and Chancellor Alistair Darling. The scheme is being supported by HMTreasury and the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) will provide up to £700 million of the new finance, with the remainder matched by RBS, Lloyds Banking Group and BNP Paribas Fortis.

The loans will be available to eligible onshore wind projects with a total project cost of between £20 million and £100 million.

“We welcome the EIB’s commitment to provide this vital funding for renewable projects across the UK,” said the Chancellor, Rt Hon, Alistair Darling, MP. “The money that is being made available will help continue the essential work of building the UK’s capacity in renewable energy.”

He continued, “As the Government continues to push for a global agreement on climate change at Copenhagen it is even more important that we live up to our responsibilities and make progress in reducing this country’s dependence on carbon. This government is determined to provide all the support that is needed to secure a greener future.”

“The UK now has 4 gigawatts of wind capacity,” added Miliband. “And the pace of installation is picking up. It took us 14 years to build the first gigawatt, and just one year to build the last. But we still need a six-fold increase in renewables by 2020 to hit our renewables target. That target is vital if we are to be on course to cutting emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

“So we need to pull out the stops including making sure the capital is there to build the wind farms in the first place. This partnership of the EIB with RBS, BNP Paribas Fortis and Lloyds Banking group will address that problem.”

“The EIB’s contribution to transforming wind energy generation in the United Kingdom is a core element of our support for renewable energy technology across Europe,” said Simon Brooks, EIB’s European vice president responsible for the United Kingdom. “We are sure that targeted support, following UK and European Union policy combating climate change, will facilitate rapid and sustained investment in the industry and promote continued transformation to a low-carbon economy.”

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The process involves using carbon to adsorb a refrigerant — essentially causing it to cling to the carbon’s surface, rather than absorbing it — depending on the surrounding temperature. When heated, the carbon would release the refrigerant and cool the surrounding area, storing the extracted heat in a radiator or hot water tank.

Because they operate as closed systems, such adsorption technologies are more efficient than conventional condensing boilers or electric heat pumps. Up until now, though, the problem has been the technology’s size: it would have to take up roughly 300 litres for a car air conditioner and even more space for a home heat pump.

Researchers at the University of Warwick, however, have made a breakthrough that could dramatically shrink such devices, making them small and light enough to use in both cars and homes. Their new design uses very thin sheets of metal distributed through the carbon; each sheet contains 100-plus tiny water channels that help make the heat transfer more efficient. This has enabled the research team to shrink the required size of adsorption technologies by up to 20 times.

Eventually, the researchers hope, such improved adsorption technologies could create domestic heat pumps that could reduce both fuel bills and carbon dioxide emissions by more than 30 per cent. Used in car air conditioning systems, the technology could lead to fuel consumption and emissions reductions of nearly 5 per cent.

The innovation has already attracted interest from commercial developers, prompting the research team to spin out a new company, Sorption Energy Ltd.

“The technology is now ready for commercialisation and we are very excited by the opportunities which are developing,” said lead researcher Bob Critoph. “It is particularly pleasing that the technology will significantly help reduce CO2 emissions.”

“This is exciting stuff,” added David Auty, CEO of Sorption Energy. “The technology has been proven in the University’s laboratories at the sizes needed for vehicles and domestic systems, and there are several other large markets.  The ability to provide products which make significant reductions in both energy consumption and CO2 emissions at a similar price to existing products will make Sorption Energy very attractive to customers, and is very satisfying for the team.”

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Items that qualify for listing in each week’s index include new climate data published in peer-reviewed academic journals and extreme weather incidents or other natural events that are likely directly linked to the global warming trend.

The Climate Change Index for this week, ending 8 Nov. 2009 (details below): 4

2 November: The snows — and ice — of Kilimanjaro could melt away within two decades or less, according to the latest survey of ice fields remaining on the storied Tanzanian peak.

2 November: Most land-use changes occurring in the continental United States reduce vegetative cover and raise regional surface temperatures, says a new study by scientists at the University of Maryland, Purdue University, and the University of Colorado in Boulder.

2 November: Commenting on the flooding that recently hit parts of Scotland, Environment Minister Roseanna Cunningham last week said, “Climate change is clearly happening on our doorsteps and flooding events such as these are likely to occur with increasing frequency. Everyone needs to be aware of the increased risks and, as we have seen in the last 24 hours, that doesn’t just apply to those living in areas where there is a history of flooding.”

3 November: The latest update of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ shows that 17,291 species out of the 47,677 assessed species are threatened with extinction. Environmental changes, including climate change, are blamed for the threats to many of the species listed.

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Andy Russell, a scientist at Newcastle University, said such floods could hit parts of Europe within decades. He and his research team this week published their first comprehensive review of such volcano-connected flooding impacts in the journal Developments in Quaternary Sciences.

Such flooding events — which can dramatically alter the surrounding landscape — are actually relatively frequent in Iceland, where a large sub-glacial eruption is long overdue, according to Russell’s research. In the past, the region has seen enormous volumes of water and sediment suddenly entering the ocean during these floods, which can also generate tsunamis and extend the coastline by several kilometres within hours.

The new study focuses on Mýrdalsjökull, Iceland’s southernmost glacier.

“Knowledge of how outburst floods behaved previously enables us to better predict the impacts of future events and allows us to develop appropriate strategies to lessen their impact on the surrounding population,” said Russell. “We can’t predict or stop nature, but we can be prepared for it when she blows.”

Russell has been working with other researchers and Earthwatch volunteers in Iceland for the last 10 years.

“There are still many gaps in our understanding and we are realising that meltwater can find its way out of glaciers much more quickly than previously thought,” he said. “We’re looking at the possibility of a flow the size of the Amazon being released within less than an hour and that doesn’t give people much time to get out of way.

“The potential impact of much of our work is in helping to inform both the local population and the civil defence authorities to ensure they are as prepared as possible.”

Russell observed firsthand how quickly the environment can change in response to the rapid receding and shrinking of glaciers. During this past summer’s fieldwork, he watched the demise of Iceland’s largest glacial river, the Skeiðará, which started flowing on a new drainage path, along the glacier margin into the Gígjukvísl River.

“The impacts of this event were spectacular,” Russell said. “The levels in two iceberg-infested lakes at the glacier margin rose and water levels in a further three lakes dropped.

“Newly-routed water sliced through the glacier margin like a hot knife through butter. River channels between the lake basins experienced major growth over just ten days.

“This spectacular event illustrates dramatically how climate change can lead to sudden environmental change.”

Today, water no longer flows in the Skeiðará River system. Coupled with the nature of the whole outwash system, these changes so close to the glacier are likely to have significant impacts further downstream and within the coastal zone in the future, according to Russell.

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Researchers with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have found that phytoplankton, tiny marine plants, are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by melting ice around the Antarctic Peninsula. As those blooms die back, the phytoplankton will likely sink to the sea-bed, where their absorbed carbon could be stored for thousands or millions of years.

Reporting this week in the journal Global Change Biology, the BAS scientists estimate this new natural carbon sink is taking up about 3.5 million tonnes of carbon from the ocean and atmosphere each year. That’s the equivalent of 12.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

For comparison’s sake, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change reached 8.7 billion tonnes of carbon in 2007.

“Although this is a small amount of carbon compared to global emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere it is nevertheless an important discovery,” said Lloyd Peck, lead author of the study. “It shows nature’s ability to thrive in the face of adversity. We need to factor this natural carbon-absorption into our calculations and models to predict future climate change. So far we don’t know if we will see more events like this around the rest of Antarctica’s coast but it’s something we’ll be keeping a close eye on.”

Peck and his colleagues compared records of coastal glacial retreat with records of the amount of chlorophyll (the green plant pigment essential for photosynthesis) in the ocean. They found that, over the past 50 years, melting ice has opened up at least 24,000 square kilometres of new open water (an area similar to the size of Wales) — and this has been colonised by carbon-absorbing phytoplankton.

According to the authors, this new bloom is the second-largest factor acting against climate change so far discovered on Earth (the largest is new forest growth on land in the Arctic).

“Elsewhere in the world human activity is undermining the ability of oceans and marine ecosystems to capture and store carbon,” Peck said. “At present, there is little change in ice shelves and coastal glaciers away from the Antarctic Peninsula, but if more Antarctic ice is lost as a result of climate change then these new blooms have the potential to be a significant biological sink for carbon.”

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That finding runs contrary to a significant body of science that predicts the planet’s ability to take up carbon dioxide will diminish as emissions keep rising.

Wolfgang Knorr says he’s found that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tonnes a year in 1850 to 35 billion tonnes a year now.

Knorr’s study, published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is based solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, rather than on computations with complex climate models.

His findings have implications for future climate change policies, because emission targets to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen early next month have been based on projections that have a carbon-free sink already factored in. Some researchers have cautioned against this approach, pointing at evidence that suggests the sink has already started to decrease.

However, Knorr cautioned that his study is not necessarily cause for optimism.

“Like all studies of this kind, there are uncertainties in the data, so rather than relying on nature to provide a free service, soaking up our waste carbon, we need to ascertain why the proportion being absorbed has not changed,” he said.

Knorr’s study also found that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published last week in Nature Geoscience, which concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.

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Researchers at the University of Florida (UF) have been studying how the insects digest wood via a mixture of enzymes from bacteria and other single-celled creatures that live in termites’ guts, as well as enzymes from termites themselves. After two years of dissecting and analysing gene sequences from termite guts and gut fauna, the research team has now begun to identify which of those genes encode for enzymes that could be used to improve the production of cellulosic ethanol.

Cellulosic ethanol is a fuel made from wood chips, corn stover and other inedible plant materials. According to the US Department of Energy, cellulosic ethanol could replace half of the nation’s gasoline if the production process could be made more efficient and cost effective.

“Termites are very unique creatures, and this research helps give the most complete picture of how their systems collaborate to, very efficiently, break down really tough biological compounds to release fermentable sugars,” said Mike Scharf, a UF entomologist who’s heading the research effort.

The UF team has identified nearly 200 enzymes that help break down the problematic plant compound lignocellulose. This compound is the most costly barrier to wide-scale production of cellulosic ethanol because it must be broken down by intense heat or caustic chemicals.

Termites, however, are able to almost completely break down lignocellulose through simple digestion.

“The termite gut is a complicated and exotic package of biodiversity that manages these tasks with an efficiency that you really have to admire,” said Claudia Husseneder, a specialist in the molecular biology of termites at Louisiana State University who was not associated with UF’s research. “Mike’s work is on the cutting edge of understanding this system.”

In September, Scharf and the Maryland-based firm Chesapeake-PERL Inc. received a $750,000 grant from the US Department of Energy to help develop his work into a product that can be used to help manufacture cellulosic ethanol.

Except for their genes, termites and their associated single-cell symbiotic organisms probably won’t have much to do with the processes that result from the work. The enzyme-producing genes would probably be transferred to a more controllable creature, Scharf said

Typically, this has meant using genetically modified fungi or bacteria. However, Scharf said the genes would likely be transferred into other insects, such as caterpillars, to produce the enzymes on an industrial scale.

“Insects have played an important role in how this planet functions for millions of years,” Scharf said. “They still have a lot they can teach us. There are still many ways we can learn to benefit from Earth’s six-legged inhabitants.”

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The final iawards winners will be announced during a ceremony at the Science Museum on 16 November.

The shortlist innovators announced today include:

• The iaward for energy and environment: AlertMe, AMEE UK Ltd and Siemens Mobility, Traffic Solutions: Environmentally Friendly ELV Traffic Systems;
• The iaward for places to live and work: E-Stack Ltd: E-Stack Atrium Ventilation System, Quiet Revolution Ltd: qr5 Wind Turbine, Crest Nicholson: Sustainable Communities;
• The iaward for digital communications: Mippin: Mippin Buzz Widgets, BigHand: BigHand for BlackBerry smartphones, Powertraveller Ltd: solargorilla;
• The iaward for entertainment and media: Publishing Research Laboratories Ltd: Intelligent Flatplan, Cortexica Limited: Cortexica, The Foundry: Ocula;
• The iaward for a consumer product: Unilever R&D: Pureit – home water purification device, MAS Design Products Ltd: One Touch™ Automatic Jar Opener, trueCall Ltd: trueCall;
• The iaward for cross-application of technology: Legal Advice Direct-Video Conferencing Services Limited Information: Advice Support Service, Metrasens Ltd: Ferroguard, National Physcial Laboratory: Automated Vegetable Harvesting Vehicle;
• The iaward for best collaboration: Opal Contracts: Infection Minimising Curtain Hook, Nottingham Scientific Ltd: Next Generation Satellite Navigation Receiver, Thales Research & Technology (UK) Limited: nuVa;
• The iaward for British inside: Ubisense: Ubisense Real Time Location System, DigePrint Ltd: LumeJet, Alumet Systems (UK) Ltd: ABLE Facade System;
• The iaward for best technology start-up: Horizon Discovery Ltd: Introducing the X-MAN: A Model Cancer Patient, i2O Water Ltd: Intelligent Water Control – Advanced Pressure Management, Novacem Limited: Novacem;
• The iaward for the next big thing: Diverse-Energy Ltd.: PowerCube, Baxi Group:  Baxi Ecogen micro-CHP, Argento Diagnostics Ltd:  Argento Diagnostics.

All entrants had to specify the British involvement in any innovation, demonstrating that creative thinking and development came from a British organisation or team. Each entry also had to illustrate how its innovative qualities relate to at least one of the following challenges:

• Addressing the healthcare needs of an ageing society;
• Increasing international security from tackling global poverty to minimising the threat of terrorism;
• Preserving finite natural resources in the face of population growth and climate change; and
• Delivering public services which make best use of new technologies.

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