As you know the big international convention on climate change is taking place in Copenhagen from 7th-12th Dec. Around the world actions are taking place to remind our world leaders that we want action on climate change. As part of this awareness raising the Centre for Civil Society together with Climate Justice Now! SA will be hosting the following films:

The Age of Stupid

This is a climate change documentary from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. The oscar nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055 looking at old footage from 2008 and asking : "Why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance?"

The Story of Stuff 

From its extraction through to its sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20 min, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. It exposes the connection between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something. It'll make you laugh and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

The Imagine Durban project has formed a partnership with TAFTA to assist them grow organic food gardens at their old age homes.  The purpose of the project is to encourage and empower old age homes and local communities to grow their own food gardens.  The John Dunn Home in Austerville was chosen as the pilot site.  The gardening method will use garden beds that will be created by using cement blocks. The reasons for choosing this method are:-

• Firstly, the beds will be high enough to allow the old people to comfortably work in the garden, even those in wheelchairs will be able to work
• Secondly, the beds will be designed to encourage the use of organic kitchen and garden waste.  Worms will be introduced into these beds to create compost.  This is both cost effective and encourages recycling
• This type of gardening has been proven to produce a high yield over a short period of time and with limited space

Conventional wind turbines work best when located as far as possible from the destructive vortices of neighbouring turbines. However, a pair of scientists in the US have worked out that the performance of other kinds of turbine actually improves when they are placed close to one another, concluding that wind farms could therefore be made much smaller than they are today.  The familiar propeller-like turbine with a horizontal axis of rotation can convert 50% or more of the energy from the wind that it is exposed to. In a wind farm, however, the wake from one turbine will disturb the air reaching the blades of its neighbours meaning that turbines must be placed far apart.

A less familiar family of turbines have a vertical axis of rotation.  Individually, these vertical-axis turbines are less efficient than the horizontal-axis devices because only part of the turbine can be pushed by the wind at any one time, and they have therefore proven far less popular. However, these turbines have a significant advantage over the horizontal-axis variety – their power output can be increased when they are placed very close to one another.  Now, Robert Whittlesey and John Dabiri of the California Institute of Technology have worked out how best to arrange such closely spaced turbines by drawing on the work of aeronautical engineer Daniel Weihs, who showed in the 1970s how fish save on energy by swimming within schools. Such fish form a series of offset rows, and Weihs found that fish get carried forward by the vortices created by the swimming motion of their two closest companions in the row immediately in front of them. Whittlesey and Dabiri wondered whether the relative spacing of vortices produced by an individual fish might serve as a good template for the arrangement of vertical-axis turbines within a wind farm and set up a computer model to test this idea.

Read the full article by Edwin Cartlidge.