Give us shelter from reign of departmental nonsense
We hear of more Buildings Department/illegal structure nonsense. Some years when Swire was developing Taikoo Place, some footbridges were built to connect nearby buildings. It was decided to erect a canvas structure on one to provide protection from the rain. This resulted in a letter from the department complaining that this was a fixed structure. The footbridge would become a covered floor area under the general building plan and would therefore increase the floor area, breaching the lease conditions on plot ratio. The developer wrote back to say the structure wasn't fixed as it was a canvas cover. Back came the response: 'If it's not fixed, it should be possible to take it down.' The developer replied that he could take it down anytime. The department replied: 'OK, take it down and take a photograph of it and send us the photograph.' It cost the developers HK$1 million to dismantle the structure, photograph it and replace the canvas cover. Hardly best practice on the part of the Buildings Department.
A stroke of cool irony
The government's done it again. Last week, it noted that the Observatory had issued a hot weather warning advising us to wear broad-brimmed hats and drink water, and so. But it didn't think of warning us against a more deadly threat - the very high levels of roadside pollution. Yesterday, there was another hot weather warning and the Labour Department got in on the act, urging employers to protect their employees from heatstroke. The irony is that we are all aware of the weather and the heat, but we don't see the pollution. There are two possible reasons for this. First, the government doesn't want to draw too much attention to its dirty problem. Second, there's a bureaucratic problem. The Environmental Protection Department just measures emissions and has no remit for health. Public health is dealt with by the Department of Health but it doesn't study emissions.
Palm trees in Antarctica
There's been an interesting study in the journal Nature that proves that palm trees once grew in Antarctica. The proof comes from drilling deep into the edge of the modern continent. A drilling rig was dropped through four kilometres of water off Antarctica and then drilled through one kilometre of sediment to get to samples from the Eocene epoch. Analyses of the drill cores show pollen and spores and the remains of tiny creatures that give a climatic picture of the of the early Eocene period about 53 million years ago, the BBC reports. The study by an international team of scientists suggests that Antarctica winter temperatures exceeded 10 degrees Celsius, while summer may have reached 25 degrees. The early Eocene period was characterised by atmospheric CO2 concentrations considerably higher than today's levels of 390 parts per millimetre (ppm), reaching between 600 ppm and 1125 ppm. Of course, in those days there hadn't been an industrial revolution and there weren't any cars or power stations. How alarming is that?