Author: Tim

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Is the Javan tiger extinct? Update on image

This is a post origially put out 2 years ago, however, I found the video had not worked, so here it is again.

There are still sizable areas of protected land in Java, and in 2017 a warden took the below photo.

 

 

Now it is hard to see it clearly, but to me I think it looks more like a leopard unfortunately

Now I am unsure about this picture but would be pleasantly pleased to be proved wrong.

If not, the Javan tiger is very similar to the Sumatran tiger. As such, with a recovery in the wild Sumatran population if a reserve is not suffering poaching, it would be possible to bring the tiger back to Java.

There has been no more sightings of this animal, which suggests that this sighting cannot have been real, but who knows.

It should be noted, that while rangers decided that it must be showing a leopard, this is still exciting. This is because, while a leopard is not a species declared extinct 48 years ago, the Javan Leopard is a species that is highly threatened. The current estimate of the population of this leopard species is between 188-571, most likely around 250 leopards is an accurate figure.

The video below is a clip filmed of the Javan leopard

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Chinese water deer, while vanishing at home, are thriving in the UK

Certainly not native, but doing well

There are perhaps only 10,000 of this species in China, though there are around 700,000 living across the border in South Korea (slightly different subspecies).

They are also doing well in the UK with around 2000 living in the country, having been introduced by the Duke of Bedford into his animal collection, and then quickly escaped (around 100 years ago)

This makes the UK an important part of this species survival. It is particularly easy to see in the Norfolk broads, but is also found in other counties in this area.

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Electric two wheelers are cutting carbon emissions by 1 million barrels of oil a day

There are a variety of different industries which need to stop using carbon. The hardest, is transport. While electrifying aircraft is incredibly hard, we have already worked out everything we need to electrify the worlds roads.

An electric scooter uses around 1/10 of the electricity of an efficient small electric car, so every person who switches from car to e-scooter will save a lot of energy each year.

Worldwide, it has been calculated, that at the current time, e-scooters are cutting carbon emissions 4 times faster than electric cars.

This makes it clear, that we need to electrify all forms of transport.

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Aircraft contrails are a significant part of global warming

A recent experiment by google and American airlines, has shown that these could become far rarer which would help cut aviation emissions.

Through using AI models, contrails can be reduced by 54%. Given the impact on global warming (contrails absorb and trap heat really well), removing these contrails could make a big difference around the world.

So how big is this difference? Well planes only account for 2.5% of global emissions, but this increases to 3.5% with other effects such as contrails. A large part of this 1% is down to contrails, so by largely eliminating them, could cut aviation impacts by 2 sevenths.

Looking at it differently, a reduction of 2/7 or 29%, accounts for 2/3 of the emissions cuts required by aviation by 2050.

This does not really make a big difference to the overall issue, but shows that Aviation can still cut their impact in a meaningful way.

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Onshore wind is the cheapest renewable resource, so why is it not being built

Why is this not returning to a be a common thing

From 2015 to last year, there was a defacto ban on onshore wind. This was because of a change by David Cameroon, who changed planning rules, so it took just one objection to block a wind project. This was a stupid idea, and indeed was only put in place as a result of NIMBY (not in my back yard) concerns from wealthy donors and conservative MPs.


Why should we care, if these wealthy people blocked onshore wind for all that time? Well it is estimated that the lack of extra onshore wind capacity is costing around £510 million to the UK public, because it is easily the cheapest electricity. To put that in perspective that is £182 per household (this is from july 2022-june 2023).

We need to reverse this foolish decision now. We need every wind turbine we can get, in the effort to reach carbon neutral power generation in the UK as soon as possible.

Continue reading “Onshore wind is the cheapest renewable resource, so why is it not being built”
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Could bonobos go extinct because of malaria?

Humans are not the only species of primate which can get ill or die as a result of malaria – an illness carried by mosquitos. The problem is, that while humans have developed ways to fight the infection, and many humans live far from where they could get bitten, the Chimpanzees gorillas orangutans and Bonobos all live in hot humid rainforests which are perfect breeding places.

Bonobos live the other side of the Congo river to chimpanzees, and while a relatively recent species to appear, they are very different to chimpanzees – make love not war, the hippy priimate.

This becomes a greater problem when humans have already reduced these species populations so dramatically.

One bonobo population was found to have developed an immunity to the illness, but unfortunately this has not been discovered anywhere else.

Should bonobos have got this condition naturally, it would have been fine – while it may have killed a small percentage, overall they would have been fine. Unfortunately, we have pushed them so close to extinction, that in many areas they cannot afford these extra deaths from malaria.

Up until recently, while infection had been noted in other great ape species, bonobos had not been found to suffer from the condition, but now we know better.

The issue is that, with humans having reduced populations through direct hunting and deforestation, the loss of any individual can have a far greater impact on the local population.

More people going to see this species in the wild would help save them, as it will give them value to the local population. We hope to add links that you can use to arrange your wild travel as soon as possible.

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Otters not yet safe in Cumbria

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The recovery of otters in the UK continues apace, but threats remain

Otters were once one of the most common predators in the UK. However, being apex predators, they are the first sign of contamination in the system. This is because, while each fish may have a low enough dose to not be impacted, when the otter has eaten many fish they are impacted.

The main threats have been chemical runoff from farms, though sewage is also a problem. 

By the 1980s, the British otter was virtually extinct from large parts of the country, only surviving in remote places, far from people and pollution. Oddly, otter hunting with special hounds was not banned until 1981, which will not have helped.

No more! Otters are now found within all counties of the UK. Now, it is true that otters are hard to see – they have always been. Generally they are species which require you to be out at strange times of the day, or just very lucky.

There are places to head where this is not the case, such as the Isle of Mull and similar islands around the UK, where the otters are dependent on the tide, so can be easier to find active in daylight.

On mainland Britain, it seems that Cumbria is an increasingly good place to look, with all suitable habitat now occupied.

Time will tell, but hopefully in the near future, this will be the case all over the UK.

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Do not buy a hydrogen boiler!

The UK watchdog (amongst many other groups) have concluded that hydrogen boiler is a stupid idea. It is true that its only waste product is water and oxygen, but the cost of making the hydrogen is very high.

Should there be large quantities of hydrogen sitting around, then this might make sense – burning hydrogen is generally a very clean fuel. The problem is, that it is almost impossible to store or transport it without loosing much on route, and it is incredibly expensive to split water – the current form for the vast majority of the hydrogen on the planet. Fossil fuel companies are keen, because their old methods can extract and split hydrogen, but it will mean large carbon emissions as well, so is useless – there is a reason that it is called grey hydrogen. Green hydrogen is the only kind that will give us any profit as a world.

So why is the government supporting the switch (alongside gas focused industry). The department for energy security and net zero stated this week that the gas network ” will always be part of our energy system”. I am not sure why anyone would look at it, given an air-source heat pump is likely to be around price parity, and ground source heating even cheaper.

Installation, at the cheap end will be far cheaper than a heat-pump, but this will be more than made up for over the lifetime of the device. Furthermore, with the grants currently available, you are far better off going straight to a heat pump. This is a waste of time and money, and it would not be remotely surprising, if you had to remove it before the end of its life,as it would be costing too much

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Half of plantations in Indonesia’s palm oil heartland are illegal

I wrote in February about how an assessment had found that 20% of palm oil plantations were illegal (to read click here). This latest assessment suggests that in its heartland, half are illegal. Riau province is this heartland. Illegal plantations within this area cover an area almost as large as Hawai, and hosts more than half of the illegal plantations in the whole of Indonesia.

These illegal plantations are also not all owned by small players, with some of the biggest names in palm oil on the list. The government is suggesting 3 years to get retrospective permission.

The problem with this, is that it is essentially permission by the back door. If companies know that they will eventually get permission, there is a high incentive to break the law.

Furthermore, if these areas were designated for coservation, we need to find areas of similar importance to replace them

 

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Company Green Grazing from Vietnam is aiming to grow and sell red seaweed, as an additive to livestock feed

Why is this important?

red seaweed photo credit Peter Southwood

Around the world there are around 3 billion cattle and sheep. These produce around 231 billion pounds of methane each year, which is around 10 billion metric tonnes of methane into the air. Remember that over the first 20 years (it reduces after this) methane traps roughly 80 times the same amount of carbon dioxide. So this is the equivalent of a huge amount of carbon.

To put this in perspective, if we shrink the worlds carbon emissions to zero, but are left with all this methane, we are likely to have runaway global warming anyway.

So what does this seaweed do? It essentially causes the cows and sheep to create less methane. How much? Well, while around 100 million tonnes of this seaweed would be needed, they could eliminate 98% of the methane emissions from these livestock!

In 2019 around 34.7million tonnes of seaweed was farmed, which is leading some sceptical researchers to suggest that it cannot be done. However, if we look logically, this is already enough seaweed to reduce methane emissions by 1 third – not to be sneezed at.

Another problem, is that currently Greener Grazing is restricted to only growing 1/3 of the year, as the water temperature kills the seaweed the rest of the time. However, this could be fantastic – if cross breeding can give this seaweed the ability to cope with warmer water, they might be able to meet the whole worlds demands.

More work is needed, and other tests have proved less successful in the reduction of methane, but still, this is a field, where we might be able to green peoples behaviour without requiring them to stop eating meat.

Now, of course, if meat grown in a lab could reach price parity, it may deal with this problem overnight, though it would also eliminate many peoples source of income.

Time will tell if this company is going to have a large effect or not. We need to have farmers wanting this additive, thereby creating a valuable market for coastal communities around the world.

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