These kelp forests have an essential little helper for its survival. It has become clear that sea otters are essential members of communities of the kelp forests off the coast of California. Sea weed, which includes Kelp, locks away around 200 million tonnes of carbon each year and so are an essential part of the fight against global warming.
Continue reading “A new study from Monteray Bay Aquarium has once again highlighted the importance of sea otters for the health of the Kelp forests”Climate stripes
This image is a fantastic way to be able to see climate change. Created by Professor Ed Hawkins in 2018, it shows the changing in temperature over the last 2 centuries.
Blue lines show years where the yearly average temperature is lower than the overall average (and the darker the further below the average). The red is the opposite.
While it does not need pointing out, can you see how dark it has got in the last few years.
Below is a short video about the stripes with their creator explaining them.
Platinum Rhino, the worlds largest captive rhino breeding operation sold to africaparksnetwork! (update, instagram embed did not work)
Hearing this news, one might think “great, another 10-20 rhino”? Think again.
Platinum rhino holds as much as 15% of the current wild population in its operation -2000 individuals. Here is an instagram on the news!
This could be great! Current rhino numbers are estimated to be in the low 2000, down 79% since 2011. Releasing the whole herd back into the Kruger could allow numbers a sizable boost, and rapidly move the kruger back towards its former stronghold of the white rhino. However, in the first half of 2023 over 200 rhino were poached from the Kruger, suggesting that this is not going to be easy.
Unfortunately, the Kruger is already one of the best preserved large reserves in the world. Thankfully, rhino horn has dropped in value from its peak in 2012 of $65,000 per kg, down to a current $8000 per kg. It would be good to depress this further, however the risks for the poacher are very high: not only are many poachers killed by the rhino, they are also often killed by other wildlife such as lions – and the Kruger has a sizable number of man-eating specialists.
I suspect the organization will spread the rhino around, across many of their reserves. Hopefully the recognition that farms like this make no sense, will allow them to thrive back in the wild.
Education is still needed in China, Vietnam and elsewhere. Rhino horn is the same substance as your finger-nails, Keratin. Consuming it will make no difference to any medical condition, science has tried to show any positive health benefit, and can see nothing scientific – at best a placebo effect.
Below, is a video about this farm, 6 years ago back in its heyday. Hopefully, all these rhino can recover white rhino populations far and wide.
Transforming coal into protein for livestock feed uses 0.1% of the space!
Currently, land given over to growing animal feed accounts for 40 million square kg (15.4 million square miles). Given the worlds land mass accounts for almost 60 million square miles (160 million square km( this is a significant increase). This amount of land, freed up, could potentially allow a huge improvement in the amount of space given over to wilderness on the earth.
So where would we get protein for livestock feed?
Chinese scientists have created a method which allows the conversion of coal into protein – far more effectively than with plants. 0.1% of this land is required in this new system. It is true that this still accounts for 60,000 square miles,
So the process has a number of steps.
- The coal is transfored into methanol via gasification (this can now be done with a near zero carbon emissions)
- The methane is then fed to a special strain of Pichia pastoris yeast, which ferments the methanol, in order to produce a single-cell protein complete with a range of amino acids, vitamins, inorganic salts, fats and carbohydrates. There is far more protein in this than in plants and it can be used to partially replace the protein currently used
The conversion efficiency is at a remarkable 92%. This means that it is a cost effective replacement. Now, how much of the protein can be replaced, however a trial facility has already produced thousands of tonnes of this protein.
So if we assume that it cannot replace all of the protein, it seems reasonable to be able to replace 50% or 80% of the protein.
Even countries like the USA could free up thousands of square miles.
The idea that we could free up 30 -48 millions square kilometres (7.5 to 12 million square miles) to be returned to wilderness and carbon sinks among other purposes. If just half of this land was rewilded, it would allow large amounts of the land around the world to return to a wild state, which would help us cut emissions.
Now, it is true that this coal will be emitted as carbon at the end of the line, but if enough of the freed land is used for forest and similar, the net carbon gain can be huge.
Can simple changes help the Javan rhino recover?
Above is a fascinating video about a photographers journey to try to see this rhinos in the wild (spoiler alert, it was a success, as you can see from the thumbnail). The problem is that despite this video being from 8 years ago, the Javan rhino has not recovered a great deal in the intervening years.
So, when I say it has not recovered much in those years, what do I mean? Well in 2015 the Javan rhino population was estimated at 72, it is now thought to number 76.
A new study has suggested a number of idaes that might accelerate the recovery of this rhino.
These are captive breeding, and forest clearance to give more areas for the rhino to feed.
While the latter may well have some merit, the former may not. It should also be noted that currently 13 of the rhino show signs of inbreeding. So why not bring some of the remaining rhino into captivity, in order to breed? This has not proved highly successful in the past, and indeed often a number of individuals die in the early stages. With a population of just 76 individuals, we do not have spare rhino to gamble with.
Like the Sumatran rhino, the small population left in Java is a relict of a species which roamed a great area of Asia, until not that long ago. If we can save this Javan population there is a potential in the future to reintroduce them to a wide variety of countries in this part of Asia, both mainland and islands.
Will this happen? who knows
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.
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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
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.
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
Company Green Grazing from Vietnam is aiming to grow and sell red seaweed, as an additive to livestock feed
Why is this important?
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.
Largest offshore windfarm just powered up, and its just off UK
This vast wind farm can produce around 3.6 gigawatts of power when turned on. To put that in perspective, peak demand in the UK is currently around 61 gigawatt hours, This means that even at peak demand, this wind turbine is capable of providing roughly 5% of the UK power demand. By contrast, the average house in the UK has a low-point in power demand, during the night, when around 0.2kwh is used an hour. This equates to around 5gigawatt hours. In other words, this single wind farm is likely to be able to deal with all baseload demands of the UK housing. Of course there is other demand, from shop lights being left on, to night shifts in factories.
However, what is clear, is that this is a significant amount of power, and is likely to greatly reduce the amount of gas required to be burnt for power production.
Given that this adds to the already installed stock, we now can create around 30gwh of electricity from wind – when it is at its peak.
Now, of course the wind does not blow at this required rate to produce the maximum amount of power 24 hours a day, so these numbers are not available all day.
To put these numbers in context, in 2022, wind delivered around 26% of UK electricity. Given all the large wind farms planned, this will grow.