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There is a constant argument made by those who like the combustion engine car. They want to add up all the emissions that are released creating the electricity and therefore suggest that the electric car is worse.
This argument quickly runs into problems: an electric car is so much more efficient that it is irrelavent.
Continue reading “Do not be mislead, an electric car always has lower emissions than an equivalent combustion engine car”Uganda has suffered during lockdown. As much as 7% of the countries population works in tourism, a sector which has been either totally shut down, or greatly reduced over the last few years. Several other countries like Tanzania have suffered in a similar way.
How can we expect countries to protect huge ecosystems if the income to protect them can dry up with no warning?
Continue reading “Lockdown has shown the perils of overreliance on tourism: what to do”
Incredible progress has been made over the last couple of decades towards greening our grid. Coal is now supplying a very small percentage of our power, and this is likely to fully disappear in the next few years. Gas is the only remaining fossil fuel on our grid. We mad roughly 28 gigawats of electricity from gas in 2018 (last normal year before epidemic). There are plenty of ways to get this from clean sources
As an example, 1 megawatt of solar panels takes roughly 4 acres, and costs about 1 million pounds. Therefore, 1 gigawatt would take roughly 7 square miles and cost roughly 1 billion. That means to replace 28 gigawatt hours of gas generation with solar, would cost roughly 28 billion. The batteries would cost about 2 billion for a similar quantity. In terms of area, we would need roughly 150 miles, which is roughly 2/3 of all the rooftops of the UK housing stock. If, however, all UK commercial governmental and industrial buildings have their roofs covered in solar panels, this would likely take a great deal of the capacity needed. Even if you assume we need extra for night time power, we can not be talking more than 50 billion.
I am not saying that the government needs to invest this now. However, as gas powerplants do not last more than about 25 years, we can assume that by 2050 all the current ones would be decommissioned. If as each gas powered plant goes offline it was replaced with solar and batteries, the cost would be roughly £1.8 billion a year while a huge cost to many countries, would essentially be a rounding error in the UK.
Can the human race use the lessons learnt during the Covid epidemic to start addressing climate change as the existential threat that we know it is? Estimates vary as to what the Covid epidemic has cost, but economists estimate roughly $28 Trillion. Now while that sounds huge, it is only about 1/3 of global output annually. Given that Covid has taken place over around 2 years, that means an output reduction of less than 20%.
Now it is true, that governments around the world have spent vast amounts money propping up economies and trying to avoid as much of the pain as possible.
Climate change is predicted to cost about $23 trillion per year by 2050!
In other words, economists are predicting that in 28 years, we will have to find almost the price of fighting Covid – every year (remember that the Covid costs have been spread out over 2 years).
CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT?
We are marching towards a future, where we pay out almost the whole cost of COVID every year, to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Most scavengers are relatively small. Animals like jackals are unable to make large kills. Furthermore, the amount left behind by lion and leopard is usually more than enough for a jackal to survive on.
In the northern hemisphere though, bears get a great deal of their calories from scavenging. They have an incredibly keen sense of smell, allowing them to find dead animals,
However unlike the jackal, they are very capable of hunting. They can be seen from time to time, mixing the two.
Bears, particularly Grizzly bears, are very strong. In peak health, a large bear is more than capable of taking on a pack of wolves. They also require huge quantities of calories, and before going into hibernation, this will often push them to take bigger and bigger risks.
This is not hugely rare behaviour, but it is far rarer that it be filmed.
This proposal would mean that Indonesia could cut down all its rainforest and replace them with Palm Oil, and would have engaged in zero deforestation.
This has to be condemned globally, There are myriad problems with this. The destruction of the rainforest would release billions of tonnes of carbon into the air. Palm oil, will be incapable of reabsorbing all this carbon. Furthermore, palm oil plantations support just a handful of species of wildlife, so this would mean the end of the orangutan Sumatran elephant, tiger leopard and rhino.
Thankfully, there are many voices within Indonesia which are already condemning this move.
At the moment, this idea is the thought of various extreme academics (and much of the government). If it were to find acceptance, we could see the wholesale destruction of the forests of Indonesia, an area of deforestation that would have a huge effect on the worlds attempts to mitigate global warming. Arguments that palm oil trees absorb carbon as well, are absurd, as they absorb a tiny proportion of the carbon that would be emitted.
Hopefully, this will remain a crackpot academic idea, and a governmental daydream and never be put into place. We must be vigilant that it isnt.
From arranged marriages to informal dates, for millennia parents have often been involved in arranging their offsprings spouses.
It would appear that in the Bonobo world, things work in a similar way. Bonobos are a female dominated world. In Chimpanzees and Gorillas, generally it is the male who decides to mate, and forces himself on the female. It is certainly more complicated than this, partly because the males with the strength to do this are often the largest and therefore the most wanted anyway. Yet in Bonobos it works differently.
A significant amount of time is spent by Bonobo mothers, shepherding their male offspring to groups of suitable females and then standing guard to avoid there being any interruptions. Quite rightly, if this sort of behaviour was to be seen in humans, it would often be considered tantamount to rape. What you must remember, is that in Bonobos society mating is as casual as shaking hands is to humans. Far from the females disliking this behaviour it is accepted.
As a result of this, male bonobos who live with their mother tend to have far more offspring. While in bonobo society, the group is dominated by females, the lower ranks appear to be more fairly balanced. As a result, many mothers are high in the ranking, allowing them to give their sons a leg up.
To check this hypothesis, a group of chimpanzees in Tanzania was also watched, along with a group in Uganda and the Ivory coast. mothers in both species help their sons in fights, but only the bonobos had an increased chance to mate. Given the male dominance in Chimpanzees, mothers can have less impact.
Last month, I wrote about how google was failing to deal with climate change deniers, now there is a similar related problem.
Google allows advertisers to pay to have their advert appear as though it is a search result. One in 5 ads served on 78 climate related terms were placed their by fossil fuel companies.
The study looked at 1600 articles and found that 20% of the adverts were placed by fossil fuel companies.
A survey back in 2020 found that more than half of those using this service could not tell the difference between the search results and these ‘disguised’ adverts.
Exxonmobil, shell, aramco, Mckinsey, and goldman sachs were among the top users along with a handful of other fossil fuel providers and their financiers.
This is highly concerning. Having been forced to abandon their ridiculous claim that global warming was not happening, they are now trying to influence the discussion of decarbonisation in their favour. Far and away the most regular seen ad was Shells which were seen 156 times, and appeared on 86% of the searches for “net zero” They also kept highlighting their promise to be net zero by 2050 and to align itself with the 1.5 degrees C target (something that virtually all scientists agree are incompatible – you cannot aim for 2050 net zero and 1.5 as waiting till 1050 guarentees we blow straight past the 1.5.
Furthermore, Shells only way to reach net zero appears to be through offsets. They intend to continue to extract coal oil and gas until the end of the century.
How can we reach a concensus about where we are trying to go in fighting climate change if so many people are being fed lies.
I believe that it is time to take google at its word. If they wont stop listing these sorts of lies, then they must be treated with the same contempt as the fossil fuel companies. Further more googles future must be the same – change or go extinct. The current problem is that google is such a dominant player in search and advertising, at the moment it is hard to avoid them.
Now, I should add that I did a quick search, and was not possible to duplicate these results. Further more, i got the same results in incognito. I am unsure if google has tweaked its algorithm since yesterday, but this is part of the problem. Given that a small tweak can transform the results, it is hard to get a proper window into googles behaviour.
We need more openness from google. They are making great strides towards taking their business to carbon zero. However, if they continue to influence the rest of the world to not do so, I believe that a significant amount of the blame is retained. Do they want to be seen as a green advocate? or as a climate change denier. It is not possible to sit on the fence, climate change denial needs to be demoted in their search terms.
I have written about issues that have arisen from the delisting of wolves in America. Given their absence from a large portion of the USA, the suggestion that they have recovered is insane. Unfortunately, putting states in charge takes the decisions of what a sensible ‘harvest’ is, away from scientists and puts it in the hands of local governors.
Wisconsin has already killed 1/3 of the wolf population based in the state. The fact is, that Wisconsin stated that their aim was to have a stable wolf population, something clearly not successful.
Beavers are a native part of British fauna. I have written many times on different advantages that their return is likely to generate. These run from reduced flooding of rivers, created wetland areas which keep flow of water constant, increased biodiversity helping water mammals recover (and the advantage that comes with this is the likely eradication of American mink which cannot compete with otters), filtering out pollutants as well as many more.
Unfortunately, in America, beavers are causing problems that they would not have been able to (in the past). Up until recently, much of places like Alaska were permanently locked in permafrost. Indeed, there are now areas, where, 50 years ago no beavers live – now the land has as many beavers as it can support. Using satellite images, scientists counted 12,000 beaver ponds, a number twice that of 20 years ago.
The first concern, is that indigenous people are loosing roads and places that they need to grow enough food to survive.
However, a bigger issue is that it is thought that these beavers could accelerate climate change. As beavers do not hibernate, they store food in their ponds, keeping it fresh for longer meaning that they can continue to have enough food to stay awake through the heart of winter.
The beaver pools that are created when beavers dam rivers, create localized unfrozen hotspots which in turn melts the permafrost in the area. This is the dangerous bit, as the permafrost, that is found throughout all the arctic nations, stores vast amounts of carbon. If the permafrost melts, this will be released and there is enough quantity to pass all problem points that scientists are worried about.
If all the permafrost carbon is released, the world is likely to suffer temperature rises, that may well dwarf the current estimates. This in turn is likely to require billions of people to move as their home country falls below sea level.