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Now that the dust has settled, lets have a look at the whole Greenpeace debacle and what it is going to mean in the future in the UK.
This was started by Greenpeace engaging in a public protest at Rishi Sunak’s mansion. The reason that they went to his house, is that he is the UK prime minister.
The fear is that, with the Tonga eruption, this larger than normal hole might do extra damage to the vast store of ice on Antactica.
Why is this concerning?
Well, given the Antarctic and the Greenland icesheet has enough ice to raise sea levels by 65m worldwide. This means a 5% melt in Antarctica would raise sea levels by several meters (even without any melting of Greenland at all).
This quantity of sea level rise, would threaten cities such as Shanghai and London, to large parts of Florida and Bangladesh to total nations that would be wiped out, such as Maldives.
This means that while it may well take a century and increased carbon emissions for all of the ice at the poles to melt, it could threaten human populations long before this occurs.
Around 410 million people on earth live within just 2m of the height of the sea. This is roughly 5% of human population. Currently, there are issues with just 2% immigration into the UK. A sea level rise of 2m would likely trigger an order of magnitude more to move here, Western Europe, USA and other countries. We are all going to be hit hard, but some far harder than others.
Due to the low numbers of all of the large mammals that live in the country, poaching could rapidly threaten the survival in the country.
Currently, about 500 wolves survive, 50-60 bears and perhaps only 30 of the Balkan lynx (the Balkan lynx only has around 120 members spread across the whole Balkans).
According to SWIPE (Successful wildlife prosecution in Europe)
“While compiling the Report, a total of 165 cases were collected and analyzed, 110 of which were misdemeanors and 55 were criminal offenses. In 75% of initiated misdemeanor proceedings, the accused was found guilty, while that percentage is lower in criminal proceedings – about 57% of them ended in a conviction.“
In this report, the wild species most often targeted include song-birds and after this the bear. There was issues with captive animals that came between (I find this repugnant, but this website is to do with wildlife primarily) and then came targeting of bears.
Now, given there are only 50-60 left in the country, a poaching level of just 5-10 bears a year could threaten the countries population to extinction within the next decade. It is true that the Serbian bear population, like the wolf and the Balkan Lynx is part of a transboundary population which is more healthy. Never-the-less, local extinctions is almost always how extinction starts.
Indeed, wildlife tourism has the capacity to lift more people out of poverty, than hunting of the animals that would otherwise be photographed. Currently, world wildlife tourism is thought to be worth $156 billion, and this often goes to little places where there is little work. It seems quite conceivable for Serbia to seize a sizable portion of the wildlife tourism for Europe.
We are off, traveling in Europe. By the time you read this, we should be deep in the wilds of the northern Italian Alps, and with any luck will have spotted some bears or wolves.
We will be back in about 12 days when things will continue. Hopefully with plenty of stories to tell
Climate change effects are not restricted to the third world (though very often the impact is felt more harshly here).
In the USA the volume of water in the Colorado river has fallen by the volume of lake Mead in 23 years – this is the equivalent of 15 billion Olympic sized swimming pools. More than 40 million people rely on this river for their water – along with millions of acres of farm land.
Despite the drought that has hit the area, scientists have calculated that the water loss would not have had anywhere near the effect without the human caused climate change.
This may simply be early signs of things to come in the USA
Great progress is being made in slowing rainforest destruction in Brazil with great falls in the last year. It is true that this rate needs to fall to zero in the near future, but great progress is being.
A lot of this progress is as a result of the end of the Bolsonaro regime, and could swing back should a similar person come to power.
However, what is clear is that if the Amazon reaches a tipping point and starts to dry out, it will rapidly die, and at this point there is unlikely to be enough rain for the regions croplands to remain (the crops will no longer grow as a result of the lack of rain).
It is essential that the rest of the world invests heavily in this region, in order to give a clear alternative to soy and cattle rearing in order to earn a living.
There are a great number of different sectors which need to be tackled if we are to move towards net zero as a world. One of the hardest is the ships that transverse the world oceans, allowing the global economy to run. Is this finally an area which cuts will be possible?
Many sectors of the global economy have been fully sorted – or at least solutions exist which will take carbon to zero over time – I will include a quick overview below, but for the rest of the article look below the bullet points:
Much of what is left is the last 9% or so which is used in transportation. Air transport accounts for around 3% currently, but is a hard place to decarbonize as it is such an energy intensive process, though many companies have passenger jets for journeys are to 500 miles coming in the next decade.
This leaves sea transportation. Much of the worlds freight goes by sea. It is far cheaper (in most instances) to make lots of a product in one location in the world and then ship it to where it is needed. Currently this is highly polluting, but progress is being made here too.
COSCO electric container ship is one of the first to hit the market. Powered by 2 900kw propulsion motors, it reduces carbon emissions by 32 tonnes every 24 hours. Powered by a battery unit (housed in 20-foot containers) which has a capacity of 50mwh or 50000kwh). These containers are easily swappable, which means in places like a river where swapping them out is relatively easy, they are ready to replace all other freight and given the huge savings are likely to relatively quickly.
These ships will be able to run on full power for around 24 hours. Given that container ships tend to travel at around 20 knots (37km per hour or 22 miles per hour) this is a rang of around 500 miles. If the swapping of this battery can be done quickly, the travel along the coast should be able to able to continue relatively quick, particularly if these battery swapping stations can be stationed as near the shipping route as possible.
Now this container ship takes around 700 containers, which suggests to me, that you could put in say 10 container batteries, barely reduce the capacity and allow this same ship to cross the Atlantic and more. Now 700 containers is a small container ships with some carrying 7 times as many. A 5000 container ship takes 1.5 -2 million gallons of oil, 1 gallon weighs about 3.3kg, so we are talking 5000 tonnes at the lower end, that means that even on our smaller shop we are talking 500 tonnes of oil, 10 batteries has to compare favourably.
If well made and competition arrives soon, it is likely that these ships will arrive surprisingly fast, as the advantage to companies using them will give them to great an advantage over competition, requiring extremely rapid adoption.
Grey wolves from Oregon now appear to be thriving in California (where they disappeared from about 100 years ago).
Wolves have never been reintroduced to California, instead they were returned to Yellowstone, re-entered Oregan back in 1999, and then entered California in 2008.
Short of a sudden sustained assault on their numbers, they are back in California and are likely to multiply over the next few decades to take back up their position as apex predators. This should not be feared in any way, with sensible management, it could end up benefiting California, with healthier ecosystems, less car crashes caused by wildlife amongst many other benefits.
It is true, Wolves are hunters. More than that, they are incredibly successful hunters. They work as a team, have incredible endurance and a very high level of intelligence. This is perhaps why in the last few centuries their numbers have been greatly depleted.
In places like western Europe and the USA, they were close to extinction as a whole and had become locally extinct in much of their range. So is this fear mongering reasonable? Of course not.
Here she is talking about wolves in Colorado. She quoted figures of 500 attacks from 2002- the present, and stated that 30 people died in this time – scary numbers indeed. However, she was instantly fact-checked – those were the number of attacks around the world not just in the USA, only 1 death occurred there.
Of course, every death is sad, but to put it in perspective, each year 175-200 people die as a result of their car colliding with a deer. So over the same period, there were 3500-4000 car deaths as a result of deer – and wolf presence greatly reduces this, both by reducing the deer numbers, and creating a climate of fear, which makes deer stay away from open spaces, and so cross roads far less often.
We have live sightings maps for many of the largest reserves in Africa, as well as the Alps and the Carpathians in Europe.
We are keen to slowly build this site up as a resource for wild study and are keen to operate as a place to put together sighting data. While all maps are currently live, we are keeping an eye on poaching and will remove animals that are in danger from showing up. In the future some of this information may well disappear into the members area, but for the time being – ENJOY
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