Wildlife and conservation new, wild travel information and links for booking
While there are still many right-wing networks that deny the truth to global warming – or increasingly admit the world is warming but suggest that humans have nothing to do with this (a hard thing to argue as the only thing that has changed is us and our carbon emissions- and the change is happening faster than anything we can find in the last few million years), fossil fuel companies do not seem to be making the Investments necessary to move their business in the timescale available.
While there is not yet a battery that can power a passenger jumbo jet, aviation is looking more and more likely to go electric at some point.
The Alice plane is a plane that when carrying passengers can sit around 20. In cargo mode it can fly around 500 miles. It can be flown by a single pilot, and can fly about 1200kg. Travelling at just short of 300 miles per hour, and taking roughly 30 minutes of charging for every hour in the air (it can only stay up for about 100 minutes) it is thought that using these planes will save about 70% of the cost.
Also, being simpler engines with far fewer moving parts, the planes are expected to have higher reliability and lower costs for maintenance.
Even more exciting, these ranges are doable on current batteries. As there is huge amounts of money going into battery research it is highly likely that in the future, the range of these planes will be able to be increased.
For many years there has been concern about what will happen to the various ocean currents, as the earth and the oceans warm. One of the currents that has the biggest positive effect is the Gulf stream – and scientists warn that the loss of this current could have devastating effects on the world and must not be allowed to happen.
Unfortunately, we are not changing our habits very much at all, and certainly not fast enough.
Continue reading “Climate scientists have spotted warning signs of the Gulf stream collapse”Koalas are often listed as one of the most popular animals worldwide. Living only in Australia, most of us are not going to see them in their natural setting.
Increasingly it is looking like, no one will see them in their natural setting unless you are travelling to Australia soon.
A mix of droughts, heatwaves and bushfires have all contributed to deal this huge blow to this unique species.
There are now estimated to be just 58,000 wild koalas, down for 80,000 in 2018. Another problem occurs when developers clear land to build a property – which is continuing to occur in Koala habitat.
Earlier this year, Australia announced that it was considering listing the East coast koala as endangered. With a precipitous fall in population like this, it seems odd that there is any decision to be made – of course the Koala is endangered, and if the government is considering listing a particular subspecies as endangered it must be very bad.
Estimates as high as 1 billion are quoted for the number of animals killed in the fires.
The increase of wealth in a few people is shown by the number of people that it takes to reach 50% of humans wealth reducing over time. in 2016 61 people were needed to reach 50%, in 2017 43 were needed.
Why does this matter? well it means two things. Firstly a large proportion of humanity has few physical resources. When you are living hand to mouth, doing anything else is impossible. The second, is that those few with enormous resources have vastly bigger carbon footprints: this is not just thinking of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their rocket rivalry (it is not hard to make an argument that space could help save us in the future), but 22,000 with private jets and the many millions more who are emitting tens of tonnes of carbon each year.
Those with extreme wealth therefore need to offset a great deal more than just their own carbon footprint. Billionaires should be throwing money at people sequestering carbon – it will protect their own future just as much as the poorest on planet earth
Extraction of peat, generally means that it dries up and then releases its huge store of carbon back into the air.
There are vast areas of peat in places like Indonesia, and the DRC, however there are also large areas of peat in Scotland. Peat is full of nutrients and so it is valued by gardeners. Peat will be used by professional gardeners until 2028.
In the UK Peat is our largest carbon store, trapping as much as a tropical rainforest per hectare. They are also important habitats and protect those further down stream from flooding.
This has been known as an issue that the british government has needed to address for some time. In the end, it seems that they failed to address this with the urgency that it requires.
Most of the peat in the UK is imported from Ireland. However, they have banned it so this is soon to dry up. A ban is thought likely to cut emissions over the next 2 decades by at least 4 million tonnes.
It is a good start, but we also need to restore those peats that have already been part extracted. This could keep much of the carbon in the ground if we act fast.
It is unfortunately true, that we are so close to climate disaster that we need all large countries to move as one on mitigating climate change. What is to happen if just a few refuse? An article from a few months ago spells this out, and its not good.
If China Russia Brazil and Australia all follow up on the pledges that they made on carbon reduction the world and the rest of the world followed their example, we as a planet would be looking at warming of 5°C rather the 1.5°C that scientists tell us is needed in order to avoid terrible impacts.
Continue reading “What do we do, when the plans of just a 4 countries could doom us all?”There is a constant argument that we should not be acting on climate change because we have not reached consensus. This really is not the case.
A look at 90,000 studies which looked at the climate found that 99.9% of them agreed that humans were the cause. The degree of certainty is now the same as that on evolution or on plate tectonics -the debate is over.
It is true that you can still find supposedly learned men and women who will disagree, but we are now at the point where it is akin to arguing the world is flat. Yes there are thousands of “flat earthers” worldwide, but those denying climate change should be put in the same category as those who deny the shape of the earth (and think that the millions of people who would have to be in on it are all dutifully keeping quiet.
This study has been compiled by Cornell University and shows that the miniscule minority still fighting against this truth, is now just a small number of noisy voices.
This is terrifying! In the USA there are 30 US senators and 109 representatives who “refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change”.
It is now time for Facebook and twitter to stop giving an unchallenged voice to purveyors of falsehoods. Denying the science of climate change is likely are more dangerous for the future of the human race than denying the obvious facts about vaccines.
Roughly speaking, there is 3000 billion tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere. This is a huge number, but then we have to remember that this is higher than at any other time in human history. Before humans were on the planet, there were time periods where carbon concentrations in the atmosphere were dramatically higher.
However, the problem is that there is thought to be roughly 1600 billion tonnes locked in the permafrost around the world. If global warming continues, this permafrost will melt and release its carbon stores – increasing the carbon concentration by around 50%.
This is obviously a point at which a significant amount of planet warming will be inescapable.
So what needs to happen?
In the past great mammals behaved in such ways that it largely kept this carbon locked in the soil. There were far fewer trees, vast grasslands often covering bogs.
If mammoths were to return, perhaps alongside woolly rhinoceros and bison the same processes could return allowing a far greater quantity of carbon to remain in the permafrost soil.
Will this happen? Who knows, though with the increasing quantity of carbon known to be locked in the Siberian soil, it seems worth giving it a go.
Yesterday I was writing about a series of dams that have collapsed in Brazil. We need to remember that there are two imminent threats that we are facing in the natural world.
We need to cut carbon emissions dramatically, we know as the human race that if we do not cut emissions dramatically and very fast, our planet will go through horrific change from the loss of the ice caps (and the resulting sea level rise) to the desertificion of large parts of the planet – some of this previously being rainforest.
If we cannot halt the loss of areas such as rainforests, the problem becomes even larger as we destroy one of our largest carbon sinks.
In the west, we have a responsibility to not only cut our own emissions to net zero in the space of a few decades, we must also help developing countries grow their own economies and increase the standard of living for their citizens without destroying what remains of the ecosystems that still exist.