by DGR News Service | Aug 8, 2019 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
Image: Pierre Markuse (Flickr)
Editor’s note: the figures in this article were confirmed using multiple sources, including Grist, the Telegraph, and Inside Climate News. However, the sources are about a week old so the affected areas are probably larger
This summer’s unprecedented temperatures have melted and dried vast regions of arctic permafrost, which have begun igniting and growing into unstoppable wildfires. Russia has been forced to declare a state of emergency because active fires have now expanded to over 12,000 square miles, roughly the size of Belgium, bringing the total affected landmass to over 42,000 square miles this season. These fires are significantly worse than typical forest fires because the burning soil contains significantly more CO2 and the fires will burn for much longer.
A decade ago the phrase “melted permafrost” would have seemed like a contradiction, let alone “permafrost fire.” The definition of permafrost is that it’s not supposed to melt, at least not on human timescales. Now the carbon locked beneath melted permafrost is turning into another feedback loop, a climate system that makes itself worse once triggered; the more heatwaves we encounter the more permafrost fires we’ll experience, those fires contribute to more heatwaves, and so on in a vicious cycle.
These fires are not limited to Russia. Alaska has also experienced over 3,750 square miles of wildire through July. Even Greenland, the land of ice, has witnessed significant wildfires and lost over 197 billion tons of ice in July. These events, among many others, have made 2019 the most extreme year of climate breakdown in human history. Scientists have been forced to revise their models as levels of permafrost melt have already reached levels that were not predicted until 2090. Many climate science “alarmists” appear to have been to conservative in their estimates, an increasingly common theme.
For some people the instinct is to retreat from these horrifying events, to throw their hands up and declare the situation is hopeless and that taking action is futile. Their fear-based response is understandable but it is not acceptable; it makes those people complicit in the nihilistic destruction of life on Earth. We have a moral obligation to take action against the industrial infrastructure that has caused this catastrophe. That struggle against the forces of death is worthwhile, regardless of our personal outcomes, because life is inherently worth defending. The sooner we dismantle industrial civilization, the more species will survive, and the sooner Earth will recover.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 21, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Root Force
A series of recently released studies make it clear that wind power is not going to save us—not from global warming, not from high extinction rates, and not from the system of high-energy-consumption industrial exploitation that is killing the planet.
Let’s start with the most damning findings: even the most large-scale shift to wind power cannot slow greenhouse gas emissions enough to have any positive effect on the climate, although it may manage to make things worse. Why?
A study published in Nature Climate Change in September found that although hypothetically there is enough power in the earth’s winds to sustain current levels of energy consumption, in practice you could never harvest enough energy from wind to affect the climate:
Turbines create drag, or resistance, which removes momentum from the winds and tends to slow them. As the number of wind turbines increases, the amount of energy that is generated increases. But at some point, the winds would be slowed so much that adding more turbines will not generate more electricity. …
[T]he study found that the climate effects of extracting wind energy at the level of current global demand would be small, as long as the turbines were spread out and not clustered in just a few regions. At the level of global energy demand, wind turbines might affect surface temperatures by about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit and affect precipitation by about 1 percent. Overall, the environmental impacts would not be substantial. (emphasis added)
Another study, published in Nature last month, found that wind farms being constructed in Scotland actually lead to a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions:
Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers of current or proposed peatland wind farms.
But peat is also a massive store of carbon, described as Europe’s equivalent of the tropical rainforest. Peat bogs contain and absorb carbon in the same way as trees and plants — but in much higher quantities.
British peatland stores at least 3.2 billion tons of carbon, making it by far the country’s most important carbon sink and among the most important in the world.
Wind farms, and the miles of new roads and tracks needed to service them, damage or destroy the peat and cause significant loss of carbon to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change. …
Richard Lindsay of the University of East London, said … “The world’s peatlands have four times the amount of carbon than all the world’s rainforests. But they are a Cinderella habitat, completely invisible to decision- makers.”
Finally, a study published last month in the journal Environmental Research Letters conducted a further analysis on the effects of wind turbine drag:
Each wind turbine creates behind it a “wind shadow” in which the air has been slowed down by drag on the turbine’s blades. The ideal wind farm strikes a balance, packing as many turbines onto the land as possible, while also spacing them enough to reduce the impact of these wind shadows. But as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact, and the regional-scale wind patterns matter more.
Keith’s research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines’ slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
In short, we may not have access to as much wind power as scientists thought.
“If wind power’s going to make a contribution to global energy requirements that’s serious, 10 or 20 percent or more, then it really has to contribute on the scale of terawatts in the next half-century or less,” says Keith.
If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, “the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is that the effect of that on global winds, and therefore on climate, would be severe — perhaps bigger than the impact of doubling CO2.” (emphasis added)
As if that weren’t enough, another study has just concluded that large wind turbines constructed offshore may snap like matches when hit by medium-size waves:
“If we do not take ringing into consideration, offshore wind turbine parks can lead to financial ruin,” warns John Grue to the research magazine Apollon at University of Oslo. …
Ringing does not just harm wind turbines. Ringing has already been a great problem for the oil industry. The designers of the YME platform did not take ringing into account, and lost NOK 12 billion.
“It is possible to build your way out of the ringing problem by strengthening the oil rigs. However, it is not financially profitable to do the same with wind turbines,” says John Grue.
And finally, let’s not forget what environmentalists have been warning about for decades: wind turbines murder birds.
ReWire has learned that the North Sky River Wind project, which attracted fierce opposition from environmental groups concerned about potential threat to eagles and California condors, was the site of a golden eagle death in January. …
The eagle kill apparently occurred on January 29, just a month after North Sky River started generating power.
So what’s the solution? Certainly not wind, solar, or any other industrial magic bullet. The solution is to dramatically scale back consumption and shift to local-based economies not dependent upon stealing resources from distant people and lands.
The solution is to demolish the global economic system.
Get started!
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 24, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Andrew Gilligan / The Telegraph
Thousands of Britain’s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save, according to potentially devastating scientific research to be published later this year.
The finding, which threatens the entire rationale of the onshore wind farm industry, will be made by Scottish government-funded researchers who devised the standard method used by developers to calculate “carbon payback time” for wind farms on peat soils.
Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers of current or proposed peatland wind farms.
But peat is also a massive store of carbon, described as Europe’s equivalent of the tropical rainforest. Peat bogs contain and absorb carbon in the same way as trees and plants — but in much higher quantities.
British peatland stores at least 3.2 billion tons of carbon, making it by far the country’s most important carbon sink and among the most important in the world.
Wind farms, and the miles of new roads and tracks needed to service them, damage or destroy the peat and cause significant loss of carbon to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change.
Writing in the scientific journal Nature, the scientists, Dr Jo Smith, Dr Dali Nayak and Prof Pete Smith, of Aberdeen University, say: “We contend that wind farms on peatlands will probably not reduce emissions …we suggest that the construction of wind farms on non-degraded peats should always be avoided.”
Dr Nayak told The Telegraph: “Our full paper is not yet published, but we should definitely be worried about this. If the peatland is already degraded, there is no problem. But if it is in good condition, we should avoid it.”
Another peat scientist, Richard Lindsay of the University of East London, said: “If we are concerned about CO2, we shouldn’t be worrying first about the rainforests, we should be worrying about peatlands.
“The world’s peatlands have four times the amount of carbon than all the world’s rainforests. But they are a Cinderella habitat, completely invisible to decision- makers.”
One typical large peat site just approved in southern Scotland, the Kilgallioch wind farm, includes 43 miles of roads and tracks. Peat only retains its carbon if it is moist, but the roads and tracks block the passage of the water.
The wind industry insists that it increasingly builds “floating roads,” where rock is piled on a textile surface without disturbing the peat underneath.
But Mr Lindsay said: “Peat has less solids in it than milk. The roads inevitably sink, that then causes huge areas of peatland to dry out and the carbon is released.”
Mr Lindsay said that more than half of all British onshore wind development, current and planned, is on peat soils.
In 2011 the Scottish government’s nature protection body, Scottish Natural Heritage, said 67 per cent of planned onshore wind development in Scotland would be on peatland.
Read more from The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9889882/Wind-farms-will-create-more-carbon-dioxide-say-scientists.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 1, 2013 | Agriculture, Climate Change
By Bangor University
Growing oil palm to make ‘green’ biofuels in the tropics could be accelerating the effects of climate change, say scientists.
Researchers from Bangor University found the creation of oil palm plantations are releasing prehistoric sources of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
The findings throw into doubt hopes that biofuels grown in the tropics could help cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Working as part of an international team, the north Wales scientists looked at how the deforestation of peat-swamps in Malaysia, to make way for oil palm trees, is releasing carbon which has been locked away for thousands of years.
It is feared this carbon will be attacked by microbes and produce the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The Bangor researchers say the ancient carbon comes from deep in the soil, which as the effects of deforestation take hold, breaks down and dissolves into the nearby watercourses.
When describing their work which appears in Nature, Prof Chris Freeman commented: “We first noticed that the ditches draining areas converted to palm oil plantations were loaded with unusually high levels of dissolved carbon back in 1995, but it was not until my researcher Dr Tim Jones took samples to measure the age of that carbon that we realised we were onto something important”. Dr Jones added “We were amazed to discover that the samples from Malaysian oil palm plantations contained the oldest soil-derived dissolved organic carbon ever recorded.”
The Bangor University researchers measured the water leaching from channels in palm oil plantations in the Malaysian peninsular which were originally Peatland Swamp Forest. There are approximately 28,000 km2 of industrial plantations in peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo with even more planned, making them a major contributor to peatswamp deforestation in the region. Prof Freeman commented; “Our results are yet another reminder that when we disturb intact peatswamps and convert them to industrial biofuel plantations, we risk adding to the very problem that we are trying to solve”
Prof Freeman added: “We have known for some time that in South East Asia, oil palm plantations were a major threat to biodiversity, including the habitat for orang-utans, and that the drainage could release huge amounts of carbon dioxide during the fires seen there in recent years. But this discovery of a “hidden” new source of problems in the waters draining these peatlands is a reminder that these fragile ecosystems really are in need of conservation.”
Read more from Bangor University: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/full.php.en?nid=12106&tnid=12106
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 29, 2012 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Lobbying
By Oliver Milman / The Guardian
The world’s densest population of orangutans is set to be “extinguished” by a massive new wave of fires that is clearing large tracts of a peat swamp forest in the Indonesian island of Sumatra, conservationists have warned.
Environmentalists claim that satellite images show a huge surge in forest blazes across the Tripa peat swamp in order to create palm oil plantations, including areas that have not been permitted for clearing.
Tripa is home to a tight-knit enclave of around 200 critically endangered orangutans. However, this number has plummeted from an estimated population of 3,000.
Just 7,000 orangutans remain in Sumatra, with rampant forest clearing for palm oil cultivation blamed for their decline.
Ian Singleton, head of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP), said that the Tripa orangutans are being “extinguished.”
“The situation is indeed extremely dire,” he said. “Every time I have visited Tripa in the last 12 months I have found several orangutans hanging on for their very survival, right at the forest edge.”
“When you see the scale and speed of the current wave of destruction and the condition of the remaining forests, there can be no doubt whatsoever that many have already died in Tripa due to the fires themselves, or due to starvation as a result of the loss of their habitat and food resources.”
Felling trees from Tripa’s carbon-rich peat also triggers the release of large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Indonesia has been named as the third highest emitter of CO2 emissions in the world when deforestation is a factor, although the country disputes this.
Environmentalists have lodged a lawsuit against PT Kallista Alam, one of the five palm oil firms operating in Tripa, and Irwandi Yusuf, the former governor of Aceh, over the approval of a permit for the 1,600-hectare (3,950-acre) palm oil plantation.
Irawardi, previously styled as a “green” governor, says he granted the permit due to delays in the UN’s Redd+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programme, which has seen Norway pledge $US1bn to Indonesia to reduce deforestation.
“The international community think our forest is a free toilet for their carbon,” Irawardi said in April. “Every day they are saying they want clean air and to protect forests … but they want to inhale our clean air without paying anything.”
SOCP and lawyers representing Tripa’s local communities have called upon the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to bypass an ongoing government investigation into the forest clearing and immediately halt the razing of the area.
“This whole thing makes absolutely no sense at all, not environmentally, nor even economically,” said Singleton.
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/29/fires-indonesia-orangutan
