Links tagged “species”

“Birds have evolved over hundreds of years to fly certain paths to migrate,” said New Hampshire-based environmentalist Lisa Linowes. “You can’t throw a turbine up in the way and expect them to adapt. It’s not happening.” “Democrats have been sold a false narrative by the industrial wind industry,” said Kevon Martis, a Michigan-based environmentalist and co-founder of the Energy and Wildlife Coalition with Linowes.

“Many Democrats somehow imagine that industrial wind farms, which take hundreds of times more land than a natural gas plant, are better for the environment,” he added.

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The wind industry claims house cats kill more birds than wind turbines. But cats mainly kill small, common birds like sparrows, robins, and jays, whereas wind turbines kill big, threatened, slow-to-reproduce species like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors. 

The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.  For example, golden eagles will have just one or two chicks in a brood, and usually less than once a year, whereas a songbird like a robin could have up to two broods of three to seven chicks each year.

Antarctic penguins could experience a ‘population boom’ due to global warming as melting sea ice means they have to spend less time foraging for food.

The CO₂ Coalition of climate scientists today released a White Paper analyzing decades of peer-reviewed research on the impact on the oceans of carbon dioxide emissions from the conversion of fossil fuels to energy. ...

The White Paper reveals that the term “ocean acidification” was invented to scare citizens into opposing the use of fossil fuels, which power 80 percent of the U.S. and world economies.  It also shows that carbon dioxide is a vital part of ocean health and the ocean food web, because additional CO2 input allows marine life to thrive.  The foundation of the ocean food web is phytoplankton, which includes organisms such as microscopic plants and bacteria. These organisms require CO2 to make their food through photosynthesis.

CO2 Coalition chair Patrick Moore, a noted ecologist and a former top-ranking Greenpeace official: "The specter of ‘ocean acidification’ has no basis in the scientific data.”