Leserpost von Dipl. Ing. Martin Krohn:
Betreff: Verlierer der Energiewende
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
einige Anmerkungen zum Blog vom 26. 06. 24. Das Titelthema lautet: „Die Verlierer der Energiewende in Deutschland: Fledermäuse“. Es wird darin berichtet, dass Fledermäuse in großer Zahl durch die Windkraftanlagen verenden. Durch vereinfachte Genehmigungsverfahren wird zukünftig noch weniger auf Naturschutz bei der Genehmigung und dem Bau von Windkraftanlagen geachtet. Die Naturschutzanforderungen waren ja in der Vergangenheit schon durch die Partei der Grünen herabgestuft worden. Jetzt wird noch eins draufgelegt.
Ich finde es eine absolute Schande, dass der Naturschutz so geringfügig betrachtet wird und das ausgerechnet von einer Partei, die sich „Umweltschutzpartei“ nennt. Mit Umweltschutz haben die Grünen nicht viel am Hut, vielmehr damit, ihre eigenen Ideologien durchzusetzen.
In der EU wurde doch kürzlich ein „Re-Naturierungsgesetz“ verabschiedet. Wäre es dabei nicht eine sinnvolle Maßnahme, die fürchterlichen Windräder zurückzubauen, um die Natur zu schützen?
Viele Grüße
Dipl. Ing. Martin Krohn
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What turned Earth into a giant snowball 700 million years ago? Scientists now have an answer
Australian geologists have used plate tectonic modeling to determine what most likely caused an extreme ice-age climate in Earth’s history, more than 700 million years ago.
The study, published in Geology, helps our understanding of the functioning of the Earth’s built-in thermostat that prevents the Earth from getting stuck in overheating mode. It also shows how sensitive global climate is to atmospheric carbon concentration.
„Imagine the Earth almost completely frozen over,“ said the study’s lead author, ARC Future Fellow Dr. Adriana Dutkiewicz. „That’s just what happened about 700 million years ago; the planet was blanketed in ice from poles to equator and temperatures plunged. However, just what caused this has been an open question.
„We now think we have cracked the mystery: historically low volcanic carbon dioxide emissions, aided by weathering of a large pile of volcanic rocks in what is now Canada; a process that absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide.“
The project was inspired by the glacial debris left by the ancient glaciation from this period that can be spectacularly observed in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.
A recent geological field trip to the Ranges, led by co-author Professor Alan Collins from the University of Adelaide, prompted the team to use the University of Sydney EarthByte computer models to investigate the cause and the exceptionally long duration of this ice age.
The extended ice age, also called the Sturtian glaciation after the 19th-century European colonial explorer of central Australia, Charles Sturt, stretched from 717 to 660 million years ago, a period well before the dinosaurs and complex plant life on land existed.
Dr. Dutkiewicz said, „Various causes have been proposed for the trigger and the end of this extreme ice age, but the most mysterious aspect is why it lasted for 57 million years—a time span hard for us humans to imagine.“
The team went back to a plate tectonic model that shows the evolution of continents and ocean basins at a time after the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Rodinia. They connected it to a computer model that calculates CO2 degassing of underwater volcanoes along mid-ocean ridges—the sites where plates diverge and new ocean crust is born.
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Rieneke Weij et al. auf The Conversation:
Ice ages were not as dry as we thought, according to surprising new Australian cave study
During ice ages, dry, frozen terrain extended over much of northern Europe, Asia and North America. Many plants and animals retreated from these desolate, harsh landscapes and sought refuge in pockets of more hospitable territory.
But what was happening in the rest of the world? For a long time scientists have thought that dry conditions prevailed across the globe during ice ages, and that the warm periods between ice ages were much wetter.
This interpretation has shaped our understanding of where plants, animals, and even humans lived during Earth’s past. However, it may not be correct.
Our new research published in Nature shows ice ages were actually much wetter than previously thought – at least in the subtropical regions of the southern hemisphere (from 20° to 40° south).
Ice ages and hemispheres
Over the past million years or so, Earth’s climate has oscillated between cold ice ages (or “glacial” periods) and warmer “interglacial” periods. Currently we are living through an interglacial period known as the Holocene epoch. It began about 11,700 years ago, following the last glacial period which lasted around 110,000 years.
During glacial periods, temperatures were lower, there was less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and ice sheets covered more of the globe. During interglacials, temperatures were higher, there was more carbon dioxide in the air, and large ice sheets remained only in Greenland and Antarctica.
Evidence from the northern hemisphere shows huge ice sheets spread across the northern parts of Europe, northern Asia and North America during glacial periods, and large areas south of the ice were covered with tundra. The idea that glacial environments were extreme and harsh was then extended beyond these regions because of evidence that glacial periods were mostly treeless with dusty atmospheres pretty much everywhere, including Australia.
However, our new research reveals that parts of glacial periods were in fact wetter than today across much of the southern hemisphere.
Developing a 350,000 year climate record
One way to understand how wet it was in the past is to look at mineral deposits called speleothems, found in underground caves. These deposits, which include stalagmites and stalactites, build up over time as rainwater filters down through soil and limestone into the cave.
We can use the extent of speleothem growth over time to understand changes in water availability. More speleothem growth broadly reflects wetter conditions, while less growth suggests a drier environment.
Our understanding of past changes in the climate and environment of the southern hemisphere has been limited by a lack of well-dated and long-term records.
To address this problem, we collected samples from speleothems in two cave regions in southern Australia, the Naracoorte caves in the southeast and the Leeuwin-Naturaliste caves in the southwest.
Using a dating technique based on the decay of naturally occuring uranium, we determined the age of more than 300 individual speleothem fragments from the caves. As a result, we produced a precipitation record spanning the last 350,000 years.
Wetter and colder, warmer and drier
Our study revealed surprising yet extremely consistent trends. Over the past 350,000 years, wetter times always occurred within the cooler, glacial periods, while interglacials were consistently dry.
We also studied fossil pollen trapped within the same speleothems. It is harder to be a tree under the low atmospheric carbon dioxide of glacial periods, but moisture-demanding herbs and shrubs thrived during the glacial periods but were suppressed during interglacials, confirming the dating evidence.
Next, we used our new records from southern Australia as benchmarks for the subtropics around the southern hemisphere, and compared them with other published records from southern Africa and South America. We found wet glacials and dry interglacials were not confined to southern Australia, but in fact, formed a hemisphere-wide pattern.
Climate model simulations also showed a similar pattern over the last glacial cycle.
Stable environments with abundant water
This new understanding of what conditions were like in the southern hemisphere during glacial periods will change how we interpret the movement and expansion of plants, animals and even humans in the past.
It was previously assumed that, during glacial periods, reduced rainfall forced many plants and animals that needed higher levels of moisture into small liveable zones called “refugia”.
However, our research suggests that – at least in the subtropical southern hemisphere – glacial periods were often times of relatively stable environments with abundant water, even if low levels of carbon dioxide meant plants were slow-growing and relatively unproductive.
Our research calls for a big paradigm shift in how we view past ice-age environments across the Earth.
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Rebecca Owen, Eos:
Climate models often miss how plants respond to drought, research suggests
New research suggests that Earth system models are underestimating the effect of low moisture levels on plants’ abilities to exchange carbon, water, and energy with the atmosphere.
[…] But new research by Green et al. reports that current models may be yielding inaccurate climate projections by underestimating how moisture availability affects stomatal conductance, or the way plants exchange carbon, water, and energy with the atmosphere.
Weiterlesen auf Eos
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Eric Worrall auf WUWT:
Claim: Climate Change is Causing Domestic Violence
The husband wasn’t a sadistic POS wife beater, it was climate change which made him raise his fists? The Japan Times writes:
Domestic violence is cost of climate change for Sri Lanka women
Domestic violence is a little-studied side effect of climate change, especially in poorer nations where increasingly frequent heat waves, droughts, floods and storms can exacerbate economic hardship, which in turn can fuel anger and violence.
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Although Sri Lanka has few detailed statistics on the links between climate change-related crop failures and gender-based violence, Rashmini de Silva, a gender and climate change researcher, said when basic needs are not being met, women can suffer physical, verbal and psychological abuse.
I’m utterly disgusted by this attempt to excuse bullying and violence against women as a climate change issue. Is claiming climate change made someone use violence against his family any different from claiming the devil made me do it? The devil is the person inflicting the violence. The reason men beat their wives is they are useless excuses for men. They haven’t got the guts to take on someone who can hit back. Even worse, the abused woman’s brothers and father are too gutless to protect their sister or daughter. To try to use climate change as an excuse for such vile cowardice, all I can say is Sri Lanka and anywhere else which tolerates such behaviour needs to take a good look in the mirror, and stop making excuses for violent thugs. Cultural violence against women is fixable, either through legal changes or other means. Women in India, next door to Sri Lanka, finally got fed up with cultural tolerance of violence against women, and the refusal of authorities to act. Nowadays men in India who hurt women live in fear of being beaten by stick wielding female vigilante gangs.