Bats in the Anthropocene.

[NNadir]

Last edited Wed Jun 13, 2018, 06:12 AM - Edit history (1)

Many years ago, when my two sons were small, our neighbor used to invite us over to his house on summer evenings for drinks and conversation. Our kids kind of grew up to be different kinds of men, and we got busy and we sort of fell out of touch not because we didn't like each other - we still greet each other very warmly when we do see each other, but because...well, you know, "responsibilities..."

One such summer, a colony of bats moved into the rafters of his house, and at the crepuscule, the bats would come out, swarming and eating mosquitoes. Of course I couldn't tell much about the bats, they were shadows against the colored dying light on the horizon, but I remember how beautiful they were, God they were beautiful.

Some time back, in this space, I referred to a book I had just added to my collection called "Why Birds Matter," which was a book which I claimed justified the existence of birds on economic grounds.

We are so pathetic...

A Minor Problem For Sound Science of the Effect of Offshore Windfarms on Seabirds: There Isn't Any.

The wind industry is a trivial industry that is material intensive, unreliable, ineffective, expensive and dependent on the continuous manufacture of transient junk that last just a short time before becoming landfill, the ultimate consumerist bourgeois exercise in planned obsolescence that is designed to "make jobs" that are not only unproductive, but are actually destructive.

Despite half a century of cheering, and the expenditure of trillion dollar quantities of resources, climate change is worse than ever and we are using more dangerous fossil fuels than we have ever used.

Despite the obvious failure of this awful experiment there are still people who believe that every bit of open space should be turned into industrial parks for producing electricity in a way requiring redundancy and, as I will point out by reference to my latest edition to my collection of books on wildlife, destructive to an important element of the worldwide ecosystem, the creatures I evoked at the beginning, bats.

Before pointing to the book, let me point to a relatively recent paper from the primary scientific literature that states the problem quite clearly and well:

Behavior of bats at wind turbines (Cryan et al PNAS October 21, 2014. 111 (42) 15126-15131). This paper seems to be open sourced, but I'll excerpt it anyway:

Bats are dying in unprecedented numbers at wind turbines, but causes of their susceptibility are unknown. Fatalities peak during low-wind conditions in late summer and autumn and primarily involve species that evolved to roost in trees. Common behaviors of “tree bats” might put them at risk, yet the difficulty of observing high-flying nocturnal animals has limited our understanding of their behaviors around tall structures. We used thermal surveillance cameras for, to our knowledge, the first time to observe behaviors of bats at experimentally manipulated wind turbines over several months. We discovered previously undescribed patterns in the ways bats approach and interact with turbines, suggesting behaviors that evolved at tall trees might be the reason why many bats die at wind turbines...

...Bats are long-lived mammals with low reproductive potential and require high adult survivorship to maintain populations (1, 2). The recent phenomenon of widespread fatalities of bats at utility scale wind turbines represents a new hazard with the potential to detrimentally affect entire populations (3, 4). Bat fatalities have been found at wind turbines on several continents (3??–6), with hypothesized estimates of fatalities in some regions ranging into the tens to hundreds of thousands of bats per year (4, 6). Before recent observations of dead bats beneath wind turbines, fatal collisions of bats with tall structures had been rarely recorded (7). Most fatalities reported from turbines in the United States, Canada, and Europe are of species that evolved to roost primarily in trees during much of the year (“tree bats”), some of which migrate long distances in spring and late summer to autumn (8). In North America, tree bats compose more than three-quarters of the reported bat fatalities found at wind-energy sites (6, 9), although there is a paucity of information from the southwestern United States and Mexico. Similar patterns occur in Europe (4). Another prominent pattern in bat fatality data from northern temperate zones is that most fatalities are found during late summer and autumn, sometimes with a much smaller peak of fatality in spring (4, 6). Concurrent involvement of species with shared behaviors suggests that behavior plays a key role in the susceptibility of bats to wind turbines, and that tree bats might somehow be attracted to wind turbines (8).

Don't worry, be happy. Wind turbines are "green" even if they have done absolutely nothing at all, zilch, zip, zero to arrest climate change, which is now taking place, after half a century of cheering for wind, at the fastest rate ever observed.

It's not results that count; it's "good" intentions.

The book I just downloaded is this one: Bats in the Anthropocene: Conservation of Bats in a Changing World

Apparently you can download this book for free. God bless Springer publishing, I love them.

An excerpt:

...This brings up an important question: Do nocturnal animals benefit less from legal protection than diurnal animals? Are we more concerned about animals that we see and interact with during daytime? Do human societies perceive and evaluate, for example, fatalities of birds of prey at wind turbines in a different way than bat fatalities when both ought to benefit from the same level of protection? Do we consider recommendations to reduce light pollution for the sake of nocturnal animals such as bats, or does the expansion of the human temporal niche into the night come at high costs for all nocturnal animals? In summary, we speculate that bats as nocturnal animals might be particularly exposed to human-induced ecological perturbations because we are driven by our visual system and therefore tend to neglect the dark side of conservation, i.e., the protection of nocturnal animals.

The authors then ask the question, "Why should we care about bats."

There's some nice and gracious lip service to the beauty of bats before we hear about the only thing we care about, money.

Recent attempts to critically review the ecosystem services provided by bats have revealed that many species offer unique and large-scale monetary benefits to agricultural industry (Kunz et al. 2011; Ghanem and Voigt 2012; Maas et al. 2015). For example, flowers of the Durian tree are only effectively pollinated by the Dawn bat, Eonycteris spelaea, in Southeast Asia (Bumrungsri et al. 2009). Durian is a highly valued fruit in Asia with Thailand producing a market value of durians of almost 600 million US$ annually (Ghanem and Voigt 2012). Other bats consume large amounts of pest insects, thereby offering services that could save millions of US$ for national industries (Boyles et al. 2011; Wanger et al. 2014). However, the monetary approach for protecting bat species is a double edged sword, since bat species without apparent use for human economy may not benefit from protection compared to those that provide some ecosystem services.

We are so pathetic...

Chapter 11 of this book is all about the high number of bat deaths at wind turbines, which is entirely OK because we need to grow the wind industry by zillions of percent because, who gives a shit about bats when we can all be "green" and drive swell electric cars made by the ever popular Elon Musk?

In this book, wind power is discussed as one of "the fastest growing sources of energy" even though it, um, isn't, and grew at 1/10th the rate of coal in the 21st century.

IEA 2017 World Energy Outlook, Table 2.2 page 79

But even if its useless, it's pretty good at killing bats.

However returning to accurate statements about their area of expertise, bats, even if they apparently don't know very much about energy they write:

Wind energy development is not environmentally neutral, and impacts to wildlife and their habitats have been documented and are of increasing concern. Wind energy development affects wildlife through direct mortality and indirectly through impacts on habitat structure and function (Arnett et al. 2007; Arnett 2012; NRC 2007; Strickland et al. 2011). Bats are killed by blunt force trauma or barotrauma and may also suffer from inner ear damage and other injuries not readily noticed by examining carcasses in the field (Baerwald et al. 2008; Grodsky et al. 2011; Rollins et al. 2012; Fig. 11.2). Kunz et al (2007a) proposed several hypotheses that may explain why bats are killed and some of these ideas have subsequently been discussed by others (e.g., Cryan and Barclay 2009; Rydell et al 2010a). Collisions at turbines do not appear to be chance events, and bats probably are attracted to turbines either directly, as turbines may resemble roosts (Cryan 2008), or indirectly, because turbines attract insects on which the bats feed (Rydell et al. 2010b). Horn et al. (2008) and Cryan et al. (2014) provide video evidence of possible attraction of bats to wind turbines.

Regardless of causal mechanisms, bat fatalities raise serious concerns about population-level impacts because bats are long-lived and have exceptionally low reproductive rates, and their population growth is relatively slow, which limits their ability to recover from declines and maintain sustainable populations (Barclay and Harder 2003). Additionally, other sources of mortality cumulatively threaten many populations. For example, white-nosed syndrome causes devastating declines in bat populations in the USA and Canada (e.g., Frick et al. 2010), and national programs for improving insulation of buildings, particularly in Northern Europe, cause losses of roosting opportunities for bats such as the common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus; Voigt et al. 2016). Thus, high wind turbine mortality poses a serious threat to bats unless solutions are developed and implemented...

There's plenty more where that comes from.

You know, when I was a kid, I was a member of the Sierra Club, which I then took - it may have been true then - to be an organization dedicated to saving the open spaces, habitat and ecosystems. And of course, I did that thing that clueless bourgeois types like me do, which was to dutifully drive to a shopping mall every Christmas season to get that de rigeur Sierra club calendar with all the rock formations, stream and forest pictures, all printed on recycled paper.

Eventually whether you like it or not, most boys grow up to be men.

That's not what the Sierra Club is today. Recently I attended the New Jersey "March for Science" which turned out to be, to my disgust, a "March for Renewable Energy" where I had to listen to the drivel of the asshole who heads that organization whose "environmental program" calls for destroying the offshore Benthic zone of New Jersey by turning it into an industrial park for wind turbines.

This so called "environmental" organization actually has photographs of a wind industrial park on its web page, at crepuscule no less, the perfect time to kill New Jersey bats.

To the modern New Jersey Sierra club, birds don't matter, nothing matters other than producing electricity some of the time using inefficient material intensive and most importantly useless.

The pathetic asshole who apparently hates bats is in the picture wearing a blue tie. He is, if you must know, one of the most ignorant people you can ever meet, that is if you, unlike him, actually know something about the environment.

Glenn Seaborg, winner of the Nobel Prize, adviser to every President from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton, former chancellor of the University of California, President of the American Chemical Society, discoverer of the final shape of the periodic table, discoverer of more than 10 elements in the periodic table, and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission during the most productive period of nuclear reactor building in world history, lead by the United States, was a member of the Sierra Club.

I can't speak for the great man, but I wouldn't be surprised if he would be as disgusted as I am by what that club has become.

I wish you a pleasant Tuesday.

[3Hotdogs]

1. Do you believe solar farms are equally harmful?

[NNadir]

2. In terms of immediate danger to living things on the scale of wind turbines and bats, no.

The nightmare (or daymare) at Ivanpah doesn't kill bats because bats are nocturnal although reportedly it bakes birds in flight, but it's trivial, since the plant itself is trivial and is, at this point, nothing more than a very, very, very, very expensive gas plant trashing a huge surface of a formerly pristine desert ecosystem.

PV solar doesn't kill bats or birds directly as wind turbines do. But they're not clean.

For the long term, the solar industry is a disaster in many other ways.

The chemical processing has some real problems, particularly because of the low energy to mass issue with solar cells.

The waste and manufacturing process is very much like, almost exactly like the semiconductor industry, which is a huge international health and environmental problem.

(It does seem that China is about to ban the import of electronic waste. The health crisis effects are huge there, everything from PDBE's in breast milk to heavy metals in water supplies that show up in children and adults.)

Indeed, the mining is another problem. First Solar cells are Cadmium Telluride cells, and I once had a Q&A session after a talk by David Eaglesham - who was, by the way, quite tolerant of my badgering - where I pointed out the cadmium toxicity problem and his response was more or less along the lines of "Well, it's a side product of zinc mining."

This is true, but the solution to a toxicological problem is not "let's distribute it as a consumer product!"

This may or may not be a problem for current users - although it would be interesting to do leach tests on solar cells that are ten years old with ICP/MS in soil - but it will be a problem for future generations who will have to clean this crap up while deriving no benefit at all from what it did for electric car worshiping self declared "greens."

I am not aware of any such leach tests, but then again, I haven't really looked.

Over all, this is going to end up like the lead problem associated with tetraethyl lead in gasoline, which was banned after a previous generation spread it all over the planet. (Sometimes I wonder more than half seriously if lead poisoning and mercury poisoning - both neurotoxins - is an explanation for how a complete idiot like Trump could end up in the White House.) When the forest outside of LA or San Francisco burns, lead is still volatilized from historic tetraethyl lead combustion products.

Variability of trace metal concentrations in Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi) tree rings from the Tahoe Basin, California, USA (Kirchner, P., Biondi, F., Edwards, R. et al. J For Res (2008) 13: 347)

In any case, the solar industry is trivial and the one trillion dollars spent on it in the last ten years has had no result.

The real problem with solar energy is that it entrenches fossil fuels because for all the talk about batteries - toxicological disasters in their own right - the real back up for so called "renewable energy" is gas, and what's more it actually wastes gas because of cycling up and down.

Actually most people - particularly people who have a habit of lying to themselves - don't know this, but a solar related disaster in Japan actually killed more people immediately than did Fukushima radiation.

Explosion at Mitsubishi polysilicon plant in Japan causes deaths.

What's remarkable about this is that this number of deaths took place in an energy business that is trivial in scale when compared to the nuclear industry.

Of course no one gives a rat's ass about these deaths - even if a solar industry trade website is reporting them here in a rare burst of honesty from this overly praised industry which gets an undeserved environmental bye - because solar energy is "green" and "safe."

Yeah right.

I think it's pretty clear that I am not a fan - although probably ten years ago or so I was and before that an enthusiastic fan - of so called "renewable energy."

The biggest problem to my mind is that experimentally it did not work and is not working. I'm thoroughly convinced that it will not work, and I believe that the rush to claim that what clearly does not work will work is creating an awful mess for those who may come after us.

We've screwed those babies and babies to come as well as the small children alive today over royally.

Thanks for asking.

[3Hotdogs]

3. Thank you for the response.