If we build a bunch of wind turbines near communities, people are going to start dropping to the ground in pain because infrasound is affecting their inner ear. Or, at least, that’s what one New York doctor wants us all to believe. She’s wrong – but the problem is, opponents of wind power are seizing onto her argument to further their own agenda.

Pediatrician Nina Pierpont gathered testimony from a scant 38 people who live near wind turbines in England, Canada and elsewhere about headaches, nausea, insomnia, visual blurring, vertigo and panic attacks. Her website, WindTurbineSyndrome.com, and book of the same name attributes these symptoms to infrasound, a type of low-frequency sound that she claims disrupts the inner-ear vestibular system—the body’s chief tool for balance and spatial orientation.

Thankfully, Grist has examined and debunked Pierpont’s hypothesis:

So here’s what’s wrong with wind-turbine syndrome. First, there’s Pierpont’s method. Her study consisted of 38 people from ten families—by most standards too small to yield conclusive results. All of them self-identified as people who were already experiencing health effects; there was no control group.

Further, acousticians who study the issue say Pierpont fundamentally misunderstands the nature of low-frequency sound. Geoff Leventhall, an English acoustician who retired from the University of London and chairs the European Institute of Noise Control Engineering, agrees that turbines create infrasound that cannot be heard. So do driving with an open window, swinging on a swing set, and even jogging—the slight rise and fall of the head create the effect.

Leventhall describes infrasound as a common phenomenon that isn’t dangerous except at extremely high levels, such as those produced by spacecraft. Infrasound from wind turbines does not approach that level, said Leventhall, who recently flew to Wisconsin to testify at a hearing for the proposed Glacier Hills Wind Park.

Her work isn’t even peer-reviewed, despite her claims – the four-person editorial board that she cites includes herself, her husband and two others—a professor emeritus of literature and an ecologist and psychologist.

Grist has more technical details on why Pierpont is wrong, as well as an analysis on how her claims are affecting the wind industry.

None of this is to say that noise from wind turbines are never an annoyance for people who live near them – but it’s probably safe to say that the effect upon people who live near them is far less dangerous than that of fossil fuel-burning power plants.

Link [Grist]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coral seems so peaceful and passive, rippling in the currents of the sea in all its colorful beauty. It’s easy to forget that it’s actually an animal and not a plant. But, perhaps this photo will remind you – captured on a dive in Israel in March, it’s the first documentation of coral feeding on a jellyfish.

From BBC News:

Ocean currents and nutrients had created a seasonal bloom of the jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) and many surrounded the reef in which the team were diving.

It was then they saw the strange behaviour.

“During the survey we were amazed to notice some mushroom corals actively feeding on the moon jellyfish,” says Ada Alamaru, a member of the research team who is doing her PhD in marine biology supervised by Prof Yossi Loya at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

“We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw it,” Ms Alamaru says.

Researchers believe that coral’s ability to survive on a variety of food sources may give it an advantage in a changing world – and it’s going to need it. Reefs are increasingly threatened by climate change, particularly increased air and sea surface temperatures, rises in sea level, changes in weather patterns and changes in seawater chemistry.

But acidification of the world’s oceans from human CO2 emissions is an extremely formidable opponent for coral to face, and it’s hard to say right now whether they’ll make it through the fight.

Link [BBC News]

Of all the wacky things that fuel can be made from nowadays – ranging from dirty diapers to confiscated booze – somehow, this one takes the cake. Soon, we may be able to power our vehicles and heat our homes with nothing but air. A biofuel firm called Joule Biotechnologies has discovered a way to produce fuel from carbon dioxide in the air, using photosynthetic microbes.

From Gas 2.0:

Inside specially designed reactors, Joule’s engineered microbes thrive off of sunlight and CO2. In return, depending on the type of organism, they can produce straight ethanol, diesel or a number of other types of hydrocarbons.

Although the process sounds similar to algae-produced biofuels, the Joule process is incredibly (and beneficially) different for several reasons:

* Doesn’t produce biomass
* No agricultural feedstock needed
* Can be conducted on non-arable land
* Doesn’t need fresh water
* Produces fuel directly without the need for extraction or refinement

Fuel from thin air. Amazing, isn’t it? There is literally a world of possibilities out there when it comes to earth-friendly, renewable fuels.

Link [Gas 2.0]
Photo credit: Joule Biotechnologies

Fossil fuels don’t exactly have a good reputation as it is – they’re incredibly environmentally destructive, and bear the brunt of the blame for our current situation with global warming. Now, experts are saying that “a frenzy of hydrocarbon burning” millions of years ago might have caused the most dramatic, devastating mass extinction the Earth has ever seen.

From the New Scientist:

Around 250 million years ago, the so-called “Great Dying” saw 70 per cent of species wiped out on land and 95 per cent in the oceans. A clue to what may have triggered this disaster lies in solidified magma from this time, which is widespread in an area of Siberia where coal is also abundant.

One suggestion is that the heat of the magma could have baked many billions of tonnes of CO2 out of the coal over a geologically brief period of a few thousand years (New Scientist, 8 December 2007, p 42). The ensuing climate change and ocean acidification would account for the extinctions. Now Norman Sleep and Darcy Ogden, both of Stanford University in California, think the trigger for the Great Dying may have been even swifter and more terrifying.

Rather than causing gentle heating, magma encountering oil- and tar-soaked coal underground would melt it, producing a highly combustible material, they say. Crucially, this molten mixture would be light enough to rise quickly to the surface. There it would burn explosively on contact with oxygen in the air, blasting dust and ash into the stratosphere and releasing huge quantities of CO2.

Basically, this resulted in hell on earth – vast areas of fire fountains and smoke columns over a moonscape littered with coal tar and coal fragments. If Sleep and Ogden’s theory is correct, the evidence is hiding in Siberia’s volcanic deposits – but we will probably never know for sure.

Link [New Scientist]
Photo credit: South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Virtually all power plants burning fossil fuels release insane amounts of pollution into the atmosphere – but some are definitely dirtier than others. And if you live in the Southeast United States, you’re practically surrounded by dozens of the world’s biggest carbon offenders.

Forbes has a new interactive map that lets you see where the world’s most polluting power plants are located, and learn all kinds of startling facts about them.

For example, France is the only G-7 country with no power plants among the world’s dirtiest – because they rely on nuclear power. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s got the nastiest one in the world – the Taichung Power Plant, which emits 40 million tons of carbon every year.

Check it out over at Forbes.com.

Link [Forbes]

It’s Halloween, the day all the monsters come out of the woodwork – but don’t forget, your house is already full of vampires. Energy-sucking vampire electronics, to be precise. Not only do they pack unnecessary dollars onto your electric bill every month, they also waste tons of energy, forcing those polluting factories to work overtime.

It’s time to hunt them down and kill them – with this guide by Delta Carbon Offsets.

Here’s what you can do.

Make it a family exercise. Have the kids look in every nook and cranny – in each room, in the basement, in the garage, and make a list of every vampire module. Then determine what to do with each of them.
Some need to stay plugged in.

In certain cases, such as perhaps an alarm clock or clock radio, the appliance needs the power all the time. The power module is supplying the juice to allow the clock to run, or to keep its memory.
Some only need to be plugged in when you’re using them.

A lot of appliances only draw power from the module when they’re doing their assigned task, like audio components, stereo systems and certain small lamps, etc. These vampires can be contained easily. You can simply unplug them when you’re finished with them, or better yet, plug them into an outlet strip with a power switch, like this one.

Read the rest at Delta Carbon Offsets. Happy Halloween!

Link [DeltaCarbon.org]

Lighters, bottle caps, plastic bags and milk jugs. Fishing net, fishing line, zip ties, remnants of food containers. All of this and more floats in a massive vortex of trash in the Pacific Ocean – and in the stomachs of the birds who search for food amid the debris.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of Texas, and many of the particles of plastic contained within it are so small they can’t be scooped out of the water. But other pieces – colorful pieces that look like they might be food – get swallowed by albatross and other birds.

Photographer Chris Jordan traveled to the Midway Islands, near the center of the garbage patch, to photograph the bodies of albatross chicks that have been inadvertently killed when their confused parents fed them plastic. Jordan didn’t move a single piece of plastic – he photographed the carcasses exactly as he found them.

The photos are a disturbing reminder of just how much of an effect our throwaway society is having upon our fellow inhabitants of this planet. Head over to Planet Green to view the whole set of 30 photographs.

Link [Planet Green]

Deforestation has many prices – not the least of which is the loss of an entire Amazonian tribe, which will inevitably die out now that there are only five members left. The once-vibrant, ancient Akuntsu tribe of Brazil lost almost all of their numbers to a massacre by loggers intent on stealing their land in the 1990s.

From The Independent:

Much of the Akuntsus’ story is – for obvious reasons – undocumented. For millennia, they lived in obscurity, deep in the rainforest of Rondonia state, a remote region of western Brazil near the Bolivian border. They hunted wild pig, agoutis and tapir, and had small gardens in their villages, where they would grow manioc (or cassava) and corn.

Then, in the 1980s, their death warrant was effectively signed: farmers and loggers were invited to begin exploring the region, cutting roads deep into the forest, and turning the once verdant wilderness into lucrative soya fields and cattle ranches.

Fiercely industrious, the new migrant workers knew that one thing might prevent them from creating profitable homesteads from the rainforest: the discovery of uncontacted tribes, whose land is protected from development under the Brazilian constitution.

As a result, frontiersmen who first came across the Akuntsu in the mid-1980s made a simple calculation. The only way to prevent the government finding out about this indigenous community was to wipe them off the map.

The seven members of the tribe who escaped the massacre retreated deep into the wilderness to survive, and were not formally “contacted” until 1995. They include Konibú, the tribe’s elderly chief and shaman, Pugapía, his wife, their two daughers Nãnoi and Enotéi and a cousin, Pupak. Konibú’s sister Ururú, the sixth last member pictured at front left, recently passed away. Tribal custom does not allow outsiders to marry in.

A documentary of their struggle called ‘Corumbiara: they shoot Indians, don’t they?’ which was filmed over a period of twenty years, is now showing in Brazil. Campaigners hope that the story of the Akuntsu tribe will persuade the Brazilian public to strengthen government protections for indigenous people.

The Akuntsu represent yet another reason why we must make protecting the rainforests of the Amazon, and elsewhere in the world, a top priority. Not only are these forests five times more effective than carbon capture at combating catastrophic climate change, they also harbor so many wonders of the human, animal, insect and plant worlds.

Link [The Independent]

If we don’t act soon, amphibians could disappear – forever. That may seem improbable given how many frogs, toads, salamander and newts there are on this planet, but experts say they’re in a swift decline and projected losses would constitute the biggest mass extinction since the disappearance of dinosaurs.

Amphibians are currently found on every continent except Antarctica, with some species able to survive partial freezing, 10 years without food, long droughts and temperatures of up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit – but that doesn’t make them immune to the problems that are facing them now.

From BBC News:

A third of all species of amphibian are threatened with extinction; nearly half are in decline, and they are the most threatened of all the vertebrate groups.

The usual suspects of habitat destruction, climate change, invasive species, environmental contaminants and overexploitation represent key interrelated factors.

Additionally, a disease called chytridiomycosis or “chytrid” (caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) infects a wide range of amphibians globally and is capable of driving species to extinction.

Exacerbated by the other issues impacting amphibians, chytrid has emerged as one of the major threats to their survival. This disease can kill amphibians in otherwise pristine habitats or provide the final nail in the coffin for species already pushed to the brink of extinction.

Naturally, amphibians play an incredibly important role in the food chain, consuming massive amounts of invertibrates that we humans consider pests. Their skins also contain important pharmaceutical compounds like epibatidine, which is a painkiller 200 times more effective than morphine.

A new conservation organization called the Amphibian Survival Alliance has been launched in an effort to protect these creatures, but so far it’s seriously underfunded. Hopefully they’ll start seeing some donations roll in soon, because a world without amphibians would be really sad.

Link [BBC News]

Photo credit: R A Mittermeier/BBC News

Could you go nine years without spending a penny? It sounds pretty much impossible – how would you feed yourself, keep yourself safe from the elements? What about clothing and medicine?

Daniel Suelo consciously removed himself from the consumer lifestyle nearly a decade ago and hasn’t looked back. He lives in a cave in Utah and fishes, forages, dumpster dives and sometimes hunts for his food – and writes all about it on his website and blog from a nearby public library.

From MatadorChange, via Treehugger:

While in Ecuador on a Peace Corps mission, he witnessed a rural community acquire increased monetary wealth through farming and shift their traditional lifestyle towards a diet of unhealthy, processed food and a newfound addiction to television.

The experience led Suelo on a spiritual quest that realized itself in India, where he was particularly moved by the Sadhus, wandering monks who renounce all money and possessions. He made the conscious decision to return home, quit his job, and carve out a life without money.

As he put it, “I simply got tired of being unreal. Money is one of those intriguing things that seem real and functional because two or more people believe it is real and functional.”

Essentially an extreme freegan, Suelo receives no government assistance and does not panhandle. He lives off the excess of American society, though the kindness of strangers helps a lot when he needs a ride, and he does use taxpayer-supported public libraries.

As Treehugger points out, Suelo probably has the lowest carbon footprint of any blogger in the world. Read more about his lifestyle and how he makes it work at MatadorChange and Suelo’s own website, Living Without Money.

Link [MatadorChange] via [Treehugger]
Photo: BBC World Service