Hacker News Reader

Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Curiously, nobody seems to be very interested in studying the impact of renewable energy projects for bird populations.

Probably hard as hell to get grants for that.

If you are referring to wind turbines killing birds, those have been studied. First search result, bunch of studies in the footnotes:

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds

And if you want to put in relation to other bird killers: https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...

So, so many times.

The upshot is that if we wanted to save birds, we would tear down all office buildings and fossil fuel power plants and replace them with windmills.

But first, rid the world of cats.

Ok. I was wrong. Can someone please flag my comment dead? I don't stand by it anymore and can't delete it.

When I do something like this, I edit the comment, and add something like the following to the top "Edit: I was completely mistaken and no longer stand by this, but I'll leave my mistake up for posterity"

No, we should leave your comment alive so we can have a larger discussion about why this is a persistent meme in the discourse, why people like you are predisposed to write this nonsense, and how to counter the scourge of misinformation around renewable energy.

This comes every time when people talk about wind turbines and they are far behind the top 3 killers:

Cats

Cars

Windows in buildings

Cats for instance kill billions each year.

Strange to include a natural predator in this list.

It seems reasonable given that the vast majority of the cats in this case aren't natural per se, they are pets kept by humans.

Cats are not a "natural" predator in the modern context.

They have massive advantages over wild animals including but not limited to

1) A guaranteed source of high quality disease free calories 2) Veterinary care 3) Safe places to rest and recuperate

As a result, the numbers of domesticated cats in most environments is radically larger than they would be in naturally balanced ecosystems.

The vast majority of modern domestic cats are sport hunters. Most will not even eat their prey as they have better food readily available.

It is also worth mentioning that domesticated cats are an invasive species in any environment outside the Nile Delta in Egypt.

Modern domestic cats are not "natural" predators in any sense.

They can be very cute though!

Not to mention that they were introduced by humans almost everywhere that they exist.

By that logic everything human related is natural too.

The number of cats that kill birds is due to the fact that humans breed them en masse.

Nothing natural about that.

Cats aren't really natural in all the environments we bring them to. And they're also subsidized to hell by their owners, if we weren't feeding them tinned food there'd likely be a hundred times less.

Very strange to leave off by far the #1 issue which is habitat destruction.

Cats, cars and buildings are part of habitat destruction.

They all happen in urban areas though, which are a small fraction of the country (< 1/10 of the uk, whereas farmland is > 7/10. ). Hence, while they might be significant for whether you see any birds in your back garden, the problems on farmland are more likely to be significant for the bird population as a whole.

There are many cats in rural areas, so they are a significant problem there too.

Okay if you want to be precise, the mass of the density function of cats over uk locations is largely in urban areas, while the mass of the density function of bird-habitat-value is much more spread over the whole landscape, which is also true of agriculture. Risk to birds will be proportional to the dot-product of the bird-habitat-value density function with that of a risk factor, and since the density function of agriculture is much more correlated with that of bird-habitat-value than it is correlated with that of cats, so changes in agriculture are likely to be the greater factor in changes in bird population.

Building height is actually a tradeoff against habitat destruction, since taller buildings use less land but are ostensibly struck more often by birds.

This is highly misleading. The birds that are killed by windmills aren't the same type of birds killed by feral cats. Windmills kill high-soaring endangered predator species.

Sorry, that's just not true. Just type "renewable energy bird populations" into Google Scholar and work your way through the results. There's tons of research on that out there.

See e.g. here for a recent study: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.211...

Why not check first if it's true before you claim it? It takes the same time, too: I simply copied and pasted from your comment and here they are, take your pick:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the%20impact%20of%20re...

edit: But IMO more importantly, it's not like farmland practices that endanger birds and renewable energy somehow offset each other. Both are desirable (not the harmful farmland practices are, but farming per se is), even vital things, and their undesirable side-effects need to be reduced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com