Stockholm's bunnies burned to keep Swedes warm

Published: 12 Oct 09 14:46 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/22610/20091012/

 

The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden.


The decision to use Stockholm’s rabbit cadavers as bioenergy to warm Swedes living in Värmland doesn't sit well with Stockholm-based animal rights activists.

“Those who support the culling of rabbits surely think it’s good to use the bodies for a good cause. But it feels like they’re trying to turn the animals into an industry rather than look at the main problem,” Anna Johannesson of Vilda kaniners värn (‘Society for the Protection of Wild Rabbits’) told the local Vårt Kungsholmen newspaper.

Every year, the city of Stockholm kills off thousands of rabbits in an effort to protect trees and shrubbery in the city’s extensive network of parks and green space.

According to Tommy Tuvunger with the Stockholm Traffic Office, the agency responsible for controlling the city’s rodent and wild animal population, part of the problem rests with delinquent pet owners who decide to release their rabbits into the city’s parks.

“Many of the released rabbits are tame,” he told the newspaper.

Animal control authorities employ a special rifle to shoot the excess rabbits, with most of the culling taking place at dawn when the animals peek out from their holes.

The city usually steps up its rabbit hunting efforts in the autumn as leaves begin to fall from bushes and trees, making it easier to see the rabbits.

Tuvunger explained that it doesn’t take many newly released rabbits to do what rabbits are known for doing, much to the detriment of Stockholm’s efforts to control the size of its rabbit population.

“People who think that the bunnies are cute and cuddly suddenly don’t think they’re as fun anymore and put the animals outside. They think: ‘there they can play with the other rabbits’,” he said.

Last year marked a new record for Stockholm’s rabbit cull, with nearly 6,000 rabbits, mostly from Kungsholmen, being removed from Stockholm’s parks.

But rather than simply disposing of the dead rabbits, the city instead froze them for eventual transport to a special heating plant in Karlskoga in central Sweden, where the bunny bodies are then burned as a form of bioenergy.

According to Johannesson, Sweden’s animal control authorities aren’t interested in pursuing other options besides killing the rabbits.

“We want to see them start looking at other solutions for the rabbits,” she said, citing the Finnish capital of Helsinki, which employs sprays to make park plants unappetizing as well as a network of shelters for various domesticated animals.

“In Helsinki, where they have the same problem, they’ve come much farther,” Johannesson told Vårt Kungsholmen.

David Landes (david.landes@thelocal.se/+46 8 656 6518)

What happened to global warming?

BBC News Article


This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

Environmentalists Seek to Wipe Out Plush Toilet Paper

Soft Toilet Paper's Hard on the Earth, But Will We Sit for the Alternative? (Washington Post)

ELMWOOD PARK, N.J. -- There is a battle for America's behinds.
It is a fight over toilet paper: the kind that is blanket-fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for "soft" (Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand to go three-ply and three-adjective).
It's a menace, environmental groups say -- and a dark-comedy example of American excess.

President 'has four years to save Earth'

US must take the lead to avert eco-disaster

Read the full interview with James Hansen here

Met Office forecasts a supercomputer embarrassment

A new £33m machine purchased to calculate how climate change will affect Britain, has a giant carbon footprint of its own

Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor

For the Met Office the forecast is considerable embarrassment. It has spent £33m on a new supercomputer to calculate how climate change will affect Britain – only to find the new machine has a giant carbon footprint of its own.

“The new supercomputer, which will become operational later this year, will emit 14,400 tonnes of CO2 a year,” said Dave Britton, the Met Office’s chief press officer. This is equivalent to the CO2 emitted by 2,400 homes – generating an average of six tonnes each a year.

The Met Office recently published some of its most drastic predictions for future climate change. It warned: “If no action is taken to curb global warming temperatures are likely to rise by 5.5ºC and could rise as much as 7ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Early and rapid reductions in CO2 emissions are required to avoid significant impacts of climate change.”

However, when it came to buying a new supercomputer, the Met Office decided not to heed its own warnings. The ironic problem was that it needed the extra computing power to improve the accuracy of its own climate predictions as well as its short-term weather forecasting. The machine will also improve its ability to predict extreme events such as fierce localised storms, cloudbursts and so on.

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Alan Dickinson, Met Office Director of Science and Technology, said: “We recognise that running such massive computers consumes huge amounts of power and that our actions in weather and climate prediction, like all our actions, have an impact on the environment. We will be taking actions to minimise this impact.”

Dickinson believes, however, that the new computer will actually help Britain cut carbon emissions on a far greater scale than those it emits. He said: “Our next supercomputer will bring an acceleration in action on climate change through climate mitigation and adaptation measures as a consequence of a clearer understanding of risk. Ultimately this will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”

Machines like the Met Office’s new computer are important tools in the battle to slow climate change. They are the only way to assess the potential impact of rising CO2 levels over the coming years and decades.

This is because producing even a short-range weather forecast requires billions of calculations, something that would take weeks to do by hand. Computers enable forecasts to be generated in time to be useful.

Dickinson said: “Our existing supercomputer and its associated hardware produce 10,000 tonnes of CO2 each year, but this is a fraction of the CO2 emissions we save through our work. We estimate that for the European aviation industry alone our forecasts save emissions close to 3m tonnes by improving efficiency.

“Our next supercomputer will bring an acceleration in action on climate change through climate mitigation and adaptation measures as a consequence of a clearer understanding of risk. Ultimately this will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”

When it is finally completed, around 2011 the Met Office machine will be the second most powerful machine in Britain with a total peak performance approaching 1 PetaFlop — equivalent to over 100,000 PCs and over 30 times more powerful than what is in place today.

However, supercomputers and data centres require vast amounts of power – a problem that increasingly confronts the global information technology industry. Last week Google admitted its systems generate 0.2g of CO2 per search, even though each one lasts just 0.2 seconds.

The Met Office in numbers

- performs 125 trillion calculations each second

- £260 million benefit to the UK economy from Met Office forecast

- 74 lives saved a year through our forecasts

- it will make out four-day forecasts as good as our one-day forecasts 30 years ago

- it is the second most powerful supercomputer in the UK

Climate protesters demand swifter U.N. action

Click HERE for the full story

POZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - Thousands of climate protesters, some dressed as polar bears, devils or penguins, demanded on Saturday swifter action from the United Nations to combat global warming.

Outside U.N.-led talks in Poland aimed at pushing 187 countries toward stiffer targets to fight global warming, some 1,000 demonstrators said governments were risking the planet's future by delaying action to squabble over who was to blame.