Wild boars ‘pose greater climate change risk than a million cars’
The rising number of invasive wild pigs is having a greater impact on the climate than a million cars because the animals unearth carbon trapped in soil, a study has found.
Populations of feral pigs, such as wild boar, are growing in many countries where they are not native but have spread after animals escaped from farms or were illegally released.
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#Carbon Footprint
#Climate Change
#Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Atlantis Viewpoint
The instruments used for measuring carbon emissions calculate the presence of this compounds in the atmosphere. However, a huge portion of Earth’s carbon is stored in soil, plants and even in the ice of a glacier. So, releasing even a small fraction of this into the atmosphere can have a huge impact on climate change. Wildfires at the Amazon or melting polar ice caps represent a huge risk if we want to avoid the climate tipping point.
Probably for this reason, ‘Scientific American’ decided to make a study to find the impact of wild pigs on climate change, as they use their tough snouts to excavate soil in search of plant parts such as roots, fungi and invertebrates. The study estimates that globally wild pigs uproot each year an estimated 36,214 to 123,517 square kilometres (between the sizes of Taiwan and England). The article is titled: “Wild Pigs Release as Much Carbon Emissions as 1 million Cars”. Which does mention the real problem of cars, but seems to think it’s better to reduce the wild boars than the cars
In our opinion, this is quite a useless comparison, which does not really focus on the main problem and causes of emissions and air pollution. We need to stop burning fossil fuels, which is the real source of these excess emissions and also responsible for particulate air pollution which causes millions of deaths and lung and heart illnesses every year.
At Atlantis we know that we need cars, we need energy, we need manufacturing but also we need the Wild Boars. We can have all of these, we just need to produce our energy from True Clean Energy, use this to operate our industries and to power our vehicles. We do not need to look for scapegoats…or scapepigs! Using the combination of concentrated solar power, wind, geothermal and hydrogen we can power almost our entire world without damaging our planet or ourselves.
