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Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

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Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#361

Post by spaetzleesser »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #298
groby_b wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use and access of those logs is strictly regulated, and yes, it is enforced. Given that Germany has a much healthier employee representation than the US, it's much more difficult for management to slide in surveillance under the radar. (It's also rather painful if they get caught)

I wonder if those German workplace freedoms stem from a different legal system of culpability. In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. If the employer can show that the employee actively sidestepped the employer’s controls, the employer can make a good case against liability. I wonder if anything like that can happen…

“In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. “

I always find this reasoning strange and inconsistent . Companies give company cars to employees which could injure people. Or I could stab somebody with an employer provided knife.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#362

Post by [deleted] »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #16

I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to go out all the time during summer as a kid to catch them, they would light up whole fields. That was just like 15 years ago. Pretty sobering realization

[deleted]

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#363

Post by vinay427 »

lm28469 wrote: post #174
kaybe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany you can generally call the city office and complain and they will put some metal there to block the light from falling into your house. It might be an option in other locations as well.

Don't houses in Germany, and western Europe, have blinds ? I only had this night light issue when living in the US

Where did you find a house in the US without blinds? I honestly don't think I've ever seen one without some sort of window covering. The solid exterior blinds that I slightly prefer are much less common in the US, but both still block light adequately in my experience.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#364

Post by TheSmiddy »

mattoxic wrote: post #357
thatguy0900 wrote: post #16

I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to go out all the time during summer as a kid to catch them, they would light up whole fields. That was just like 15 years ago. Pretty sobering realization

It hit me a couple of years back, a night time drive through the Australian countryside and your car would be plastered with insects - not anymore. And fireflies, I haven't seen one in years,

Yes 10 or 15 years ago driving from Adelaide to Melbourne would require a halfway pit stop to manually clean the windscreen because the wipers weren't able to cope with all the bug guts. Last year i did it and didn't need to even use the wipers once.

Our insect loss is much more likely due to climate change than light pollution though due to our sparse population between the cities.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#365

Post by Florin_Andrei »

formerly_proven wrote: post #119
hunta2097 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a budding stargazer I hope this dark-nights idea spreads to other countries. Light pollution has the potential to get even worse with LED lighting which is no longer filterable like sodium lighting was.

I live in a fairly rural area in Germany and even if the nightsky is perfectly clear the cities in the distance cast a bright haze into the sky. They aren't that dark...

Yes. Light pollution leaks out pretty far away from the source. I don't know if there's any patch of land in Europe now where light pollution is zero. Maybe in a few places in Scandinavia.

Death Valley in California has pristine night skies. I cannot even begin to describe how different it is. Think - fine diamond dust on black velvet. There are stars everywhere you look. Amazing.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#366

Post by Florin_Andrei »

ip26 wrote: post #209
marviel wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what you mean about the risks of cold LED light? I'm unfamiliar with this problem

Cold means high blue content. Blue light is the one that most disrupts insects, nocturnal animals, your night vision, your own sleep cycle, and contributes the most to obscuring the stars.

> and contributes the most to obscuring the stars

That part is not actually true. Any light will obscure the stars; if you want to compare different colors, it's the middle of the spectrum that contributes most, but the difference is small.

As an amateur astronomer, the LED lights are a big problem because their light pollution is hard to filter out. Sodium is easy, it's nearly monochromatic, so a simple filter will remove most of it. Mercury is not super-hard, the spectrum is not very broad and it's pretty uneven. But LEDs have a broad, even spectrum, which is impossible to filter out.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#367

Post by Polylactic_acid »

mattoxic wrote: post #357
thatguy0900 wrote: post #16

I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to go out all the time during summer as a kid to catch them, they would light up whole fields. That was just like 15 years ago. Pretty sobering realization

It hit me a couple of years back, a night time drive through the Australian countryside and your car would be plastered with insects - not anymore. And fireflies, I haven't seen one in years,

21 years old and I have never seen a firefly. Figured they were an American thing. Did Australia have them?

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#368

Post by joecool1029 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #96
wenc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Chicago (in a neighborhood close to downtown) and in previous years I'd hardly ever seen any fireflies. This year, they're everywhere -- in parks and even in trees on neighborhood streets. I understand fireflies are sensitive to light pollution. I can't imagine Chicago's any different from other major cities. COVID has people staying home a lot more but that has nothing to do with street lighting. I wonder wha…

We live rural southern Ontario and fireflies are usually just a single weekend or so at the end of June or beginning of July. But this year they went on for almost two months. They only just stopped about a week ago. I'm not sure why it was a good season for them. Like you say, traffic, lighting, pesticide sprays on farms, all really the same despite COVID. Reduced air traffic I don't think would have an affect? Even…

> We live rural southern Ontario and fireflies are usually just a single weekend or so at the end of June or beginning of July. But this year they went on for almost two months. They only just stopped about a week ago.

I wonder if this is cyclical behavior. We had a year like that last year down in NJ. This year it was back to maybe only a week. I live in the west part of the state surrounded by parkland. Rainfall was the only thing that was dramatically different this year. Last year was extremely wet spring and early summer (when they appeared) followed by an extremely dry end of summer into fall. This year we've had average rain in almost every month. The rain evidence isn't anecdotal, I have a state rainfall gauge a couple miles down the road from me with records going back at least a few decades.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#369

Post by reportingsjr »

hinkley wrote: post #251
gre wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's red wasps. Growing up in Texas there used to be so many, you could see them flying low searching for spiders in the grass. Last Sunday, in the heart of summer, I couldn't find a single red wasp where there used to be hundreds.

I have a fallow field, and in perhaps two hours of dedicated observation I've got about 10 species of insect I need to identify, and for a couple of them I'm not even sure what kind of bug they are (I'm probably going to have to scan a field guide). The lot is between the river and our local garden district. I suspect I'm part of a migration route between them (I figured I was too far from the river for dragonflies,…

Would highly suggest checking out the iNaturalist app. It doesn't always nail down insects/plants/etc, but a lot of the times it gives you a good guess and other, more experienced people will come along and give a better id.

Re: Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

#370

Post by reportingsjr »

hn_check wrote: post #56
linuxftw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used to be 100's or 1000's of them during the peak in summer where I lived. Now it's a handful. This is out in a rural area, so urban lighting doesn't explain the decline. If I had to wager money, I'd say it was a blight introduced by another insect. Around the same year I saw an invasion of Asian lady bugs, the firefly memories stop. There were literally millions and millions of those Asian lady bugs released or hat…

Plenty of fireflies in my yard. As prevalent as ever [1]. This is just an anecdote, but I give that anecdote as another person who lives in a somewhat rural location. Speaking of the lady bug explosion, this year they are incredibly rare [2]. Not sure why, but they went from being a massive nuisance to being a very rare sight (of any variety). Humans are absolutely having a calamitous effect on insect life in a varie…

> Humans are absolutely having a calamitous effect on insect life in a variety of dimensions

This is incredibly obvious to be in my neighborhood. My landlord (very regretfully) has a company spray insecticide in our yard. There are no bugs, not a single bug sound.

The area I live in has many nature conscious people so about 1/10th of the yards are gardens, wildflowers, etc rather than grass. Just walking by them you hear a tremendous symphony of bugs! Then it almost entirely goes away in the next yard that is just grass.

In a local park there is about 1/4 acre that is only mown every couple of years as a "pollinator friendly" prairie-ish area, and the number of fireflies in just that section is astonishing. There are just hundreds and hundreds, it's beautiful.

Thinking about the increasing suburbanization of the US makes me sad. We subsidize this lifestyle so heavily here that it doesn't make sense to live anywhere else, but the land use is just awful.

It's not even wildlife and plants. I'm in southwest Ohio and the closest reasonably dark sky spot is almost 2 hours away. My S/O and I have been to some dark sky viewings hosted by a local observatory about 45 minutes away. I have really good night vision and can just barely see the milky way. My S/O /thought/ she could see it, but only realized the magnitude when we went to this national forest 2 hours away. It made me sad that she hadn't been able to see some of the wildness of our world.

I truly hope the "suburban dream" that has been pushed for so many decades starts dying off, so at least some of the wild areas in the US remain intact. There's already so little in the midwest.

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