Electronic smog ‘is disrupting nature on a massive scale’
New study blames mobile phone masts and power lines for collapse of bee colonies and decline in sparrows
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 7 September 2008
Mobile phones, Wi-Fi systems, electric power lines and similar sources of "electrosmog" are disrupting nature on a massive scale, causing birds and bees to lose their bearings, fail to reproduce and die, a conference will be told this week.
Dr Ulrich Warnke – who has been researching the effects of man-made electrical fields on wildlife for more than 30 years – will tell the conference, organised by the Radiation Research Trust at the Royal Society in London, that "an unprecedented dense mesh of artificial magnetic, electrical and electromagnetic fields" has been generated, overwhelming the "natural system of information" on which the species rely.
He believes this could be responsible for the disappearance of bees in Europe and the US in what is known as colony collapse disorder, for the decline of the house sparrow, whose numbers have fallen by half in Britain over the past 30 years, and that it could also interfere with bird migration.
Dr Warnke, a lecturer at the University of Saarland, in Germany, adds that the world’s natural electrical and magnetic fields have had a "decisive hand in the evolution of species". Over millions of years they learned to use them to work out where they were, the time of day, and the approach of bad weather.
Now, he says, "man-made technology has created transmitters which have fundamentally changed the natural electromagnetic energies and forces on the earth’s surface. Animals that depend on natural electrical, magnetic and electromagnetic fields for their orientation and navigation are confused by the much stronger and constantly changing artificial fields."
His research has shown that bees exposed to the kinds of electrical fields generated by power lines killed each other and their young, while ones exposed to signals in the same range as mobile phones lost much of their homing ability. Studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau, reported in The Independent on Sunday last year, have found bees failed to return to their hives when digital cordless phones were placed in them, while an Austrian survey noted that two-thirds of beekeepers with mobile phone masts within 300 metres had suffered unexplained colony collapse.
Dr Warnke also cites Spanish and Belgian studies showing that the number of sparrows near mobile phone masts fell as radiation increased. And he says that migrating birds, flying in formation, had been seen to split up when approaching the masts.
But the Mobile Operators Association, representing the UK’s five mobile phone companies, says a US research group has found collapsing bee colonies in areas with no mobile phone service, and Denis Summers-Smith, a leading expert on sparrows, has described the link as "nonsense".
(from the London Independent)
buzzzzz
I thought the bee colony thing had to do with Bayer?
The phone is a weird device to me: it’s great for time-saving contact, but it just feels awkward talking to people that I can’t react to visually. I’m often baffled walking behind people for several blocks while they chit chat away about nothing substantial (or so it appears to me). I just got my first ever cell phone last fall (and ditched the landline). Thankfully, I use it only for brief contact with my wife or for random -short- calls to work or random places. I doubt I use it for more than 30 minutes a week. But, I’d happily go back to the landline if our culture shifted back to that.
yars
I’ve wondered about the fallout from all this stuff for some time. I knew the towers had to be emitting something weird. I also think that the sound frequencies of a lot of current technology are probably damaging us in some way. For some reason my ears are freakishly attuned to super-high pitches, and there are devices, lighting fixtures, security bars, etc., that actually cause me physical distress when I walk into places that use them. The KPL, for example, has that security gate at the entrance that puts out a squeeeeeeeeee that makes a nerve in my neck dance very uncomfortably, my right arm jump without me wanting it to, and causes my eyes water. If that’s just the stuff that some of us can actually hear, what’s going on at the higher frequencies? Does this have anything to do with our de-evolution? The increasing stupidity and short temper of the masses? Eh? Anyone? Anyone?
wasn't made for these times
Yes, that song is playing as I’m reading this thread. I did know about the Bayer thing. Both seem plausible. Why not? So, regarding Dingey’s "yars" post: What you’re saying makes me think about the difference in day-to-day experiences, where you live, grown up, etc. Maybe if you, Dingey, had been born in, say, NYC, you’d be less sensitive to it, by which I mean, maybe so many people have been so accustomed to that sort of interference that it is indeed affecting them but they don’t notice it, and if they tribe is raised with it, who’s to say anything? Like how people talk on their cell phones while they are defecating, in public toilets. I have always heard the whine of a TV being on in a house or room. But do you think if you’re, now, 13 years old, have a cell phone and don’t understand why bees are anything besides a nuisance, you might have grown up accepting that sort of noise, etc.? Oh, I probably just spent a lot of words to communicate a two-word idea, which was probably obvious anyway. It’s dreamy weather we’re on.