Super efficient LEDs have made this problem totally out of control. Incredibly bright while also being very cheap to run.
Paranoid/careless jackasses are lining their houses with 100,000 lumen cool white prison lights they bought on amazon for $30.
Parking lots are getting filled with ridiculously bright street lights because "Brighter = better? Right?". Just enough light to see? No! We need to recreate the sun for this vacant lot all night every night!
It's worse than that. The high-flicker, narrow-band LEDs used for most LED streetlights today create insanely bad color discrepancy and distortion due to motion.
It's a crime against nature and a crime against humanity that cities have allowed such a scourge to proliferate, when we have the science and technology for much better LED street lights.
It gets even worse because in order to make up for these discrepancies and distortion, manufacturers just.... turn them up brighter, fundamentally ignoring the problem and only making it worse.
It's bad enough that this affects drivers and pedestrians, but think of all of the animals who don't get a say, and who are even more sensitive to the flicker and lack of color information.
According to the study methods [1], data was taken from BirdWeather, which is crowdsourced from users running local BirdNET [2], including BirdNET-Pi and BirdNET-Go [3], which runs easily on most Raspberry Pi (including slowly on Zero 2 W). BirdNET has popped up a few times on HN [4].
The original study published in Science [1] has a better title:
Light pollution prolongs avian activity
> They found that birds were generally vocal for nearly an hour longer in the presence of light pollution. Furthermore, birds that are more exposed, or entrained, to light were more affected, such as those with large eyes and open nests.
The Gizmodo article takes a bit to get to the reference point, being light pollution (I originally mistakenly thought it was a relative to time).
(Submitted title was "Birds are singing an average of 50 minutes longer per day", which was already better than the baity title of the article - thanks gmays)
What is the impact of an increase of energy spend each day by this birds? They need more food, so they will eat more insects and grain.
I doubt that it is a negligible amount. It could easy affect the amount of birds that an ecosystem can host, and way more things down the line.
All these rapid changes can mess up the equilibrium in our ecosystems. Light pollution also affects insect behavior. If light pollution makes birds consume more insects and it also reduces the number of insects it is an accumulative problem.
I don't even need to go as far as the birds and the bees. The modern pervasive light pollution affects my behavior. My city's streets feel like a movie set these nights in a really uncanny unreal way.
LED lighting is too good, too cheap, makes it too easy to have way too much goddamn light in every corner of every street over every hour of every day. It feels like it's so machines can see better, not so I can see better.
makes it too easy to have way too much goddamn light in every corner of every street
That's essentially correct, but modern tech also makes it relatively easy (and in the end cheaper compared to non-LED) to
- make lights with a properly focused well directed beam instead of flooding the whole place; we have a new one close to our house and it sheds light only on the street itself to the point you can almost see a nice straight line where the light beam stops and beyond that line it's markedly darker than it used to be even though the light beam itself has a higher intensity
- make lights which emit in wavelengths which are less environmentally harmful for flora/fauna
- make each lantern remote controllable (on/off/dimming); main street lights here dim after 11pm and are truned off in all secondary streets
(there's a website dedcated to listing the best models for all of this but I cannot find it anymore)
The thing which is lacking here mostly is awareness and governments willing to implement this properly. We live in a rather small rural village which did implement all of this - too bad there's no research project assesing before and after but since it counters most of the negatives I assume it should turn out positive for the environment. Birds are definitely positively affected by it: execpt for owls I don't hear any singing in the middle of the night anymore. And in any case it feels pretty 'normal' to come home at night while it's properly dark.
> That's essentially correct, but modern tech also makes it relatively easy (and in the end cheaper compared to non-LED)
I don't think modern tech is really needed for (some of?) the things you list:
* we've know about lenses and focusing for centuries (the highly directional Fresnel lens was invented ~1815).
* incandescent lights have been around for a century and they were <3500K since the beginning; sodium street lights (<3000K) have been around for decades too
It is not so much modern tech that's the thing as modern (better) understanding: we've actually done research into the topic, and that research is more widely known; see for example this report by the city of Toronto on effective lighting (that mentions Dark Sky certification by name):
> it sheds light only on the street itself to the point you can almost see a nice straight line where the light beam stops and beyond that line it's markedly darker than it used to be even though the light beam itself has a higher intensity
This is one of the biggest contributors to the uncanny movie-set feeling for me. I don't like it :/
Does it prolong activity, or enable prolonged activity? I’ve seen flocks of waterfowl fly along lit roads at night, taking sharp turns at intersections, seemingly navigating by the light patterns.
Light pollution affects behavior of most animals we bother to study, it's only one topic of many in the book but Ed Yong's 2022 book An Immense World covers this for insects in particular. Some of it can be mitigated mostly by simply changing the color of the light or frequency of flashing.
It must have been around 15 years ago I first noticed birds singing in the dead of night near street lights. Light pollution is up there with noise pollution as my least favourite things about living in a society. Both seem to be mostly due to cars as it happens. It's kind of absurd that we talk about energy saving etc. but light up entire damn streets all through the night for no reason.
Super efficient LEDs have made this problem totally out of control. Incredibly bright while also being very cheap to run.
Paranoid/careless jackasses are lining their houses with 100,000 lumen cool white prison lights they bought on amazon for $30.
Parking lots are getting filled with ridiculously bright street lights because "Brighter = better? Right?". Just enough light to see? No! We need to recreate the sun for this vacant lot all night every night!
It's worse than that. The high-flicker, narrow-band LEDs used for most LED streetlights today create insanely bad color discrepancy and distortion due to motion.
It's a crime against nature and a crime against humanity that cities have allowed such a scourge to proliferate, when we have the science and technology for much better LED street lights.
It gets even worse because in order to make up for these discrepancies and distortion, manufacturers just.... turn them up brighter, fundamentally ignoring the problem and only making it worse.
It's bad enough that this affects drivers and pedestrians, but think of all of the animals who don't get a say, and who are even more sensitive to the flicker and lack of color information.
According to the study methods [1], data was taken from BirdWeather, which is crowdsourced from users running local BirdNET [2], including BirdNET-Pi and BirdNET-Go [3], which runs easily on most Raspberry Pi (including slowly on Zero 2 W). BirdNET has popped up a few times on HN [4].
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv9472
[2] https://birdnet.cornell.edu/
[3] https://github.com/Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi and https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The original study published in Science [1] has a better title:
Light pollution prolongs avian activity
> They found that birds were generally vocal for nearly an hour longer in the presence of light pollution. Furthermore, birds that are more exposed, or entrained, to light were more affected, such as those with large eyes and open nests.
The Gizmodo article takes a bit to get to the reference point, being light pollution (I originally mistakenly thought it was a relative to time).
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv9472
Ok we can use that title above. Thanks!
(Submitted title was "Birds are singing an average of 50 minutes longer per day", which was already better than the baity title of the article - thanks gmays)
What is the impact of an increase of energy spend each day by this birds? They need more food, so they will eat more insects and grain.
I doubt that it is a negligible amount. It could easy affect the amount of birds that an ecosystem can host, and way more things down the line.
All these rapid changes can mess up the equilibrium in our ecosystems. Light pollution also affects insect behavior. If light pollution makes birds consume more insects and it also reduces the number of insects it is an accumulative problem.
- Light pollution is a driver of insect declines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
I don't even need to go as far as the birds and the bees. The modern pervasive light pollution affects my behavior. My city's streets feel like a movie set these nights in a really uncanny unreal way.
LED lighting is too good, too cheap, makes it too easy to have way too much goddamn light in every corner of every street over every hour of every day. It feels like it's so machines can see better, not so I can see better.
makes it too easy to have way too much goddamn light in every corner of every street
That's essentially correct, but modern tech also makes it relatively easy (and in the end cheaper compared to non-LED) to
- make lights with a properly focused well directed beam instead of flooding the whole place; we have a new one close to our house and it sheds light only on the street itself to the point you can almost see a nice straight line where the light beam stops and beyond that line it's markedly darker than it used to be even though the light beam itself has a higher intensity
- make lights which emit in wavelengths which are less environmentally harmful for flora/fauna
- make each lantern remote controllable (on/off/dimming); main street lights here dim after 11pm and are truned off in all secondary streets
(there's a website dedcated to listing the best models for all of this but I cannot find it anymore)
The thing which is lacking here mostly is awareness and governments willing to implement this properly. We live in a rather small rural village which did implement all of this - too bad there's no research project assesing before and after but since it counters most of the negatives I assume it should turn out positive for the environment. Birds are definitely positively affected by it: execpt for owls I don't hear any singing in the middle of the night anymore. And in any case it feels pretty 'normal' to come home at night while it's properly dark.
> That's essentially correct, but modern tech also makes it relatively easy (and in the end cheaper compared to non-LED)
I don't think modern tech is really needed for (some of?) the things you list:
* we've know about lenses and focusing for centuries (the highly directional Fresnel lens was invented ~1815).
* incandescent lights have been around for a century and they were <3500K since the beginning; sodium street lights (<3000K) have been around for decades too
It is not so much modern tech that's the thing as modern (better) understanding: we've actually done research into the topic, and that research is more widely known; see for example this report by the city of Toronto on effective lighting (that mentions Dark Sky certification by name):
* https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/8ff6-city-...
> it sheds light only on the street itself to the point you can almost see a nice straight line where the light beam stops and beyond that line it's markedly darker than it used to be even though the light beam itself has a higher intensity
This is one of the biggest contributors to the uncanny movie-set feeling for me. I don't like it :/
> there's a website dedcated to listing the best models for all of this but I cannot find it anymore
Could be the DarkSky approved products: https://darksky.org/what-we-do/darksky-approved/
Thanks, yes that was the one.
Best case we will get a lost generation before these changes are made.
Not me! I'm taking melatonin and automating my home lights to resemble natural lightning levels in order to mitigate.
Does it prolong activity, or enable prolonged activity? I’ve seen flocks of waterfowl fly along lit roads at night, taking sharp turns at intersections, seemingly navigating by the light patterns.
Maybe this is contributing to the insect decline. More time when both birds and bugs are out.
Light pollution affects behavior of most animals we bother to study, it's only one topic of many in the book but Ed Yong's 2022 book An Immense World covers this for insects in particular. Some of it can be mitigated mostly by simply changing the color of the light or frequency of flashing.
Great. More avian productivity! They were sleeping too much anyway.
Try to have a calm night near floodlights. They make the birds sing 24/7.
Great, we're giving the birds insomnia too.
It also prolongs human activity.
It must have been around 15 years ago I first noticed birds singing in the dead of night near street lights. Light pollution is up there with noise pollution as my least favourite things about living in a society. Both seem to be mostly due to cars as it happens. It's kind of absurd that we talk about energy saving etc. but light up entire damn streets all through the night for no reason.
[dead]
I thought it was a good thing, it charged their batteries longer /s