Billionaires fund attacks on climate science

[StraitTalk]

I'm sorry but when did "climate denial" become a phrase? It's just so silly...but typical of the alarmists...

About the same time "alarmist" became my least favorite dysphemism of the year. Those who attack character in place of argument have no argument.

[StraitTalk]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... -australia

Sickness being attributed to wind turbines is more likely to have been caused by people getting alarmed at the health warnings circulated by activists, an Australian study has found.

Complaints of illness were far more prevalent in communities targeted by anti-windfarm groups, said the report's author, Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University. His report concludes that illnesses being blamed on windfarms are more than likely caused by the psychological effect of suggestions that the turbines make people ill, rather than by the turbines themselves.

"If windfarms were intrinsically unhealthy or dangerous in some way, we would expect to see complaints applying to all of them, but in fact there is a large number where there have been no complaints at all," Chapman said.

The report, which is the first study of the history of complaints about windfarms in Australia, found that 63% had never been subject to noise or health complaints. In the state of Western Australia, where there are 13 windfarms, there have been no complaints.

The study shows that the majority of complaints (68%) have come from residents near five windfarms that have been heavily targeted by opponent groups. The report says more than 80% of complaints about health and noise began after 2009 when the groups "began to add health concerns to their wider opposition".

"In the preceding years health or noise complaints were rare despite large and small turbined wind farms having operated for many years," it says.

According to Chapman, when windfarms started being built in Australia about 20 years ago some of the anti-wind lobby was driven by people who simply did not like the look of them.

"Then in about 2009 things started ramping up and these people discovered if you started saying it was a health problem, a lot more people would sit up and pay attention. It's essentially a sociological phenomenon," he said.

Giving the illness a name like "wind turbine syndrome" and "vibro-acoustic disease" had been a key feature in its spread, Chapman said. He accepted that some people genuinely felt ill but "where you set up an expectation in people that something in their environment is noxious, that can translate into an expression of symptoms".

The findings run against the claims of the Waubra Foundation, a national group that opposes windfarms and says serious medical conditions have been identified in people living, working or visiting within six miles (10km) of wind turbine developments. The group says the onset of conditions including sleep deprivation, hypertension, heart attacks and depression correspond directly with the operation of the windfarms.

Waubra's chief executive, Sarah Laurie, said illnesses resulting from exposure to windfarms were "an inconvenient truth".

"There's been an attitude that the people who are getting sick are collateral damage," she said.

"People are not getting sick because someone tells them they're going to become unwell. They're waking up in the middle of the night and suffering from sleep deprivation because something is waking them up."

Laurie, who trained as a rural GP, said it was important that more research was done so we have a better understanding of exactly what's going on.

"No evidence doesn't mean no problem. It means the evidence hasn't been collected because the research hasn't been done," she said.

Chapman said that if wind farms did genuinely make people ill there would by now be a large body of medical evidence that would preclude putting them near inhabited areas. Eighteen reviews of the research literature on wind turbines and health published since 2003 had all reached the broad conclusion that there was very little evidence they were directly harmful to health.

Chapman cited a recent New Zealand study that exposed 60 healthy volunteers to both real and fake low-frequency noise, similar to what is produced by wind turbines and is sometimes known as infrasound. Half of the volunteers were shown television documentaries about health problems associated with wind turbines before they listened to the low-frequency noise; the other half were not. They were then played a mixture of noises. Those who had seen the videos about the adverse affects reported higher levels of symptoms whether exposed to the genuine or fake audio samples.

In spite of results like this, complaints from some living near wind turbines persist. David Mortimer is a beef and cattle farmer in Millicent, South Australia, 400km south-east of Adelaide. Wind turbines were built on his farm in 2004.

"Mostly I've had sleep-related problems," he said. "At night I get a deep rumbling sensation in my head which makes it hard to get to sleep. I also get a pulsing in my heat that does not correlate to my heartbeat. It gives me an acute sense of anxiety and arrhythmia that goes on for days."

Mortimer said he sleeps well when he's away from the farm, when the silence in his head at night is "absolutely profound".

"As soon as we come back the symptoms reappear," he said. "A lot of people like me are complaining but politicians and wind farm companies are not listening."

An application for 160 new turbines has been approved to be built on his neighbour's property. Seventeen of them will be visible from Mortimer's house and within 3.5km of his home.

Link to the study: http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/8977

[logicalview]

Wind Turbines: NOT “Pollution-Free”

By rwrand, on February 26th, 2011

If you’ve read my posts and published articles you’ve gleaned some understanding of the noise pollution created near the large, three-blade industrial wind turbines being proliferated across the formerly beautiful and quiet lands of Maine.

Some visiting my site appear incensed at my cautions about this technology, insisting we must do something to reduce pollution from other power generation technologies such as coal, and touting wind technology as a pollution-free alternative.

Now, I already know that wind technology is not pollution-free. It produces noise pollution, a world-around formally recognized and serious health impact, within a locale around each turbine of perhaps a mile, and that locale increases in size for multiple-turbine facilities especially near water or in hill-valley topography. Yet: did you know that the wind turbines require very large quantities of so-called “rare earth” metals to form the large magnets in the generators? That these metals are mined? That these mines are a total ecological disaster, directly affecting the health of thousands of people living nearby?

It appears that wind turbines pollute heavily from inception through operation.

With the instant availability of news reports on the internet, how could anyone maintain an allegiance to this technology and this industry- unless they are profiting from it?

If you are incensed at my cautions and feel wind technology is indeed, “pollution-free,” perhaps you should read this news article. We’ll get back to noise pollution, my area of interest, in the next post. Thanks for reading. May you find this useful.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive ... scale.html

————–

-a comment on the news article from Ontario…

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/colum ... 12836.html

…A story by Simon Parry and Ed Douglas in the Daily Mail, Jan. 29, describes a horrific toxic stew brewing in China as a result of our search for the great, green holy grail. … The toxic lake left behind after mining for “rare earth metals” needed for the turbines’ magnets is creating an environmental boondoggle of epic proportions. … The city of Baotou, in Inner Mongolia, is home to more than 90% of the world’s rare earth metals.

The story quotes retired farmer Su Bairen, 69: “‘At first it was just a hole in the ground,’ he says. ‘When it dried in the winter and summer, it turned into a black crust and children would play on it. Then one or two of them fell through and drowned in the sludge below. Since then, children have stayed away.’”

Plants withered. Livestock died.

“Villagers say their teeth began to fall out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages, and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases. Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed,” says the Mail.

Still gung-ho to go green?

Every time I see a new turbine I’ll think of those children dying horrific deaths. And I’ll hang my head in shame at the environmental disaster we’ve created.

http://randacoustics.com/wind-turbines- ... tion-free/

[fluffy]

Geez, some of these drama queens will never be happy. We could be living in caves and eating rocks and bushes and they'd still find something to criticise.

[underscore]

Geez, some of these drama queens will never be happy. We could be living in caves and eating rocks and bushes and they'd still find something to criticise.

Probably that using berries for cave paintings was ruining the natural beauty of the caves.

[StraitTalk]

Geez, some of these drama queens will never be happy. We could be living in caves and eating rocks and bushes and they'd still find something to criticise.

It's always the same song and dance, you just gotta tune it out.

[logicalview]

yes you could tune it out...or perhaps listen to an alternative point of view...that maybe...just maybe...wind power isn't the answer to anything and a massive waste of resources....mostly government resources...

When will this green madness cease?

By James DelingpolePoliticsLast updated: March 15th, 2013

When is a bird not a bird? When it's one of the millions of avian species splattered, decapitated, clunked, winged, brained or otherwise condemned to death by a wind turbine.

Mysteriously, in the eyes of environmentalists – and bird conservation bodies such as the Audubon Society and the RSPB – all those deaths, no matter how rare the species involved, are acceptable collateral damage in the great war to save the world from the unproven threat of "man-made global warming." If you want more details of their dishonesty and hypocrisy, read here.

Isn't it funny, though, how this bird-killing dispensation only seems to apply to those modes of energy-generation approved by green activists? Consider this report, from the Times, explaining why the development of Britain's spectacular shale gas reserves is proving so painfully slow:

Migrating birds have halted Britain’s embryonic shale gas expansion in its tracks.
The company backed by Lord Browne, the former BP boss, admitted yesterday that it must delay resuming fracking near Blackpool until next year because of rules protecting thousands of birds wintering in the surrounding picturesque Fylde peninsula.

Cuadrilla Resources triggered dozens of earth tremors in Lancashire two years ago when it became the first company to frack in the UK, resulting in a government ban. This was lifted in December and the company planned to begin fracking again in August this year. However, the presence of birds, including bar-tailed godwits and Bewick’s swans, mean it must delay again.

It's not just in Britain where these double standards apply. In the US when a fossil fuel company is responsible for bird deaths, it faces near-certain prosecution. But when it's a wind energy company doing the killing, it gets a free pass, as this excellent Energy Tribune article notes:

By exempting the wind industry from prosecution under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and/or the Eagle Protection Act, the federal government is providing another indirect subsidy to the sector. Other energy companies have been required to pay hefty fines and perform mitigation work to reduce the risk that their facilities pose to birds. For instance, in 2009, ExxonMobil pled guilty in federal court to charges that it killed 85 birds – all of which were protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines and fees for the bird kills, which occurred after the animals came in contact with hydrocarbons in uncovered tanks and waste water facilities on company properties located in five western states.[xiv]

And yet, despite numerous cases of bird deaths at wind-energy projects, the industry has not been prosecuted a single time by federal authorities.

The photo illustrating this piece was taken by my friend Vivian Russell on the Solway Plain in Cumbria, the next county up from Lancashire's Fylde peninsula. The turbine you see is one of dozens on the migratory path of 500 whooper swans and 3-5,000 geese. A birding friend of Vivian's who lives nearby quite often hears the thumps as the swans collide with the blades. But you won't hear any complaints from at least one member of Cumbria Bird Club: he now acts as one of N Power's bird inspectors.

Oh, and there's similar hypocrisy in Germany too. A few weeks ago the Berliner Zeitung reported on a scandal involving the German wind industry and environmental groups. The article was kindly translated for me by Philipp Mueller of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Essentially, a conservation body called Nabu appears to have been demanding a form of protection money from the wind industry: in return for a generous sum to help it out with its research and conservation, Nabu agrees not to close down the wind farms with costly law suits:

The operators of the wind farm, the company HessenEnergie and a local civic wind farm, paid 500,000 Euros into a conservation fund, to be managed by a foundation of Nabu. With this money, so Nabu, habitat enhancement for the red kite can be financed. The money will finance a study, which will investigate whether small mammals at the foot of wind turbines attract the birds and therefore put them at risk. The probably unintentionally ambiguous name of the project: "Mice for Milan."

Horst Meixner, director of HessenEnergie has approved the transfer of the money with a heavy heart. "We simply could not afford not to comply with the proposal of Nabu." Even the shutdown of the plant for a few months has caused a total loss of around one million Euros. "Thus we have chosen the lesser evil, and settled with the Nabu." One of the decommissioned plants is owned by a local civic wind farm. Some investors therefore were threatened even with personal bankruptcy – thus the anger was great locally.

What's astonishing is that, apart from the odd rare newspaper and magazine article like the ones quoted above, the ongoing global wind scandal appears mostly to be reported only in the blogosphere.

Here in Britain, it beggars belief that national energy policy has been permitted to have been hijacked by green ideologues such as Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey, and that no one in industry, within the Conservative party, within conservation bodies or – indeed – in any concerted way, within the national press, is kicking up a stink about this.

When I wrote in Watermelons that environmentalism was the most dangerous totalitarian movement in the world today, I wasn't exaggerating. If you don't believe this, ask yourself how it is that at the time of the deepest, most intractable economic crisis in our history, a "Conservative"-led government still feels so fearful of and bullied by the green movement it does not even dare to take the measures necessary (shale and nuclear, basically) to restore our energy economy; and how yet, at the same time, it is happy to go on allowing the construction of wind turbines which are not only hugely unpopular with the people who have to live near them but are wildly expensive, hideously inefficient and wouldn't even exist at all without massive taxpayer subsidy.

Not even human deaths are considered a concern-worthy obstacle to the unstoppable march of eco-fascism.

Winter weather has killed a million Brits since the 1980s and will kill a million more by 2050, experts have warned. Age support groups and doctors blame poor housing, high energy bills and pensioner poverty. Many killed by the cold are elderly but the ill, vulnerable and very young also die. A total of 973,000 people died due to winter weather from 1982/83 to 2011/12, Office of National Statistics data for England and Wales shows. ONS data shows another million Brits will be killed by winters by 2050, based on the average of 27,400 cold weather deaths per winter in the last five years.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/james ... ess-cease/

[ForestfortheTrees]

When will this green madness cease?

By James DelingpolePoliticsLast updated: March 15th, 2013

Trouble with this is that James Delingpole has very little credibility as an unbiased and rational human being.

[steven lloyd]

Trouble with this is that James Delingpole has very little credibility as an unbiased and rational human being.

Unlike Al Gore and David Suzuki? Don't get me wrong. I think climare change is occurring and that we need to prepare ourselves that adapt to that. The reason we need to prepare to adapt to that is because we sure as *bleep* ain't going to be stopping it. If Al Gore and David Suzuki really belived humankind could even significantly altar let alone stop climate change, they wouldn't own Hummers and fly all over the world in jets. Because of the monies being diverted yo what will be highly ineffective efforts (except for making guys like Al Gore and David Suzuki even more wealth so they can drive even more Hummers and fly jets to even more places, we are not going to be able to respond to the inevitable climate change that will be occurring. Billions in storm damage, lives lost and economies destroyed with no realistic plan for communities to adapt and survive.


Stop producing oil ???

[JLives]

If somebody has a factual claim about climate change and drives or flies a certain vehicle does that make their claim wrong or does it just reflect on their personality?

[ForestfortheTrees]

Unlike Al Gore and David Suzuki? Don't get me wrong.

I don't get my information from these guys either

I think climare change is occurring and that we need to prepare . . . blah blah blah

Whatever

[steven lloyd]

Whatever

Of course just ignoring climate change is another option.

[ForestfortheTrees]

If somebody has a factual claim about climate change and drives or flies a certain vehicle does that make their claim wrong or does it just reflect on their personality?

Jenny, it is a really good question that I challenged myself with awhile ago and this is what I have come up with. First of all, if you participate in a system it does not mean you have no right to criticize it and ask for changes. Examples:

Voting in elections. I think the first-past-the-post electoral system is fundamentally flawed when there are more than two political parties. I want electoral reform so does this mean I should not vote?

Food supply The majority of Canadians use the industrial food system and most eat meat. Does this mean we have no right to ask for better standards of food safety, or for livestock to be treated humanely? No, it doesn't. And, if we said that you are a hypocrite if you complain about these things but still participate in the system you would be persecuting the most vulnerable--those of lower socio-economic standing who cannot afford other option.

So here is my stand when it comes to oil consumption. We live in a world that is dominated by petroleum products. Switching off oil production tomorrow is not a viable option and would cause widespread hardship, violence, and death. I don't want that. However, I do not think how we produce, consume, and dispose of petroleum products is particularly ethical, and I want to see that change. I don't believe that oil and the economy should be the card that trumps all other concerns. Pollution of the Athabasca watershed by the oilsands operations should be of top concern and we should be holding the corporations to account. Likewise in other locations like BP in the Gulf of Mexico and Shell in the Niger delta. I could go on but I think you get the idea.

So, I ride my bike as much as I can but Kelowna is a city built for cars. I try to keep energy consumption down in my house during the winter, but I live in a 70's era home and cannot afford to upgrade it for energy efficiency. I generally don't buy products with lots of plastic packaging, but it is impossible to avoid it 100%. We all participate in the petroleum economy, however, this does not mean we have no right to ask for better practices.

[logicalview]

Trouble with this is that James Delingpole has very little credibility as an unbiased and rational human being.

what difference does it make who is writing it? is that all you have Forest? That you feel, in your own completely biased opinion, that Delingpole has little credibility? Firstly, it doesn't matter what you think, other than to you. Secondly, what about actually countering what he said with counter-arguments? Why does the wind industry get a free pass to kill birds? Why is this being covered up? Just answer that question, I and many others would love to know. I do like how every writer who dares to tell the truth suddenly "has no credibility". That is just such a cop-out.

But killing birds isn't the real issue. The real issue with wind power is that it doesn't generate much if any power. That's a fact that getting harder and harder to hide. Here's another Delingpole article on that little chestnut...

James Delingpole: Wind farm scam a huge cover-up

ONE of the great popular misconceptions about climate-change sceptics such as Ian Plimer, Bob Carter, Cardinal George Pell and me is that we’re all Big-Oil-funded, Gaia-ravaging, nature-hating emissaries of Satan.


We can’t look at a lovely pristine beach, apparently, without praying for a nice, juicy oil slick to turn up and wipe out all the pelicans and turtles and sea otters.

But this isn’t actually true. I love our beautiful planet at least as much as your $180,000-a-year (for a three-day week) climate commissioner Tim Flannery does. One of my great heroes is Patrick Moore, the Canadian co-founder of Greenpeace with whose sensible, rational approach to environmental issues I agree 100 per cent. Another of my heroes, after an article headlined “Where eagles dare not fly” in The Weekend Australian on April 21, is this newspaper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd.

It took great courage for Lloyd to write up his expose of the tremendous damage being caused by a wind farm to a small community in Waterloo, north of Adelaide. Most newspaper environment editors — from Australia to Britain and the US — tend, unfortunately, to be so ideologically wedded to the supposed virtues of renewable energy they find it all but impossible to criticise it.

Lloyd interviewed a number of victims whose lives had been ruined by the vast, swooshing wind towers looking over their homes. They found sleep almost impossible; they couldn’t concentrate; they had night sweats, headaches, palpitations, heart trouble. Their chickens were laying eggs without yolks; their ewes were giving birth to deformed lambs; their once-active dogs spent their days staring blankly at the wall. The damage, it seems, is caused not so much by the noise you can hear but by what you can’t hear: the infrasonic waves that attack the balance mechanism in the ear and against which not even home insulation can defend you. Its effects can be felt more than 10km away.

Inspired by Lloyd’s article, I went to investigate and was heartbroken by what I found. Until you’ve seen what it can do to people, it’s easy to dismiss wind turbine syndrome as a hypochondriac’s charter or an urban myth. But it’s real all right. Waterloo felt like a ghost town: shuttered houses and a dust-blown aura of sinister unease, as in a horror movie when something dreadful has happened to a previously ordinary, happy settlement and at first you’re not sure what. Then you look up on to the horizon and see them, turning slowly in the breeze . . .

Even more shocking than this, though, were my discoveries about the finance arrangements and behaviour of the wind farm companies. What we have here, I believe, is the biggest and most outrageous public affairs scandal of the 21st century — one in which the Gillard government is implicated and that far exceeds in seriousness and scope of the Slipper or Thomson sideshows.

At the heart of this scandal are the union superannuation funds that are using the wind farm scam as a kind of government-endorsed Ponzi scheme to fill their coffers at public expense. One of the biggest wind farm developers — Pacific Hydro — is owned by the union superfund Members Equity Bank. To meet its carbon reduction quotas, we’re told, Australia needs to build about 10,000 new wind turbines like the ones that have destroyed Waterloo (and dozens of communities like it from NSW to South Australia).

The figures are mind-boggling. Each of those turbines will cost about $3 million, which means $30 billion even before you’ve started building the power lines. And where’s this money coming from? The consumer, of course — mostly via tariffs whacked on to the price of conventional, fossil-fuel energy prices, in the form of payouts called Renewable Energy Certificates.

Note that wind turbines produce very little power. Because wind is intermittent, they operate at between one-fifth and one-third of their capacity, meaning they are erratic, unreliable and have to be fully backed up by conventional “black” (mostly coal-fuelled) power. Where the money is to be made is through the REC subsidy. A 3MW wind turbine that generates (at most) $150,000 worth of electricity a year is eligible for guaranteed subsidies of $500,000 a year. A ridgeline hosting 20 or 30 turbines generates very little power — but an awful lot of free cash for those lucky enough to get their snouts in the trough.

http://junkscience.com/2012/05/02/james ... -cover-up/

[StraitTalk]

Let's not get too focused on the wind thing, that's really not why I posted this thread. There are a lot of good arguments on both sides but I don't think this is the place for those.