I recall reading a piece some time ago by an avid environmentalist who made a point lost on his fellow environmentalists: So-called “alternative” energy can have an effect on the environment even worse than conventional energy.

This article about a plan to destroy a forest in Germany makes that point better than he ever could. It seems that a developer plans to erect 60 giant wind turbines in an untouched forest that is the pride of the region of Palitinate.

That’s too much for the locals:

“According to Die Welt, hungry wind park developers with deep pockets plan to install 60 wind turbines, each 209 meters (700 feet) tall in the area. Unsurprisingly this looming large-scale green industrialization of this particularly idyllic landscape has become too much to take, even for the most avid climate activist groups. Die Welt writes that for the first time all ten local environmental groups have closed ranks against the project, says Bernd Wallner of the Pfälzerwald-Verein (Palantinate Association).”

An unsightly solar array occupies what had been acres and acres of farm and forest on the Mercer County College campusPhoto by Paul Mulshine 

These people are learning the less so many New Jerseyans have already learned: Wind and solar projects can be much more irritating and ugly than any other source of power.

I wrote here about how some beautiful farm fields and tree stands at Mercer County College were bulldozed for an unsightly solar array that stretches for acres.

And then there was that horribly misguided idea of putting a wind turbine right in the middle of the small town of Ocean Gate. The houses in that Shore community are on small lots, which means many are withing hearing range. It sounds like a dryer with some loose change rattling around within.

Meanwhile the power produced by these plants can cost up to 400 times as much as conventional power according to this article. That’s because conventional gas and coal plants have to be online to make up for the unpredictable surges in wind and solar power.

I have long argued that belief in the alarmist view of anthropogenic global warming is more of a religion than a science. The true believers are essentially puritans who feel guilty about having ample electricity at their disposal. So they dream up ways of making it more expensive and less accessible.

Good for them, but if they really believed global warming was such a threat then they would be pushing the only technology that is capable of generating huge amounts of power with no CO-2 emissions. That’s nuclear power. The Germans plan to phase it out.

But somehow I suspect they won’t follow through on those plans. At a certain point, an industrial country needs power. And Germans already pay twice as much for it as we do. I don’t think they’re going to let their economy destroyed because of the work of a bunch of climate “scientists.”

I put the word in quotes because the real experts in this field are not the climatologists. By the very nature of their studies, climatologist have a vested interest in further alarmism about global warming. The more alarmism, the more money gets spent on their studies.

But the true experts are the physicists. Not surprisingly, the most prominent among them like to point out that this is a field that requires much more study before any definitive conclusions can be arrived at. The most prominent such physicist is Freeman Dyson
of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Dyson, who may be the smartest man on the planet, has told me in some detail why he is a climate-change skeptic.

Despite the complicated nature of the problem, Dyson can talk to regular people about it. That’s because he is a writer of many books that explain scientific concepts to laymen.

So was Richard P. Feynman. Feynman, who worked on the atom bomb back in World War II, was the author of a number of books including “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.”

The book is a compendium of anecdotes by Feynman about his various adventures working on the bomb, learning how to crack safes, and deducing the science of picking up women in bars.

No one with a sense of humor could be offended in the least by any of it. But the world of science has becomes so politically correct these days that a writer was canned from a leading science publication for being insufficiently offended by the book.

This Washington Post piece explains how blogger Ashutosh Jogalekar got the boot:

Commenting on recent biographies of Feynman, Jogalekar noted the physicist’s “casual sexism,” including his affairs with two married women, his humiliation of a female student and his delight in documenting his strategies for picking up women in bars. But while expressing disappointment in Feynman’s behavior, Jogalekar essentially dismissed it as a byproduct of the “male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years.”

Within a day of the column’s appearance, Scientific American pulled it from its site, with another note from Brainard: “The text of this post has been removed because it did not meet Scientific American’s quality standards.”

It turns out that the Scientific American people are also trying to bowdlerize writers for expressing frank opinions on the connection between genetics and intelligence. That should tell you all you need to know about why global-warming alarmism remains ascendant in the media: To these p.c. types, propaganda trumps science every time.

And by the way, no one is actually questioning the science behind Feynman’s theories on how he could best pick up women. Note this one outraged writer’s piece on the controversy.

“Basically, Feynman was convinced that buying women things and expecting sex as payment was respecting them. In order to do anything different, he had to disrespect them and think of them as horrible demons.”

No, what Feynman was doing was running an experiment in how to pick up women. He decided they don’t fall for guys who chase them too much.

In the book, he describes how a bartender in New Mexico taught him that lesson and how it worked out in practice. He then concludes that “I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.”

Now that, boys and girls, is the scientific mind at work. It would have been fascinating to see how Feynman treated all the hype over global warming. Unfortunately he died in 1988.