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| A spokesman for Michael Gove has said that teachers who do not offer a balanced view on issues like climate change are breaking the law. The Department for Education’s comments came after a report from The Global Warming Policy Foundation raised serious concerns about the lack of balance in British classrooms. The Secretary of State for Education’s Spokesman said: “The Secretary of State read this report with concern. Schools should not teach that a particular political or ideological point of view is right – indeed it is against the law for them to do so. Great care should be exercised to make sure information provided to students is scientifically rigorous. It is important that any material used in the classroom is rooted in science, not driven by the aims of a campaign.” –Andre Walker, Breitbart London, 8 April 2014Teachers Breaking The Law Over Climate Change Bias, Education Department Says Breitbart London, 8 April 2014Andre Walker A spokesman for Michael Gove, [the Secretary of State for Education], has said that teachers who do not offer a balanced view on issues like climate change are breaking the law. The Department for Education’s comments came after a report from The Global Warming Policy Foundation raised serious concerns about the lack of balance in British classrooms. The report by Andrew Montford and John Shade, warned that “eco-activists” in the education system were frightening children and using “pester power” to ensure parents are forced to adopt lifestyle choices dictated in schools. The report said: “We find instances of eco-activism being given a free rein within schools and at the events schools encourage their pupils to attend. In every case of concern,the slant is on scares, on raising fears, followed by the promotion of detailed guidance on how pupils should live, as well as on what they should think.” However, shortly after the findings were reported at media outlets including Breitbart London the Secretary of State for Education’s Spokesman issued a statement pointing out his “concern” about the findings. He said: “The Secretary of State read this report with concern. Ministers are clear that the new national curriculum must equip young people with the core knowledge they need to understand the weather, climate, the earth’s atmosphere, physical geography and the interaction between nature and the environment. “That means in both science and geography, pupils must learn the facts and processes which underpin public discussion of climate change. They must be equipped with the scientific knowledge to make their own judgments about political responses. They must not be directed towards a particular campaigning agenda. “Schools should not teach that a particular political or ideological point of view is right – indeed it is against the law for them to do so. Great care should be exercised to make sure information provided to students is scientifically rigorous. It is important that any material used in the classroom is rooted in science, not driven by the aims of a campaign.” Dr Benny Peiser, from The Global Warming Policy Foundation, welcomed the comments but called for an independent enquiry into the actions of teachers. Peiser told Breitbart London: “We are pleased that the Secretary of State is clearly concerned about the evidence we have put forward in our report. But we are worried that there is a discrepancy between what the Secretary of State wants and what is going on in Schools. “This is a positive response but the next step is to ensure anything that contravenes these standards is weeded out.” There has been concern for a number of years about teachers using the classroom to preach radical ideas. The Thatcher government introduced the National Curriculum in 1988 because some schools spent so much time on ‘trendy’ causes that they had little time left for the basics. Report Finds Schoolchildren Being ‘Brainwashed’ Over Climate Change Andrew Montford, blogger and author of a new report on climate change in education, says children in England and Scotland are being brainwashed over climate change. He blames the United Nations for setting an agenda which has been blindly adopted in schools. VoR’s Scott Craig asked him to explain. Andrew Montford told VoR: “Environmentalism and, in particular, global warming alarmism, is all-pervasive in the curricula in England and in Scotland. We found that global warming is being taught in almost every area of the curriculum. In one examination board we found global warming being tested – as it were – in papers in economics, in chemistry, geography, religious studies, physics, French, humanities and one-and-on-and-on. “It’s absolutely everywhere and it’s not being taught as something that is there for debate, that there are different views on it. It is being taught in a quasi-religious fashion. You are being taught a dogma. You can get marks for following the dogma and repeating the dogma, but you cannot get marks for questioning it and for challenging the aspect of it. “There are actually very few people – including most people who are termed ‘deniers’ – who actually deny that global warming is something that happens. People don’t deny that Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The question is how much it’s going to affect us. What we find is that global warming is being taught as a definite disaster that is impending. And that just isn’t true from the science. “The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] working group report, the scientific report, reported a range of possible warming that ranges for relatively un-alarming to really quite alarming. Now that range of different outcomes leads to very different conclusions. If warming is going to be slow and potentially even beneficial for the next 50 years, you adopt quite different policies to those you would adopt if we’re going to see very serious effects in the short term. “Again, you see none of that in what our children are being taught in school. This is being mandated by the national curriculum and by the curriculum for excellence in Scotland. We traced it right back to the United Nations, who are promoting sustainable development as something that really can’t be disputed (although, if you read the academic literature, it is a disputed concept – it’s a rather nebulous concept at the best of times – but people certainly dispute whether it’s the right way for mankind to move ahead), but – yes – it carries on from the United Nations into the curricula and into the schools. “I don’t really point particularly point to the teachers as being the problem here. They have a curriculum that they’re required to teach. Now I think some of them are all for the green agenda and they bring environmentalists’ activists material into their classes. Others pay lip-service to it and try to teach knowledge and questioning in the way that you would hope would happen in schools. But the overall impression is that the activists are winning here. “We are calling for the ministers who are responsible for the curriculum to examine our report in detail and to institute inquiries into exactly what is going on. We’ve done a desktop review of what appears to be going on, looking a publicly available documents and trying to get a feel for what is going on in schools and this really needs a proper study to see just how bad it is. There are signs in the new English national curriculum that the level of environmentalism is being toned down. In Scotland, it appears to be getting worse, if anything. So there is a real cause for concern here, I think.” |
Professor from Belfast University tells about “Giant Fans”!
The Irish have seen a colossal wind-rush with giant fans being slung up all over the Emerald Isle. Planning rules are so lax as to be derisory – fans are literally speared into backyards – with the victims suffering the obvious impacts from incessant low-frequency noise and infrasound – such as sleep deprivation and all the adverse health consequences that flow from that insidious form of torture.
Here’s a great little article put together by Emeritus Professor Alun Evans from Belfast University summarising the impacts of wind farms on health.
Wind Farms and Health
Alun Evans
3 April 2014
According to the World Health Organisation’s recent report, ‘Night Noise Guidelines for Europe’ [1], environmental noise is emerging as one of the major public health concerns of the twenty-first century. It observes that, “Many people have to adapt their lives to cope with the noise at night,” and the young and the old are particularly vulnerable.
This is because hearing in young people is more acute and, in older people, a loss of hearing of higher sound frequencies renders them more susceptible to the effects of low frequency noise. It is a particularly troublesome feature of the noise generated by wind turbines due to its impulsive, intrusive and incessant nature.
A recent case-control study conducted around two wind farms in New England has shown [2] that subjects living within 1.4 km of an IWT had worse sleep, were sleepier during the day, and had poorer SF36 Mental Component Scores compared to those living further than 1.4 km away. The study demonstrated a strongly significant association between reported sleep disturbance and ill health in those residing close to industrial wind turbines.
The major adverse health effects caused seem to be due to sleep disturbance and deprivation with the main culprits identified as loud noise in the auditory range, and low frequency noise, particularly infrasound. This is inaudible in the conventional sense, and is propagated over large distances and penetrates the fabric of dwellings, where it may be amplified. It is a particular problem at night, in the quiet rural settings most favoured for wind farms, because infrasound persists long after the higher frequencies have been dissipated.
Sleep is a physiological necessity and the sleep-deprived are vulnerable to a variety of health problems [2,3]. particularly Cardiovascular Disease in which nocturnal noise is an important factor [4]. Sleep deprivation in children is associated with increased bodyweight [3,5], which is known to ‘track’ into later life, and predisposes to adult disease. That is why “Encouraging more sleep” is a sensible target in the Public health Agency’s current campaign to prevent obesity in children. It also causes memory impairment because memories are normally reinforced in the later, Rapid Eye Movement, phase of sleep; again, it is the young and the old who are most affected. Sleep deprivation is associated with an increased likelihood of developing a range of chronic diseases including Type II Diabetes, cancer (eg breast with shift work [6]), Coronary Heart Disease [7,8] and Heart Failure [9]. Although the quality of the data are mixed, those on Heart Failure reported recently from the HUNT Study [9] are quite robust as they are based on 54,279 Norwegians free of disease at baseline (men and women aged 20-89 years). A total of 1412 cases of Heart Failure developed over a mean follow-up of 11.3 years. A dose-dependent relationship was observed between the risk of disease and the number of reported insomnia symptoms: i) Difficulty in initiating sleep; ii) Difficulty in maintaining sleep; and, iii) Lack of restorative sleep. The Hazard Ratios were ‘0’ for none of these; ‘0.96’ for one; ‘1.35’ for two; and, ‘4.53’ for three; this achieved significance at the 2% level. This means that such a result could occur once by chance if the study were to be repeated 50 times, Significance is conventionally accepted at the 5% level.
Another important, recent study is MORGEN which followed nearly 18,000 Dutch men and women, free of Cardiovascular Disease at baseline, over 10-14 years [8]. In this period there were 607 events: fatal CVD, non-fatal Myocardial Infarction and Stroke. Adequate sleep, defined as at least seven hours, was a protective factor which augmented the benefits conferred by the absence of four traditional cardiovascular risk factors. For example, the benefit of adequate sleep equalled the protective contribution of not smoking cigarettes. Given that cigarette smoking is such a potent risk factor for Cardiovascular Disease, this result is striking. The findings built on earlier ones from the MORGEN study [7]. It seems that adequate sleep is important in protecting against a range of Cardiovascular Diseases which result when arteries of different sizes are compromised: large (coronary, cerebral) arteries in heart attacks and stroke, small arteries (arterioles) in heart failure.
All of these studies share the weakness that they are ‘observational’ as opposed to ‘experimental’ and, as such, their results do not constitute ‘proof.’ We now have the evidence of an experimental study carried out in human volunteers which shows that the expression of a large range of genes is affected by sleep deprivation of fairly short duration [10]. This might be the key to understanding why the health effects of sleep deprivation are so diverse. It could also shed light on the ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome,’ a cluster of symptoms which include sleep disturbance, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, nausea, changes in mood and inability to concentrate [11]. In this condition infrasound is a likely causal agent.
This group has now shown in another small intervention study that mistimed sleep desynchronized from the central circadian clock has a much larger effect on the circadian regulation of the human transcriptome (i.e., a reduction in the number of circadian transcripts from 6.4% to 1% and changes in the overall time course of expression of 34% of transcripts) [12]. This may elucidate the reasons for the large excess of cardiovascular events associated with shift work found in a meta-analysis of over 2 million subjects in 34 studies [13]. The results demonstrate that any interference in normal sleeping patterns is inimical to cardiovascular health.
The old admonition that ‘What you can’t hear won’t harm you,’ sadly isn’t true. It is now known that organ of Corti in the cochlea (inner ear) contains two types of sensory cells: one row of inner hair cells which are responsible for hearing; and, three rows of outer hair cells which are more responsive to low frequency sound [14]. The infrasound produced by wind turbines is transduced by the outer hair cells and transmitted to the brain by Type II afferent fibres. The purpose is unclear as it results in sleep disturbance. Perhaps it served some vital function in our evolutionary past which has persisted to our detriment today? In fact, many animals use infrasound for communication and navigation. This could well have a genetic basis as it is only a minority, albeit a sizable one, which is affected. This may well be the group which is also liable to travel sickness. Schomer et al have now advanced the theory that as wind turbines increase in size they increasingly emit infrasound with a frequency below 1Hz (CPS) [15]. Below this frequency the otoliths in the inner ear respond in an exaggerated way in a susceptible minority who will suffer symptoms of the Wind Farm Syndrome. Previously it was thought that the brain was only under the control of electrical and biochemical stimuli but there is new evidence that it is sensitive, in addition, to mechanical stimuli [16].
The problem of infrasound and low frequency noise was well-recognised in a report by Casella Stanger [17], commissioned by DEFRA in 2001, and since ignored: “For people inside buildings with windows closed, this effect is exacerbated by the sound insulation properties of the building envelope. Again mid and high frequencies are attenuated to a much greater extent than low frequencies.” It continued: “As the A-weighting network attenuates low frequencies by a large amount, any measurements made of the noise should be with the instrumentation set to linear.” It drew heavily upon the DOE’s Batho Report of 1990 [18]. In fact, these problems had already been elucidated and the measurement issues addressed in a trio of papers by Kelley (et al) in the 1980s [19-21]. This research again has been ignored or forgotten so the problem continues to be seriously underestimated. When measured using a tool which can detect it, levels of infrasound and low frequency noise are disturbingly high, with ‘sound pressure levels’ greater than previously thought possible [22].
There are a number of other adverse effects associated with sleep deprivation. Tired individuals are more likely to have road traffic accidents and injure themselves while operating machinery. In addition, wind turbines can, and do, cause accidents by collapsing, blade snap, ice throw, and even going on fire. They induce stress and psychological disorder from blade flicker, which also has implications for certain types of epilepsy and autism. Even the current planning process, with its virtual absence of consultation, is stress inducing, as is the confrontation between land owners, who wish to profit from erecting turbines, and their neighbours who dread the effects. Finally, wind turbines considerably reduce the value of dwellings nearby and this has a negative long term effect on their owners’ and their families’ health [23]. On top of this, increasing numbers of families will be driven into fuel poverty by spiralling electricity costs which are subsidising wind energy. It is galling that SSE’s current, seductive advertising campaign is being supported from these sources.
‘Wind Turbine Noise’ was reviewed in an editorial in the British Medical Journal in 2012 [24]. The authors concluded that “A large body of evidence now exists to suggest that wind turbines disturb sleep and impair health at distances and noise levels that are permitted in most jurisdictions.” This remains the case today. The Public Health Agency has dismissed this editorial as falling short of a ‘systematic review,’ which is fair enough, given the constraints of the format, yet ignores at least one, excellent, recent systematic review [23]. Interestingly, that review records the fact that in 1978 the British Government was found guilty in a case taken to Europe by the Irish Government of applying five techniques, including subjection to noise and deprivation of sleep. These were used in Ulster to ‘encourage’ admissions and to elicit information from prisoners and detainees. They amounted to humiliating and degrading treatment, ie torture [23].
The Public Health Agencies in the UK are now relying on a document published in April 2013 [25]. It was written by a group of acousticians at the University of Salford, which begs the question as to why such a group was selected to give advice on health issues. Since acousticians derive a significant proportion of their income from the wind industry, their scientific objectivity might be open to question. Similarly, if a profession, which worked closely with the tobacco industry, was asked to report on health, questions would be asked.
The wind industry has at times acted in a way that is reminiscent of the tobacco industry in the past. Recently a Vestas Powerpoint presentation from 2004 has surfaced [26] demonstrating that Vestas knew a decade ago that safer buffers were required to protect neighbours from wind turbine noise. They knew their pre-construction noise models were inaccurate and that “we know that noise from wind turbines sometimes annoys people even if the noise is below noise limits.” Some of this is due to the methods they use to measure noise. Presenting mean amplitude data means that 50% of the peak noise is disguised. In 2011 the CEO of Vestas wrote [27] to the Danish Minister of Environment admitting that it was not technically possible to produce wind turbines which produced less noise. Similarly, we are repeatedly told that modern turbines are quieter and produce less ILFN which in reality is the reverse of the case [28].
The Salford Report concludes that there is “some evidence for sleep disturbance which has found fairly wide, though not universal, acceptance.” The increasing weight of evidence of sleep deprivation’s association with several chronic diseases is totally ignored. The authors of the report are at pains to deny any ‘direct’ health effects. In terms of prevention any differentiation between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ is irrelevant: the introduction of iodine supplementation in milking cattle to improve their “reproductive performance” during the 1960s indirectly led to a reduction in endemic goitre in humans. This was thanks to the unforeseen spillover of iodine into milk and dairy products [29].
In 2008 the distinguished American acoustic engineers, George Kamperman, and Richard James posed the question [30], “What are the technical options for reducing wind turbine noise emission at residences?” They observed that there were only two options: i) Increase the distance between source and receiver; or, ii) Reduce the source sound power emission. It is generally accepted that as larger and larger wind turbines are built, the noise problems are aggravated [29]. They added [30] that neither solution is compatible with the objective of the wind farm developer to maximise the wind power electrical generation within the land available.
Although the associations between noise pollution and ill health can be argued against, and there are gaps in our knowledge, there is sufficient evidence to cause grave misgivings about its safety. Further research, supported by adequate funding, remains necessary. Good and caring Government should entailcting with greater caution when its policies could jeopardise the health and human rights of its people. It is essential that the Primum non nocere, or ‘Precautionary’, principle should be applied.
In conclusion, there are serious adverse health effects associated with noise pollution generated by wind turbines. It is essential that separation distances between human habitation and wind turbines are increased. There is an international consensus emerging for a separation distance of 2 km, indeed some countries are opting for 3 km. The current guideline on separation distance is based on ETSU-R-97 and is manifestly out of date. It is only relevant to the small turbines of that era. The vastly increased scale of today’s turbines means that the current recommendation on turbine separation is grossly inadequate.
Principa Scientific International
References
[1] World Health Organisation. Night noise guidelines for Europe. Copenhagen. 2009.
[2] Nissenbaum MA, Aramini JJ, Hanning CD. Effects of industrial wind turbine noise on sleep and health. Noise & Health 2012;14: 237-43.
[3] Basner M, Babisch W, Davis A et al. Auditory and non-auditory effects of noise and health. Lancet 2013, dx.doi.org/10.1016
[4] Hume KI, Brink M, Basner M. Effects of environmental noise on sleep. Noise & Health 2013:IP 193.171.77.1
[5] Carter PJ, Taylor BJ, Williams SM, Taylor RW. Longitudinal analysis of sleep in relation to BMI and body fat in children: the FLAME study. BMJ 2011;342:d2712
[6] Chung SA, Wolf TK, Shapiro CM. Sleep and health consequences of shift work in women. J Women’s Health 2009;18:965-77.
[7] Hoevenaar-Blom MP, Annemieke MW, Spijkerman AMW, Kromhout D, van den Berg JF, Verschuren WMM. Sleep Duration and Sleep Quality in Relation to 12-Year Cardiovascular Disease Incidence: The MORGEN Study. SLEEP 2011;34:1487-92.
[8] Hoevenaar-Blom MP, Annemieke MW, Spijkerman AMW, Kromhout D, Verschuren WMM. Sufficient sleep duration contributes to lower cardiovascular disease risk in addition to four traditional lifestyle factors: the MORGEN study. Eur J Prevent Cardiol 2013; doi: 10.1177/2047487313493057.
[9] Laugsand LE, Strand LB, Platou C, Vatten LJ, Janszky I. Insomnia and the risk of incident heart failure: a population study. Eur Heart J 2013 doi:10.1093/eurheartj/eht019.
[10] Möller-Levet CS, Archer SN, Bucca G, et al. Effects of insufficient sleep on circadian rhythmicity and expression amplitude of the human blood transcriptome. PNAS 2013; doi/10.1073/pnas.1217154110.
[11] Pierpont N. Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment. K Selected Publications, Santa Fe, New Mexico 2009.
[12] Archer NA, Laing EE, Möller-Levet CS et al. Mistimed sleep disrupts circadian regulation of the human transcriptome. PNAS 2014;www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1316335111
[13] Vyas MV, Garg AX, Iansavichus AV et al. Shift work and vascular events: systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ 2012;345:e4800 doi.
[14] Salt AN, Lichtenhan JT. Responses of the inner ear to infrasound. IVth International Meeting on Wind Turbine Noise, Rome, Italy April 2011.
[15] Schomer PD, Edreich J, Boyle J, Pamidighantam P. A proposed theory to explain some adverse physiological effects of the infrasonic emissions at some wind farm sites. 5th International Conference on Wind Turbine Noise Denver 28-30 August 2013
[16] Ananthaswamy A. Like clockwork. New Scientist, 31st August 2013 Pp 32-5.
[17] Casella Stanger. Report on Low Frequency Noise Technical Research Support for DEFRA Noise Programme (on behalf of DEFRA, Department of the Environment, Northern Ireland, Scottish Executive, National Assembly for Wales). 2001.
[18] Noise Review Working Party Report (Batho WJS, Chair). HMSO, London 1990.
[19] Kelley ND, Hemphill RR, Mckenna HE. A methodology for assessment of wind turbine noise generation. Trans ASME 1982;104:112-20.
[20] Kelley ND, McKenna HE, Hemphill RR, Etter CI, Garrelts RI, Linn NC. Acoustic noise associated with the MOD .. 1 wind turbine: its source, impact, and control. Solar Energy Research Institute, A Division of Midwest Research Institute, 1617 Cole Boulevard, Golden, Colorado USA. February 1985
[21] Kelley ND. A proposed metric for assessing the potential of community annoyance from wind turbine low-frequency noise emissions. Presented at the Windpower ’87 Conference and Exposition San Francisco, California, October 5-8, 1987. Solar Energy Research Institute. A Division of Midwest Research Institute 1617 Cole Boulevard Golden, Colorado USA, November 1987
[22] Bray W, James R. Dynamic measurements of wind turbine acoustic signals, employing sound quality engineering methods considering the time and frequency sensitivities of human perception. Proceedings of Noise-Con; 2011, July 25-7;Portland, Oregon.
[23] Frey BJ, Hadden PJ. Wind turbines and proximity to homes: the impact of wind turbine noise on health (a review of the literature & discussion of the issues). January 2012. http://www.windturbinesyndrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Frey_Hadden_WT_noise_health_01Jan2012.pdf
[24] Hanning CD, Evans A. Wind Turbine Noise. BMJ 2012: 344 e 1527
[25] von Hünerbein S, Moorhouse A, Fiumicelli D, Baguley D. Report on health impacts of wind turbines (Prepared for Scottish Government by Acoustics Research Centre, University of Salford), 10th April 2013.
[26] http://aefweb.info/data/AUSWEA-2004conference.pdf
[27] See attachment to covering email message.
[28] Møller H, Pedersen CS. Low-frequency noise from large wind turbines. J Acoust Soc Am 2011;129:3727-44.
[29] Phillips DJW. Iodine, milk, and the elimination of epidemic goitre in Britain: the story of an accidental public health triumph. JECH 1997;51:391-3.
[30] Kamperman GW, James R. The “How To” guide to siting wind turbines to prevent health risks from sound (P 8):http://www.windturbinesyndrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/kamperman-james-8-26-08-report-43-pp.pdf
Sleep deprivation: a special kind of torture
OPP Closing In? We certainly hope so!!!
This is a working list of the folks the anti-rackets unit wants to interview.
None of these people have been named as supsects. So far, only McGuinty’s last chief of staff, David Livingston, has been named as a suspect. For the record, police say he refused a police interview. So did his secretary. Police also say Peter Faist and Laura Miller refused interviews. Their lawyers say that’s not the case at all and they were fully co-operative. Either way, they have not been interviewed.
So yeah, here’s the OPP’s working wishlist of folks they want to interview.
Again, nobody on this working list has been accused of any wrongdoing.
In no particular order:
Dalton McGuinty
Christopher Bentley
Dave Gene
* Dave Nicholl’s lawyer
Alexandra Gair, former assistant to Laura Miller
Craig McLennan
George Smitherman
Several forensic specialists on the government’s cyber security team
* Nicholl gave a police interview.
The working list is growing and subject to change. A senior officer says they’ll go where the evidence leads them.
I believe Nicholl will soon be testifying at the gas-plants hearing. the questions will be different now that we got the search warrant unsealed.
He is not accused of anywrongdoing and is not a suspect in the case against his former colleague David Livingston.
@crimegarden
Using the Climate as a Tool to Scare our Children….
Climate-anxiety: reports of frightened children
Last update: 02 April 2014
I want to provide links to reports, comments, and discussions of children being frightened by what they have been told about climate change or how they have been told it.
The problem of deliberately targeting the very young using scare stories to win their attention and attract them to political causes or even actions was described in the context of many eco-scares by Herbert London in 1984, in his book ‘Why Are They Lying to Our Children’. Climate scares get a mention there, but since then we have seen many quite outrageous efforts by climate activists to, in Lomberg’s words, scare ‘our kids silly‘. He also noted (this is 2009): ‘We see the same pattern in the United Kingdom, where a survey showed that half of young children aged between seven and 11 are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern. This is grotesquely harmful. And let us be honest. This scare was intended. Children believe that global warming will destroy the planet before they grow up because adults are telling them that .’
Alarmists have caused a rash of poorly-thought out policies, backed by our tax dollars!
Bad News for Big Desert Solar: Arid Lands Absorb Huge Amounts of Greenhouse Gases.
Chris Clarke — ReWire — April 7, 2014
The debate over whether utility-scale solar projects are right for desert public lands just got more complicated. A new study shows that undisturbed desert landscapes absorb a fair amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, potentially helping to lessen climate change.
And according to the study, those landscapes may well sequester even more greenhouse gases as the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere increases.
The study, which has run for ten years on research plots in the Mojave Desert in southern Nevada, indicates that arid lands worldwide may sequester as much as eight percent of humankind’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Previous research had indicated that desert landscapes might well be absorbing a significant amount of CO2 from the atmosphere, but the findings were controversial. Work in the Gubantonggut Desert in China and in the Mojave published in 2008 suggested that desert landscapes may well be taking up atmospheric CO2. But critics pointed out that in order for that to be the case, the carbon dioxide would have to be readily detectable in the soil, either as organic matter or as carbonate compounds.
Think of it this way: forests can sequester lots of CO2, but it’s no mystery where it goes: into the wood, bark, and forest floor soil. Deserts generally don’t seem to have huge reservoirs of carbon compounds one can point to as possible destinations for sequestered atmospheric CO2. Continue reading here…..
The Smartest Scientists, and the Unbiased Scientists, are NOT Alarmists!
Climate ‘consensus’: Is carbon dioxide the new cholesterol? (Mulshine)
By
MORE PAUL MULSHINE
- Climate ‘consensus’: Is carbon dioxide the new cholesterol? (Mulshine)
- The internet era: Citizen journalists or just boobs? (Mulshine)
- The feds are bananas when it comes to Hurricane Sandy rebuilding (Mulshine)
- Chris Christie Bridgegate report is dedicated to obscuring the truth (Mulshine)
- Chris Christie changes his story on those ‘dedicated lanes’ (Mulshine)
In that case, the consensus was that the amounts of saturated fats and cholesterol in the diet are related to the levels of cholesterol in the blood and “that reducing the one will lower the other,” the Post wrote.
That seemed to be the case at the time. But there were dissenters who claimed carbohydrates, particularly refined ones, were the more likely triggers for obesity and heart disease. That led the mainstream authorities to hold a “Consensus Conference” in 1984. The result was a national policy emphasizing low-fat diets as a means of combating obesity and heart disease.
Soon the market was inundated with low-fat foods. But they weren’t having the desired effect. By 2002, the cracks in the consensus were so evident that the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy and well-researched article by noted science writer Gary Taubes headlined “What if it’s all been a big fat lie?”
“It used to be that even considering the possibility of the alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was tantamount to quackery by association,” Taubes wrote. “Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along.”
Last month, the prior consensus was turned on its head by a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. A meta-analysis of 76 studies and clinical trials showed no link between fat, even saturated fat, and increased heart-disease risk.
I discussed this yesterday with Meir Stampfer, who is a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. Stampfer said the move to low-fat diets might have actually increased obesity and heart-disease risk. That’s because people tended to substitute refined carbohydrates for fat in their diets, Stampfer said.
“Basically what happens is the refined carbs are very rapidly absorbed,” Stampfer said. “Blood sugar goes up very rapidly and insulin is secreted so it plummets again.”
That rapid fluctuation leads to an increase in triglycerides, which in turn can lead to weight gain and atherosclerosis, he said. So is there a new consensus that “Butter is back” as one op-ed piece in the Times recently stated?
Nope, said Stampfer. He and his Harvard colleagues disagree with those who are promoting saturated fats from dairy and red meat. The Harvard crowd argues that people would be better off consuming more olive oil and seafood.
But that’s a healthy disagreement. As for that prior consensus, the consensus is that it did not hold up.
“This is complicated and the policymakers tried to make it simple,” Stampfer concluded.
“But it’s better to be complicated and right than simplified and wrong.”
It is indeed, and I would encourage my fellow journalists to keep that in mind in light of the highly touted “consensus” on the role of carbon dioxide in promoting global warming.
Climate science is infinitely more complicated than human physiology. Once all of the data are in, we may find that atmospheric carbon dioxide actually has the effect predicted by physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. The 90-year-old Dyson, whom many consider to be the smartest guy on Earth, argues that far from harming the planet, atmospheric C)-2 may have a positive effect by increasing plant growth.
Perhaps you disagree. Fine, but you’re disagreeing with a guy who calculated the number of atoms in the sun when he was 5 years old and who’s been at the institute since Einstein was walking the grounds.
Science requires taking the long view, said Dyson when I called him the other day.
“Science of course is always correcting mistakes,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about.”
It is indeed. What it’s not about is consensus.
That’s for editorial writers.
COMMENTS: If you’re going to comment here, please make particular points about actual scientific studies, as I have above. Do not merely parrot the consensus.
Also, here’s a challenge for the climate alarmists. I see I’m getting quite a few comments from the true believers who refuse to accept that science works by research and constant change, not consensus.
So here’s a challenge: Predict for us what the consensus on CO-2′s role in the climate will be 30 years from now.
Will it be exactly the same?
What will studies show about the role of solar activity? Will the alarmist theory of radiative forcing be borne out?
Here’s an interesting passage from an article in Science Magazine on CO-2 and forcing (free subscription required):
“Multicomponent climate change mitigation strategies are likely to be much more cost effective than carbon dioxide (CO2)–only strategies (1, 2) but require quantification of the relative impact of different emissions that affect climate.”
And then there’s the question of the role of cosmic rays in cloud formation as positied by Henrik Svensmark:
“In the 1990s, Svensmark developed a theory that links cloud formation to sunspots. When the number of sunspots is low, more cosmic rays get through to the atmosphere. And these rays, Svensmark theorizes, are the primary cause of cloud formation. The clouds reflect more sunlight back into space. Earth gets colder.”
Sharpen those pencils, boys and girls!
Climate Alarmism…..the Sales Gimmick for Unreliable renewables!
Game Set Match–Warmers lose
That’s what Mr. Moore says.
I would not disagree.
However, when 20 billion a year (US alone) is at stake for the grantees and agencies, an announcement by a writer from the UK Telegraph is not likely to stop the IPCC and their army of modelers and fakers. The climate change runaway train is still careening down the track trying to change world economics and attitudes.
May I snip a little of Mr. Moore’s review of Rupert Darwell’s new Book. The Age of Global Warming (Quartet)
Moore:
The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).
These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.
Wind Turbines never Were Environmentally friendly…..but now they’re admitting it!
Wind turbines are no longer ‘environmentally friendly’, says Tory chairman
Grant Shapps suggests the Tories will pledge to curb onshore wind power in their manifesto as he says “giant” turbines are no longer “environmentally friendly”
It is no longer “environmentally friendly” to have “giant” turbines in the countryside, a Conservative minister has said, as he indicated that the Tories will pledge to curb onshore wind power in their manifesto.
Grant Shapps, the Conservative Party Chairman, said that the Conservatives want to focus on offshore wind and that they are completely opposed to Liberal Democrat plans to have onshore turbines “all over the place”.
The Daily Telegraph earlier this month disclosed that the Conservatives will use their manifesto to set out plans to “rid” the English countryside of onshore wind farms.
The Tories could pledge to impose a cap on the total number of turbines or reduce subsidies in order to make them financially unviable, it is understood.
Asked whether the Tories will make a manifesto commitment to curb wind farms, Mr Shapps said: “The wind is moving in a clear direction here.”
Mr Shapps said: “The Conservatives feel wind farms have a place – and it is offshore, by and large. Lib Dems love them, everywhere, and in as many locations as possible.
“Presumably all over the South West if they can pull it off. They’ll somehow think it’s environmentally friendly to have the giant pylons all over the place. So that’s an area of real differentiation.”
He added: “I think wind power’s great. But we have the best coastline for wind because of the geography of the country of any country in the world for the prospect of wind.
“And, actually, they work better off in the sea as well because it’s windier, so they don’t have to blight the landscape and upset everybody at the same time. The direction of wind travel is clear, without wanting to pre-empt our manifesto.”
A senior source close to the Prime Minister earlier this month said that Mr Cameron is now “of one mind” with the Government’s most vociferous opponents of “unsightly” onshore wind turbines.
Reality has made the Alarmists look like Fools….again!
The game is up for climate change believers
Charles Moore reviews The Age of Global Warming by Rupert Darwall (Quartet)
9:42PM BST 06 Apr 2014
Most of us pay some attention to the weather forecast. If it says it will rain in your area tomorrow, it probably will. But if it says the same for a month, let alone a year, later, it is much less likely to be right. There are too many imponderables.
The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.
Some of the utterances of the warmists are preposterously specific. In March 2009, the Prince of Wales declared that the world had “only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”. How could he possibly calculate such a thing? Similarly, in his 2006 report on the economic consequences of climate change, Sir Nicholas Stern wrote that, “If we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least five per cent of global GDP each year, now and forever.” To the extent that this sentence means anything, it is clearly wrong (how are we losing five per cent GDP “now”, before most of the bad things have happened? How can he put a percentage on “forever”?). It is charlatanry.
Like most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been inflicted on us over the past 30 years or so in the name of saving the planet.
The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.
These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.
The G7 Summit in Toronto in 1988 endorsed the theory of global warming. In the same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up. The capture of the world’s elites was under way. Its high point was the Kyoto Summit in 1998, which enabled the entire world to yell at the United States for not signing up, while also exempting developing nations, such as China and India, from its rigours.
The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it, a desperate Gordon Brown warned of “50 days to avoid catastrophe”, but the “catastrophe” came all the same. The warmists’ idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have “the green crap”, but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard.
Since then, the international war against carbon totters on, because Western governments see their green policies, like zombie banks, as too big to fail. The EU, including Britain, continues to inflict expensive pain upon itself. Last week, the latest IPCC report made the usual warnings about climate change, but behind its rhetoric was a huge concession. The answer to the problems of climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation, it admitted. So the game is up.
Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the “subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to learning from the past”. If they read this tremendous book they will see those lessons set out with painful clarity.
A Stay of “Devastation”….for Ostrander Point!
Stay granted
Work at Ostrander Point is stopped until an appeal decision is rendered
In a surprising twist of the plot, the Ontario Court of Appeal granted a stay last week, barring a developer from proceeding with construction of an industrial wind turbine project at Ostrander Point in North Marysburgh. The court went further—seemingly pushing open a wide doorway through which the Prince Edward County Field Naturalists will pursue an appeal to a Divisional Court decision in February that restored the Renewable Energy Approval (REA) permit to a unit of Gilead Power Corporation.
It has been a roller coaster ride for the folks who comprise PECFN, and for others who have followed this story closely.
GETTING HERE
Last summer, an Environmental Review Tribunal was persuaded, after 40 days of testimony and more than 180 exhibits, that the threat posed to the Blanding’s turtle, an endangered species, was “serious and irreversible”. The Tribunal revoked the REA permit. The decision sent shock waves across the country. It was the first time an REA permit had been revoked.
The developer and the Ministry of Environment— the issuer of the REA permit—appealed to the Divisional Court. They argued that the Tribunal, itself a creature of the Ministry of Environment, had overreached in reconsidering the issues surrounding the issuance of a permit to “kill, harm and harass”, issued by the Ministry of Natural Resources as part of the REA.
They claimed, too, that the Tribunal it had not provided the developer the opportunity to address its issues through mitigation or alternative measures.
The Divisional court sided with the developer and reinstated the REA permit.
“In my view, the Tribunal ought to have assumed that the MNR would properly and adequately monitor compliance with the ESA permit,”wrote Justice Ian Nordheimer in the decision by the Divisional Court. “The Tribunal ought to have accepted the ESA [endangered species act] permit at face value.
The only legal avenue left for PECFN was an appeal of the Divisional Court decision. But to do this, it must persuade the court that the issues are unique and important enough to hear the appeal.
PECFN believe the issues at stake go to the very heart of environmental protection in Ontario— that if the Tribunal was precluded from adjudicating upon the fate of endangered species and the mitigation measures proposed to reduce harm to the species, then these safeguards are meaningless.
So they pressed on.
But with the developer eager to get to work, PECFN filed for a stay, to stop activity on the site until the appeal is heard, or leave to appeal is refused.
The stay was granted last week.
WHAT WAS WRITTEN
The decision written by Justice Robert Blair in granting the stay that has aroused fresh hope that Ostrander Point might yet be stopped.
First, the Ministry of Environment elected not to oppose the stay. Through every stage of the review and the Divisional Court appeal, the MOE has argued side-by-side with the developer in support of its REA permit.
But at this latest step, the MOE was conspicuously absent.
“They did not attempt to defend the wind company’s ability to go ahead,” said Eric Gillespie, lawyer for PECFN. “Certainly, some people are reading it as the ministry starting to realize that green energy does not trump anything else.”
But that may be a stretch.
Far more interesting were Justice Blair’s comments in granting the stay.
Justice Blair wrote there is a “sufficiently serious” argument that the Divisional Court failed to give deference to the Tribunal—despite particular specialized expertise in the field at question, as contended by PECFN.
He went further.
“…the issues raised on the proposed appeal are issues of broad public implication in the field of environmental law,” he wrote.
He noted as well that “if leave is granted, the appeal to this Court constitutes the first time that either the Divisional Court or this Court will have dealt with an appeal from an REA.”
Gillespie expressed relief that his arguments had found a sympathetic recipient.
“The Divisional Court wrote a 37-page decision that focused only on vehicle traffic. In a single paragraph, the appeal court recognized that the concerns go much farther, and include not just traffic, but poaching, predators and habitat loss. In one paragraph, the court of appeal has shown a better understanding of the case than what our client sees in the Divisional court’s ruling.”
This is important for reasons that go far beyond the stay of activities on the site.
“The court of appeal has found that there are serious issues still to be tried,” said Gillespie. “The court appears to acknowledge that there are legitimate arguments that can be advanced in response to the Divisional court decision.”
Justice Blair’s decision makes it harder for the court of appeal to ignore PECFN’s motion seeking leave to appeal.
IRREPARABLE HARM
But Gillespie sees further good news in Justice Blair’s decision. PECFN had argued that to allow work to begin would cause irreparable harm to the Blanding’s turtle habitat.
In accepting this argument, Justice Blair wrote that in his view “fine distinctions” were inappropriate.
“Once a habitat is destroyed, it is destroyed,” he wrote, “for at least short-term purposes, in any event— and the species sought to be protected here is a vulnerable and endangered species.”
Gillespie sees this as a significant advancement of PECFN’s argument.
“The court of appeal has found irreparable harm— if the project proceeds,” said Gillespie. “Many people are asking how different that is—if at all—form the test of irreversible harm.”
A cheer erupted at the monthly PECFN meeting last Tuesday night on news that a stay had been granted.
“Now, Gilead Power will not be able to destroy any habitat before we can ask for leave to appeal,” said PECFN’s president Myrna Wood. “We are relieved, as early migration has begun and spring melt is starting to create the conditions needed by all the wildlife at Ostrander Point, including Blanding’s turtle.”
Gillespie outlined the path facing PECFN.
“The next step is the leave to appeal motion,” said Gillespie. “Some of these findings may be relevant to that process. The decision on that issue is likely still a number of weeks away, but clearly PECFN believes that there is good reason to move ahead.”
HOW TO HELP
Funding these legal battles remains a challenge. While the gala dinner and art auction is already sold out—there are three other fundraising events planned for the weeks ahead.
PECFN supporters may watch Mamma Mia and The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn on the big screen at the Regent Theatre on April 30 in joint fundraiser with the Picton Rotary Club.
On Saturday May 3, Active Arts Studio in Rednersville is screening the Bruce Cockburn documentary, Pacing the Cage. The evening includes County wine, canapés and sweets—and a performance by the Frere Bothers.
The following Saturday, May 9, Sandbanks Vacations and Terry Sprague are hosting a tour of the County’s exquisite natural areas in a comfortable coach. There are only 12 places available. The cost for this day-long excursion is $100, including a picnic lunch.
The wind industry, and their dirty deeds….they harm with impunity!
By Jim Wiegand
For those that have the mistaken belief that wind is green, clean, or in some way a noble venture, reality couldn’t be any further from the truth. There is nothing commendable about hiding the slaughter to millions of protected bird and bats each year.
Most of public is unaware of this because at industrial wind farms there is no transparency. With gag orders, high security, and studies being conducted by the industry’s own biologists, the public has no way of really knowing anything. Under these conditions information is filtered and the industry can report what they believe the public will accept.
Rigging Search Area Size
For decades I have been doing research and making astute wildlife observations. I have the expertise to see what others can not and when analyzing this industry’s studies, I see one sided environmental documents.
From my research and analysis I now have several thousand carcass distance records from turbine blade strikes. These records are from the years 1990 -2010 and none were taken from industry studies conducted with grossly undersized search areas. Search areas for these studies ranged from 50-105 meters from towers. The wind turbines I looked at ranged in size from 65 kW up to 1.5 MW.
These carcass distance records are from the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area, Montezuma Hills Wind Resource Area, Buena Vista wind project, Foote Rim Creek Rim Wind Project, Cedar Ridge Wind Farm, Forward Energy Center, and the Blue Sky Green Field wind project. From these carcass records it can be seen that most carcasses upon impact are launched beyond a turbines blade tip length away from towers. In fact this number is about 60% -70% depending on the study being looked at. This still does not take into consideration that search areas for most of these studies were too small for the size of turbine being studied. Several of the studies even mention this.
The average carcass distance from turbine towers recorded in these studies ranges from about 1 1/2 – 3 times the blade length of these turbines. Many of these turbines were only about 100 feet tall when including blades of about 8.5 meters in length. Hundreds of the other turbines I analyzed were about 300-400 feet at the tip of the rotor sweep.
But the industry has evolved and newer studies do not use larger search areas for their much larger turbines.
For the sake of comparison I will comment on some of the recent mortality studies that have been conducted by Stantec. The Stantec studies are important because in my opinion they represent the worst of the worst that this industry has to offer. In the last few years the average carcass distance reported by Stantec in their mortality studies at Wolfe Island, Kibby Mountain, Laurel Mountain, and Georgia Mountain in the Northeast, is about the same distance that was reported from the smallest 65-100 kw turbines at Altamont. But there are huge differences between the turbines studied by Stantec and these smallest turbines. The turbines they write reports for are 40-50 times larger. They reach 250-350 feet higher into the sky, they have blades that reach out 50 meters or more in all directions, and their deadly blade tip speeds are much faster.
All of these factors are important in mortality studies because they contribute to greater blade impact force, more carcass drift from the higher altitudes, and impact points much further out from turbine towers. In one case the blade tip impact points were as much as 47 meters further away (56 total) from turbine towers. Add into the equation that some of these the turbines are located on ridge lines and the carcasses thrown towards the downward slopes will to drift even further.
Yet every one of these Stantec’s mortality studies defies the Laws of Motion and Gravity because the industry’s own data proves that any carcass hit by a turbine blade has a much better than 50/50 odds or 1 out of 2 chance of this carcass landing at a distance beyond a turbines blade length.
For the hundreds of carcasses reported in the Stantec studies, only a handful have been reported past the turbine blade length and the average carcass distance disclosed is about half the distance of the turbine blade length. The odds of this reported carcass distribution to have actually occurred around these huge turbines is so high that it can not be calculated. In other words the numbers are impossible.
In years to come college math and physics classes will have fun analyzing all this. They can apply different wind speeds, acceleration, and points of impact to the wind turbine carcasses distance equation. The combinations are endless but one thing is certain they will understand that most of the carcasses being smacked with 200 mph blade tip speed will fly beyond a turbine’s blade length.
Below is an image of data taken from a 3 year study showing the carcasses distribution for 505 carcasses found in the Montezuma Wind Resource Area. The turbines are 1.5 MW and the search methodology used search areas of 105 meters from towers. The carcasses distance data was reliable for the point I am making but the study still had severe flaws that underreported mortality estimates. When looking at this data readers will see that I have added some notes.
Rigging the Data
The industry is using many tricks and manipulations to make carcasses disappear from around their turbines. None of this is scientific and I see differences in nearly every study I look at. The changes in their studies are predicated on how much mortality needs to be hidden. The most recent wind industry studies are the most appalling and this is because with the industry’s huge turbines they need far more carcasses to vanish.
From the previous information I have provided it should be quite obvious that the industry studies are unreliable because search areas are far too small. But there is much more. So much more that I can not put everything in this article or even ten articles. I have chosen to expose some of the manipulation of search plots and touch on the manipulation of carcass data.
In the image below it is fairly self-explanatory and easy to understand. The industry instead of using round search areas and thoroughly searching them has come up with a devious method to hide carcass data, the square search plot. It can be any size they choose but generally an area 120 – 160 meters on all sides. It may not even be square and the turbine may or may not be centered in the plot. The square search plot is used to give the illusion of a much bigger search area while avoiding the majority of carcasses expected to land within the designated searchable area around the turbine.
Not only are these square plots far too small, the data collected from these plots is easily manipulated. These plots may be fully searched but in most cases they are not and “proportions of area searched” are developed for the wind industry’s contrived mortality formulas. I have seen proportion of area searched for the furthest point declared at 100 percent as in the Maple Ridge Wind Farm study. But what the report is not putting in the formulas is that they only searched 100 percent of the area out to the furthest corner of the plot, the carcasses, the data, and the mortality from the full the declared annulus was avoided.
In the calculation of the proportion area searched, carcasses found at the furthest points can boost the numbers dramatically. In the image below I show how these carcasses when found and properly calculated can really boost the reported mortality with very small overall search areas.
This information was taken from a mortality study conducted in Wisconsin at the Cedar Ridge wind farm. I took the actual area searched and made corrections for the reported carcasses in relation to the proportion of the area actually searched.
From looking at just the search area data, 18 turbines are killing approximately 1100 birds per year and this does not take into consideration that the search areas should have been 150-175 meters from towers. It also does not taken into consideration searcher efficiency and other factors that boost the mortality numbers. This project has 41 turbines and the actual yearly fatality to birds and bats is many thousands.
For these 18 turbines in 2010 they reported an estimate of 216 bird fatalities.
This study did show that the majority of carcasses land past the turbine blades but how the data collected was processed, hid thousands of birds and bats being killed at this site. They not only used the square search plot ploy but they barely even looked around these turbines. They also discarded important carcasses by labelling them as “incidental”.
In any wind industry study if carcasses are labeled “incidental” it is a major red flag that the study is critically flawed. The word “incidental” is trump card exclusion for wind industry studies. All the carcasses shown in the square plot image are considered incidentals by the industry even though they are finding them dead or crippled on a regular basis.
Honest studies would suggest moving the search areas out to locate and include them in the data.
A high percentage of the raptors found during wind industry studies are dismissed as being incidental. Even the study that produced the data in the first image dismissed golden eagles found as far away as 200 meters because they were found beyond the 105 meter search areas.
Since 2004 Altamont Pass has been excluding dozens of golden eagles from their mortality estimates killed by turbines because they have been placed in the incidental category. How do these most of these dead eagles get placed in the incidental category? Wind personnel go around and pick them up along with other dead raptors ahead of the people doing “standardized surveys”.
An honest survey would never allow any wind personnel to touch a carcass but this takes place at every wind farm.
What I have pointed out is just a taste of what it is like to read through a wind industry study. It is a dreadful journey, but it must be done to save species from what is coming from this industry. The tricks may change from study to study but the end product is still the same, most of the wind turbine mortality is being hidden. For the wind industry there is no standardized research methodology and they make it up as they go along. The only thing I see in wind industry studies that is truly standardized is a very clear pattern of these studies being rigged to hide mortality.
All of this is allowed to take place because the industry has been handed voluntary regulations from the upper levels of our government agencies. It is time for everyone to take note and to start asking the hard questions because these turbines are contributing to species extinction faster than any other source of energy.
Jim Wiegand is an independent wildlife expert with decades of field observations and analytical work. He is vice president of the US region of Save the Eagles International, an organization devoted to researching, protecting and preserving avian species threatened by human encroachment and development.
(Image at top of Page: Golden eagle =Беркут (Aquila chrysaetos) Source=http://www.flickr.com/photos/chuckthephotographer/2391751046/; Author=Chuck Abbe, cc-by-2.0, Courtesy Wikipedia)
We desperately need health studies, that are done PROPERLY!
Max Rheese: the time for Health Research on fan impacts is NOW
Max Reese: the time for research is now.
Australia: National Health & Medical Research Council says more studies on wind turbine noise is needed
Max Rheese
2 April 2014
The National Health & Medical Research Council has finally published its long awaited Draft Information Paper: Evidence on Wind Farms and Human Health on which the CEO, Professor Warwick Anderson is seeking public comment.
This paper follows years of campaigning for medical and acoustical studies by individuals and groups concerned about health impacts from wind turbine operation. Large multi-national and Australian energy companies, along with global turbine manufacturer Vestas have consistently rubbished claims of adverse health impacts.
Following the release of the Information Paper media reporting almost exclusively concentrated on a statement contained within the paper “There is no reliable or consistent evidence that wind farms directly cause adverse health effects in humans”, failing to report comments such as “The body of evidence relating to wind farms and health is small and poor quality”.
Or that, “Further high quality research is needed – particularly exploring relationships between noise at varying distances from wind farms and annoyance, sleep and quality of life – to address concerns that some people have about the possible effects of wind farms on human health.”
This last statement reflects the concerns the Australian Environment Foundation has had for some time that current research into health impacts is “insufficient and sub-standard.”
This second review has been eagerly awaited by both the wind industry and communities impacted by wind farms since the 2010 Rapid Review of existing literature by the NHMRC made a similar statement seized upon by the wind industry claiming there was no evidence of a direct link between wind turbine noise and adverse health impacts. Like the current review, this finding is entirely unremarkable as there have still been no independent, properly designed medical studies into health impacts, a fact clearly articulated in the current review.
Following the 2010 Rapid Review the NHMRC CEO appeared before a senate committee where he stated under questioning that the NHMRC was not prepared to say there are no health problems caused by wind turbine operations.
Now there is nothing surprising in the wind industry highlighting the fact there has been no direct, conclusive or reliable evidence linking wind turbines with health impacts, but it is disingenuous to claim absolutely there are no health effects when there have been no studies acceptable to the NHMRC to prove or disprove the claim!
The previous NHMRC 2010 Rapid Review, this new paper and the 2011 Senate Inquiry into the Impact of Wind Farms recommendations have been unequivocal in calling for more research into wind farm noise, which no doubt influenced the decision of the Abbott government to recently announce such a study.
Rather incredibly the Information Paper just released found that:
No studies were identified that explicitly considered possible effects on human health of infrasound and low-frequency noise or electromagnetic radiation produced by wind turbines.
A direct connection between wind turbine noise and adverse health impacts is unlikely to be found if it is not explicitly considered.
Adding further to the sub-standard nature of many of the studies reviewed by the NHMRC it was found that “Wind turbine noise was not directly measured at participant’s homes in any of the studies.” Could this possibly mean that the primary location where most of those affected by wind turbine noise and where they suffer the worst effects was not subjected to any on-site noise measurement? You bet.
Nobody disputes wind turbines emit noise. What is in dispute is the nature, the level and the effect of the noise, particularly inside the homes of neighbouring residences. These effects are poorly understood by the wind industry, most of the medical fraternity and legislators because of the above acknowledgements that existing studies did not explicitly consider health effects and did not measure the noise inside the homes of those affected. However, this has never constrained wind supporters from denying any adverse health impacts from turbine noise.
A team from the University of Adelaide was commissioned by the NHMRC to undertake a ‘Systematic review of the human health effects of wind farms’ on which the Information Paper was based and this was completed in 2013.
The review found no evidence to support the fanciful claims of a nocebo effect promulgated enthusiastically by some on the fringes of the medical fraternity. Those pushing the nocebo effect claim there are no actual adverse effects (although they have not undertaken medical research to verify this), but that the impacts are imagined. The so-called nocebo effect in relation to adverse health impacts from wind turbine noise is the manifestation of a self-fulfilling prophecy that is supposed to appear in some residents who have been subject to the negative warnings about the ill-effects of wind turbine noise.
The review paper however found “In the limited literature linking adverse health outcomes to wind farms, there was no evidence identified that considered health effects or related non-health effects (e.g. annoyance) could be due to expectation effects, or nocebo effects.”
The paper goes on to say that further and better research on the relationship between noise from wind turbines and health, sleep and quality of life is warranted, confirming earlier independent inquiries into wind turbine noise and public health.
Moreover, new research will be able to target wind farms that are utilising the massive 3MW turbines which became operational after the NHMRC cut-off date of late 2012 for studies reviewed for the current Information Paper. A fact overlooked by many armchair supporters of the wind industry is that larger modern turbines have the capacity to produce even lower frequency noise and broadcast it over a much larger area potentially affecting many more residents. Use of these larger turbines corresponds quite remarkably with increasing community complaints about wind turbine operations.
The paper also notes the insufficient research to date and the action now undertaken in some other jurisdictions:
The limited availability of robust, peer-reviewed scientific studies on the health effects of wind turbines/farms has stimulated some government health authorities, such as Health Canada, to begin conducting independent research. Health Canada argues that lack of prevalence data on community complaints and self-reported health impacts from studies with strong methodological designs are significant barriers to providing advice on noise impacts from wind turbines.
This contrasts mightily with what the wind industry and its supporters have been saying for years – that there is no adverse health impact from wind turbine operation. They do not know. They have not done the medical research. Of this we can be sure, because if the global wind industry had commissioned medical research anywhere that demonstrated no ill effects from wind farms they would be proclaiming that endlessly.
Littered all the way through the material released by the NHMRC is the acknowledgement that the research is “limited, small and of poor quality, insufficient, not reliable”; however the wind industry and its supporters, such as Friends of the Earth, attest with certitude that the study had shown once again wind farms are “clean and safe”.
In a media release following the NHMRC Information Paper Clean Energy Council Policy Director Russell Marsh said it was yet another tick of approval for the wind industry from the country’s best health experts. Huh?
These and similar fallacious statements repeated by the small army of spin doctors employed by the wind industry are completely at odds with the uncertainty expressed by the NHMRC, the senate inquiry and Health Canada who have all recommended detailed medical research, which is all that residents of rural communities involuntarily affected by wind farm noise have ever asked for.
Max Rheese is the Executive Director of the Australian Environment Foundation.
STT agrees – unless and until the work is done – thoroughly and properly funded – the wind industry and the clowns that pass for academics in this country will continue to lie and dissemble around the wishy-washy statements made by peak bodies like the NHMRC.
The Coalition have promised to do precisely that with their planned health inquiry into wind farms (see our post here). STT hears that the inquiry will have nothing to do with the NHMRC but, instead, will involve leading academic institutions around Australia and internationally.
The study will be multidisciplinary focusing on turbine noise and the impacts on sleep and health. And, no doubt, to the horror of the wind industry and its parasites, will start by gathering a welter of data in the field from affected neighbours. The very places where the industry’s so-called “health experts” fear to tread.
The complete enquiry – given its scope – is expected to take time – in the order of 3-4 years – but, once the data is gathered, initial observations and preliminary results are expected to be published within months.
As Max points out affected communities have been crying out for this work to be done for years – there is no reason to delay.
While – as repeatedly pointed out by STT – it’s the perverse economics of wind power that will kill the industry – its demise is of little consolation to the unnecessary victims at places like Cullerin, NSW; Waubra, Cape Bridgewater, Toora and Macarthur, VIC and Waterloo, SA. With the RET review headed up by Dick “RET Slayer” Warburton the industry is on life support now.
Built entirely around the mandatory RET and the REC Tax on all Australian power consumers that will add more than $60 billion to power bills over the life of RET – and driving the recent escalation in power prices – the true and hidden costs of wind power are finally being scrutinised in the mainstream press – particularly by economic writers and editors in The Australian.
That scrutiny will continue and – eventually – these journalists will gain a deep and thorough understanding of the scale of the fraud – both economic and environmental – as they come to understand that wind power can only ever be delivered at crazy, random intervals – it disappears entirely from the grid hundreds of times each year – accordingly requiring 100% of its capacity to be backed up 100% of the time from conventional generation sources – the insane costs of running fast start-up peaking power plants, mostly Open Cycle Gas Turbines which belt out of 3-4 times the CO2 per unit generated compared to coal/gas thermal and cost around $300 per MW/h to run (compared to $25 per MW/h for coal/thermal) to cover missing wind-watts and – in the end result – failing in it’s only purported justification because it cannot and will never reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector (see our posts hereand here).
Public perceptions of wind power have shifted monumentally and adversely in the last 12 months – and with it the political tide. The Head Boy has made it plain that he understands the costs of the RET and the impact it’s having on power prices and therefore employment and living standards (see our post here). The majority within the Coalition are hostile to corporate welfare of any kind and – as Angus “the Enforcer” Taylor puts it – the RET/REC scheme is simply “corporate welfare on steroids”.
However, there is every reason to press for and ensure that the Coalition’s health inquiry starts now, is properly funded and is both exhaustive and thorough.
It will, of course, take time and – in a political environment – time is always a factor.
Fortunately for long-suffering communities the planets aligned last September with the election of a Coalition government that is – at the very least – prepared to listen. Witness the efforts (celebrated on these pages) of people like Chris Back, Dan Tehan, Craig Kelly and Angus Taylor – to name a few.
But don’t expect the same type of sympathies to continue should Australia ever be unfortunate enough to end up with another Green/Labor Alliance in the future. With the Coalition making all the right noises the time to get on the front foot and have this work done is absolutely now. Affected communities will never get a better opportunity.
With a solid data set and reproducible scientific conclusions the opportunity presents itself to confirm – without further debate – the relationship between turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound and the sleep disturbance/deprivation and other known and obvious health impacts being suffered by neighbours. With firm scientific conclusions to back the growing body of evidence of those impacts on communities in Australia and internationally those communities will be in a position to fight back.
Scientific proof opens the way to a flood of private litigation – affected neighbours suing developers and turbine hosts in nuisance and negligence for unreasonable interference with the use and enjoyment of their properties and the personal injury, pain and suffering these people have had to endure for far too long.
Properly gathered field data will demonstrate – without a shadow of a doubt – that the noise guidelines drawn up by the wind industry and in use in Australia and internationally are utterly irrelevant when it comes to avoiding noise impacts, such as sleep deprivation (see our post here).
Solid data providing confirmation of the noise impacts also provides a basis for proper regulation and control of operating wind farms. Real-time noise monitoring with an ability to enforce properly set noise limits – targeting low-frequency noise and infrasound, rather than the irrelevant dB(A) measure used as the basis for all noise guidelines – by shutting down turbines at night time – presents as the obvious way to avoid or minimise the harm caused to neighbours. At the Federal level the obvious penalty for non-compliance with properly set noise standards is to remove the operator’s entitlement to receive Renewable Energy Certificates – something put on the table by SA’s favourite Greek, Senator Nick Xenophon and backed by Victorian Senator John “Marshall” Madigan (see our post here).
Faced with a mountain of data and irrefutable scientific conclusions, politicians of all hues would find it difficult to resist a call for better noise guidelines and proper regulation of operating wind farms.
The parallels with the tobacco and asbestos industries are obvious. Once the scientific proof was eventually marshalled, litigation, government regulation and control came as night follows day. Both industries fought like fury to avoid proper scientific scrutiny simply because their economic survival depended on ensuring they were able to continuing lying to the public and governments about the known and obvious impacts of their products. The wind industry is no different.
For those members of the Coalition pushing hard on the health inquiry and the proper regulation of wind farms in operation – scientific confirmation of the impacts can only help serve them in their ultimate efforts to protect hard-working rural people unluckily situated too close to turbines.
For the wind industry – which has been fighting like fury to prevent any of this from ever happening – all of these factors add up to an enormous set of RISKS.
Being forced to shut down turbines at night will have an obvious and immediate impact on their revenue stream and economic viability – being deprived of RECs for non-compliance, likewise. The potential for endless private litigation and/or further regulation and control also necessarily generates ongoing risk to the profitability of existing operations.
So, far from being a simple issue about the health impacts on neighbours, the Coalition’s health inquiry has the potential to do real and lasting economic damage to existing operations and to further spook potential investors in future.
Banks stopped putting money into wind farm projects years ago as retailers stopped signing Power Purchase Agreements. The threat posed by the RET review has seen investors run a mile from new projects. Only a handful of fans are being erected in Australia at the minute – and all involve developers which had signed PPAs years ago.
For potential investors the risk associated with the Coalition’s health inquiry – and consequences of the kind outlined above – can only add to present fears about losing their shirts as a result of the RET review.
So – no time like the present – put pen to paper and let members of the Coalition know just how critical it is that the promised health inquiry is comprehensive, exhaustive and must start NOW.
No time like the present.
There needs to be a HUGE investigation….people ARE suffering!
BRITISH MEDICAL PRACTITIONER IN THE ENERGY FIELD FOR OVER 32 YEARS SAYS TURBINES DO AFFECT HEALTH
Letter to the Editor – Blackmore Vale Magazine — April 6, 2014
I strongly contest Dr Erik Blakeley‘s comments in your recent article calling wind turbine noise as a placebo effect. As a medical practitioner in the energy field of over 32 years I disagree.
I have amassed over the last few years negative health evidence from across the globe wherever wind turbines are erected, many locals even supported their erection initially only to find their health began to deteriorate afterwards.
Apart from Canadian, American, Danish and Australian information I have articles from specialists in “sleep disorder“ from the BMJ (British Medical Association) referring to ‘wind turbine syndrome‘ . It is the ULF (Ultra Low Frequency)or ELF vibrations that cause the most harm and cannot be heard. Can Dr Blakeley deny the MoD developed and used these frequencies for “acoustic warfare“ and in Russia ULF was developed by Vladimir–Gavreau for use in the Cold War of the 1950s onward only to be banned because it was so devastating on the human organism!
We must remember each person is an individual, some more sensitive than others and this has to be respected. The global evidence that amasses are that the main symptoms are insomnia, elevated blood pressure, depression, irritability and even suicide, never mind the effects on epileptics and hyperactive children. As our whole world is comprised of energy, we live in a time of Einstein and Quantam Physics not Newton, so as to accuse locals as “fools to their symptoms“ is not only utterly insulting to their intelligence but also ignores their individual health susceptibility.
Mrs S.Gonzalez BA.,MCH.,R.S.Hom,Milborne St Andrew
World-wide – Corruption goes hand-in-hand with the Wind Industry!
Six bullets: Wind developer “goons” shoot, and kill, locals who oppose them (Mexico)
Apr 6, 2014
Editor’s note: Mexico. State of Oaxaca. The Zapotec have occupied their land since time out of memory — even before Cortes came ashore carrying the Spanish flag, a bible, and smallpox.
Now they’re back, this time with wind turbines — and firearms. The new invader being the Spanish wind energy giant, Fenosa.
Before reading further, familiarize yourself with Fenosa’s official position on “health & safety,” taken from its website.
Committed to “ensuring the health and safety of . . . society as a whole,” Fenosa’s Corporate Responsibility Policy has “improved acceptance of operations by the local community.”
Really?
Not in Oaxaca. It seems that Fenosa, in collusion with corrupt (bought-off?) government officials, has co-opted communally-owned land, precious to the indigenes for its farming and other sacred qualities. Now usurped for wind turbines. Lots of them. Wind turbines built several hundred meters from Zapotec homes.
When locals formed a protest group — as tens of thousands of people around the world have done — and began blockading roads and holding demonstrations, Fenosa responded — by shooting them.
So says the protest group, the Popular Assembly of the Juchiteco People (APPJ). (Forget about the sham public meetings, forget about the phony environmental impact reports and bogus health studies. Just shoot ‘em! Shoot ‘em to save the earth from global warming, by God!)
Héctor Regalado Jiménez, opponent to the wind-energy projects and sympathizer of the Popular Assembly of the Juchiteco People (APPJ), died on 1 August [2013] in the city of Juchitán de Zaragoza as a consequence of the injuries he sustained due to the six gunshot wounds he received on 21 July [2013].
According to a denunciation from the APPJ, Héctor Regalado and other members of the organization were fired upon by hitmen working for the multinational energy firm Fenosa Natural Gas, being accompanied also by units of the Auxiliary, Banking, Industrial, and Commercial Police (PABIC), a police institution that has been contracted by the firm to safeguard the construction work of the wind-energy park Bii Hioxho. (Click here for source.)
Wind energy! “Clean, green, renewable”! Oppose it and you’re dead! Oaxaca’s new slogan. Destroy prime agricultural land, destroy mangroves, steal communal land from the indigenes, block their access to sacred sites — and hire assassins and corrupt state police to scare ‘em with death threats.
When that doesn’t win them over: Shoot them! (Pump him with 6 bullets, to make certain you kill the bastard, not just wound him.)
Weeks before the attack, persons identified as hired gunmen threatened Héctor Regalado with death and warned him that they would fire on the APPJ [wind energy protest group] camp on the Playa Vicente access road, which is the location of the site where the multinational [Fenosa] is building the Bii Hioxho wind-energy park. Furthermore, days after being threatened with death, Héctor Regalado warned that representatives of the multinational had attempted to co-opt him by offering him work, in exchange for his abandoning the APPJ campaign.
On 24 February 2013, indigenous residents and Binniza fisherfolk founded the APPJ in the fishing village near Juchitán de Zaragoza. This organization asserts as its principal objective the struggle against the construction of megaprojects [industrial wind plants] on their lands and territories. As a first action, APPJ members blockaded an access road in Playa Vicente so as to impede the movement of workers and vehicles owned by Fenosa.
The residents denounce that the rented lands are of communal use, and that the contract signed between them was illegal. Since its founding, the APPJ has denounced the constant death-threats and attacks suffered by its members at the hands of the state police and private hitmen hired by the firm.The APPJ “holds the state government of Oaxaca and the State Attorney General’s Office responsible for the wave of death-threats and aggressions that we as members and sympathizers of the [APPJ] constantly suffer.” (Clickhere for source.)
Read more, below, taken from here.
Some 1,200 agents from the police forces of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca tried unsuccessfully on March 26 [2014] to remove local residents who were blocking a road leading to the Bii Yoxho wind farm, which is under construction in Juchitán de Zaragoza municipality near the Pacific coast. The operation was also intended to recover construction equipment protesters had seized on Feb. 25 in an ongoing effort to stop the completion of the wind project, which is owned by the Mexican subsidiary of the Spanish company Gas Natural Fenosa.
Local prosecutor Manuel de Jesús López told the French wire service AFP that 22 people were injured in the March 26 operation, including 11 police agents, and one police agent was taken prisoner. Protesters reported eight local people with serious injuries, including Carlos Sánchez, the coordinator of Radio Totopo, a community radio station.
Several companies have been building wind farms in southeastern Oaxaca on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Residents in the Juchitán area, mostly from the Zapotec and Ikoots (Huave) indigenous groups, say the Bii Yoxho project is being built in an area they use for fishing and farming that also includes ceremonial sites, along with mangrove forests that are critical to the local environment. The barricade blocking access to the Bii Yoxho project on the Juchitán-Playa Vicente road is one of four main points of resistance to the wind turbines.
Activists have also occupied the town hall in San Dionisio del Mar since January 2012; have refused to recognize the mayor in San Mateo del Mar, Francisco Valle, because he favors the projects; and have set up a barricade in Juchitán’s Alvaro Obregón neighborhood to block access to another wind park, owned by the Mareña Renovables company.
The resistance has been subjected to police harassment, such as the 24-hour detention by federal police of Lucila Bettina Cruz Velázquez, a leader in the Assembly of the Indigenous Peoples of the Tehuantepec Isthmus in Defense of Land and Territory, in February 2012. Protesters also report the presence of armed paramilitary groups, some with connections to unions and other groups affiliated with the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or close to the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
On March 21 a group of men linked to Juchitán’s PRI mayor, Francisco Valle Piamonte, briefly detained reporter Rosa Rojas and photographer Francisco Olvera, both from the left-leaning national daily La Jornada, along with three reporters from alternative media and a San Mateo resident. On the morning of March 29 a paramilitary group dismantled Radio Totopa, seizing a laptop and the transmitter and cutting the power cables, according to the Popular Assembly of the Juchiteco People (APPJ). APPJ spokespeople called this “another attack by the state government and the transnational companies which are trying to use violence to silence the voices of those who oppose the construction of wind parks.”
After negotiations with representatives of the Oaxaca state government on March 28, the APPJ returned 12 vehicles, including a backhoe, to Gas Natural Fenosa; in exchange the state agreed not to press charges against the protesters. However, the APPJ rejected the state’s proposal for them to lift the road blockades on April 1 and attend an April 2 meeting in the city of Oaxaca. The protesters said they would maintain their barricades, and they called on Oaxaca governor Gabino Cué Monteagudo to come meet with them in Juchitán.
(You can read more here and here and here and here.)
And you folks in Wisconsin, Ontario, and Australia thought you had it tough with the wind thugs!
Climate Alarmists have their Own Agenda!
How did the IPCC’s alarmism take everyone in for so long?
Climate scaremongers are still twisting the evidence over global warming
When future generations come to look back on the alarm over global warming that seized the world towards the end of the 20th century, much will puzzle them as to how such a scare could have arisen. They will wonder why there was such a panic over a 0.4 per cent rise in global temperatures between 1975 and 1998, when similar rises between 1860 and 1880 and 1910 and 1940 had given no cause for concern. They will see these modest rises as just part of a general warming that began at the start of the 19th century, as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age, when the Earth had grown cooler for 400 years.
They will be struck by the extent to which this scare relied on the projections of computer models, which then proved to be hopelessly wrong when, in the years after 1998, their predicted rise in temperature came virtually to a halt. But in particular they will be amazed by the almost religious reverence accorded to that strange body, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which by then will be recognised as having never really been a scientific body at all, but a political pressure group. It had been set up in the 1980s by a small band of politically persuasive scientists who had become fanatically committed to the belief that, because carbon dioxide levels were rising, global temperatures must inevitably follow; an assumption that the evidence would increasingly show was mistaken.
Five times between 1990 and 2014 the IPCC published three massive volumes of technical reports – another emerged last week – and each time we saw the same pattern. Each was supposedly based on thousands of scientific studies, many funded to find evidence to support the received view that man-made climate change was threatening the world with disaster – hurricanes, floods, droughts, melting ice, rising sea levels and the rest. But each time what caught the headlines was a brief “Summary for Policymakers”, carefully crafted by governments and a few committed scientists to hype up the scare by going much further than was justified by the thousands of pages in the technical reports themselves.
Each time it would emerge just how shamelessly these Summaries had distorted the actual evidence, picking out the scary bits, which themselves often turned out not to have been based on proper science at all. The most glaring example was the IPCC’s 2007 report, which hit the headlines with those wildly alarmist predictions that the Himalayan glaciers might all be gone by 2035; that global warming could halve African crop yields by 2050; that droughts would destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest. Not until 2010 did some of us manage to show that each of these predictions, and many more, came not from genuine scientific studies but from scaremongering propaganda produced by green activists and lobby groups (shown by one exhaustive analysis to make up nearly a third of all the IPCC’s sources).
Most of the particularly alarmist predictions came from a report by the IPCC’s Working Group II. This was concerned with assessing the impact on the world of those changes to the climate predicted by the equally flawed computer models relied on by Working Group I, which was charged with assessing the science of climate change. The technical report published last week was its sequel, also from Working Group II, and we can at once see, from its much more cautious treatment of the subjects that caused such trouble last time, that they knew they couldn’t afford any repeat of that disaster.
We’re with you Paul! Visualizing success is easy to do!!! Let’s make it REAL!
“CUTTING DOWN THE NETS” OF THE WIND INDUSTRY
Paul Kuster — April 6, 2014
Many who know me, know I love basketball. This time of year is great since the NBA is heading for the play-offs, but it’s NCAA “March Madness” that makes this time even better. As this years tournament enters the final weekend, it hasn’t disappointed in terms of excitement and improbable victories by underdog teams.
One of the most improbable wins was back in the 1983 tournament when an underdog NC State beat a Houston team that was highly favoured with a last second buzzer beater shot. It is acknowledged as the #1 moment in college basketball.
Later on, the coach (the late Jim Valvano) would describe in a speech just how he was able to motivate a young team, constantly looked upon as underdogs. Valvano would keep telling his players to visualize winning the championship by invoking the tradition of “cutting down the nets”.
Cutting the nets is an act done after the game for the championship is won and the trophy is handed out. It involves all the team players taking turns snipping the strings of the netting until the coach makes the final cut. It’s a powerful symbol of the accomplishment just achieved.
I find myself also thinking of this when I look at the battle against wind turbines and their placement here in Ontario and around the world. Let’s face it. We’re still the underdogs and facing some very dark forces. Problem is, wind warriors around the world have to confront these forces at varying degrees of the implementation of this despicable agenda. It’s not easy to feel upbeat about the battle all the time.
There’s the shock of learning that turbines are coming to an area. There’s the fight trying to prevent their approval. There’s the sickening feeling watching them go up. Finally there’s the despair of watching the beginning of their onslaught on the environment and on human health. On top of all of this, you are fully aware that the formidable forces against you include your own government and their various agencies who are supposed to put your welfare ahead of wind lobbyists and the wind industry.
It’s times like this, I like to think about what would be my version of ‘cutting down the nets’. I like to visualize sitting on the beach here in Port Elgin with a cigar and a glass of really good single malt Scotch. Could be difficult though here in Premier Stepmom’s Ontario. More probable is to spring for one hell of a party with lots of fireworks. Though I like quiet celebration, I think it is obligatory to have a very overt celebration as well. It would illustrate the importance of the fight as well as the victory. Those dark forces must have it known to them that they’ve been defeated. If that means cutting down the nets, spiking the ball, rubbing it in their faces, etc., so be it. My hope is it will sink into the scarred brains of these dark forces.
What’s important is to make sure we complete the job before we celebrate. The Southgate wind facility cancellation this week, or if the Conservatives form the next government, while reasons to be optimistic, does not mean the battle has been won. It may seem that the tide has turned and maybe it has to some slight degree, but there’s a long way to go. When the time comes and we think we’ve won, like forest fires, there’s always some hot spots that need to be attended to and extinguished.
We’ll want many “heads on a spike”… people like Dalton Mcguinty; Kathleen Wynne, George Smitherman; Bob Chiarelli, Chris Bentley (all members of the LPO); Dr. Arlene King, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health; Doris Dumais; the MOE; the CAW leaders; Gideon Foreman of CAPE; Dr. David Colby … the list is too great to go on, but we know who they all are. People who knowingly brought harm to the very residents they are sworn to protect. People who will claim they were ‘just following orders’. That excuse doesn’t let war criminals off the hook and it won’t hold with us. We’ll want their jobs and in some cases, criminal charges filed. No amber left burning.
So, until then, even during the darkest moments, think about what will be your version of cutting down the nets. It will help us to continue on, because as wind warriors, we know we will never give up. Not ever.
We’ve seen some victories, albeit small, but battles won nonetheless. We must keep our eyes on the prize and the eventual dream of ‘cutting down the nets’.
Angus “the Enforcer” Taylor….what a great guy! Go Aussies!!!
Angus Taylor: ACT fan plan Corporate Welfare on steroids
Angus “the Enforcer” Taylor on the front foot over ACT fan plan.
True to form, Angus “the Enforcer” Taylor has gone on the front foot over the Power Purchase Agreement signed between Infigen and the ACT. Since then, it appears Thai wind scammers, RATCH have piled in on the deal too.
When the deal was announced a few weeks back Angus came out swinging and hasn’t stopped since (see our post here).
Angus has been joined by Goulburn Mulwaree Mayor, Geoff Kettle and State and Federal Liberals and Nationals, including Family and Community Services Minister and Member for Goulburn, Pru Goward; Primary Industries Minister and Member for Burrinjuck, Katrina Hodgkinson; and, Member for Monaro, John Barilaro – who are all intent on killing the plan.
Here’s what Angus had to say in a press release:
NSW MPS CALL ON ACT TO FIND CHEAPER WAY THAN WIND
1 April 2014
Federal and NSW MPs have called on the ACT Government to find a cheaper way than wind to reach its 90% renewable energy target.
Meeting earlier today at one of Canberra’s scenic lookouts, the MPs were keen to point to numerous locations within the ACT where wind farms could be built.
Federal Member for Hume Angus Taylor said opposition to the ACT plan was growing. “Gathered here are MPs from surrounding NSW – from Goulburn, Monaro, Burrinjuck. The mayor of Goulburn is with us – and we want the people of Canberra to understand what the ACT Government is doing to them.
“By investing in wind farms, all located across the border in NSW, it’s not only treating NSW like a junkyard, it’s a case of corporate welfare on steroids for the wind industry. If we’ve learnt anything over recent years, it’s that we need to find low cost ways of reducing carbon emissions. When you boil this down, it’s one giant corporate welfare scheme. The households and businesses of Canberra will be the ones to pay,” Mr Taylor said.
He said by setting an aggressive renewable energy target, the ACT was effectively overpaying the wind industry for its role in reducing emissions.
“Wind is an extremely expensive option – at least double other domestic alternatives and as much as 20 times the cost of offshore credits. Conventional power costs $30 – $40 per megawatt hour, whereas wind power costs $90 -$120 per megawatt hour. Someone has to foot that bill and it will be the poor old ACT taxpayer.
“The other point I want to make is the division that wind farms create. If the ACT Government wants 90 percent of all energy coming from renewables, let them build turbines on the hills of Canberra.”
Costs behind the ACT’s Renewable Energy Target
The 90% target (by 2020) is way out of line with other countries and jurisdictions:
• Australia is targeting 20% by 2020 – no targets beyond 2020
• Most other developed countries that have adopted RE targets are focused on 20% by 2020 (e.g. Europe)
• Many countries are now scaling back their targets (e.g. EU)
Wind power is at least three times more expensive than conventional power to produce:
• Conventional power costs $30-40 per MWh (assuming spot prices), wind power costs $90-120 per MWh (assuming spot prices)
o The ACT government is assuming costs of around $105/ MWh for 2014
• Solar is substantially more expensive – as much as 10 times conventional power
• The renewable industries arguments about power costs are often flawed because
o They include a carbon cost in their assumptions
o They compare wind with long term contracts (requiring lower prices) alongside conventional power using spot contracts (requiring higher prices)
o They focus on operating costs, not total costs (which include capital costs)
The ACT renewable energy target is an extreme case of corporate welfare:
• Wind is an extremely expensive way to reduce carbon emissions – at least double other domestic alternatives and as much as 20 times the cost of offshore credits
• By setting an aggressive renewable energy target we OVERPAY the wind industry for the role it plays in reducing emissions
• The subsidy received by the wind industry under this scheme will be equivalent to over $600k per turbine – around two thirds of likely company revenues
Additional back up and transmission costs will also be added to bills:
• Wind capacity only works at around 30% of its full capacity, because the wind is intermittent
• The ACT will need to source conventional capacity from NSW to ‘fill the gap’
• This requires back up capacity and additional transmission capacity to redirect electricity to the ACT with minimal lead times
• Once renewables make up more than around 30% of the total supply, the costs of managing the grid escalate rapidly.
Angus Taylor (Member for Hume)
The ACT fan plan is aimed at sourcing 90% of its power from “renewables” – which seems just a little bizarre given that the ACT sources almost all of its power from the Snowy Hydro scheme, already.
The Canberra media have sucked it up – parroting Infigen’s spurious claims about “powering” 80,000 homes in Canberra. Sure, fans will deliver spurts of power over a few hours – usually at night-time when the lights and giant flatscreen TVs are turned off.
In reality – just like everywhere else – wind power will be delivered at crazy, random intervals such that those 80,000 homes – if left to rely upon wind power alone – will see their owners sitting freezing or in the dark at least 70% of the time – except they’ll never know which 70% of the time that might be. Positively Stone Age stuff (see our posts here and here andhere and here).
Then, of course, there is the INSANE cost of wind power when it is actually delivered. The ACT is staying schtum on the price set in its PPA with Infigen, but – for Infigen to breakeven – the guaranteed minimum price per MW/h has to be at least $90 – and may well be closer to $120. At those rates the ACT will be paying 3-4 times the cost of conventional power.
The cost of this lunacy will, of course, be born by power punters in Canberra – a point well made by Angus Taylor in this great little piece from The Australian.
Renewable energy proposal for Canberra offers a capital example of the green Left’s hot air
The Australian
Angela Shanahan
5 April 2014
Federal Liberal member for Hume Angus Taylor has calculated that under Corbell’s initiative, power bills in the ACT are likely to triple, rendering the territory an economic basket case. Source: Supplied
There is an area of Canberra called Fyshwick that politicians never bother to visit unless they are searching for a hardware bargain or, like a newsworthy ex-politician, in the market for hard-core, not hardware.
Canberra has a thriving sex industry, discreetly crammed between the bleak building supplies and cheap furniture outlets. It doesn’t bother most Canberrans. It is confined and there has been only one prosecution for sex slavery in Canberra.
That has not stopped two Liberal ACT assembly members from embarking on a study tour to Europe and South Korea to search out better ways for women to exit the industry, much to the ire of ratepayers. It is not that the ratepayers don’t care; they are fed up with the ideological obsessions of assembly politicians.
On one side is the left-green obsession of saving the planet; on the other a variety of moral causes. Neither set of ideologies has anything to do with governing a small city.
To pursue causes from saving prostitutes to studying euthanasia, Canberra’s MLAs have, on top of $125,000 base salary, a $24,000 travel allowance that includes spouse travel. So infrequent are assembly sitting days, averaging about three days in a month, that Canberrans are likelier to meet their local member in Portland, Oregon, recently visited by Deputy Chief Minister Andrew Barr, or in London, on a parliamentary advisory tour, than in Canberra’s Civic centre.
Yet the capital has a notoriously high cost of living and the highest rates and taxes of any jurisdiction in Australia. There has been a decline in general services, particularly in the new suburbs of Gungahlin, and the city is undergoing a radical change in the planning that made it the world’s model capital, with urban infill and high-density Stalinist apartment dwellings replacing its much admired green inner suburbs. The ACT government budget is dependent on flogging land.
Chief Minister Katy Gallagher and Environment Minister Simon Corbell are far green-left, but Corbell’s latest green scheme may be the final straw for ACT residents. Corbell has formulated a bizarrely expensive plan to deliver a 90 per cent renewable energy target by contracting wind farms outside the territory. He claims ACT power bills will rise to a maximum of $4 extra a week per household and wind is the cheapest technology to deliver power, costing 8c or 9c a kilowatt hour, and these projects will bring permanent jobs to Goulburn and Collector. Corbell has pre-empted the auction process by saying the bid from the owner of Collector Wind Farm will be accepted.
However, federal Liberal member for Hume Angus Taylor has calculated that under Corbell’s initiative, power bills in the ACT are likely to triple, rendering the territory an economic basket case. “Standard electricity price at the moment is $30 a megawatt hour,” he says, “but according to my calculations, the cost of wind on an equivalent basis is over $90, triple. So this will have a big impact on household electricity bills. Furthermore, it is not really renewable. Most electricity is still from the grid because the wind doesn’t blow all the time. If Corbell is saying the ACT will not be paying more than $4 extra a week he must be playing a trick somewhere. I have challenged him to produce his modelling. But I have not heard boo.”
This scheme will hit ACT businesses, which will not be able to absorb the steep rises in electricity prices. There will be a multiplier effect as key service providers such as supermarkets, petrol stations and retail outlets pass on costs. Businesses will relocate to Queanbeyan and first-home buyers and lower income groups will suffer, a blatant example of the Labor Party betraying its constituency to get elitist green votes.
However, the demographics of Canberra are changing and its constituency is not what was.
Taylor has 8000 constituents a day going to work in Canberra, which was the fastest growing city in Australia, but a huge amount of development has transferred to NSW because ACT planning is not reliable and the cost of living too high. Although Corbell has wrapped up his proposal in a lot of vague wishful thinking about employment in surrounding areas, wind farms are an expensive fly-in, fly-out industry. Cost of installation is $6 million a turbine and $100,000 to service. Added to that cost is their unreliability, which means having backup. In the end, 70-80 people are left employed and anyone who doesn’t want to be near the turbines will move.
In short, the ACT will pay a lot more for energy, with the dirty work being done in NSW. Wind turbines are technological and economic white elephants. Even Germany and Denmark are going back to coal-fired power. Renewable targets are about delivering corporate welfare to the suppliers, not carbon emission strategies.
And those high-minded MLAs out to get rid of the sex industry should be wary of too much success. If Taylor’s predictions are right, one day politicians who drive from the airport to Parliament House may get a surprise. The sex industry may be the one viable business left in Canberra.
The Australian
Seems somehow fitting for an article discussing the economics of wind power to throw in a take on the future of prostitution in Canberra.
Canberra politics is clearly being driven by a hard Green-Left agenda bereft of any understanding of energy market economics, let alone the true and hidden costs of wind power.
Another point of tremendous RISK for ACT power punters is the impact of the RET review on the long-run price for Renewable Energy Certificates. A substantial cut to the mandatory RET – which is clearly on the cards – will see demand for RECs plummet – with their price to follow.
The value of the REC is incorporated in the PPA – under which the certificate is issued to the generator and passed to the retailer, who then cashes it in. The retailer ends up paying the difference between the fixed PPA price and the amount recovered on the REC trade. The lower the REC price, the more the retailer pays out of its own pocket.
STT hears, though, that this deal – going well beyond bizarre – has the ACT opting out of the Federal RET/REC scheme altogether. If that’s right it means the ACT will not receive a REC under its PPA – which in turn means the power punters in Canberra will end up paying the full cost of the trade – ie a minimum of between $90-120 per MW/h.
But, of course, the ACT government is unlikely to reveal the price set by its PPA, let alone to explain the intricacies of the trade to power punters.
In the meantime, a bunch of very angry Coalition MPs – headed up by Angus Taylor – look set to shine an unwelcome spotlight on a very ordinary deal for ACT power consumers and their NSW constituents – who will end up suffering all the costs, all the impacts and all the grief – all in the name of Green-Left grandstanding and, as Angus puts it: “corporate welfare on steroids”.
Another Doctor from Australia tells the AMA that their position is WRONG!
OPEN LETTERToAMA President Dr. Steve HambletonVice President Professor Geoffrey DobbAll Members of AMA Federal CouncilCopy: the Australian NHMRC, The Presidents of the Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Danish Medical Associations, the World Medical Association and the Waubra FoundationA highly alarming position paper from a Medical association (Australian AMA)On the background of my long working life in community and occupational medicine, including environmental medicine and research, weighting the preventive aspects, I am chocked to read your position paper on wind farms and health. The style and language is definitely not based on scientific, medical wording but sounds much more of what we hear from the wind turbine industry and their sales promoting lobbyists. A pure worship to this “modern” technology. Based on technologies, that are in sharp contradiction with the legal requirements, that manufacturers may not promote, sale or export harmful products such as machinery, which wind turbines by the EU Machinery Directive per definition are. The industry has never documented their harmlessness, based on research, involving relevant medical expertise (e.g. audiologists, medical epidemiologists, community medical specialists etc.) without any conflicts of interests.There are several untruths in your text. It is not a question of ”modern” or not but about the sound energies emitted, hitting pregnant, children and the elderly or the many neighbors in serious risk groups, especially due to the noise in the low frequency and infra sound (ILFN) range, which is never measured, using the formal, and obviously erroneous prerequisites in the laws and other publications from authorities. For example in Denmark the formal rules for wt noise thresholds, including ILFN, were calculated only by engineers, without ANY participation of competent medical experts, like audiologist, or involving neighbors to wind turbines to > 1 MW size. The former CEO of Vestas, well known even in Australia, in public stated, that the Government must not change the noise limits because that will harm their export, if greater distances between wt’s and dwellings were required. Also the rules dictates the use of A-filters where nothing of the sound pressure can be recorded under 20 Hz, where by far the largest sound pressure from wind turbines is (between 70-95 dB from a 2 MW turbine – according to Kelley and newer research, that measures full spectrum noise down to about 0.2 Hz frequency). But human bodies, inner ears and the brain are easily affected by those amounts of sound energy – only they are not “audible” in a narrow definition, but they are definitely hazardous and strongly activating specific brain nuclei (amygdale, hippocampus), causing panic, anxiousness and in long run depression. But worst of all, they cause impaired sleep or insomnia (sleeplessness) with deleterious effects (see the new Norwegian HUNT study attached). So all the “mechanisms” you speak about, direct and indirect, are there and they are well documented, see e.g. the Alec Salt recent article (attached).What has AMA done to convince the Australian Medical Authorities to inform the physicians of your country about the mounting evidence of health hazards for wt neighbors since, say, the year 2000? Does the UN Precautionary Principle and the UN Aarhus Convention not apply in Australia and especially among doctors? Preventive action must be taken long before there is final and water proof evidence, if there is just a suspicion of that human life and health is threatened. And finally: wind turbines, due to the fluctuation, unpredictability and capriciousness of the wind requires an everlasting backup from fossil electricity plants, thereby making the postulated “green” wt electricity just black and filled with CO2.The tone and the inhumane wording in your statement seems to me in severe conflict with the World Medical Associations code of Medical Ethics. The forerunner of AMA was in 1947 among the constituting members of the WMA. WMA has glorious traditions in developing solid ethical and moral rules and traditions in the international medical community. By sending a copy of this letter to my now (Danish) Medical Association and my earlier (Swedish and Finnish) and orienting the Norwegian and Icelandic associations I hope to stimulate them to debat the ethical attitudes Australian AMA in the position paper unveil toward diseased countrymen. I also hope the WMA will find time to consider this correspondence during General Assembly to come. Especially I will point to the following paragraphs in the WMA Code of Medical Ethics (2014). The problems with the relations between wind farms and health are not unique for Australia. They are well known also in Denmark, the other Nordic countries and word wide. The debates are raging in 70 – 100 countries and in an increasing degree now also in the developing countries, towards which the wt-industry now is moving and where the knowledge of these complex problems and the prevention necessities in the medical forums are even more limited than in our countries.I here remind WMA and all the member associations about the following ethical paragraphs and hope they are not violated either by Australia or any other countries:“WMA International Code of Medical EthicsAdopted by the 3rd General Assembly of the World Medical Association, London, England, October 1949and amended by the 22nd World Medical Assembly, Sydney, Australia, August 1968and the 35th World Medical Assembly, Venice, Italy, October 1983and the 57th WMA General Assembly, Pilanesberg, South Africa, October 2006DUTIES OF PHYSICIANS IN GENERALA PHYSICIAN SHALL always exercise his/her independent professional judgment and maintain the highest standards of professional conduct.A PHYSICIAN SHALL not allow his/her judgment to be influenced by personal profit or unfair discrimination.A PHYSICIAN SHALL be dedicated to providing competent medical service in full professional and moral independence, with compassion and respect for human dignity.A PHYSICIAN SHALL deal honestly with patients and colleagues, and report to the appropriate authorities those physicians who practice unethically or incompetently orwho engage in fraud or deception.A PHYSICIAN SHALL certify only that which he/she has personally verified.A PHYSICIAN SHALL respect the local and national codes of ethics.”I think this also is applicable to the ethics and moral of the medical associations.http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/c8/ ( WMA International Code of Medical Ethics, full text )With best wishesMauri Johansson, MD, Master in Humanities and Health StudiesSpecialist in Community and Occupational Medicine (including Environmental Medicine)Sportsvej 177441 BordingDenmark (Europe)
Wind Weasels Destroy Lives!
SpeakOut Ontario – Nikki Horton; Chatham-Kent Wind Turbines
“Nikki and her husband reside in Chatham-Kent, Ontario. Their rural home is surrounded by IWTs. Her family, including two young boys, have suffered health, environmental, and economic problems associated with living near turbines.
Nikki’s property taxes have doubled since the renovations mentioned in this video, despite real estate agents saying her house is “unsellable” – she is currently taking action to resolve this property tax issue.
Nikki started a blog which has resulted in international conversations between victims suffering the same health problems. http://mywinddiary.blogspot.ca/“
The Devastation Caused by the Faux-green Miscreants, has Got to Stop!!!
“Today, it’s difficult to stop crying,” she told Chief Medical Officer Dr. Rosemary Lester (Australia)
Apr 4, 2014
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Editor’s note: No, this isn’t Rosemary Lester. Rosemary Lester is Chief Medical Officer of the State of Victoria, Australia. Dr. Lester is the recipient of the letter reprinted, below — from a woman, a middle-aged woman, who, as she wrote the letter, couldn’t stop weeping. Her name is Melissa Ware.
Melissa (lovely name) is writing to Rosemary (another lovely name), asking for humaneness, common sense and, not least, proper medical attention.
The tragedy is, Rosemary will almost certainly reject Melissa on every request.
How so? Dr. Lester steadfastly refuses to investigate the screamingly obvious health problems at wind farms within her jurisdiction. Instead, her department published a reportdenying physiological impacts from wind turbine infrasound and low frequency noise (ILFN). A report effectively trashing the work of Professor Alec Salt (Dept. of Otolaryngology, Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, USA), Professor Colin Hansen, Dr. Nina Pierpont, and a host of other researchers & clinicians who have demonstrated — drum roll, please! — direct physiological impacts from wind turbine ILFN. (Does this tin-horn bureaucrat know something these clinical researchers — with credentials that eclipse hers — don’t know?)
Leading to the obvious question: What happened to Dr. Lester’s duty of care as senior medical officer? Where is the state’s duty of care? Lester can’t claim she knows nothing about the suffering; Annie Gardner bombards her with emails, even as sick and suicidal residents have met with Lester and her department — for naught.
“Rosemary, what the fuck is going on, honey?” (It’s time to use her first name, reminding her that the “doctor” stuff is professional horseshit. Above all, she’s a human being, dammit, and from our perspective she’s doing a really bad job at that task. Not, “First, do no harm,” but “First, be a human being for God’s sake!”)
Rosemary’s own medical staff admitted they knew there was a problem with Wind Turbine Syndrome. We refer to Dr. Simon Slota-Kan and Dr. Stephanie Williams. Both physicians admitted to the community and to directors of the Waubra Foundation (meetings in April 2011 at Evansford and on 14th October 2011 in the health department offices in Melbourne), that they knew there were real health problems from turbines! Indeed, at the April meeting, Drs. Slota-Kan and Williams said research money was available.
“Um, Rosemary, what happened to the money, honey?”
None of these pleas, none of this evidence, has moved this woman or her department to conduct a health impact assessment, again, despite repeated requests and, indeed, despite it being her legal responsibility. And despite it being obvious, for Chrissakes, Rosemary! (Why is this woman still in this job? Is anyone in the govt. paying attention? Where’s the media? Hello! Anyone home in the Land of Oz?)
This is either hilarious or grotesque — you choose.
Anyhow, read on. Melissa Ware is one of many sufferers under the official, certified, legal, state-mandated, medically approved & authorized & licensed care and protection of Rosemary Lester. (Why does she still hold a medical license?)
What the fuck!?
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This abuse and torture have got to stop, now! Too many of us, including children, handicapped and elders are physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted, too many of us are fed up, and too many of us are forced to live with preventable pain caused by operating or proposed industrial wind facilities.
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To: Dr. Rosemary Lester, Chief Health Officer, Victoria, Australia
From: Melissa Ware, Cape Bridgewater, Victoria, Australia
Regarding: Abuse & torture of residents by wind turbine infrasound & low frequency noise
Date: April 2, 2014
You and your Department are well aware of impacts of industrial wind turbines on human health from reports from Victorian residents. This document explains precisely what is occurring for residents living in quiet rural areas and what physiological harm is occurring (click here).
We experience many health problems living next door to the Cape Bridgewater Wind Farm in South West Victoria. I have read the statement by Mr. Mark Duchamp from the World Council of Nature (click here).
Today it’s difficult to stop crying. Not only is human health being ignored, animals are severely impacted by wind turbines as well. Tears are flowing because not only are animals not protected from harm, neither are we residents. We can no longer bear the impact of our experiences near wind facilities not being heard, not being acted on and not being prevented.
GP’s and Specialists advise the cure is to “move away,” give limited instructions and advice, proffer prescriptions and pills, request blood tests etc. to discover the cause of ill-health and as required by law to provide correct diagnosis and treatment; expensive measures on a national scale and our health and well-being deteriorates. Relocation is unaffordable, our home deemed unsalable according to the valuer engaged by the bank holding our mortgage. We have followed instructions of the Health Department, Department of Planning, and Glenelg Shire Council and co-operated as requested, with Pacific Hydro whom own the wind facility.
We are traumatised by the inhumanity being shown towards our communities.
We hit our heads against a medical system brick wall over and over again, in attempt to be simply being heard. To repeatedly point out independent noise testing in our homes detects noise problems, that these noises are the direct cause of headaches, illness and many health problems. To repeatedly be put down, dismissed and told “there are no problems near wind farms” and “there’s nothing we can do” or “there is no evidence” or “move away.”
For those responsible for our pain, to legally speak, “Ignorance is no excuse,” and you will be held to account.
The 2011 “Senate Inquiry into the Impact of Wind Farms” called for more research into wind farm noise, as does Prime Minister Abbot’s government, as does Minister Guy, as does the National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC), as do many senators and professionals and persons of integrity wanting to see justice for people and communities who are negatively impacted and suffering.
Solid stone homes, concrete slabs, corrugated roofs and sheds, even the ground vibrates to the sound energy emissions from the turbines. Bodies and internal organs and tiny bones, vibrate to imissions and are blasted by pressure waves. Years of exposure to bodily harm; infrasound and low frequency noise bombard every living cell. Prolonged exposure to noise and resulting sleep deprivation causes harm.
Noise pollution from wind turbines was shown by Dr Neil Kelley, thirty years ago, to DIRECTLY cause a range of symptoms, currently named Wind Turbine Syndrome, to neighbours of bigger and larger wind facilities with ongoing unresolved noise issues (clickhere).
Negative impacts have been well researched and documented. Dr. Kelley defined and established health protective exposure limits for wind turbine infrasound and low frequency noise, which state and federal governments, including the NHMRC, have been repeatedly made aware of, yet choose to ignore.
The Association of Veterans Affairs Audiologists in America in 2010 documented the effects of infrasound and recommended levels of exposure determined by various highly regarded bodies such as NASA etc. (click here).
No-one monitors or limits our exposure levels
Not to noise, not to infrasound, not to blade flicker, not to vibration within our homes, not to electromagnetic radiation — no one is monitoring this industry. People living next door are required to report faults, or fires, or blade damage or noises. There’s seemingly no safeguarding whistles and bells, as reported at this wind facility.
Environmental noise exposure risks public health, and is recognised by international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the US Center for Disease Control. What are your directives for managing wind farm harm? What are you doing to protect people from wind industry interference in health management? Interference revealed by Senator Madigan in parliament recently regarding wind farm communications with medical clinics in the Western District, including two clinics in Portland (click here).
How much longer are we to bear ongoing wind farm abuses? Six, ten, twenty, thirty years reporting problems and nothing has been done to cease the pain and harm. We’ve been palmed off from one government department to another and eventually ignored or derided. All the while, infrasound and low frequency noise, audible noise and vibration from the turbines tortures us.
Noises annoy us, sleep eludes us
Denial of the problems and this form of torture is unacceptable. No doubt litigation will occur here in Australia as it has overseas, with turbines being ordered to be pulled down in Portugal, because of proven vibroacoustic disease in animals and humans. In December 2013, Justice Muse ordered the wind farm in Falmouth, Massachusetts (USA) to be turned off at night to prevent “irreparable harm to physical and psychological health.”
How often is it to be repeated that people, physicians, the public, administrators must be better educated regarding the issues we’re daily confronted with? The Health Department, the EPA, the NHMRC and government are where such awareness and education begin, where solutions are enacted. Departments, professionals and government representatives, including local government, need to consider their advice (or lack of), their own behaviour, adhere to their standards of conduct and act with integrity and honesty, and have no conflicts of interest and actively advocate on our behalf.
Even the wind industry admits to problems of noise, engineering design and maintenance. (See, for example, lubrication problems and poor or incorrect installation or siting.) Section 5.1.1 of the draft New Zealand standard on wind farm noise, 2009, states: “Limits for wind farm noise are required to provide protection against sleep disturbance and maintain reasonable residential amenity.”
THIS ABUSE AND TORTURE HAVE GOT TO STOP, NOW! Too many of us, including children, handicapped and elders are physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted, too many of us are fed up, and too many of us are forced to live with preventable pain caused by operating or proposed industrial wind facilities.
Raising awareness starts by reading professional and personal statements. You may begin here with responses made to the Australian Medical Association’s recent statementwrongly proclaiming no health effects from wind farms.
Your written response to this letter and URGENT action from you and your department, consistent with your legal, professional and ethical duties, are urgently required.
Wynne & the Libs….The Gang-green Has to be Eradicated, for Ontario to Survive!
THE LIBERAL RATS ARE TURNING ON EACH OTHER (IN AN ATTEMPT TO DISTANCE WYNNE FROM MCGUINTY)
*** Special Note: Make sure you don’t miss the last 3 paragraphs at the bottom to fully understand the diabolical, evil, manipulating piece of slime that ran this province for 10 years.
The Toronto Star has an article today that goes into great detail about how Kathleen Wynne is furious at Dalton McGuinty for leaving her holding the bag for the gas plant scandal. This, of course, is the same Kathleen Wynne who upon winning the leadership for the LPO, stood up and proclaimed to the world how she was so proud of her role in the Dalton Gang cabinet and how she intended to stay the course and continue building on McGuinty’s legacy.
But with an election looming on the horizon, it appears that the Liberal cheering team at the Toronto Star are in full damage control mode by trying to tell us that all manner of civility is now gone between the former and current Premiers. “Tensions are high, relationships fractious, nerves frayed.”
Naturally, in trying to distance Wynne as far as possible from The Quitter, they fail to mention that it was Wynne who signed off on the cancellation of those gas plants. As much as she likes to deny knowledge of any wrongdoing, she either has to admit that she’s a liar or one of the dumbest people on the planet, to have not known the details of those cancellations.
In addition, she’s also playing innocent on the current scandal rocking Queen’s Park (has the ever been a moment in the past 11 years when there hasn’t been a scandal rocking QP??) the cleaning of 24 hard drives on government computers. The wiping of the hard drives happened between February 6, 2013 and March 20, 2013. Wynne became official leader of the LPO on January 26, 2013 and became the Premier of Ontario on February 11, 2013. It certainly is hard to believe that she had no knowledge of what was happening on her watch.
It is interesting to note one final thing. In August of 2012, Dalton McGuinty cut funding for the Centre of Forensic Sciences, a highly skilled and world-renowned task force dealing with, among other things, child pornography.
But notice, in this Toronto Sun article from August 2012, the description of what this task force does:
“The employees at the Centre of Forensic Sciences now facing unemployment do not grow on trees. They are highly educated in computer sciences, mathematics and criminology, and skilled in retrieving data from files that have been erased or deleted from the electronic devices of suspected criminals, and that includes computers and cellphones that have been heavily damaged.
They can venture into cyberspace and restore deleted e-mails and Internet chat logs that will assist police in tracking criminals involved in such rackets as human smuggling and organized drug rings.”
If there was ever a politician who deserves to be ‘walking the Green Mile”, it is the disgusting vile creature known as Dalton McGuinty. The 111 page search warrant regarding the computer tampering can be found here.
Kathleen Wynne refuses to accept Reality…Wind is Useless!
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For the sake of brevity, Green Energy Fraud in Europe is on the verge of being dumped in the garbage bin YET Ontario forges ahead with this misguided and destructive plan regardless!
Talk about “head in the sand” of denial!
Possibly Wynne and her Gang Green at Queen’s Park don’t read any news stories outside their pink building anymore in case some little lower ranked employee gets “informed”.
For a master plan for fraudulent behaviour to exist then all parties involved MUST be onside at all times with little or no dissension in the ranks.
This is how Dictatorships world-wide have existed for so long around the world. Keep the people ignorant, uninformed, disenfranchised and poor………..then one has control over the people!
Europe is basically a basket case (as is Ontario) with huge electricity costs, loss of industry, loss of land and property values dropping like a stone and the experiment in renewables that has caused this to happen is now a poisonous satnce for any politicians looking for re-election.
David Cameron KNOWS he is in trouble and is now reversing course on his Green Energy debacle so he can stay in power for another term so he doesn’t lose the keys to the public vault of hard earned tax dollars!
Why not Wynne?…………….could it be that when one signs onto a contract with a gang of no-neck Louies like the ones that exist within the Wind Industry, your fate is sealed from the beginning…….the old adage for a gang of thieves is …………Blood In…………..Blood Out!
Kathleen Wynne issues lawsuit against Hudak for saying what all Ontarians want to say!
Posted: April 5, 2014 in Uncategorized
An out of control Liberal Government spinning downward to oblivion and scrambling to shut down any criticism for their rampant theft of public monies for their own gain has issued the first of probably many lawsuits to stifle the outrage of Ontario citizens by trying to GAG the Opposition leader, Hudak, from any further accusations about theGas Plant Scandal!
Futile?……..probably. Hypocrisy?……yes! Bizarre?……to the extreme! Everything that is wrong with this action can be summed up nicely with one sentence……………..“when someone gets caught doing something wrong and has no legitimate explanation for what they did, their last resort is to lawyer up!”
Gag orders are the favourite means to an end for the Liberal Government and that can’t be more apparent with the massive amount of gag orders the Liberals have embraced over the past 6 years with their Green Energy Act and their partners in that fraud called Wind Turbine Developers.
Once a person signs a lease with a Wind Developer he/she has an automatic gag order in place so they can’t ever talk about the downside of “selling their souls to the company store”.
Not only are lawsuits common with Wind Developers but seem to be the norm when honest hard working Ontario citizens try and fight back against the assault on their homes lands and health with the out of control siting of Wind “Farms” (disasters) such as the lawsuit against Esther Wrightman who calls Nextera, “Nexterror”
I assume the same people who are working hard behind the scenes advising McGuinty and now Wynne how to make their Green Energy Fraud work are advising Wynne now the legal tools she has in her bag of tricks of how to shut down a democratic discussion on mishandling of public funds with one of the most heinous use of $$$ to buy votes…..the “Gas Plant Cancellations“
What’s next?…..a lawsuit against ANY Ontario Citizen who cries FOUL on what this failed Government has done to them?
We MUST fight Agenda 21. Our Children Are Worth It!
U.N. Agenda 21 Impacts Private Property Rights and Freedom
[This piece is co-authored by Bonnie O’Neil]
Our last article, “Are You Under Attack by UN Agenda 21,” exposed the “United Nation Agenda 21″ scheme to grab American citizens’ property rights and freedoms. While that information is not exactly going viral throughout America, more and more people are realizing something unusual and troubling is happening in America.
That is good news, because the more citizens become observant and knowledgeable, the better chance we have of stopping what many now believe is an invasive attack upon us. While property rights are a major part of Agenda 21, it encompasses far more areas of our lives, with new laws and adverse changes from our government. We will explain the other tentacles of this odious United Nations agenda in future editions. This article will inform you of more ways it impacts our property and freedom, as well as our natural resources, parks and historic landmarks.
We must deny the assumption that only government can protect nature, air, soil, water, and open spaces. History informs us that all societies run by totalitarian governments experience severe environmental degradation where there is little or no private property and a misuse of resources. The end result is a chasm which develops between the haves and have-nots and a resulting bleak future for individual citizens.
An example of personal property being taken by the government is The Wildlands Project. It dictates how land is to be set aside for non-humans, and if your property happens to be located in one of their designated areas, you become less important than animals. In Kern County, California, there are 400 such areas planned. The pretense to confiscate the land is that it is national forest land, with the claim “it is good for the people.”
There is a definite push to have people become more dependent by relocating them from suburbs into cities, out of private homes into condos, and out of private cars onto their bikes or electric cars. Bike lanes and bike paths are all the rage right now, as cities and rural areas are being remade in accordance to the sustainable model. With high density urban developments, parking for cars could be eliminated, as there would be no need for vehicles that sprew forth CO2. As documented in the Fifth Assessment Report issued by the U.N. International Panel of Climate Change (ipcc) on September 27. 2013, manmade Global Warming was attributed in large part to CO2 emissions.
In 2013 San Francisco Bay Area residents battled city planners on the implementation of “Plan Bay Area and Senate Bill 345″– known as the “smart growth” program — which called for the moving of people from rural communities into the city’s urban sprawl so government would have more control over how they impacted the environment. Rosa KIoire, a former forensic appraiser and the founder of Democrats Against UN Agenda 21, believes the smart growth plan is more about making people live closer together so government can have more control over them than about any environmental impact.
The Monument Act was originally created to protect America’s historical landmarks and/or structures from being destroyed. That Act is now being used by the federal government to grab land for their own purposes. Those who designed the Act did not foresee something as odious as Agenda 21, and trusted that our federal government would never use the Act for any other purpose than to preserve our monuments. However, abuses are happening, as the citizens of New Mexico can testify. In December of 2012, President Obama used the Monument Act to grab the area known as the Taos Plateau, even though that area lacked properties that would qualify it for a national monument. That area of the state has enormous underground resources, such as oil, coal, and uranium, resources that could be providing economic benefits to both the state and its residents. Rather than create jobs that would benefit the people who live in New Mexico, that land now belongs to the government.
Then there is the Clean Water Act of 1972 where even mud puddles can become wetlands that must be protected. Should an area be deemed a wetland, the owner is no longer allowed to use or sell it. One of the more mindless abuses of the law happened in California. Using a provision in the Clean Water Act, which provided for a healthy habitat for fish, California officials purposely diverted the Sacrament River and allowed that essential water supply to flow into the ocean. Sound too incredible to believe? What would ever cause such a strange action?
A relatively unknown, small SMELT fish was being caught in pumps that supplied water to the valley. The fish was on the endangered list and citing the Endangered Species Act, a judge ordered the pumps that watered the valley turned off and the water diverted, lest the Delta melt be disturbed That water supply was needed to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres of farm area in California, and without it, farmers were forced to watch once thriving fruit groves to wither and die, as well as other types of crops throughout a huge region in the California valley. Jobs were lost, lives were destroyed, all because the government chose to protect a fish over peoplewhose lives depended upon their farming their land for a living. Even when California fell victim to a severe drought, the government would not relent and let the river flow along its normal course. We now live in a land in which a fish is more important than people. Certainly this is not what our forefathers intended of the law, but an overreaching government has abused our freedoms.
The erosion of property rights has continued despite public backlash, as it did in the Supreme Court Kelo v. New London decision in 2005, which allowed a Connecticut town to seize private property not just for public use, but also for private development surrounding new offices for the Pfizer Inc. drug corporation. In 2009, New York state’s highest court ruled the state could use eminent domain to seize large numbers of homes and businesses in Brooklyn to make room for a new arena for New Jersey Nets basketball. Even more grievous, in 2005, The Supreme Court ruled that local governments may force property owners to sell out and make way for private economic development when officials decide it would benefit the public, even if the property is not blighted and the new project’s success is not guaranteed.
You are probably wondering whom is behind the U.N. Agenda 21 plan. Unfortunately, quite a few world-wide leaders, including many in our own country. Not surprising, one of the more prominent is George Soros, a billionaire and liberal socialist, who strongly supports Agenda 21. Soros’ money has been tracked to funding parts of ICLEI, as early as 1997 when his “Open Society” gave ICLEI over 2 million dollars to support a Local Agenda 21 Project. His billions fund over 90 leftist organizations such as ACORN, SEIU, MoveOn.org, Occupy Wall Street, the ACLU and most any that promote his far-left agenda. In a subsequent article we will discuss how Soros’ Open Society Institute has partnered with the U. S. Department ofEducation to promote a global education initiative to bring about the nationalization of the American education system known as Common Core, endorsed by Arne Duncan, Obama’s left leaning Secretary of Education.
We can only hope that we can defeat Agenda 21 before experiencing any more government abuses. One way to stop Agenda 21 from infiltrating American is to vote for Conservative candidates who oppose U.N. Agenda 21. Oh, and not just vote, but support them in every way possible. Educate yourself about the candidates and then talk to your friends, relatives, and neighbors …. maybe even your grocery store clerk. Whatever it takes: Vote against the slick liberals who make claims they have no intention of keeping. Look at their records, not their rhetoric. There is an ongoing war for our future, and we need good men to fight on the side of liberty and freedom.
When the defense of liberty becomes a crime, tyranny is already in force. At that point, failure to defend liberty makes slavery a certainty.
[Originally published at Illinois Review]
Everyone is Waking Up to the Facts about Useless, Overpriced, Inefficient Wind!
Cut subsidies to wind farm developers, York MP tells ministers
8:41am Friday 4th April 2014 in News
York Outer MP Julian Sturdy, pictured signing a residents’ petition against the city’s Local Plan, which includes dozens of potential wind farm sitesGOVERNMENT energy subsidies should be redirected away from wind turbines towards other schemes, a York MP has told ministers.
Julian Sturdy, who represents York Outer, is opposing plans for masts at Murton Moor and Kexby and has criticised City of York Council‘sLocal Plan which includes more than 40 sites with the potential to be used for wind farms.
He and other Conservative backbench MPs have called for cuts to subsidies for wind turbine developers so other forms of renewable energy, including offshore wind, tidal and wave power, get more investment, with Mr Sturdy saying he feared turbines were being “forced on some communities by landowners hellbent on achieving very desirable subsidies”.
Energy and Climate Change Minister Ed Davey said subsidies were already being balanced but he continued to support subsidies for onshore wind. Mr Sturdy claimed Mr Davey and the Liberal Democrats were blocking the Government from cutting onshore wind subsidies, saying: “it is ultimately our rural communities who have to bear the brunt of these massive and unsightly turbines, which create a meagre and intermittent energy supply in spite of the distress they cause.”
CO2 and Global Warming – nothing to be afraid of!
‘WORLD DOING JUST FINE; GLOBAL WARMING IS GOOD; CO2 IS OUR FRIEND’ SAY SCIENTISTS
The latest verdict is in on ‘climate change’ – and the news is good. The planet is greening, the oceans are blooming, food production is up, animals are thriving and humans are doing better than ever: and all thanks to CO2 and global warming.
So say the authors of the latest Climate Change Reconsidered report by the NIPCC – that’s the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change, an independent research body funded by the Heartland Institute.
The scientific team, led by atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, geographer and agronomist Craig Idso, research physicist Sherwood B. Idso and marine geologist Bob Carter, has assessed the peer-reviewed evidence and reached a conclusion somewhat different from the scaremongering narrative which has been promoted in the last week by the IPCC and its amen corner in the mainstream media: reports of the planet’s imminent demise have been somewhat exaggerated; in fact we’re doing just fine.
Here are their latest report’s key findings.
Biological Impacts
Atmospheric CO2 is not a pollutant and is greening the planet. Far from damaging food production it is helping to increase it, as are rising temperatures. Ecosystems are thriving and rising CO2 levels and temperatures pose no significant threat to aquatic life. Global warming will have a negligible effect on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases but will, on balance, be beneficial because cold is a deadlier threat to the human species than warmth.
CO2, Plants And Soil
Numerous studies show that CO2 is good for plants, increasing their growth-rate, reducing their reliance on water and making them less vulnerable to stress. Increased CO2 has resulted in reduced topsoil erosion, has encouraged beneficial bacteria, and improved aerial fertilization – creating more plantlife which will help sequester the carbon apparently of so much concern to environmentalists.
Plant Characteristics
Rising CO2 will improve plant growth, development and yield. It enables plants to produce more – and larger – flowers, thus increasing productivity. It also helps plants grow more disease-resistant.
Earth’s Vegetative Future
Rising CO2 has led to a greening of the planet. Agricultural production has increased dramatically across the globe in the last three decades, partly because of new technologies but partly also because of the beneficial warmth and increased CO2.
Terrestrial Animals
There is little if any evidence to support the IPCC’s predictions of species extinction which are based mainly on computer models rather than hard data. Amphibian populations will suffer little, if any, harm. Bird populations may have been affected by habitat loss – but not by “climate change” to which they are more than capable of adapting. Polar bears have survived periods climatic change considerably more extreme than the ones currently being experienced. Butterflies, insects, reptiles and mammals tend on balance to proliferate rather than be harmed by “climate change.”
Aquatic Life
Multiple studies from multiple oceanic regions confirm that productivity – from phytoplankton and microalgae to corals, crustaceans and fish – tends to increase with temperature. Some experts predict coral calcification will increase by about 35 per cent beyond pre-industrial levels by 2100, with no extinction of coral reefs. Laboratory studies predicting lower PH levels – “ocean acidification” – fail to capture the complexities of the real world and often contradict observations in nature.
Human Health
Warmer temperatures result in fewer deaths associated with cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness and strokes. In the US a person who dies of cold loses on average in excess of ten years of life, whereas someone who dies from heat loses likely no more than a few days or weeks of life. Between 3 and 7 per cent of the gains in longevity in the US in the last three decades are the result of people moving to warmer states. There is a large body of evidence to suggest that the spread of malaria will NOT increase as a result of global warming. Rising CO2 is increasing the nutritional value of food with consequent health benefits for humans.
The report concludes:
The impact of rising temperatures and higher atmospheric CO2 levels in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has not been anything like what IPCC would have us believe and its forecasts differ wildly from those sound science would suggest.
Either IPCC’s authors purposely ignore this research because it runs counter to their thesis that any human impact on climate must be bad and therefore stopped at any cost or they are inept and have failed to conduct a proper and full scientific investigation of the pertinent literature. Either way, IPCC is misleading the scientific community, policymakers and the general public. Because the stakes are high this is a grave disservice.
This Article Explains Why Wind Turbines Affect People Negatively!
“ For years, they have sheltered behind the
mantra, now shown to be false, that has been
presented repeatedly in many forms such as
‘What you can’t hear, can’t affect you.’ ”
How Does
Wind Turbine Noise
Affect People?
http://freewco.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/2014-saltlichtenhan-acoustics-today.pdf
This article was published in, “Acoustics Today”, Winter 2014
A publication of the Acoustical Society of America
Today
The Climate Change Scam – a Sales Gimmick for the Faux-green Money Drain.
‘Nobody Really Knows What’s Happening With Climate Change. They’re Just Guessing’
The IPCC Just Agreed With Nigel Lawson
Nigel Lawson was right after all. Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies lecture in 2006 that launched the former chancellor on his late career as a critic of global warming policy, Lord Lawson has been stressing the need to adapt to climate change, rather than throw public money at futile attempts to prevent it. Until now, the official line has been largely to ignore adaptation and focus instead on ‘mitigation’ — the misleading term for preventing carbon dioxide emissions. That has now changed. The received wisdom on global warming, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was updated this week: the IPCC emphasised, again and again, the need to adapt to climate change. –Matt Ridley, The Spectator, 5 April 2014
Take this climate matter everybody is thinking about. They all talk, they pass laws, they do things, as if they knew what was happening. I don’t think anybody really knows what’s happening. They just guess. And a whole group of them meet together and encourage each other’s guesses. –James Lovelock, BBC Newsnight, 2 April 2014
Influential scientist, inventor, and environmentalist James Lovelock is having some second thoughts about the whole climate change thing. In the context of a doom-and-gloom United Nations climate science report, Lovelock, 94, described the environmental movement as becoming “a religion, and religions don’t worry too much about facts.” He added that “It’s just as silly to be a denier as it is to be a believer. You can’t be certain.” –Inquisitr News, 2 April 2014
The latest United Nations report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is something of brain twister. The IPCC report is at odds with global economic and political realities. There are, in effect, two different worlds. At the IPCC, the objective is to fan fears of fossil-fuel-induced global crises brought on by rising carbon emissions. In the rest of the world, demand for fossil fuels continues to expand, regardless of the carbon risks. It surely has not escaped the IPCC’s policy leaders that as they try to drum up support for reduced carbon emissions and policy action, the leading powers are in an escalating battle for fossil-fuel supremacy. –Terence Corcoran, Financial Post, 1 April 2014
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group II has concluded that global warming of 2.5˚C would cost the equivalent to losing between 0.2-2.0% of annual income. This seems in sharp contrast to the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, which found it would cost 5-20%. How can that be? The Stern Review was prepared by a team of civil servants and never reviewed (beforepublication) by independent experts. Some argue that the Stern Review served to bolster Gordon Brown’s credentials with the environmental wing of the Labour Party in preparation for his transition to party leader and prime minister. And in fact next weekIPCC Working Group III will conclude that the Stern Review grossly underestimated the costs of bringing down greenhouse gas emissions. –Richard Tol, The Conversation, 2 April 2014
The Truth about the Windscam, and What it is Doing to Ontario
Canada Town Square
| Ontario Wind Turbines |
Ontario has the most expensive electricity in North America
leading to unaffordable hydro bills, manufacturing leaving the province, high unemployment and a stagnant economy.
This is a serious problem and is the result of Wind Turbines; an industry that Ontario doesn’t need and never did.
“Ontario is probably the worst electricity market in the world,”
Pierre-Olivier Pineau, Associate Professor and Electricity Market Expert, University of Montreal HEC Business School.
Ontario’s Energy Policy will affect every person in Ontario.
Eleven years ago, Ontario had a vibrant energy sector that offered inexpensive electricity. It has changed dramatically since then.
The following is a summary of the new energy policy that is being implemented by the Ontario Government.
Supporting information is under Sources. Pictures are of wind projects in Ontario.
Over the next 20 years, your household will pay an additional $40,000 for electricity.
The money is to pay for the cost of wind energy that will add $110,000,000,000.00 to our electrical bills.
Ontario is building 6736 Wind Turbines.
About 1800 turbines are built with about 4900 more to go. There are plans to accept more wind contracts in 2015.
Ontario, however, already has clean and excess electricity from water, nuclear and gas and doesn’t need energy from wind.
Ontario has the highest electricity rates in North America.
It was the Liberal’s decision for Ontario to pay more for wind energy than any other province/state in N. America.
Ontario is giving multi-billion-dollar subsidies to the multi-billion-dollar wind energy business.
Less than 3% of our electricity comes from wind, yet 50% of our bill pays for the Liberal wind energy costs.
Ontario hydro consumers pay for a hydro debt that was paid off in 2010.
The 10% clean energy rebate on your hydro bill is charged to Ontario tax payers.
Ontario is the only province/state that charges HST, delivery, and regulatory fees on electricity.
Your hydro rates will continue to increase every May and October to pay for wind energy.
In 2004, you paid 4.7 cents per kilowatt hour.
Today you pay 15-23 cents per kilowatt hour. Check your hydro bill; divide the total (including HST) by your usage.
Compare our rates to: 4.8 cents in Montreal, 5.45 cents in Chicago and 8.12 cents in Detroit.
Monthly Usage Cost Comparison
1699 kw hours will cost in Ontario, $210; Montreal, $82; Chicago, $93; Detroit, $138.
288 kw hours will cost in Ontario, $ 79; Montreal, $14; Chicago, $16; Detroit, $24.
(The less hydro you use, the higher the percentage of delivery & regulatory charges; resulting in a higher rate per kw hour.)
Manufacturing is leaving Ontario and new manufacturing is not coming.
Key reasons include expensive electricity and limited opportunities.
To name a few: Caterpiller (2 plants), United Steel. Heinz, Bicks, International Trucking,
General Motors, Navistar, Kellogg’s, John Deer, Lance Bakeries, Kraft Foods, GE Electromotive Plant.
Large manufacturers are seeing their hydro costs increasing by $3-10 million a year.
NOVA Chemicals says the cost of power is critical in its decision to locate a multi-billion-dollar polyethylene expansion in Sarnia Ontario.
Their alternative is the U.S. Gulf Coast where hydro rates are a fraction our rates.
Ontario’s economy is shrinking and electricity use has decreased by 6% since 2006.
Almost 1 million Ontarian’s are out of work.
For 8 years, Ontario has had one of the highest unemployment rates in Canada.
Ontario is now the have-not province of Canada with a debt of $227 billion.
Gone are the days of beautiful Ontario….
Wind projects can be built anywhere in Ontario.
Wind projects are approved by the Ontario Government without consent from the affected municipalities or people.
Many Ontario laws or regulations do not apply to Wind Companies: municipal bylaws, building permits, road weight restrictions, drainage, protection of wetlands; migratory paths; death or harm to endangered species.
Wind companies simply obtain exemptions from any law that impedes their projects.
Wind turbines towering as high as 60 storeys, are intrusive and will affect over 4800 sq. miles in Ontario.
Every Great Lakes coastline will have 1,000-2,000 wind turbines.
Tourism is diminishing, rural property values are decreasing; livestock, endangered species, wildlife and fowl are being negatively affected.
Ontario Wind Turbines are built closer to humans than any place in the world; people are suffering from wind turbine syndrome which can be life threatening.
People don’t want to live near these turbines and are abandoning their homes without recourse.
Areas in rural Ontario are becoming ghost towns.
In the Niagara area, turbines that were built too close to residents, are violating the law and need to be dismantled.
As of March, 2014, the Liberals have been attempting to give the wind company a pass over the residents and the law.
http://www.niagarathisweek.com/news-story/4390620-enforce-the-law-hudak-to-energy-minister
The Liberal & NDP support our wind energy policy even though it is convoluted and wastes our money.
- Nuclear, hydro, & gas is cheap, reliable, clean energy but, wind has priority.
- At 3-4 times the price, wind energy is too expensive, unreliable, available only about 20-30% of the time (sometimes as low as 10%).
- Wind needs backup energy. For every kilowatt of wind power, we need one kilowatt of backup energy fuel, that could otherwise be our initial source.
- Ontario has so much electricity that we pay the USA & Quebec to take it off our hands or, when permitting, charge them 2.5 cents per kw hour. In 2013 alone, the loss was $1 billion which will cost your household an additional $250.
- Quebec turns around and sells our hydro at cheap rates (5 cents per kw hour) to the New England states and makes a substantial profit.
- Ontario is spending $11 billion building transmission lines to feed energy from wind turbines. That’s an additional $2750 cost to your household.
- Beginning in 2007, Ontario installed smart meters at cost of $700 per household. As of February, 2104, there are discussions to replace these meters at another $700 per household.
- When there is too much electricity, Ontario pays $1 million dollars a day to take a nuclear plant off-line ($66 million in 2013); diverts the water at Niagara Falls and pays wind companies to shut down their turbines.
- Ontario pays gas plants to run continually in backup mode for wind energy.
- According to the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers,
Carbon Dioxide Emissions will increase by 48% in 2030, because gas plants starting up and shutting down on a continuous basis expels significantly more emissions into the atmosphere than if they ran continually. - The first weekend in August, Ontario lost $10 million because of the highly windy days resulting in unexpected energy to the grid. The same situation occurred on November 9 & 10, where Ontario lost another $20 million. These losses are charged back to Ontario hydro consumers.
- Effective September 11, 2013, Ontario agreed to pay Wind Energy companies $200,000 per MW NOT to supply their wind energy to the grid, because it’s “cheaper” than paying the USA & Quebec to use it. Since then, the Liberals continue to approve new wind farm projects on a weekly basis.
- The plan to build two new nuclear reactors at Darlington was abruptly cancelled by the Liberals in October 2013 at a cost of $180 million. This will be charged back to the Ontario hydro consumer.
- The $1.1 billion cancellation of 2 gas plants by the Liberals will cost your household an additional $250.
- Because wind is so unreliable and unpredictable, the staff at the IESO, must continually manipulate the grid on an hourly basis, by shutting down, or starting up, the nuclear, gas or hydro plants or sending the excess off to the states.
- These constant changes to the grid are prone to error and Ontario’s grid wasn’t built to handle such.
- Experts say that we better be prepared for frequent and long blackouts or worse, as in complete failure of our energy grid resulting in a devastating blackout.
Truth is stranger than fiction
Ontario pays Quebec to take our excess electricity.
Quebec sells it to bordering States at dirt cheap rates.
These states attract manufacturing because of cheap electricity.
Therefore:
Manufacturers can move to the border States to get cheap electricity that is sourced from Ontario.
New York State clearly sees opportunity.
In March 2014 promotional information was sent to Ontario’s Manufacturing sector citing Ontario’s high energy costs as a main reason to relocate to New York State.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/soaring-energy-prices-making-ontario-look-dim-for-manuf…
Does this make sense to you??
The Liberals & NDP’s give way to the resident wind energy lobbyists at Queens Park regardless of the impact on Ontario.
This has been going on for years. In 2004, the Liberals awarded Mike Crawley, the (then) Ontario President for the Liberals, a wind energy contract that guarantees his company $66,000 a day for a total of $1/2 Billion dollars.
The Wind Industry held a fundraising event for Kathleen Wynne in April 2013.
Another lobbyist fundraiser was held in March 2014 that raised $5 million.
Those who promote Wind Energy, such as the Liberals, NDP, David Suzuki, Greenpeace, Pembina Institute, Environmental Defence, Friends of the Wind and CANWEA are supported by Wind Energy companies and benefit financially from these companies.
Ten minutes of research on the Internet will tell you that wind turbines are nothing more than big money for billion dollar companies, big money for environmentalists and big money for politicians with many disadvantages to the Ontario people.
Question: Can these Wind Projects be Stopped?
The answer is: Yes
The Liberals have the discretionary power to cancel or modify these contracts but their actions make it clear they don’t want to.
An Ontario court ruling in the decision of Trillium vs. Ontario, 2013, clearly states that:
“Governments are free to alter policies in the public interest.”
“Companies in the renewable power business participate in government subsidy programs ‘at their own risk’.”
The Liberals refuse to acknowledge this ruling.
The NDP’s are supporting the Liberals.
The PC’s want them stopped.
As of March 2014, Ontario has 55 incomplete wind power projects (consisting of approximately 4900 turbines) that could be stopped legally.
If the Liberals allow them to be completed (which they intend to do) the cost to Ontario will be:
An additional $22 billion ($5500 cost to your household);
More intrusion on our countryside and our people.
Wolfe Island (Kingston) BEFORE
Wolfe Island (Kingston) AFTER
Teaching Your Kids to Think for Themselves….
Climate Lessons
A blog sharing information about materials presented to children on climate, highlighting those intended to frighten or mislead, and those which seek to inform and inspire rather than to recruit, even the very young, for an ill-founded political campaign around the threat of CAGW. A campaign which is irresponsible, destructive, divisive, and degrading.
“I suspect that many people feel , as I do, that the climate zealots would be a lot more persuasive if they were a little more modest. It is precisely their angry, bullying, majoritarian intolerance which makes me suspect that they are rather nervous about their beliefs. Their recent utterly unscientific claims that typhoons, hurricanes and wet winters are evidence of general climate change are even more inclined to make me think they are more interested in shouting people down, and stirring the mob, than they are in argument. “
Peter Hitchens http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/04/beware-of-the-green-rapture-it-may-not-happen-.html
Climate-Anxious Children – can parents, and caring teachers, help correct the harm done by climate alarm materials?
How Not to Teach Climate Change ‘Collectively, anxiety conditions are the most common mental disorders in children. Moreover, they often persist throughout life, causing significant distress and interfering significantly with social life and achievement both during the child’s formative years and later in adulthood. ‘
The quote is from a mental health researcher, Kathy Griffiths
There is considerable evidence that many children suffer from anxiety about climate change. The plausibility of that seems obvious given the dreadful materials, in books , websites, and curricula aimed at children, and in some cases aimed at scaring them into being political activists.
Who will help children cope with climate alarmism, and help protect them from those who, wittingly or otherwise, are acting as recruiting sergeants?
The best candidates are surely their parents, aided whenever possible by sympathetic teachers.
The pioneering book Facts, Not Fear by Sanera and Shaw, shows how easy it is to de-fuse so many eco-alarms, not just the climate one. Their approach is simply one of helping children see the bigger picture, and not the narrow-minded, highly-selective view pushed at them by propagandists.
I stumbled across an illustration of this today, on the blog of a teacher in London. His post is entitled
Here is an extract from it (I have added the emboldening):
‘Last week I substitute-taught a Year 5 class that was learning about climate change. One of our pre-planned activities was to continue making posters about “good gases and bad gases”. I immediately noted that every student had slapped carbon dioxide (CO2) in the “bad gas” column.
I quizzed the class, and discovered that they had been taught the following line of thinking.
- Carbon dioxide is a harmful and poisonous gas.
- Nearly all daily human activity – turning on lights, jumping in a car, using an electrical device etc. – creates carbon dioxide.
They had no idea of the following:Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a natural constituent of the atmosphere… Carbon dioxide is by far the most important (organic compound) for the sustainability of the biosphere (the whole of life on Earth).Without CO2 the life of photosynthetic organisms and animals would be impossible, given that CO2 provides the basis for the synthesis of organic compounds that provide nutrients for plants and animals. Biology Cabinet Just think about that for a second.Imagine you’re a naive child, and your teacher tells you that your every daily action creates poisonous gases that destroy the planet. I was shocked, and quickly set the record straight by informing them that CO2 is actually essential for life on earth; it feeds plants, and it is a crucial ingredient in their, and in every other living creature’s, bodies. I added that scientists think it may be warming up our planet, but they’re still not 100% sure.* These facts came much to their surprise and relief. ‘[Hat-tip: it was from his post that I obtained the link to the mental healthcare quote which I used earlier]
What to do about it?
See how easy it was! Here is a man who has compassion for the children, and enough knowledge to realise very quickly what a dangerously limited view they have of CO2. A few simple facts seem to have helped dispel at least some of their fear. Well done that man!
This is one of the kinds of intervention suggested by Sanera and Shaw, and it seems to me that it could be accomplished by parents as well. But first, those parents need to get themselves reasonably well-informed. They will need to look beyond biased-outlets such as the BBC or most of the rest of the mass media, such as the UK’s Guardian or Independent newspapers.
A discussion-group that met regularly could invite expert speakers, and do online research to gather scientific results and informed opinions on any issue. Has your child been told that a polar bear will die unless you switch off your lights and stop using the car so often? It won’t take long to discover that the bears are doing quite well, and that nothing extraordinary has been happening to Arctic sea ice, which has long been known to be highly variable. Or that rising seas will swamp their coastal cities? A quick check should show that there has been no great acceleration of the slow rise in sea levels which has been going on long before our CO2 could have had an impact, and that the plausible projected levels this century will readily be coped with. It is not hard, but some persistence is required to sift through the torrents of alarmist-conformism that will be encountered.
More proof of harm from wind turbines!
WIND FARMS AND HEALTH
According to the World Health Organisation’s recent report, ‘Night Noise Guidelines for Europe’ [1], environmental noise is emerging as one of the major public health concerns of the twenty-first century. It observes that, “Many people have to adapt their lives to cope with the noise at night,” and the young and the old are particularly vulnerable.
This is because hearing in young people is more acute and, in older people, a loss of hearing of higher sound frequencies renders them more susceptible to the effects of low frequency noise. It is a particularly troublesome feature of the noise generated by wind turbines due to its impulsive, intrusive and incessant nature.
A recent case-control study conducted around two wind farms in New England has shown [2] that subjects living within 1.4 km of an IWT had worse sleep, were sleepier during the day, and had poorer SF36 Mental Component Scores compared to those living further than 1.4 km away. The study demonstrated a strongly significant association between reported sleep disturbance and ill health in those residing close to industrial wind turbines.
The major adverse health effects caused seem to be due to sleep disturbance and deprivation with the main culprits identified as loud noise in the auditory range, and low frequency noise, particularly infrasound. This is inaudible in the conventional sense, and is propagated over large distances and penetrates the fabric of dwellings, where it may be amplified. It is a particular problem at night, in the quiet rural settings most favoured for wind farms, because infrasound persists long after the higher frequencies have been dissipated.
Sleep is a physiological necessity and the sleep-deprived are vulnerable to a variety of health problems [2,3]. particularly Cardiovascular Disease in which nocturnal noise is an important factor [4]. Sleep deprivation in children is associated with increased bodyweight [3,5], which is known to ‘track’ into later life, and predisposes to adult disease. That is why “Encouraging more sleep” is a sensible target in the Public health Agency’s current campaign to prevent obesity in children. It also causes memory impairment because memories are normally reinforced in the later, Rapid Eye Movement, phase of sleep; again, it is the young and the old who are most affected. Sleep deprivation is associated with an increased likelihood of developing a range of chronic diseases including Type II Diabetes, cancer (eg breast with shift work [6]), Coronary Heart Disease [7,8] and Heart Failure [9]. Although the quality of the data are mixed, those on Heart Failure reported recently from the HUNT Study [9] are quite robust as they are based on 54,279 Norwegians free of disease at baseline (men and women aged 20-89 years). A total of 1412 cases of Heart Failure developed over a mean follow-up of 11.3 years. A dose-dependent relationship was observed between the risk of disease and the number of reported insomnia symptoms: i) Difficulty in initiating sleep; ii) Difficulty in maintaining sleep; and, iii) Lack of restorative sleep. The Hazard Ratios were ‘0’ for none of these; ‘0.96’ for one; ‘1.35’ for two; and, ‘4.53’ for three; this achieved significance at the 2% level. This means that such a result could occur once by chance if the study were to be repeated 50 times, Significance is conventionally accepted at the 5% level.
Another important, recent study is MORGEN which followed nearly 18,000 Dutch men and women, free of Cardiovascular Disease at baseline, over 10-14 years [8]. In this period there were 607 events: fatal CVD, non-fatal Myocardial Infarction and Stroke. Adequate sleep, defined as at least seven hours, was a protective factor which augmented the benefits conferred by the absence of four traditional cardiovascular risk factors. For example, the benefit of adequate sleep equalled the protective contribution of not smoking cigarettes. Given that cigarette smoking is such a potent risk factor for Cardiovascular Disease, this result is striking. The findings built on earlier ones from the MORGEN study [7]. It seems that adequate sleep is important in protecting against a range of Cardiovascular Diseases which result when arteries of different sizes are compromised: large (coronary, cerebral) arteries in heart attacks and stroke, small arteries (arterioles) in heart failure.
All of these studies share the weakness that they are ‘observational’ as opposed to ‘experimental’ and, as such, their results do not constitute ‘proof.’ We now have the evidence of an experimental study carried out in human volunteers which shows that the expression of a large range of genes is affected by sleep deprivation of fairly short duration [10]. This might be the key to understanding why the health effects of sleep deprivation are so diverse. It could also shed light on the ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome,’ a cluster of symptoms which include sleep disturbance, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, nausea, changes in mood and inability to concentrate [11]. In this condition infrasound is a likely causal agent.
This group has now shown in another small intervention study that mistimed sleep desynchronized from the central circadian clock has a much larger effect on the circadian regulation of the human transcriptome (i.e., a reduction in the number of circadian transcripts from 6.4% to 1% and changes in the overall time course of expression of 34% of transcripts) [12]. This may elucidate the reasons for the large excess of cardiovascular events associated with shift work found in a meta-analysis of over 2 million subjects in 34 studies [13]. The results demonstrate that any interference in normal sleeping patterns is inimical to cardiovascular health.
The old admonition that ‘What you can’t hear won’t harm you,’ sadly isn’t true. It is now known that organ of Corti in the cochlea (inner ear) contains two types of sensory cells: one row of inner hair cells which are responsible for hearing; and, three rows of outer hair cells which are more responsive to low frequency sound [14]. The infrasound produced by wind turbines is transduced by the outer hair cells and transmitted to the brain by Type II afferent fibres. The purpose is unclear as it results in sleep disturbance. Perhaps it served some vital function in our evolutionary past which has persisted to our detriment today? In fact, many animals use infrasound for communication and navigation. This could well have a genetic basis as it is only a minority, albeit a sizable one, which is affected. This may well be the group which is also liable to travel sickness. Schomer et al have now advanced the theory that as wind turbines increase in size they increasingly emit infrasound with a frequency below 1Hz (CPS) [15]. Below this frequency the otoliths in the inner ear respond in an exaggerated way in a susceptible minority who will suffer symptoms of the Wind Farm Syndrome. Previously it was thought that the brain was only under the control of electrical and biochemical stimuli but there is new evidence that it is sensitive, in addition, to mechanical stimuli [16].
The problem of infrasound and low frequency noise was well-recognised in a report by Casella Stanger [17], commissioned by DEFRA in 2001, and since ignored: “For people inside buildings with windows closed, this effect is exacerbated by the sound insulation properties of the building envelope. Again mid and high frequencies are attenuated to a much greater extent than low frequencies.” It continued: “As the A-weighting network attenuates low frequencies by a large amount, any measurements made of the noise should be with the instrumentation set to linear.” It drew heavily upon the DOE’s Batho Report of 1990 [18]. In fact, these problems had already been elucidated and the measurement issues addressed in a trio of papers by Kelley (et al) in the 1980s [19-21]. This research again has been ignored or forgotten so the problem continues to be seriously underestimated. When measured using a tool which can detect it, levels of infrasound and low frequency noise are disturbingly high, with ‘sound pressure levels’ greater than previously thought possible [22].
There are a number of other adverse effects associated with sleep deprivation. Tired individuals are more likely to have road traffic accidents and injure themselves while operating machinery. In addition, wind turbines can, and do, cause accidents by collapsing, blade snap, ice throw, and even going on fire. They induce stress and psychological disorder from blade flicker, which also has implications for certain types of epilepsy and autism. Even the current planning process, with its virtual absence of consultation, is stress inducing, as is the confrontation between land owners, who wish to profit from erecting turbines, and their neighbours who dread the effects. Finally, wind turbines considerably reduce the value of dwellings nearby and this has a negative long term effect on their owners’ and their families’ health [23]. On top of this, increasing numbers of families will be driven into fuel poverty by spiralling electricity costs which are subsidising wind energy. It is galling that SSE’s current, seductive advertising campaign is being supported from these sources.
‘Wind Turbine Noise’ was reviewed in an editorial in the British Medical Journal in 2012 [24]. The authors concluded that “A large body of evidence now exists to suggest that wind turbines disturb sleep and impair health at distances and noise levels that are permitted in most jurisdictions.” This remains the case today. The Public Health Agency has dismissed this editorial as falling short of a ‘systematic review,’ which is fair enough, given the constraints of the format, yet ignores at least one, excellent, recent systematic review [23]. Interestingly, that review records the fact that in 1978 the British Government was found guilty in a case taken to Europe by the Irish Government of applying five techniques, including subjection to noise and deprivation of sleep. These were used in Ulster to ‘encourage’ admissions and to elicit information from prisoners and detainees. They amounted to humiliating and degrading treatment, ie torture [23].
The Public Health Agencies in the UK are now relying on a document published in April 2013 [25]. It was written by a group of acousticians at the University of Salford, which begs the question as to why such a group was selected to give advice on health issues. Since acousticians derive a significant proportion of their income from the wind industry, their scientific objectivity might be open to question. Similarly, if a profession, which worked closely with the tobacco industry, was asked to report on health, questions would be asked.
The wind industry has at times acted in a way that is reminiscent of the tobacco industry in the past. Recently a Vestas Powerpoint presentation from 2004 has surfaced [26] demonstrating that Vestas knew a decade ago that safer buffers were required to protect neighbours from wind turbine noise. They knew their pre-construction noise models were inaccurate and that “we know that noise from wind turbines sometimes annoys people even if the noise is below noise limits.” Some of this is due to the methods they use to measure noise. Presenting mean amplitude data means that 50% of the peak noise is disguised. In 2011 the CEO of Vestas wrote [27] to the Danish Minister of Environment admitting that it was not technically possible to produce wind turbines which produced less noise. Simiarly, we are repeatedly told that modern turbines are quieter and produce less ILFN which in reality is the reverse of the case [28].
The Salford Report concludes that there is “some evidence for sleep disturbance which has found fairly wide, though not universal, acceptance.” The increasing weight of evidence of sleep deprivation’s association with several chronic diseases is totally ignored. The authors of the report are at pains to deny any ‘direct’ health effects. In terms of prevention any differentiation between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ is irrelevant: the introduction of iodine supplementation in milking cattle to improve their “reproductive performance” during the 1960s indirectly led to a reduction in endemic goitre in humans. This was thanks to the unforeseen spillover of iodine into milk and dairy products [29].
In 2008 the distinguished American acoustic engineers, George Kamperman, and Richard James posed the question [30], “What are the technical options for reducing wind turbine noise emission at residences?” They observed that there were only two options: i) Increase the distance between source and receiver; or, ii) Reduce the source sound power emission. It is generally accepted that as larger and larger wind turbines are built, the noise problems are aggravated [29]. They added [30] that neither solution is compatible with the objective of the wind farm developer to maximise the wind power electrical generation within the land available.
Although the associations between noise pollution and ill health can be argued against, and there are gaps in our knowledge, there is sufficient evidence to cause grave misgivings about its safety. Further research, supported by adequate funding, remains necessary. Good and caring Government should entailcting with greater caution when its policies could jeopardise the health and human rights of its people. It is essential that the Primum non nocere, or ‘Precautionary’, principle should be applied.
In conclusion, there are serious adverse health effects associated with noise pollution generated by wind turbines. It is essential that separation distances between human habitation and wind turbines are increased. There is an international consensus emerging for a separation distance of 2 km, indeed some countries are opting for 3 km. The current guideline on separation distance is based on ETSU-R-97 and is manifestly out of date. It is only relevant to the small turbines of that era. The vastly increased scale of today’s turbines means that the current recommendation on turbine separation is grossly inadequate.
References
[1] World Health Organisation. Night noise guidelines for Europe. Copenhagen. 2009.
[2] Nissenbaum MA, Aramini JJ, Hanning CD. Effects of industrial wind turbine noise on sleep and health. Noise & Health 2012;14: 237-43.
[3] Basner M, Babisch W, Davis A et al. Auditory and non-auditory effects of noise and health. Lancet 2013, dx.doi.org/10.1016
[4] Hume KI, Brink M, Basner M. Effects of environmental noise on sleep. Noise & Health 2013:IP 193.171.77.1
[5] Carter PJ, Taylor BJ, Williams SM, Taylor RW. Longitudinal analysis of sleep in relation to BMI and body fat in children: the FLAME study. BMJ 2011;342:d2712
[6] Chung SA, Wolf TK, Shapiro CM. Sleep and health consequences of shift work in women. J Women’s Health 2009;18:965-77.
[7] Hoevenaar-Blom MP, Annemieke MW, Spijkerman AMW, Kromhout D, van den Berg JF, Verschuren WMM. Sleep Duration and Sleep Quality in Relation to 12-Year Cardiovascular Disease Incidence: The MORGEN Study. SLEEP 2011;34:1487-92.
[8] Hoevenaar-Blom MP, Annemieke MW, Spijkerman AMW, Kromhout D, Verschuren WMM. Sufficient sleep duration contributes to lower cardiovascular disease risk in addition to four traditional lifestyle factors: the MORGEN study. Eur J Prevent Cardiol 2013; doi: 10.1177/2047487313493057.
[9] Laugsand LE, Strand LB, Platou C, Vatten LJ, Janszky I. Insomnia and the risk of incident heart failure: a population study. Eur Heart J 2013 doi:10.1093/eurheartj/eht019.
[10] Möller-Levet CS, Archer SN, Bucca G, et al. Effects of insufficient sleep on circadian rhythmicity and expression amplitude of the human blood transcriptome. PNAS 2013; doi/10.1073/pnas.1217154110.
[11] Pierpont N. Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment. K Selected Publications, Santa Fe, New Mexico 2009.
[12] Archer NA, Laing EE, Möller-Levet CS et al. Mistimed sleep disrupts circadian regulation of the human transcriptome. PNAS 2014;http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1316335111
[13] Vyas MV, Garg AX, Iansavichus AV et al. Shift work and vascular events: systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ 2012;345:e4800 doi.
[14] Salt AN, Lichtenhan JT. Responses of the inner ear to infrasound. IVth International Meeting on Wind Turbine Noise, Rome, Italy April 2011.
[15] Schomer PD, Edreich J, Boyle J, Pamidighantam P. A proposed theory to explain some adverse physiological effects of the infrasonic emissions at some wind farm sites. 5th International Conference on Wind Turbine Noise Denver 28-30 August 2013
[16] Ananthaswamy A. Like clockwork. New Scientist, 31st August 2013 Pp 32-5.
[17] Casella Stanger. Report on Low Frequency Noise Technical Research Support for DEFRA Noise Programme (on behalf of DEFRA, Department of the Environment, Northern Ireland, Scottish Executive, National Assembly for Wales). 2001.
[18] Noise Review Working Party Report (Batho WJS, Chair). HMSO, London 1990.
[19] Kelley ND, Hemphill RR, Mckenna HE. A methodology for assessment of wind turbine noise generation. Trans ASME 1982;104:112-20.
[20] Kelley ND, McKenna HE, Hemphill RR, Etter CI, Garrelts RI, Linn NC. Acoustic noise associated with the MOD .. 1 wind turbine: its source, impact, and control. Solar Energy Research Institute, A Division of Midwest Research Institute, 1617 Cole Boulevard, Golden, Colorado USA. February 1985
[21] Kelley ND. A proposed metric for assessing the potential of community annoyance from wind turbine low-frequency noise emissions. Presented at the Windpower ’87 Conference and Exposition San Francisco, California, October 5-8, 1987. Solar Energy Research Institute. A Division of Midwest Research Institute 1617 Cole Boulevard Golden, Colorado USA, November 1987
[22] Bray W, James R. Dynamic measurements of wind turbine acoustic signals, employing sound quality engineering methods considering the time and frequency sensitivities of human perception. Proceedings of Noise-Con; 2011, July 25-7;Portland, Oregon.
[23] Frey BJ, Hadden PJ. Wind turbines and proximity to homes: the impact of wind turbine noise on health (a review of the literature & discussion of the issues). January 2012. http://www.windturbinesyndrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Frey_Hadden_WT_noise_health_01Jan2012.pdf
[24] Hanning CD, Evans A. Wind Turbine Noise. BMJ 2012: 344 e 1527
[25] von Hünerbein S, Moorhouse A, Fiumicelli D, Baguley D. Report on health impacts of wind turbines (Prepared for Scottish Government by Acoustics Research Centre, University of Salford), 10th April 2013.
[26] http://aefweb.info/data/AUSWEA-2004conference.pdf
[27] See attachment to covering email message.
[28] Møller H, Pedersen CS. Low-frequency noise from large wind turbines. J Acoust Soc Am 2011;129:3727-44.
[29] Phillips DJW. Iodine, milk, and the elimination of epidemic goitre in Britain: the story of an accidental public health triumph. JECH 1997;51:391-3.
[30] Kamperman GW, James R. The “How To” guide to siting wind turbines to prevent health risks from sound (P 8):http://www.windturbinesyndrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/kamperman-james-8-26-08-report-43-pp.pdf
Download original document: “Wind farms and health”
Climate fear mongering…..the Renewables sales gimmick!
Scaring the World about its Climate
By Alan Caruba
Ever since the creation in 1988 of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it has engaged in the greatest hoax of modern times, releasing reports that predict climate-related catastrophes as if the climate has not been a completely natural and dynamic producer of events that affect our lives.
The IPCC was set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program. It has enlisted thousands of scientists to contribute to its scare campaign, but as Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, noted in a recent Forbesarticle regarding the vast difference in the assertions of the IPCC scientists and those of its puckishly named Nonintergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), “What is a non-scientist to make of these dueling reports? Indeed, what is a scientist to make of this?”
“Very few scientists are familiar with biology, geology, physics, oceanography, engineering, medicine, economics, and scores of other more specialized disciplines that were the basis of the claims…” The IPCC has depended on the ignorance of those scientists outside their particular disciplines and recruited them to be involved in the UN hoax. The rest of us look to them to provide guidance regarding issues involving the climate and, as a result, have been deliberately deceived.
The NIPCC, anticipating the latest IPCC addition to its climate scare campaign, has just issued a new addition to its“Climate Change Reconsidered” reports. The first volume was 850 pages long and the latest is more than 1,000 pages. It represents the findings of scores of scientists from around the world and thousands of peer-reviewed studies. At this point they represent some twenty nations.
I have been an advisor to The Heartland Institute for many years and have been exposing the climate change lies since the late 1980s. A science writer, I have benefited from the work of men like atmospheric physicist, S. Fred Singer, a founder of the NPCC who has overseen five reports debunking the IPCC since 2003.
The Heartland Institute has sponsored nine international conferences that have brought together many scientists and others in an effort to debunk the UN’s climate scare campaign.
I have always depended on the common sense of people to understand that humans have nothing to do with the climate except to endure and enjoy it. We don’t create it or influence it.
The global warming campaign is based on the Big Lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps the Sun’s heat and warms the Earth, but the fairly miniscule amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (0.038%) does not do that in a fashion that poses any threat. Indeed, it is the Sun that determines the Earth’s climate, depending where you happen to be on the Earth. Next to oxygen, CO2 is vital to all life on Earth as it is the “food” on which all vegetation depends. More CO2 is good. Less is not so good.
The IPCC has depended in part on the print and broadcast media to spread its Big Lie. It also depends on world leaders, few of whom have any background or serious knowledge of atmospheric science, to impose policies based on the Big Lie. These policies target the use of “fossil fuels”, oil, coal and natural gas, urging a reduction of their use. The world, however, utterly depends on them and, in addition to existing reserves, new reserves are found every year.
One reason the IPCC has been in a growing state of panic is a new, completely natural cooling cycle based on a reduction of solar radiation. As James M. Taylor, the managing editor of Heartland’s“Environment & Climate News”, pointed out recently, “Winter temperatures in the contiguous United States declined by more than a full degree Celsius (more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit) during the past twenty years.” He was citing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. “The data contradicts assertions that human induced global warming is causing a rise in winter temperatures.”
In addition to the recent extremely cold winter, there have been others in 2000-2001 and 2009-2010. There will be more.
The IPCC report is full of claims about global warming, now called “climate change” since the world is obviously not warming. In March, Taylor rebutted an IPCC claim that crop production is falling, noting that global corn, rice, and wheat production have more than tripled since 1970. In recent years, the U.S. has set records for alfalfa, cotton, beans, sugar beets, canola, corn, flaxseed, hops, rice, sorghum, soybeans, sugarcane, sunflowers, peanuts, and wheat, to name just a few.
The Earth would benefit from more, not less, CO2 emissions, but the Obama administration has been engaged in imposing hundreds of new regulations aimed at reductions. It targets the development and expansion of our energy sector. The President has repeated the lies in his State of the Union speeches and we have a Secretary of State, John Kerry, who insists that climate change is the greatest threat to mankind and not the increase of nuclear weapons.
Every one of the Earth’s seven billion population are being subjected to the UN’s campaign of lies and every one of us needs to do whatever we can to bring about an end to the United Nations and reject the IPCC’s claims.
© Alan Caruba, 2014POSTED BY ALAN CARUBA
ALAN CARUBAI am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, “Warning Signs”, is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE
Wind Pushers in Australia are worried about their “cash cow”!
Kill the subsidies and the wind industry dies
Alexander Chancellor: it’s the end of the gravy train that did them in.
In recent weeks the greentard blogs have been overcome with grief as they moan about the almost inevitable consequences of the Coalition’s RET review, the future of the CEFC and now the ARENA fund – yet another taxpayer backed renewable slush fund that faces the chop.
Their wailing and gnashing of teeth undermines their specious little argument that the costs of wind power production has plummeted to such an extent that it’s now economically competitive with conventional generation sources. Were that case – and, of course, it never will be – then why is the wind industry and its parasites so terrified of the RET review?
Could it be because in the absence of the mandatory Renewable Energy Target – currently 41,000 GW/h by 2020 – backed up by the fine imposed on retailers under the RET legislation (the “shortfall charge” of $65 per MW/h for each MW the retailer falls short of the mandatory target) – there simply is no market for electricity delivered at crazy, random intervals and at four times the cost of conventional power? For detail on how the RET and the shortfall charge work – see our post here.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Chief Economist, Burchell Wilson described the RET as Corporate welfare on a massive scale.
Scrap the RET and Australia will never see another fan erected beyond the handful being slung up now.
The story’s the same the world over – with what is euphemistically called “regulatory uncertainty” bringing the wind industry to a grinding halt.
Here’s The Spectator on the beginning of the end in Britain.
Local protests don’t stop windfarms. Subsidy cuts do.
The Spectator
Alexander Chancellor
8 February 2014
Here in the valley of the River Tove in south Northamptonshire my chickens are laying copiously, my ducks are quacking loudly, and my Jack Russell, Polly, is yapping gaily in celebration of a great victory: the Spanish energy company, which for more than three years has been threatening to desecrate this pleasant bit of countryside with a line of eight giant wind turbines, each taller than Big Ben, has suddenly said it is abandoning the plan after deciding that it is not feasible. The company, Gamesa, belatedly revealed that it would not after all be seeking planning permission for this wind farm in a curt and otherwise uninformative little letter to the Conservative Member of Parliament for South Northamptonshire, Andrea Leadsom, who has gallantly championed the cause of the local community that has been campaigning vigorously against it.
I can’t tell you what a relief this is, not only for the bats whose little lungs will be saved from bursting under the air pressure caused by wind turbines, nor for the horses at Towcester racecourse who will be spared the fear and confusion provoked by the ‘shadow flicker’ of their rotating blades, but also for the many human residents of the valley, including me, whose homes were expected to fall in value by at least 30 per cent if the ‘Tove Renewable Energy Park’, so-called by its planners to suggest bucolic peace and ecological virtue, were to go ahead. We used to feel guilty about putting our own petty interests above those of entire populations fighting global warming; but now that we know that wind farms do nothing whatsoever to reduce carbon emissions (not a single fossil-fuel power station has been closed because of them), we don’t feel guilty any more. We feel, on the contrary, that we have been fighting in a just cause to preserve some of what’s left of the English countryside and of the environs of the listed buildings and monuments in which this otherwise unsung county abounds. There is no conservation body here that hasn’t opposed Gamesa’s plan.
Gamesa hasn’t disclosed its reasons for dropping the project. It would be nice to think that our local action group made a difference; that all those placards attached to trees saying ‘No wind farm here’ had their effect, that the ‘blimp’ (a kind of balloon) flying over Towcester racecourse to show people the extraordinary height of the proposed turbines made a great impression; but I rather doubt it. As Andrea Leadsom says on her website, ‘Gamesa do not elaborate on why they have decided this is not a feasible project but I hope that the recent reductions in government subsidies will have contributed to the decision.’
I expect that that was the main reason, because local opposition to wind farms has so far had a poor record of achieving anything. Even when local councils have rejected planning permission for them, their decisions have tended to be overruled by government inspectors on appeal. But the two recent reductions in government subsidies (paid for, incidentally, by hard-up electricity consumers to the further enrichment of already rich landowners) may well have given some energy companies second thoughts. The great Mrs Leadsom is no fan of the European Union, but she warmly supports the European Commission’s proposal to end all subsidies to wind farms on the grounds that the wind industry is now ‘mature’ and should be allowed to operate without taxpayers’ support.
The thing I don’t understand, however, is why energy companies threatening local communities with these frightful impositions are allowed to keep them in suspense for years on end. Here in the Tove Valley we have spent thousands of pounds and held countless unhappy meetings in anticipation of a decision by Gamesa that it has spent years refusing to reveal. Should it not have been obliged to declare its intentions at a somewhat earlier stage? Yes; but we have been luckier than others, such as the people around the village of Helmdon, a few miles north of here, whose hated wind farm proposal has been granted, rejected, and then reopened again, with a final decision now resting in the hands of Eric Pickles, the portly Local Government Secretary.
He is expected to decide in May, and may he decide rightly. For his decision will be an important factor in determining whether Northamptonshire, despite being less windy than any other English county, but because of its lack of ‘national parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, green belts or airport exclusion zones, which would get in the way of turbines 125 metres high’ (I quote the CPRE), will remain ‘the wind farm capital of England’ (the CPRE again). It is completely ridiculous that it should be so.
The Spectator
One year anniversary of CAW/UNIFOR turbine
Editor:
We are approaching a dark anniversary of what I believe to a very bad and hurtful declaration pushed into our community by the combined forces of UNIFOR (CAW) and our own provincial government.
8,760 hours (one year) of suffering by members of this community should be considered a serious crime. The evidence is clear and precise. Industrial wind turbines project two levels of noise that effect certain people in a most horrid way. Currently, about 1,800 turbines are built and another 4,900 are planned to eventually total 6,736 turbines ruining rural Ontario. Within two weeks of the CAW turbine starting, 16 complaints had been made and that number kept increasing throughout the summer. If you used just 16 complaints for one turbine and multiply by 6,736 projected turbines, 108,000 Ontario citizens are and will become sick. The reality of actual facts makes this estimate very low.
When you know that Ontario produces more power than needed and the government has no intention of altering future turbine developments, you have to wonder where common sense disappeared to. Cronyism is thriving. One of the first companies to reap the windfall from turbine subsidies is now the president of the Liberal Party of Canada. This may partially explain why the CAW turbine, with no setback distance, was allowed to proceed despite the government’s own 550 m setback rule.
Ontario is finally realizing that the absorbability of money involved to prop this industry up is causing electrical rates to race to new highs. More and more people are caught in this nasty web of government chicanery as they cope with staying warm (not eating) or eating (staying cold). Now we are seeing good citizens donating money to help the poor stay warm. Despite Ontario’s electrical grid having confirmed each day who will supply electricity (nuclear, gas, hydro electric, etc.), they never know if turbines will contribute.
When the wind does blow, turbine produced electricity automatically jumps to the head of the already confirmed power producers. That is why millions of our tax dollars disappear each year. The excess power is being sold at a loss to northern states and Quebec. Isn’t it ironic that New York State is running TV ads telling potential investors that they won’t pay taxes for ten years. Let us celebrate our boundless good will knowing that our tax dollars will undoubtedly take more industry out of Ontario into New York.
Add insult to injury by knowing that less than 3 per cent of our electricity comes from wind, yet 50 per cent of our bill pays for the “McGuilty”/Wynne wind policy. Here is one last punch. In 2004, a kilowatt cost us 4.7 cents. Today we are paying 15 to 22 cents for the same unit of power. This bunch of Liberal impostors has sullied a long held Liberal belief that fiscal responsibility along with change and progress are fundamental.
It is difficult to decide who is the biggest hypocrite in our situation. Under section Solidarity (UNIFOR), their vision states that “the union is shaped by how we treat and care for each other.” Really? On the other hand, Liberal Bill 14 Anti Bullying Act of 2012, subsection 170 states that the legislation “provide instruction on anti bullying prevention.” Really? Do as I say, not as I do.
Council is seriously considering joining a coalition of Ontario communities who are prepared to challenge the ‘noise’ level coming from turbines. Bravo to you. This appears to be a viable step to exercise their rights under the Municipal Act. Sadly two members of our community are moving to another location within the town. Even though their present location has not sold, their suffering dictates this move. Try and imagine being in this tragic scenario.
The bottom line… people are hurting because of a government induced program that has minimal returns but a very high cost to us. I believe CAW/UNIFOR obviously agrees with this program because the turbine is on. I’ve asked MP Ben Lobb why the Green Energy Act is allowed to trump the Charter of Rights and Freedom. This is provincial legislation denying arguably the most important Federal legislation in Canada’s history.
The fight for these victims continues. Get involved. There is always strength in numbers and these people just want to live in peace. A reminder that some of our community members are employed at the Education Centre and they hold no responsibility for bringing this turbine into our back yard. Encourage our Council to join this coalition. It is a light to what has been a very dark tunnel for thousands of Ontario turbine victims.
Wayne McGrath
Port Elgin
The Faux-Green Push for unreliable, unaffordable, renewables
5 Ways Environmentalism Harms the Environment
Friends of the Earth, Earthwatch, Environmental Defense Fund, Green Cross International, The Climate Project, World Resources Institute, WWF, and of course the inevitable Greenpeace.
These are just some of t
he environmental organizations that have for decades been pushing for – and in many cases outright lobbying for – ever more stringent environmental regulations to save the Earth and humanity from supposed catastrophe. Undoubtedly the majority of the people involved with these and other organizations are well-intentioned individuals that sincerely believe in their cause. That is not to say, however, that they are absolved from scrutiny as to the consequences of their (political) actions; you judge a tree by its fruits.
As it turns out, it can be quite convincingly argued that the very people and organizations purportedly fighting for protection of the environment are achieving much different outcomes, and one does not have to dig very deep at all to discover what those outcomes really are. As you read this, understand that this is not a ringing endorsement of a throw-away society, but rather an honest attempt at dissecting the arguments made for increasingly strict environmental policies and examining the results thereof.
1. Tilting the balance in favor of large corporations
“Green” regulations, like any and all forms of regulation, disproportionally hurt small and medium-sized businesses. After all, large (multinational) corporations have the financial resources and manpower that their smaller competitors lack to deal with the regulatory burden. As such each and every new law passed further threatens the very existence of mom-and-pop stores in your neighborhood. And unlike multinationals they don’t have the lobbying power to turn the regulatory tide, either. The result? Fewer local stores in your area, forcing you to drive farther away for your groceries. True, you will likely plan ahead to avoid having to go to the store every day, but that means you now need a car to transport all those groceries in. You might not have needed that car to begin with if you could just stop by your local grocer that’s now gone out of business.
2. Increasing pollution with “green” energy
Wind turbines don’t come falling from the sky. They require vast amounts of steel produced in steel mills and the fiber composite that make up the blades is manufactured in a chemical plant. Then there is the issue of rare earth metals (or rare earths), used in everything from electric car batteries to wind turbines to solar panels. Nearly all production today takes place in China, where both people and the environment suffer due to the hazardous and radioactive byproducts released in the process. Mines and processing plants are struggling to keep up with the demand artificially pushed up by governments in the form of tax incentives and massive subsidies.
3. Impoverishing people
Speaking of subsidies, one of the major recipients has been the “green jobs” industry. In an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, the argument is that specific policies would lead not only to a better environment, but also boost the economy through the creation of “good jobs”. Though the proponents of green jobs have yet to find agreement on what defines such a job, what has become clear is that the net effect on employment is actually negative. In the UK 3.7 jobs are lost for every green job while in Spain the ratio stands at 2.2 jobs lost per green job. Poof!
To make matters worse, prominent green jobs reports such as the UNEP report even go so far as to rail against high-productivity jobs lest they “pose the dual challenge of environmental impact and unemployment”[1]. Apparently the report’s authors are totally oblivious to the fact that increased productivity is what makes a society wealthier, and that the inefficient use of resources for the sake of “spreading the work” will inevitably make everyone poorer.
It goes without saying that poor people will naturally care less about the environment and more about where their next meal is going to come from. While rich people have the luxury of worrying about the environment, poor people do not. So the wealthier a society, the more likely it is to take good care of the environment.
4. Wasting resources mandating recycling
I know this is going to sound counterintuitive – as it did to me – but recycling does not always save energy or money. The latter makes sense considering the top-down approach that has dominated environmental initiatives; if there was any money in recycling, force would not have been necessary to bring it about. New York City’s recycling program, for instance, costs the taxpayer almost double what it would cost to just throw glass, metal, and plastic away.
Still, it would be one thing to spend all that taxpayer money on recycling if it actually saved resources. Unfortunately even that is not necessarily the case. Trees are planted and grown on tree farms specifically to make paper and as such do not contribute to deforestation. Other materials such as glass and aluminum can be effectively recycled, benefitting both the environment and the economy. However, businesses involved with the production of these materials have an inherent incentive to recycle anyway, so there is no need for regulatory requirements there.
5. Carbon taxes
Carbon taxes help funnel money into wind and solar power, which also come with environmental problems even in addition to the aforementioned. Solar thermal technology, for instance, consumes huge quantities of water – you know, the substance that is generally already lacking in areas where solar panels are the preferred “renewable energy” source (e.g. California, southern Spain).
Solar panel fields and wind farms are also very land-intensive, and wind farms negatively impact animals in the form of habitat loss and fragmentation. Besides, few people find wind turbines scattered over the countryside to be of benefit to the landscape. Some even suffer negative health effects that have been linked to living near a wind farm.
Finally, carbon taxes aggravate the aforementioned problems of favoring large over small businesses and impoverishing people.
Given these issues it would behoove environmentalists to consider the unintended consequences of their push for continued “climate action”, even aside from the debate over whether or not climate change is man-made to begin with. Having blind faith in politicians and special interest groups that try to greenwash their agenda to appeal to your sense of justice may not be the best strategy if you really care about the environment.
[1] Green Jobs: Towards decent work in a sustainable, low-carbon world. United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). (2008). p.6.
Another Letter to the A.M.A…..this time from the World Council for Nature!
Windfarms, vertebrates, and reproduction
To the AUSTRALIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
Open letter, 2 April 2014 (Sydney)
To: Dr Steve Hambleton, AMA President
Professor Geoffrey Dobb, AMA Vice-President
The World Council for Nature (WCFN) laments the surprising decision of the Australian Medical Association (AMA) to deliver a clean bill of health to victims of industrial wind turbines, without having conducted an epidemiological study or seen any of the patients. Windfarm neighbors around the world have been requesting for some time that health authorities would carry out such a study, including the measuring of infrasound peaks and seismic vibrations inside neighboring homes. But this is being denied to them. Physicians at large are helping the industry, not its victims. It’s a repeat of the doctors-for-tobacco propaganda from years back.
Courtesy of Craig Kelly, MP, Sydney.
AMA asserts that windfarm neighbors suffer from anxiety, nothing else, and that anti-windfarm campaigns are the cause (1). In other words: it’s the nocebo effect, which “originates exclusively from psychological sources” (Wikipedia).
But what about the animals? We know that hens and cattle living in the vicinity of wind farms suffer a wide range of pathologies. Of highest concern are the deaths of otherwise healthy animals, the stillbirths, and the deformities in newborns and yearlings. As animals can’t read propaganda material, listen to the radio nor surf the Internet, WCFN submits that their pathologies cannot be caused by anti-windfarm campaigns. Here is the circumstantial evidence we are asking you to consider:
1) – 400 goats died in Taiwan in 2009. These animals, kept on a windfarm, were unable to sleep: “the goats looked skinny and they weren’t eating. One night I went out to the farmhouse and the goats were all standing up; they weren’t sleeping” (2).
2) – In Denmark, which is the EU’s leader in mink farming, millions of Danish kroners were lost in damaged pelts when wind turbines started to operate near a mink farm. The animals became aggressive, attacking one another, andresulting in many deaths. The owner was heard by Members of Parliament, who were stunned (sic) to learn that wind turbines were not as harmless as the wind industry had told them (3).
3) – In Poland, a recent peer-reviewed study on domestic geese concluded that: “the results indicate the negative impact of the immediate vicinity of wind turbines on feed consumption, weight gain and cortisol concentration in blood” (4).
4) – Nova Scotia, Canada: the Ocean Breeze Emu Farm, popular among tourists, has closed down. The vibrations from nearby wind turbines, 850 meters away, have killed many of the emus, the owners announced. “Our birds became very aggressive. They were never like that. They were very docile”, Debi VanTassell said. The big birds were not sleeping. They were running in their pens night and day, writes the journalist who talked to the Van Tassells. “We noticed they weren’t gaining any weight”, the owner said. “Some of them were so skinny, you’d see the little backbones,”… Barely audible or low-frequency vibrations from the turbines have done them in. The infrasound gets in your head and body and takes you over, explained VanTassell to the Chronicle Herald (5). Three days earlier, she had written to globalwindenergyimpact.com:“We cannot prove that it is due to the effect of the turbines, but one thing we do know is that for the 18+ years before the turbines we NEVER had any problems with our birds, no unexplained deaths, no agitation… We had healthy, productive, and content emus.” (6)
5) – A study from Portugal shows that foals born and raised near wind turbines developed Equine Flexural Limb Deformities. “The results presented herein strongly suggest that the presence of LFN-generating WT in the vicinity of this horse breeding farm can play a significant role in the triggering and onset of equine flexural limb deformities” (LFN: low frequency noise – WT: wind turbine). (7) It was published by the Universidade Lusófona and formed the basis for a thesis at the UNIVERSIDADE TÉCNICA DE LISBOA (8).
The above image shows the same foal at 3 and 6 months of age.
Club feet – LFN can cause a thickening of blood vessels walls.
6) – Biologist Dr. Lynne Knuth, in a letter to the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, testified as follows: “The problems with animal reproduction reported in the wind farms in Wisconsin are lack of egg production, problems calving, spontaneous abortion (embryonic mortality), stillbirth, miscarriage and teratogenic effects:
• In chickens: Crossed beaks, missing eyeballs, deformities of the skull (sunken eyes), joints of feet/legs bent at odd angles (Jim Vollmer, personal communication)
• In cattle: missing eyes and tails (updated Excerpts from the Final Report of the Township of Lincoln Wind Turbine Moratorium Committee).
“It is disturbing to me that in chickens and cows in separate wind farms (separated by 50 miles) similar teratogenic effects are being observed, namely missing eyeballs. Based on the correlation of effects seen experimentally and those seen in the wind farm in chickens, these defects may be due to low frequency vibration. Jim Vollmer, the farmer who owns these chickens, reports that the tin structures on his farm buildings vibrate. If the infrasound/ low- frequency sound is strong enough to vibrate structures on his farm as it passes through, what is it doing to the delicate connections and circulation inside the developing chicken embryos, and inside people, as it passes through them?
“Animal health problems in the Srnkas’ formerly award-winning herd include cancer deaths, ringworm, mange, lice, parasites, cows not calving properly, dehydration, mutations such as no eyeballs or tails, cows holding pregnancy only 1 to 2 weeks and then aborting, blood from nostrils, black and white hair coats turning brown, mastitis, kidney and liver failure. . . .” (9)
7) – There are many more accounts of wind turbines affecting animals, for example shepherds’ dogs refusing to work, or even get out of the kennel (10). People have also reported the disappearance of wildlife around wind farms, except for visiting birds and bats, and scavengers which come to feed on their carcasses.
The above circumstantial evidence is more than enough to warrant a thorough epidemiological study on windfarm neighbors who complain about Wind Turbine Syndrome, and on their animals. Applying the precautionary principle,a moratorium should be called on windfarm development until such time as the study is published and analysed. To guarantee against bias, and to keep it simple, half of the professionals involved in the study should be approved by WCFN, which can’t be accused of being pro-windfarms.
WCFN oppose wind turbines because of their deleterious effects on biodiversity, but we are not insensitive to the harm they do to people. We too believe in this principle contained in the Hippocratic oath: “primum non nocere” – first, do no harm.
Mark Duchamp
Chairman
References:
(1) – http://waubrafoundation.org.au/resources/ama-statement-wind-farms-and-health-2014/
(2) – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8060969.stm
(3) – http://www.maskinbladet.dk/artikel/tidligere-miljominister-vil-aendre-vindmollebekendtgorelse
(4) – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24597302
(5) – http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1168233-turbines-blamed-for-killing-emu-business
(6) – http://globalwindenergyimpact.com/2013/11/16/once-successful-nova-scotia-emu-farm-forced-to-close-after-turbines-destroyed-their-flock/
(7) – http://www.windturbinesyndrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/2010-Denmark-Wind-turbines-Lyon-follow-up.pdf
(8) –https://www.repository.utl.pt/bitstream/10400.5/4847/1/Deforma%C3%A7ao%20flexural%20adquirida%20da%20articula%C3%A7ao%20interfalangica%20distal%20em%20poldros.pdf
(9) – http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-03-14/business/ct-biz-0314-wind-energy–20100314_1_turbines-wind-power-last-year-wind-farm
(10) – http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/06/24/working-dogs-may-be-affected-by-wind-farms/
Huge Threat to Bald Eagles….
PROPOSED WIND PROJECT IN D.C. MAY BE BIGGEST MAN-MADE KILLER OF BALD EAGLES EVER
Tip o’ the hat to Small Dead Animals
American Bird Conservancy — Media Release — March 28, 2014
American Bird Conservancy, one of the nation’s leading bird conservation organizations, is calling for a detailed reanalysis of a proposed wind power facility in Maryland that could prove to be the single most deadly project for bald eagles in the Americas. The Great Bay Wind Project is proposed to be located in Somerset County, Maryland, near the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
In letters sent to Thomas Miller, President of the Maryland Senate and Governor Martin O’Malley, ABC expresses strong support for Maryland House Bill 1168, which would mandate further studies of the proposed facility. Having passed the House by a wide margin, Maryland. HB 1168 will be considered by the State’s senate in the coming weeks and if passed and signed by the Governor, would delay possible approval of the Great Bay Wind Project for up to 13 months to allow a more detailed analysis of the environmental and economic impacts of this proposed development.
“Of particular concern to ABC and its members is the project’s potential impact on Bald Eagles, our national symbol and an emotional favorite of the American public,” said Dr. Michael Hutchins, National Coordinator of ABC’s Bird Smart Wind Energy Campaign. “If this project is built to current projections, it may be the single most deadly project for Bald Eagles in the Americas, perhaps the world. It is ironic that it is also planned at a virtual stone’s throw from our Nation’s capital,” he said.
Hutchins says that while the project has been scaled back from earlier proposals, it still is quite large and if construction proceeds, will potentially involve two installations of about 20-25 turbines each, with turbine heights reaching approximately 600 feet. Depending on the size of the build out, it has been estimated that between 15-43 Bald Eagles will be killed annually by the project. Hutchins says that those projections are quite uncertain and are based on “ … untested models, which essentially amounts to an experiment with our public trust resources at stake.”
“We believe the Maryland House and Senate are right to be putting the brakes on the current irresponsible headlong rush to renewable energy development,” Hutchins said. “ABC supports responsible wind energy development, but only if it is Bird Smart. Bird smart wind energy development is primarily about appropriate risk assessment during siting and the location of this facility in close proximity to Chesapeake Bay and the height of the proposed turbines could be a deadly combination for birds.”
According to the ABC letter, Bald Eagle population estimates in the lower 48 states are nowhere near levels that existed before the pesticide DDT was banned in the early 1970s. “There are plenty of other locations that could be considered (for wind development),” the letter said, “Especially on already-developed farm land that is farther away from the bird-rich Chesapeake Bay.”
If the risks this facility poses to wildlife are to be properly assessed, ABC says it will be important to consider the project’s proximity to sensitive wildlife habitats, such as wetlands and wildlife refuges. ABC has already developed an interactive map that the nation’s wind developers can use as a siting tool. Most of Somerset County is colored orange on this map, indicating the need for extreme caution given the potential impact on birds, including the Saltmarsh Sparrow, which is listed as a Vulnerable species by the IUCN Red List.
Concerns exist in the U.S. House of Representatives about the enforcement of the federal laws designed to assure protection of eagles, including the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. The House Committee on Natural Resources held a full committee oversight hearing on Wednesday, March 26th to examine enforcement actions by both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of the Interior (DOI). At the hearing, both DOJ and DOI were accused of enforcing eagle protection laws inconsistently.
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American Bird Conservancy (ABC) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit membership organization whose mission is to conserve native birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. ABC acts by safeguarding the rarest species, conserving and restoring habitats, and reducing threats, while building capacity in the bird conservation movement.
Jobs…..or Industrial Wind Turbines? You can’t have both!
Ford closes as energy costs in Australia sky rocket
Senator Ros Boswell called it – either you can have renewable energy or an industry sector – not both. You can remind yourself of his speech at our Wind Power Fraud Rally here – where he lists the demise of our industry sector, industry by industry, and breaks down the power bills of a Wyndham iceworks factory to reveal the impact renewable energy policies are having on their operation. He has declared that Australian manufacturers face a “killing field”, and that the RET was on track to cost $5 billion a year by 2020, and that the carbon tax and renewables schemes had played a significant part in tipping businesses “over the edge” (see our post here).
It is a problem the world over. Today’s article is by Matthew Sinclair, who is an economist and the author of Let Them Eat Carbon: The Price of Failing Climate Change Policies, and How Governments and Big Business Profit From Them. In this article Matthew explains the green myth – that is why renewables (or as our friends like to call them unreliables) instead of creating new green jobs, actually destroys jobs.
The green myth: Why renewables destroy jobs
Matthew Sinclair
25 Math 2014
POLITICIANS and activists are celebrating the news that Siemens is prepared to invest £160m in facilities in and around Hull to produce and install offshore wind turbines. It sounds like good news: 1,000 new jobs. But our embrace of renewable energy will cost jobs overall, not create them.
The UK is putting eye-watering amounts of money into low carbon sources of energy. Most commentators think £200bn needs to be invested in the energy sector, mostly to meet government environmental targets.
Any investment on that scale will create jobs. If you invested hundreds of billions in building statues of Nick Clegg, workers would be needed to design, build, install and maintain them. It is also reasonable to believe that there will be more jobs in the energy sector if we shift from conventional energy – coal and gas – to renewable energy. More labour is needed to generate a megawatt hour of renewable energy than a megawatt hour of conventional energy. If we switched to generating our energy by hiring people to run around in circles, carrying children’s pinwheels, it would almost certainly create even more jobs. But do we really think that would be a good idea, or increase overall employment?
We pay a price for those green jobs. Energy firms need to make a profit on that £200bn investment, and the return on that investment will come straight out of the pockets of families and businesses. Analysts at Liberum Capital expect that total power costs could double by 2030 in real terms.
Higher energy bills will mean that families and businesses have less to spend on other goods and services. That means fewer jobs at the many, many firms which would have supplied those goods and services.
We can also expect energy-intensive industry to steadily relocate to countries where energy is cheaper. Due to high energy prices, the International Energy Agency expects Europe to lose 10 per cent of the global export market for energy-intensive goods.
If these industries leave, that costs jobs. Hundreds of jobs were lost when the Alcan Lynemouth aluminium smelter closed in 2012, for example, and the other sectors which depend on energy-intensive industries as suppliers or customers will also suffer.
The government is trying to help, and industry representatives welcomed the relief announced at the Budget. But for firms planning long-term investments, reliefs are a limited and unreliable substitute for the low prices competitors enjoy in the US.
Studies in Spain, Italy and Germany have confirmed that renewable energy subsidies destroy more jobs than they create overall. It is only possible to create net green jobs if you secure significant net exports. Basic arithmetic tells you not everyone can win that game.
Every country cannot simultaneously sell more wind turbines or solar panels than it buys, and installing lots of expensive offshore wind turbines in Britain will not make us the most competitive location in which to make them. Over time, the jobs will leak to other countries where costs (including energy costs) are lower. While it is understandable that people are celebrating in Hull now, they need to plan for the day when the constant stream of expensive subsidies which offshore wind depends on dwindles, and the green jobs dry up.
The sad thing is that jobs lost when energy policy raises prices are at firms that could have otherwise stood on their own two feet. Britain’s green jobs are no sustainable replacement.
Matthew Sinclair
Matthew Sinclair
Letters to the Australian Medical Association- Very Interesting and Informative! A Must-Read!
Letters to the AMA in alphabetical order
Heartwrenching Letter from Wind Turbine Victim, Annie Gardener
Annie strikes again
Annie and Gus: Life before the turbines
Annie and Gus Gardner are hard working rural folk who have shared their battles with the AGL wind factory us at our Wind Power Fraud Rally last year and in letters covered in our posts here, here, here, here, here andhere.
The outrage that stemmed from the Gardner’s reading of the AMA position paper on wind farms and health is captured well in this letter to the President and Vice president of the AMA
Mr. Steve Hambleton, President,
Prof. Geoffrey Dobb, Vice-President,
Australian Medical Association,
P.O. Box 6090,
KINGSTON, A.C.T. 2604
25 March, 2014
Dear Mr. Hambleton and Professor Dobb and AMA members,
My name is Ann Gardner and I have lived and worked happily and healthily for 34 years, on my husband’s and my farming property in south-west Victoria until October 2012, when the first only 15 turbines of the Macarthur wind farm began operation, and threw our lives and those of many others, into turmoil.
At the time of writing this letter I am suffering terribly from the infrasound emitted by the 140 turbines located FAR TOO CLOSE to our property.
I have a bad headache. I have a very strong pain shooting up through the back of my neck and into my head. I have extremely sore and blocked ears and very painful pressure in my nose. I have pressure in my jaws and my teeth. My heart is POUNDING …… I can feel the vibration going through my body, through the chair, like an electric charge. I have just taken yet another two tablets to try and alleviate the pain.
I am also exhausted, as last night, along with every other night, I spent more time awake than asleep. The infrasound in our bedroom, was appalling …… I could feel the vibration through the mattress and the pillow, like an electric charge through my body. My head felt as if a brick was on it, and the pressure and pain in my nose was extreme. I have always been a very sound sleeper, that is until October 2012. I am now lucky if I am able to get two or three hours sleep each night, in my own home.
My family’s common law right to a good night’s sleep in our own home HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY FROM US BY AGL and THE MACARTHUR WIND FARM.
My nights are spent as above. I take at least two tablets in the middle of the night to try and get back to sleep, but most times they just don’t work. Getting up in the morning I feel wretched and reach for at least two more tablets to try and make me feel able to start my working day, with any energy at all.
My husband is severely impacted by the infrasound also, to the extent that since October 2012, we have been forced to leave our property for at least two nights of each week, which literally means three days away. We do this to try and get at least two decent nights sleep each week, and also to remove our bodies from the cumulative impact of infrasound. In your position, surely you would know what infrasound does to the human body. If not, read the link www.lowertheboom.org.au.
When we move away, which is at great cost to us and our business, our symptoms go away and we feel like normal people again. Our animals suffer, our business suffers, but we can no longer live in our own home for a whole week. What an absolute disgrace this is …… in a country such as Australia. When we return home again, after several days respite, the symptoms return immediately.
The above description is just how it is EVERY DAY. and EVERY NIGHT we spent in our home and on our property, thanks to AGL’s monster Macarthur wind farm where the turbines have been constructed far too close together, and far too close to people’s homes. Already two families have been forced to leave their homes, their jobs and their properties due to the impact of the wind farm turbine noise and infrasound/low frequency noise. Other families, like ours, are forced to leave their homes regularly for respite and to get a good night’s sleep.
THIS IS NOT RIGHT ……
So to read the AMA’s position statement released recently, we were just appalled.
It is such a disgrace to see that the AMA has allowed the wind industry to infiltrate this association, whose Mission Statement goes along the following lines –
“The AMA promotes and advances ethical behaviour by medical professionals and protects the integrity and independence of doctor/patient relationship”.
The Position Statement released literally promotes the lies and fraud which is endemic within the wind industry, and you two men, who have no doubt been elected with a responsibility and duty of care to protect the health of ALL Australians, have allowed the reputation of the AMA to fall into disrepute, by allowing the AMA to be aligned with and influenced by, the greedy wind industry.
The claims of the “nocebo” effect and “scaremongering” are just OUTRAGEOUS.
These are outright LIES and the AMA knows it.
My family did NOT EVER imagine we would be impacted in any way by this enormous wind farm developed next to our farming property. We feared the noise and vibration could possibly resonate within the walls of our shedded sheep enterprise, but not for one minute did we anticipate any problem regarding our own health.
Do you know why?
We were told by AGL that there would be no more noise than any ordinary working farm!!!!
LIES, LIES, LIES and more LIES, is what the innocent, hard working families were spun by this large Australian company, whose conduct in this district has been shocking.
We, along with so many other families CANNOT SEE the turbines, but we can certainly FEEL them.
What amazes me is that for the past year, various organisations have been “trotting” out reports claiming there are NO health impacts from wind turbines.
BUT each of these reports (bar the NHMRC’s) DO NOT HAVE AUTHORS. Why is this?
Could it be that a certain academic from a well-known university, or the Clean Energy Council, or wind developers have had a very large part in writing these shonky reports ?
First of all, we saw the release of the Victorian Health Department’s two fraudulent reports titled Wind Farms, Sound and Health. But alas, NO AUTHORS …….
Recently the NHMRC released its latest report. It did have the names of the authors, however a serious conflict of interest has been discovered between several people involved, and the wind industry …….
Now we have the AMA Position Statement released. Again, NO AUTHOR.
No doubt, release of names of all those who participated in this appalling statement, would identify the very close involvement of the wind industry within this organisation also.
I have several questions which I would appreciate your immediate answers to please.
- How many impacted victims did you interview at various wind farms around Australia ?
- Why did you NOT visit the Macarthur wind farm ?
- Why did you NOT interview impacted families surrounding the Macarthur wind farm?
- Why did you NOT carry out multi-disciplinary research at the Macarthur wind farm?
- Why did you NOT carry out HEALTH IMPACT ASSESSMENTS at the Macarthur wind farm?
- Why did you NOT carry out ANY investigation in the field at the Macarthur wind farm, when you are WELL AWARE of the preliminary health survey carried out in 2013 in this district, whereby around 23 families (around 66 people) reported various degrees of health problems associated with the turbines?
Just in case you’ve conveniently forgotten about this preliminary health survey (bearing in mind it was not truly representative of all the district, as many families have signed confidentiality agreements to host turbines for another wind farm proposal) the link is as follows –
http://waubrafoundation.org.au/2013/macarthur-preliminary-survey-shows-effects-out-8-9km/
I suggest you read it and thoroughly digest, particularly the chilling comments made by the people responding to the survey.
In line with your totally unacceptable behaviour trotting out this recent fraudulent report full of the wind industry’s lies, I suppose you condone the behaviour of AGL Energy Ltd. whereby in November 2012, they had the audacity to send a letter to the 12 medical centres in this large south-west Victorian district?
This letter literally advised all the doctors that should any of their patients present with symptoms which they attributed to the turbines at the Macarthur wind farm, there is no evidence of health impacts from wind turbines, and the doctors should advise the patients simply to go home and read the AGL website.
This action by AGL seriously breached the contract between doctor and patient, and caused doctors in this district to neglect their patients and simply not investigate any further their problems, not assisting their sick patients in any way.
Thus I would like your answer to my question –
Does the AMA condone AGL’s actions in trying to influence the medical practitioners in this district, thus ignoring their duty of care and responsibility to the health of their patients?
The totally irresponsible manner in which the AMA has acted, literally allowing themselves to be an advocate of the wind industry, and the behaviour of AGL in this manner, remind me of what it would be like to live in a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, where those in authority treat the people with such contempt and shocking disregard.
I ask you, how can the AMA and its members ABUSE their duty of care to PROMOTE ETHICAL BEHAVIOUR when both the President and Vice President have allowed themselves to compromise the position of this Association whose mantle is literally DO NO HARM?
The harm your Association has caused to the hundreds of rural Australians whose health and lives have been destroyed by wind turbines, by the greed of developers, by promoting what I am of the opinion to be the corrupt actions of wind developers, is immeasurable. You, along with the wind industry, insist on denigrating innocent families who dare to speak out, in their desperate attempts to prevent further damage to their health and wellbeing.
All I can say to you is SHAME ON YOU.
Could you please inform me the name/s of those who authored this Position Statement?
I ask that you immediately REVOKE this disgraceful example of dishonesty and “spin”, and start acting in the manner which is expected of you, as leaders of such a supposed exemplary body.
Put simply, this Position Statement is ABSOLUTE RUBBISH and you two men should RESIGN immediately. You do NOT DESERVE the positions which you hold, having severely abused the privilege bestowed upon you to hold such offices.
I would also appreciate your HONEST answers to my NINE questions, by return mail please. Yours sincerely,
ANN C. GARDNER (Mrs)
PENSHURST, Vic.
The AMA makes statements, with no real proof. Were humans studied? NO!
Attorney warns Aust. Medical Assoc. that its reckless statement on WTS is “actionable”
Mar 28, 2014
.
To: The President of the Australian Medical Association (AMA)
From: Terrence Conn, Attorney at Law (New South Wales, Australia)
Regarding: The AMA’s “actionable” and reckless formal statement on wind turbines & health
Date: 3/28/14
.
Excerpt:
It is time to put the “anxiety from scare mongering” and Professor Simon Chapman’s “nocebo” argument to rest and move on. The idea is illogical, cruel and ridiculous in the context of rural communities and there is not one skerrick of evidence to support it. . . .
To put it briefly, I am flabbergasted by the recklessly negligent AMA position statement. The position statement is reckless in the extreme. It parrots wind farm protagonist propaganda and shows no hint of independent research into health issues or energy issues. The statement is negligent because, firstly, your organization has an acknowledged “duty of care” towards the citizens of Australia and secondly, “you know or ought to know” what the actual evidence is. . . .
Apart from the health issues (about which you would be well advised to limit any AMA statement – again, the case of negligence and recklessness would not be difficult to establish) the position statement makes gratuitous remarks about other aspects of industrial wind turbines. It repeats wind industry propaganda about the benefits of wind farms and the absence of ill effects. In this respect, your statement is patently political and ideological. . . .
In summary, your statement is ignorant, unprofessional, ideologically driven and ill-informed. It is a disgrace to the medical profession. It is dripping with the words of propaganda used by the proponents and supporters of wind farms. I note that its authorship is not acknowledged and it bears an uncanny resemblance to statements issued by the “clean energy council” (formerly the Australian Wind Energy Association) which consistently misrepresents the impact of wind farms. It is an embarrassment to your members and, quite probably, actionable. It should be removed from the internet and, if you must take a public position in the matter, re-done.
I am a solicitor [lawyer] and farmer living in the Central Tablelands of N.S.W. I, and my wife, were approached by a wind farm developer in 2008 and thereafter to consider “hosting” industrial wind turbines on our farm. As a result, I (unlike the AMA) carefully researched and studied the “impacts” of wind farms on rural communities world wide in order to form an independent judgment in relation to these matters. Having done so, I was appalled to read the “Wind Farms and Public Health Position Statement” dated the 18th March 2014 and published on the internet. This is a letter of protest.
To put it briefly, I am flabbergasted by the recklessly negligent AMA position statement. The position statement is reckless in the extreme. It parrots wind farm protagonist propaganda and shows no hint of independent research into health issues or energy issues. The statement is negligent because, firstly, your organization has an acknowledged “duty of care” towards the citizens of Australia and secondly, “you know or ought to know” what the actual evidence is. Even if the author (s) had read the recently released 264 page draft report by the NH&MRC and its referenced material, no “reasonable man” – let alone a qualified professional – could possibly come up with an “objective” statement that resembles anything like the “AMA position” on wind farm health impacts.
In addition to reading the NH&MRC report and references, the author of a proper (rather than a reckless and negligent) AMA position statement would need to consider and weigh the “peer reviewed” literature which the NH&MRC ignored.
Further, it has to be odds of at least 1,000 to 1 that neither you nor any of the authors of your report has ever spoken to a victim suffering ill-health from industrial wind turbines. The negligence case against the AMA in relation to its position statement would not be a difficult one!
Perhaps, if you have spoken to any victims you concluded they were suffering as a result of “heightened anxiety” or “negative perceptions.” As a long standing resident of a rural community and a 4th generation Australian farmer the notion that rural people can be led “lemming like” down a path of “anxiety” with their bulging eyes glazed over in a mask of unintelligent incomprehension into any abyss of physical ill health is absurd. Philosopher M Thomas Inge makes the observation that “farming is the sole occupation which offers total independence and self sufficiency.” The “independence” extends to their decision making.
There are any number of studies and written observations that exist in Australia relating to rural people’s consistent exercise of independence of thought. Do some real research. Look them up but I will refer to one study by Heidi Lindner, School of Health and Environment, La Trobe University. The study outlines an extraordinary propensity by farmers for stoicism, independence and self reliance and concludes that a strong tendency exists in the culture to “victim blame” – to assume that an individual has control over their own behaviours and that their poor health is their own fault. It is precisely this tendency to “victim blame” that makes your statement so utterly careless, negligent and destructive. It deliberately fosters and encourages such an attitude.
It is time to put the “anxiety from scare mongering” and Professor Simon Chapman’s “nocebo” argument to rest and move on. The idea is illogical, cruel and ridiculous in the context of rural communities and there is not one skerrick of evidence to support it.
Apart from the health issues (about which you would be well advised to limit any AMA statement – again, the case of negligence and recklessness would not be difficult to establish) the position statement makes gratuitous remarks about other aspects of industrial wind turbines. It repeats wind industry propaganda about the benefits of wind farms and the absence of ill effects. In this respect, your statement is patently “political” and “ideological.” More importantly, it demonstrates extraordinary ignorance of energy matters and is proof that you have not even been aware of persistent and continuous media and professional debates about the place of wind farms as a generator of electricity in a modern society with an electrical grid system. Hundreds of papers have been written and submitted to governments by professional economists, various engineering groups, individual engineers and acousticians (not involved with the wind industry). I have numerous references to these papers and submissions but I have no intention of attaching them to this letter or sending them to you because you need to first introduce the AMA to health issues rather than the issues that are much debated in energy circles.
That said, bit by bit, governments around the world are realising that they have been “conned” by wind industry propaganda in respect to efficacy, abatement of CO2 emissions, abatement of pollution and the cost of wind energy. In relation to efficacy alone, imagine trying to run just one hospital from power generated by every wind farm in Australia – you can’t. As you would know if you had done any research, even AGL admits this! The obstinate obsession by protagonists to limit discussion of wind farms to only the generation of electricity is another absurdity thrust upon us by the wind industry and its proponents, and apparently now by the AMA. Somebody should have informed the authors of the statement that the “generation” of electricity is just one part of a complicated system that provides 24 hour a day, 7 day a week power to consumers when it is needed. Why would you build a car and place it in an environment with no roads, bridges, traffic control or any of the other components needed for a complicated transport system. The evidence is now in and mounting – the engineers have been consistently correct, the ideologists incorrect. Case studies from around the world are demonstrating that running a national grid that is mandatorily connected to voluminous wind farms is a complete, dangerous and massively expensive flop in every respect.
To say that I am extremely disappointed by the quality and content of the position statement would be to put it more mildly than I am prepared to. At an intellectual level, much has been written recently by social commentators (you could start with the work of Nick Cater) about the emergence of a smug, superior class in Australian society, a class which has delusions of its own adequacy and which takes neither the time nor the trouble to remove itself from its own comfort zones and thought bubbles to connect with real people and “the real world.” It appears to me that the AMA echelons, which have now categorized rural people as worthless, stupid imbeciles incapable of knowing whether they are sick or not, have been permeated by such attitudes and they have no place in a professional organization.
In summary, your statement is ignorant, unprofessional, ideologically driven and ill-informed. It is a disgrace to the medical profession. It is dripping with the words of propaganda used by the proponents and supporters of wind farms. I note that its authorship is not acknowledged and it bears an uncanny resemblance to statements issued by the “clean energy council” (formerly the Australian Wind Energy Association) which consistently misrepresents the impact of wind farms. It is an embarrassment to your members and, quite probably, actionable. It should be removed from the internet and, if you must take a public position in the matter, re-done.
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