Return to sanity!

Pointman Says it Best…..Energy Poverty is Killing People!!!

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TELL ME WHY.

Posted by Pointman on October 2, 2014 ·

mal08

I posed some simple questions a number of articles back and I’d like to begin this piece by asking them again, because they’re fundamental.

Don’t they know how many of our own poor can no longer afford to heat their homes? Don’t they know how many millions die in the developing world from malaria because we won’t allow them access to DDT? Don’t they know that a million children a year die or are simply blinded for life by withholding the distribution golden rice? Don’t they know how many lives could be saved by supplying the poor with drought and disease resistant GM seeds? Don’t they know that switching from growing food staples to growing biofuel crops for cars only the rich can afford has more than doubled prices of basic foods? Don’t they know about the people killed in the food riots? Do they actually know anything? Do they care anyway?

There’s no oily sophistry about those questions, no sophistication, no tricky debating traps, no guile, no hidden agenda but always an essential inhumanity to the silence or uneasy evasiveness with which they’re met. I’ve raised an impolite subject. The truth is people are not dying, they’re being killed and we’re the ones through inaction doing the killing. I make no apology for being so blunt because they’re needed questions, simple questions, brutal even, and yet there’s always that awkward silence in response to them.

There really isn’t a party line on the moral dilemmas which are at the very heart of those questions, because morality is no longer about people or ones behaviour towards them, but simply about what’s good for the Earth or not. All else is secondary to that consideration. In a deeper sense though, any wider altruistic morality is now about nothing more than projecting a good image of oneself rather than any notion of common humanity.

What we’re talking about are the lives of the most vulnerable being needlessly sacrificed atop a green altar, because of an almost automatic obeisance to a new and terrible earth goddess called Gaia.

You might think those questions were addressed at the real climate fanatics, those who’re absolutely determined to save the Earth even if that means over the megadeath, rigour-mortised and stacked-high burning corpses of humanity, but you’d be wrong because as must be obvious by now, those zealots simply don’t care about such collateral damage. After all, a smaller, more “sustainable” number of people on the Earth is one of their oft expressed aspirations. Humanity is a plague on the Earth, to quote David Attenborough.

Those questions were originally directed at the religious bodies of our rich developed world but with the sure and certain expectation of nothing in reply, not only because they were rhetorical but because the churches are by now in denial or wilfully blind to the moral issues presented by those questions.

They’ve fallen so far down into the abyss of the governing elite’s unquestioned dogma, which puts the Earth before the human cost of protecting it, that they now effectively worship a graven but green image in their desert of moral desolation. They’ve lost touch with that most basic imperative of all religions – the duty of care we all have towards the poor and vulnerable. Common decency, if you will.

Those questions, like this article, are now being addressed to the footsoldier clergy of those churches; the priests and the pastors, the imams and the rabbis, the holy men, the human beings representing their respective faiths and trying to make a difference in the lives of their local congregations.

This issue is not about science, since climate science has long ago allowed itself to become a compliant and willing harlot to politics. It sucks greedily on the teat of notoriety and all integrity has long since fled. Political sentiment can be changed because it’s driven by the fickle beast of popular opinion, which you still have a measure of influence over. What can’t be changed is that this is at heart a basic moral issue and morality is an invariant which should never be subject to the passing vicissitudes of fashion or alarmed public opinion.

The killing of the innocents is wrong, standing idly by when that’s done for nothing better than a mistaken idea grown into a well-intentioned but homicidal monster or for a quick buck, is wrong. Don’t delude yourself, the moneylenders are busy at work in your temples, doing brisk business under the righteous cloak of that false goddess Gaia but in reality serving nothing other than their own god Mammon. Your silence is helping them.

I’ll pose some new questions just for you, but I’m going to help you out by giving you the answers to them.

Will you ever read this article? Probably not. Will you ever read past the first page of Google’s reassuring results from various well-heeled green NGOs about any of the above questions? No. Will you ever stop to wonder how we eradicated malaria in the developed world using DDT and still have plenty of birds and the bees? No. Will you ever try to calculate how many lives have been saved by us being malaria-free for over half a century? No. Will you think about why we’ve spent 800 billion dollars to fight global warming when the Earth’s temperature hasn’t risen in nearly two decades? No. Will you consider the effect that amount of money could have had on poverty relief around the world? No.

Will you at least admit that standing idly by and not speaking out means there’s some blood on your hands? Just a touch, a smidgen even? No.

You are this very day in the midst of a silent ongoing genocide, a slowmo invisible annihilation, a new shoah of such dimensions as to put the Nazis to shame and yet you will not acknowledge it or speak out about it. You do nothing. Nothing, nada, nada and nada every time. It’s Hemingway’s prayer and that’s the prayer of those who not only believe they’ve been abandoned by God, but have ceased to believe there can even be such an entity.

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

Can there actually be a god? What sort of god could countenance such needless cruelty, suffering and callous waste of innocent lives? Deus irae? An angry god? Is there a reason? Do you have a reason? An excuse? Anything?

All those millions of preventable deaths are the direct result of political policies driven by nothing more than fashionable ideas about what our relationship with the Earth should be. In the midst of it all, you ignore the pressing issues, preferring instead to hotly debate schismatic irrelevances like female or gay priests. It’s no wonder that whole sections of churches in the developing word are considering decoupling themselves from what they consider to be out of touch mother churches in the developed nations, who simply won’t engage with real problems.

You plant saplings in leafy suburbs doing your bit to save the Earth while the poor in the developing countries are running out of shrubs to burn to keep themselves alive. You talk about living in harmony with God’s good green Earth while the poor can do nothing more than lay damp towels over their dying children and hope for the fucking best. Who needs God’s forgiveness there? All my tears outside the walls of Babylon have long ago been wept; there’s nothing left in me now but an abiding anger at you.

You are a part of the problem when you should by any decent notion of religious conviction be a major part of fixing it.

I am nothing and nobody, a small man with a small voice who long ago despaired of any faith in some sort of god. And yet I beseech you in the name of whatever god you follow to do something, or at least speak out. Like the Nazarene, you will not be rewarded for telling the simple truth.

Don’t tell me why god allows such things because there can be no reason, don’t bother debating god’s existence with me or his mysterious ways, just tell me why as a human being and a supposed man of god with some influence, you aren’t standing in your pulpit at every opportunity, raging and thundering to your congregation against such an obscene and preventable waste of human life and worse still, allowing that inhumanity to grind on day after pitiless day without doing a single thing about it.

Tell me why.

Unaffordable, Unreliable Wind Turbines, Create Energy Poverty

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Bjørn Lomborg: Wind Power – The Rich Man’s Curse on the Poor

October 2, 2014 by

Bjorn-Lomborg-wsj

When it comes to assessing the costs, risks and benefits of environmental policy Bjørn Lomborg has always tried to provide balanced, detailed analysis supported by facts and evidence. The economic choices we make – about allocating scarce resources to unlimited wants – should – as Lomborg consistently points out – be made taking into account all of the costs weighed against properly measured benefits (see our post here).

Bjørn Lomborg has become one of the most high profile critics of insanely expensive and utterly pointless renewable energy policies across the globe (see our posts here and here).

Bjørn’s back –  in this piece published by The Australian – in which he hammers the insane cost and utter pointlessness of tying our energy futures to unreliable and intermittent renewables, like wind power.

Poverty Must Be the World’s Top Priority
The Australian
Bjørn Lomborg
1 October 2014

Ban Ki-Moon overstates the case while renewables kill millions in poor countries 

LAST week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gathered the heads of government from more than 120 countries for a climate summit “to make climate change a top priority for all leaders”. Of the world’s many ills, he unequivocally finds that “top of the priority list is climate change”.

Yes, global warming is a real problem, but it makes no sense to claim it is the world’s first priority.

And the UN knows it. Its outreach program, The World We Want, asked more than five million people from every nation to name their top priorities: better education and healthcare, less corruption, more jobs and affordable food. And they placed global warming as priority No 17.

This is no surprise when you consider the poorest half of our world. If your kids are at risk of dying from malaria or malnutrition, those are your first priorities. Even Europe, with the world’s strongest climate policies, ranks global warming 10th.

Yet politicians use catastrophic alarmism to bolster the claim that climate is our “generational mission”. Britain’s winter floods predictably were held up as a “wake-up call for climate change”, although study after study has shown that so far more flooding is due entirely to more houses being built on more flood plains. In the long run, climate also likely will make a smaller contribution, but blaming global warming simply takes away attention from political failure to focus on the real game changers: building better levies and setting aside some flood plains for floods.

An analysis of climate communication by the University College London found that appeals to fear are ineffective and often lead to a suspicion that “they are trying to manipulate me”. Remember when Al Gore told us in his Nobel speech in 2007 that the north polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff” and it could be gone in “as little as seven years. Seven years from now”.

That is now. Arctic ice definitely shows a long-term decline, but from the low point in 2012 it has actually increased 47 per cent.

Ban declared that climate posed “sweeping risks” while we’re heading towards a “cataclysm”. Yet the UN climate panel finds the total cost of climate change by the 2070s is less than 2 per cent of gross domestic product. This is a problem, but not the end of the world. Weigh the 2 per cent loss against the fact the UN expects the world to be 800 per cent richer in 2070.

Compare it to the very real challenges the world faces right now. There are still 1.2 billion people living in abject poverty, and they need economic growth. In the past 30 years China has lifted 680 million people out of poverty, the greatest poverty reduction ever, and it did it with lots of cheap, if polluting, coal.

Yet well-meaning Western leaders (including Barack Obama, Francois Hollande and David Cameron, but not Tony Abbott) descended on New York to reiterate the solution to global warming that has failed for more than two decades: we must switch to renewables. But look how that is going. The EU’s climate policies cost an unaffordable €209 billion ($303bn) a year, yet at the end of the century, after costing more than €18 trillion, they will have reduced temperature rises by 0.05C.

Moreover, pushing renewables is hypocritical: according to the International Energy Agency, Europe gets just 12 per cent of its energy from renewables and just 1.5 per cent from solar and wind. Africa gets almost 50 per cent from renewables — because it is poor — and the renewable source is mostly wood, which kills more than half a million a year as a result of indoor air pollution and contributes to deforestation.

Not surprisingly, when African leaders went to Washington last month, they said they wanted to use more coal. Even the climate-worried World Bank president accepted that “there’s never been a country that has developed with intermittent power”.

A new study from Washington-based Centre for Global Development starkly shows the cost of pushing renewables. Spending $US10bn ($11.4bn) on renewables in Africa can lift 20 million out of darkness and poverty. But spending $US10bn on gas would lift 90 million. Insisting on renewables means deliberately leaving 70 million people in darkness.

This does not mean we shouldn’t tackle global warming. But as long as renewables are much more expensive than fossil fuels, rich countries may spend a couple of hundred billion to make themselves feel virtuous, but it won’t make a difference to the climate. Right now, the world pays more than $60bn a year in subsidies to solar and wind, yet they supply less than 0.6 per cent of its energy. Even in its extremely ­optimistic scenario, the IEA estimates solar and wind will supply just 3.5 per cent of our energy by 2035 — and the bill for subsidies will run to about $US100bn a year.

Some campaigners claim that renewables are already competitive. But this is wishful thinking — if they were, they wouldn’t need subsidies. Look at Spain: with lower but still substantial wind subsidies, Spain has this year put up just one wind turbine.

Instead of wasting billions in current subsidies, we should invest much more in green innovation to reduce the cost to future generations of clean energy. When innovation takes the price of green energy below fossil fuels, everyone will switch.

But in a world where four million die each year from burning wood and dung in open fires inside, while poverty, lack of clean water, infectious diseases, poor education and too little food afflict billions, we cannot with a straight face claim that climate should be our top priority.
The Australian

Bjørn doesn’t limit his criticism of the impact of ludicrously expensive intermittent renewables on the poor in the developing world; he makes the same point in relation to poorest in, supposedly, first world economies like Australia (see our post here).

With $50 billion to be transferred from power consumers to wind power outfits over the next 17 under the Large-Scale RET (see our post here) – and that cost added to already spiralling power bills – there will be many more households who will be unable to afford power; adding to the tens of thousands of homes already deprived of what was once a basic necessity of (a decent) life. And thousands more destined to suffer “energy poverty” as they find themselves forced to choose between heating (or cooling) and eating.

If our political betters in Canberra don’t line up to kill the LRET very soon – in less than a decade – Australia will have created an entrenched energy underclass, dividing Australian society into energy “haves” and “have-nots”.

For a taste of an escalating social welfare disaster, here are articles from Queensland (click here); Victoria (click here); South Australia (click here); and New South Wales (click here).

There’s something deeply troubling about thousands of Australian households descending into gloom after dark – unable to afford the power needed for electric lighting; or troubling, at least, for those with a social conscience.

Beyond the LRET’s perverse impact on the poorest and most vulnerable there is, of course, its wealth and job destroying impact on the economy as a whole (see our post here).

For those that claim to be “friends of the poor” there’s no time like the present to prevent a mere disaster from becoming an all-out catastrophe. How about it Clive? It’s time to scrap the LRET and give the poor a truly bright (ie “well-lit”) future.

clive palmer sleeping

Today marks 18 years, with NO Global Warming! (But plenty of CO2)

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Happy Anniversary: 1 October Marks 18 Years Without Global Warming Trend

/ 6 hours ago October 1, 2014

Via The GWPF Global Warming Pause Comes Of Age

The Earth’s temperature has “plateaued” and there has been no global warming for at least the last 18 years, says Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama/Huntsville. “That’s basically a fact. There’s not much to comment on,” Christy said when CNSNews.com asked him to remark on the lack of global warming for nearly two decades as of October 1st. –Barbara Hollingsworth, CBS News, 30 September 2014

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Figure 1. RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies (dark blue) and trend (thick bright blue line), October 1996 to August 2014, showing no trend for 17 years 11 months.

More on the “The pause” here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/04/global-temperature-update-no-global-warming-for-17-years-11-months

What will the Warming Pause do next? Get a job? Go on a gap year? Maybe go to college and rack up some proper student debt. Who knows, but it’s worth celebrating the good news that the planet’s temperatures are not accelerating to thermageddon. –Josh, Bishop Hill 1 October 2014

The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant. –Phil Jones, University of East Anglia 5 July 2005

Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried. -Phil Jones, University of East Anglia 7 May 2009

2014 will probably be in the top five warmest, but at the moment it will probably not turn out to be warmer than 2010. It is impossible for it to beat 2010 by a statistically significant margin, even if we define that as only one standard deviation above the decadal mean. Even if 2014 does beat 2010 it will only be by a statistically insignificant margin and well within the inter-annual error bars. In all probability 2014 will continue the global surface temperature standstill in a statistically perfect manner. When will the global surface annual temperature start to rise out of the error bars of the past 18 years? –David Whitehouse, The Global Warming Policy Forum, 28 September 2014

It’s fair to say that this pause is something of an embarrassment to many in the climate research community, since their computer models failed to indicate that any such thing could happen. Just how long the temperature pause must last before it would falsify the more catastrophic versions of man-made climate change obviously remains an open question for many researchers. For the time being, most are betting that it will get real hot real fast when the hiatus ends. –Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, 9 September 2014

Former United Kingdom environment secretary Owen Paterson launched an attack against the “wicked green blob,” saying policies to stop global warming might do more harm than good. “There has not been a temperature increase now for probably 18 years, some people say 26 years,” Paterson told an audience at the Conservative party conference over weekend. “So the pause is old enough to vote, the pause is old enough to join the army, the pause is old enough to pay its taxes.” –Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 29 September 2014

Rebecca Thompson is Wise to the Windweasels!

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A Lesson in Journalism: Rebecca Thompson Exposes the Great Wind Power Fraud

October 1, 2014 by

Rebeca Thompson Sun
Rebecca Thompson is the brilliant young journo behind the recent Sun News documentary, Down Wind – that tipped a bucket on the great wind power fraud in Canada (see our post here).

Down Wind, which runs for 96 minutes, can be purchased as a file and downloaded or as a DVD for those in the US and Canada (here’s the link). For those outside the US and Canada the file can be purchased and downloaded (using this link). If you’re in there fighting the great wind power fraud, Down Wind is essential viewing. For a detailed synopsis of Down Wind – see our post here.

Rebecca is a stand-out not simply because she exhibits the proper temerity to challenge the lunacy of wind power and those behind the fraud (it’s what journalists are supposed to do), but because she has taken the time and trouble to understand every aspect of the most destructive government sanctioned rort of all time: be it the infantile pointlessness of throwing $billions at an intermittent and unreliable power source; spiralling power prices; the utterly flawed economics; the slaughter of thousands of birds and bats; and the harm caused to thousands of hard-working rural people through incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound – Rebecca has a complete grip on the facts.

It’s almost incredible what happens when journalists open their eyes, ears and minds – instead of knocking out endless streams of drivel from the wind industry and its highly paid spin-masters – readers and viewers are gifted with a real insight into the insane costs and non-existent benefits of wind power. It’s a pity there aren’t more journos like Rebecca.

Here she is being interviewed by Alex Pierson on Sun News (22 September 2014) (transcript follows):

Straight Talk – Alex Pierson with Rebecca Thompson

Alex Pierson: Well call it the latest David verses Goliath kind of fight – as an Ontario farming family begs the court to help them stop an enormous wind farm that’s going to go up in their farming town, just in a little tiny farming community called Goderich, which is about an hour outside of Toronto.

And it’s bringing Rebecca Thompson to talk about the realities facing this particular family. What are we talking as far as this latest wind farm v turbine …

Rebecca Thompson: So interestingly, Downwind, which is a documentary that Sun News network aired a couple months ago, that featured this family that is asking the Divisional Court in Ontario, the Ontario Divisional Court to review their appeal to not have this 140 wind turbine project put up. And essentially the Divisional Court has never – this would be precedent-setting – if in fact this family among other families who are part of this appeal would be able to win this on the grounds that this would cause problems for their health.

So right now Health Canada, which is at the Federal level, is reviewing whether or not wind turbines cause health concerns. Given the fact that in Ontario the setbacks of wind turbines are only 500 feet. This is a concern because it’s too close to people’s homes.

Alex Pierson: You did a lot of work of on this in your documentary, and I urge any of you who haven’t yet seen Downwind – watch it. I don’t care if you are living in the city of Toronto. I don’t care if you’re living in a big urban centre – watch it because until you’ve seen what Rebecca exposes you don’t really truly get an understanding. And you made some really a valid points in the documentary that – what absolutely confounds me is that there are so many questions about health issues that are being looked into, and nobody seems to know what the long-term implications are. But yet the province is forging full steam ahead building these things.

Rebecca Thompson: The province is forging full steam ahead and they have indicated that there are no health concerns even though they haven’t done sufficient research into whether the or not there are health concerns. Look at places like Alberta. There are wind turbines set up, but they’re 2 miles away from anyone’s home. And in Ontario there was a theory that the reason why the wind turbines were admitted to be put up 500 foot away was because farms in Ontario are only an acre. So basically if the Ontario government can get away with putting wind turbines along a transmission line which is you know, a few turbines every other farm, then they could get away with a 500 foot setback.

The challenge with this that Health Canada is currently researching. I interviewed them – they said absolutely we’re seeing evidence that families have health issues, specifically …

Alex Pierson: sleeping issues, depression issues …

Rebecca Thompson: Sleeping, tinnitus, headaches, feeling faint, having stomach issues. There’s all sorts of issues.

Alex Pierson: So why wouldn’t the Courts then be listening to this and saying well hold on we don’t have enough conclusive evidence to say that there are no health problems, we have to rule in favour, there is doubt?

Rebecca Thompson: Well so far, the Provincial government has written its laws and its rules to be heavily in favour of the companies. And so essentially when any family, and there have been more than 20 appeals that have gone to Environmental review tribunals in Ontario, when any – and by the way these families they dip into their RSPs, they have to take it from their own small farming business, or whatever kind of businesses they have. They have to take it from the profits to pay for these appeals. Hire lawyers all the rest and they essentially lose the appeals because the Ontario government has written the regulations in a way where the wind turbine companies, often foreign companies, win time and time and again.

Alex Pierson: But when it comes to the bigger picture because all I’m hearing right now is massive lawsuits. Maybe not tomorrow, but in the next 5 or 6 years, when Health Canada finally comes out and says yes there are long-term health implications. So does the Ontario government not want to look at the bigger picture?

Rebecca Thompson: I don’t think they do. You know, I asked Kathleen Wynne, the Premier of Ontario point-blank will you put a moratorium on wind turbine projects that have not yet been built, given the fact that they’re causing endless amounts of communities serious concerns? Not only with health, but also property values. And also the fact that we pay through the nose for electricity now as a result of wind turbines, wind farms and wind power. And she said no we’re not going to put a stop to this.

Essentially they’ve offered the opportunity for wind turbine companies, often foreign based, to come in and have a 20 year contract to provide a source of wind power which is often intermittent. So the issue with these farmers – and you know I went out for the documentary and had an opportunity to meet with a ton of families. Thinking, you know what are the health issues?

Alex Pierson: What are they complaining about?

Rebecca Thompson: And I spoke with doctors, I spoke with researchers and experts and what they indicated is that yes, when it comes to the average person, it does effects to them – not everybody is affected – but children are seriously affected. Senior citizens are affected. You know it’s a concern that has driven these families to actually get a lawyer to fight at Divisional Court for them.

Alex Pierson: And I should point out one of the best lawyers in the country so I’m hoping that at least, under his guidance, they can get this seen – because I think it’s going to be one of these issues that ends up going to the Supreme Court and finally you’ll have someone ruling in on behalf of them.

You know it was interesting over the weekend I was reading an article by a Mexican ecologist who has opened the door, he’s blown the whistle on the corruption, the lies and what he calls the incompetence of the wind industry. And he talked about a whole bunch of countries – whether it be the United States, Australia and Canada – talking about the massive environmental damage these windmills are creating. And he talks about – it doesn’t seem that the environmentalists care about the clear cutting, they don’t care about the birds, they don’t care about the bees, they don’t care about the environmental ecosystems that are destroyed by these stupid windmills. But they’re aren’t doing anything. They’re just all about optics and there are people behind-the-scenes making billions of dollars. So it’s such a hypocritical hype.

Rebecca Thompson: Absolutely. You know what’s interesting is that these individuals – there’s a mass movement, not only in Ontario but across Canada to try to stop, to try to curtail wind power, or at least stop to research it before it goes up. And they reached out to a number of environmental groups. Specifically when it came to the mutilation of migratory birds by these wind turbine blades.

And the bird organisations in Ontario, sorry in Canada, said you know, we’re not interested. It’s partially because, you know Sierra is …

Alex Pierson: Are they getting funding from someone?

Rebecca Thompson: Well, they certainly rely on government funding. And essentially you have the Ontario government or the Canadian government or whoever offering these groups funding for in return they’re going to stay silent on these major issues.

Alex Pierson: It’s such an incestuous industry. You know we make a big stink about birds flying into buildings within city centres. And we do all sorts of things to protect birds by asking people ‘turn off your lights’ or do whatever, don’t seem to care about the birds. Don’t seem to care about the bees.

Rebecca Thompson: No, you know it’s interesting.

Alex Pierson: Certainly don’t care about bats.

Rebecca Thompson: They certainly don’t – and it’s the bats in fact, which are an endangered species in Ontario. You know, there’s evidence that in Northern Ontario, the bats that are an endangered species, could be obliterated as a result of wind turbines and you know maybe the Ministry of Natural Resources has stood by idly and said ‘Oh well’.

Alex Pierson: So where is David Suzuki? Because I would think that this is something he should care about. Because he should know. I’m no scientist. I’m no bat expert. But I do know that when you take out one species from the ecosystem, you unbalance the whole infrastructure of it. So if you take out the bats, that means other birds and bugs and all the rest of it, it unbalances the systems, and you get big problems.

Rebecca Thompson: Yes, and David Suzuki was out over few months ago saying what’s the big deal? Everybody should endorse wind power. You know this is the big question. It’s not only the environmental lies. It’s not only the major health concerns that right now are being researched and we don’t know the extent of the health problems. But it’s also the fact that our wallets and pocket books are being heavily hit because of the fact that electricity prices have gone through the roof. And I’m not just saying that. The Auditor General researched this. There have been countless studies researching and identifying the fact that wind power all around is just bad economics.

Alex Pierson: I think the Green Energy Act, maybe not this year but in the next few years is going to be exposed as the biggest, biggest failure, fraud and sham that we’ve ever seen. So we’ll continue watching it. Rebecca Thompson joining us here this morning. Thank you Ma’am.
Sun News

Definition of fraud

Main Stream Media Refuses to Report the Truth About Climate Change.

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The Obvious Failures of Climate Science That Mainstream Media Ignores

/ September 30, 2014

Guest Post by Bob Tisdale –

The National Science Foundation press release Cause of California drought linked to climate change found its way into the mainstream media, with science reporters around the globe adding their hype. That press release is based on the recently published study Swain et al. (2014) “The Extraordinary California Drought of 2013/2014: Character, Context and the Role of Climate Change”, which can be found in the Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS report)Vol. 95, No. 9, September 2014, Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 From A Climate Perspective.

I’ll publish a few comments about Swain et al. (2014) in a few days. But this post is not about that paper.

THE CALIFORNIA DROUGHT – WHO’S TO BLAME FOR THE LACK OF PREPAREDNESS?

As I was reading Anthony Watts excellent post about Swain et al. (2014), Claim: Cause of California drought linked to climate change – not one mention of ENSO or El Niño, a number of reoccurring thoughts replayed, thoughts that have struck me numerous times as the Western States drought unfolded last year and intensified this year.

Was California prepared for a drought?

Obviously, California was not prepared for a drought this intense, and the impacts of that lack of preparedness on California residents will grow much worse if the drought continues.

Why wasn’t California prepared for a short-term (multiyear) drought this intense?

The realistic blame should be the focus of climate science in general under the direction of the IPCC. In the opening paragraph of the IPCC’s History webpage, they state (my boldface and caps):

Today the IPCC’s role is as defined in Principles Governing IPCC Work, “…to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant tounderstanding the scientific basis of risk of HUMAN-INDUCED climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.

The fact that the IPCC has focused all of their efforts on “understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change” is very important. The IPCC has never realistically tried to determine if natural factors could have caused most of the warming the Earth has experienced over the past century. For decades, they’ve worn blinders that blocked their views of everything other than the possible impacts of carbon dioxide. The role of the IPCC has always been to prepare reports that support the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels. As a result, that’s where all of the research money goes. The decision to only study human-induced global warming is a political choice, not a scientific one. In efforts to justify agendas, politicians around the world jumped on the climate change stump and funded computer model-based studies of human-induced global warming…to the tune of billions of dollars annually.

Because of that political agenda, the latest and greatest climate models still cannot simulate the basic underlying processes that govern the naturally occurring, coupled ocean-atmosphere processes like ENSO (El Niños and La Niñas), like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation…processes that have strong influences on temperature and precipitation in west coast states. So there is no possible way climate models, as they exist today, could forecast what precipitation might be like in the future there. And that basic problem will persist until there is a redirection of climate-research funding. Yes, funding. Research follows the money.

What value do climate model-based studies provide?

None.

The paper Pierce et al. (2013) The Key Role of Heavy Precipitation Events in Climate Model Disagreements of Future Annual Precipitation Changes in California provides an overview of why the climate models have no value when it comes to forecasts like California drought. In their abstract Pierce et al. write (my boldface and caps):

Of the 25 downscaled model projections examined here, 21 agree that precipitation frequency will DECREASE by the 2060s, with a mean reduction of 6–14 days yr−1. This reduces California’s mean annual precipitation by about 5.7%. Partly offsetting this, 16 of the 25 projections agree that daily precipitation intensity will INCREASE, which accounts for a model average 5.3% increase in annual precipitation. Between these conflicting tendencies, 12 projections show drier annual conditions by the 2060s and 13 show wetter.

[Hat tip to blogger “Jimbo” on the WUWT thread Claim: Cause of California drought linked to climate change – not one mention of ENSO or El Niño.]

So some climate models say that daily precipitation intensity will increase and others say it will decrease. In other words, the climate science community is clueless about what the future might bring for west coast precipitation.

Some might say that climatologists for the State of California and other west coast states have been hampered by climate science. It’s tough to make recommendations to state and local governments for long-term planning when the climate science community provides them with nothing to work with.

Is California prepared for a drought that lasts multiple decades or even centuries?

Anthony Watts’s post included a graph from a paleoclimatological study of West Coast drought that showed past droughts have lasted for hundreds of years. For the original graph and discussion, see Figure 10 of Cook et al. (2007) North American drought: Reconstructions, causes, and consequences. (Note: That’s not the John Cook from SkepticalScience.)

Now I hate to make you think about bad news. But if it’s happened in the past, can it happen again?

Why are mainstream media simply parroting press releases?

Climate-change news reports have become echo chambers of the press releases put out by colleges, universities and government research agencies. Individual reporters might provide a more in-depth report by asking the scientist-authors for a few extra word of wisdom.

But why aren’t the media asking the tough questions, like:

  • Why weren’t west-coast residents warned 10 or 15 years ago that a severe drought is just a weather anomaly away?
  • Why aren’t there enough desalinization plants in place to supplement rainfall deficits?
  • Why are the people of the west coast protesting for, and why are state governments funding, more wind farms and solar arrays when they need something more basic to maintain life there, water?

Seems to me we may very soon be seeing a reversal of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, with vast flocks of California residents migrating back to the Midwest, which also is subject to periodic droughts.

Poor planning on the parts of a few—based on politically motivated, unsound science—may make for emergencies for millions.

One More Reason Why Industrial Wind Turbines are a Dismal Failure….

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

GCube Scrutinizes Blade Breakages: Specialist renewable energy insurer analyses causes & frequency of wind turbine blade failure in new report

Specialist renewable energy underwriter GCube Underwriting Ltd has authored a detailed report to examine the problem of blade failure and breakage throughout the wind industry.

Entitled “Breaking Blades: Global Trends in Wind Turbine Downtime Events,” the report draws on a combination of GCube’s extensive proprietary claims database and publicly available market news to identify the root causes of common types of blade failure and suggests proactive mitigation measures to counter this inherent risk to wind energy assets and investment.

As wind power continues a high-profile migration from traditional growth markets to newer, often highly remote locations in Asia Pacific, Africa and Latin America and turbine manufacturers find themselves under increasing pressure to deliver cost competitive electricity generation through larger turbines with minimum unscheduled downtime and longer, lighter rotor blades, the overall integrity of wind turbines and, specifically, the performance and reliability of their blades, appears to have suffered.

With an estimated 700,000 blades in operation globally, there are, on average, 3,800 incidents of blade failure each year. While the frequency of such incidents and their severity varies significantly from country to country, blade incidents can cost in the order of $1 million to resolve and there is a clear industry imperative to ensure that these failures are kept to a minimum.

In the Breaking Blades report, GCube categorises the common causes of blade failure, ranging from lightning damage to human error and manufacturing defect, before explaining the factors influencing the cost of blade claims. The report then goes on to look in detail at the individual components of a standard blade and outlines a range of inspection criteria that should help to mitigate the risk of blade failure and loss.

This advice is followed by in-depth interviews with representatives from key industry stakeholders RES, IM FutuRe and Renewable Energy Loss Adjusters (RELA), highlighting the most frequent origins of blade damage and its wider effects on industry investment.

The launch of the report marks the first time that an insurer has shared this level of data with its client base in the renewables sector. Breaking Blades forms part of a wider knowledge sharing initiative as the first of four reports on wind turbine failure to be released by GCube between September this year and June 2015.

“As the wind industry looks to attract secondary investment from the pension and fund management communities, blade failure and the associated business interruption costs – exacerbated by the shift into emerging markets and growing pressure on manufacturers – can be an unwelcome deterrent,” said Jatin Sharma, Business Development Leader, GCube.

“Ultimately it’s in the interests of all parties to minimise unscheduled downtime and the frequency and severity of turbine failure. The Breaking Blades report is by no means an answer to the problem, but should serve to raise further questions and create opportunities for greater industry-wide collaboration.”

To request a copy of Breaking Blades: Global Trends in Wind Turbine Downtime Events, please email info@gcube-insurance.com.

GCube
http://www.gcube-insurance.com

Once again, I Must Defend My Name, and My Position, from Posers!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Once again,  I find myself in the regrettable position, of having to defend myself from false claims, made by the copycat group, that are operating, using my name.  The former co-chair, and treasurer of Mothers, verbally resigned, in front of witnesses, and a few days later, decided to illegally take the funds and try to pretend that they now had control of my group.  It was nonsense.  I had cheerfully accepted their resignations, and appointed a new co-chair, with whom I would share treasury responsibilities.     They never returned the money, or the paperwork, instead choosing to cut off all contact, forcing me to spend valuable time and energy in fighting them, instead of wind turbines.  There you have it.  The true story, instead of the nonsense those women have dreamed up.

So “Ladies”….Because you wish it, doesn’t make it so.  You are NOT Mothers Against Wind Turbines,  you are wannabes!  Stop publishing my name and my picture and making false claims, people.  I am not affiliated with your corporate fiction, in any way!   I am now, always have been, and always will be, the Director of Mothers Against Wind Turbines.      Shellie

Waiting on Word About a Moratorium on the K2 Wind Project!

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ACW Resident Waits For Word On K2 Moratorium Request

By on September 28, 2014

Wind Turbine

An Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh resident says he is hoping to hear within the next couple of weeks whether his legal request to stop Phase 2 of the wind energy project in the Kingsbridge area has been successful.

Shawn Drennan had a hearing in London earlier this week but says realistically he doubts this will be the last one.  Drennan wants the K-2 project, which will place an additional 140 turbines in the Kingsbridge area north of Goderich and around his house, stopped until several studies into health impact have been completed

He argues the province is asking for extensive research on the impact on marine life before proceeding with off-shore turbines, so the same concerns should be addressed regarding the impact of turbines on residents of A-C-W.

Drennan says at the hearing this week the request for a stay was based on concern for people but the wind company’s main argument was they should be allowed to proceed because they have already spent a lot of money.

Drennan points out this is a precedent-setting constitutional challenge so he expects both sides will appeal to the highest court before it is ultimately settled.

Seneca Mountain Wind, Will Not Be Destroying Vermont Environment! Project Cancelled!!!

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SENECA MOUNTAIN WIND PULLS THE PLUG

SEP. 28 2014, 11:41 AM 11 COMMENTS

Editor’s note: This article is by James Jardine, of the Caledonian-Record, in which it was first published Sept. 27, 2014.

Seneca Mountain Wind has removed its MET wind measurement device from its Ferdinand location.

The company also confirmed it has not started construction or site preparation at any of the other three MET sites authorized under a certificate of public good (CPG) issued to Seneca Mountain Wind by the Vermont Public Service Board.

In a letter dated Thursday, Karen Tyler, an attorney with the Burlington law firm of Dunkiel Saunders Elliott Raubvogel and Hand PLLC states, “SMW (Seneca Mountain Wind) no longer plans to either pursue its MET Tower project at a later date, or seek permission from the Board to transfer the CPG to another person or entity.”

The letter continues, “In light of these developments, [SMW] now agrees with the Appellants that their appeal of the Board’s order in Docket No. 7867 is moot.”

The MET tower in Ferdinand cited by Seneca Mountain Wind was previously constructed by Matthew Rubin when Rubin was planning a wind farm in East Haven several years ago. When Rubin canceled his plans for a wind farm, he left the MET tower in place.

Previously, Seneca Mountain Wind has argued before the Vermont Supreme Court that the certificates of public good issued by the Vermont Public Service Board have value even if Seneca Mountain Wind has canceled leases it holds on the land on which the towers are to be located. Seneca Mountain canceled a lease on land in Newark owned by Scott and Sarah Williams, Guilford, Vt., according to Newark Town Clerk Joan Bicknell. Seneca Mountain Wind also canceled a lease on land in Ferdinand and Brighton owned by Daniel Ouimette, Colebrook, N.H.

The Vermont Supreme Court, on Aug. 12, remanded Seneca Mountain’s lawsuit back to the Public Service Board, telling the PSB, “to consider, given  the current circumstances whether appellant’s CPG should be revoked or declared void with respect to the towers located in the Town of Newark and the Town of Brighton.” The remand continues, “If the Board either revokes or declares void Seneca’s CPG for those towers, then the appeal will be dismissed.”

Now that Seneca Mountain Wind has confirmed it will no longer pursue its MET tower project at a later date and will not seek permission to transfer its authorizing certificate to another person or entity, anyone hoping to build a commercial wind farm in Newark, Brighton or Ferdinand will have to start from scratch.

New York Climate Alarmist Convention……Epic Fail!

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NY Climate Spin: Putting on a brave face

/ 4 hours ago September 29, 2014

We met to talk about CO2, and got a forest agreement –

Eric Worrall writes:

Now that its all over, the climate spinners are already hard at work, desperately trying to reframe the New York climate shambles as a win for the environment.

According to “The Australian”, a major Aussie daily newspaper;

“Yet this year’s summit seemed different. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon brought together heads of state, NGOs and business leaders from major global companies such as Unilever, Coca-Cola and Asia Pulp & Paper to sign a declaration to safeguard the world’s forests. … The declaration is a commitment to act, not just to speak. Action on this scale will, though, require collaboration on an unprecedented level. A crucial phrase in the New York Declaration is: “We commit to doing our part to achieve the following outcomes in partnership.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/climate-change-talk-is-over-its-time-to-act/story-e6frg9if-1227073204287

However, a declaration to save forests is truly an empty, painless piece of spin. Forests are already recovering worldwide, thanks to globalisation, cheap energy and economic development. In a mirror of our own economic history, large scale urbanisation of countries such as Brazil and Panama, driven by the creation of new jobs in the cities, is luring the younger generation to abandon subsistence farms hacked out of the jungle.

The abandoned farms, contrary to green propaganda, very quickly revert back to a state almost indistinguishable from the original virgin forest.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/tropical-comeback-can-new-growth-save-the-amazon-rainforest-a-642199.html

In fact, the only places where forests are not recovering, are places where perverse incentives are encouraging an increase in agriculture.

One of the biggest of these perverse incentives is biofuel subsidies, which are motivating global corporations to clear fell large plots of tropical forest, to make way for palm oil plantations.

http://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/illegal-palm-oil-plantations-threaten-protected-forests

Stepping back from the forest non issue, there is another aspect of the NY climate conference spin which I find disturbing – the continuous emphasis on the need for “widespread collaboration” and “unprecedented cooperation”. Every time I see a reference to how everyone has to allegedly strive to sacrifice their own interests, and work together for a common eco-goal, to save the world, I remember something the famous author Terry Pratchett once said;

“Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.”

Thankfully, for now at least, people appear to be following Pratchett’s sage advice.