environmental

The Beginning of the End for Gov’t handouts for Solar? Let’s hope so!

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Solar energy users angry about end of tariff

LOCAL solar users are keen to take back control of their power generation.

The disdain raised by solar users comes after the State Government last week confirmed their position in axing the eight cent feed-in tariff on solar panels from July 1.

Retail businesses will hold the responsibility for offering tariffs after the mandated eight cent tariff paid to PV Solar owners will end on June 30.

Ross Atkin, a Gladstone solar user, says everyday households are being punished for using renewable energy.

“Solar installation does not mean wealthy,” he said.

“I installed solar to save money and for a more sustainable way of living.

“It just seems there are huge generalisations being made on behalf of the government in regards to solar.”

Mr Atkins was supported by 250 other Queensland solar users who are voicing a desire to ‘go off the grid’.

Solar Citizens national director Lindsay Soutar said last Friday that the Queensland Government would have more than 600,000 angry solar voters to contend with at the next election.

We Need Protection for our Children, BEFORE the Wind Turbines are Erected!

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‘I need to protect my child from wind farms’

Credit:  By Celine Naughton | Irish Independent

 

Whenever Jenny Spittle’s children visit their grandad in England, 12-year-old Billie comes home tired, complaining of headaches, earache, dizziness and hearing buzzing noises. Billie has autism and her mother is convinced her symptoms are brought on by the towering pylons and wind turbines located near her grandfather’s house. Now Jenny lies awake at night worrying about plans to build a wind farm close to her home in Co Westmeath.

“I see what she’s like after a week with her grandfather and wonder how she’ll cope if we have these things on our doorstep,” she says.

Like many autistic children, Billie is hyper-sensitive to sound and light. She hears sounds at frequencies that are inaudible to most people, and Jenny is afraid she will find the sound of wind turbines close to home intolerable.

“It’s not easy raising an autistic child, yet while I’m busy trying to organise psychotherapy, speech and language, occupational therapy and all the other kinds of supports she needs to help her cope with everyday life, I also have to make time to protest against pylons and wind turbines,” she says. “I can’t afford to wait until they’ve been built to voice my objections. I have to protect my child.”

Thirteen years ago, university lecturer Neil van Dokkum and his wife Fiona moved from South Africa to an idyllic part of Waterford with their two sons. Their youngest, Ian, had been diagnosed with autism and part of the reason for choosing to make their home in such a remote location was to give Ian the peaceful environment they felt he needed in which to thrive. Then, six months ago, Neil heard about the proposed construction of pylons in the area from a neighbour. The news set off alarm bells for him and his family.

“Ian is incredibly sensitive to electric noise and certain types of light,” he says. “He will start crying and become very agitated. It is a source of emotional trauma for him. My wife and I discovered the extent of this sensitivity when we installed energy-saving light bulbs in our kitchen. When Ian walked in, he put his fingers into his ears, screwed his face up tight and said: ‘Blue light off, please Daddy. Blue light off!’ I was sitting directly under the light and had not noticed anything. Ian was standing at the door, about four metres away, and he couldn’t bear it. Can you imagine how he will be affected by pylons carrying 400kV power lines? Like many other parents of autistic kids and indeed children with other intellectual disabilities, we deliberately moved to the country so as to be away from the city with its high levels of ambient noise, including electrical noise, and disturbance. At night, it can be so quiet here that I can hear the cows crunching grass in the field opposite. Can you imagine how that silence will be shattered by clanking pylons? More specifically, how my son’s silence will be shattered by the electrical noise coming from those cables? How will he be able to sleep with that noise? And how will the rest of my family sleep as Ian becomes highly agitated when awakened by this distressing noise?

“The other concern I have is flight risk. Ian, like many autistic children, has no sense of danger and will run away and on to the road at any opportunity. He is not running away from anything, but sometimes seems to feel the need to rush into an open space. Again, the countryside, with its minimal traffic and quieter roads, is far safer than a city with all those vehicles. Even so, my property is fenced and gated, not to keep people out, but rather to keep my son in and safe. My deepest fear now is that the electrical noise coming off cables and pylons will disturb him so much that he will attempt to run from it. And if he can’t get out, he will bang his head against the wall out of sheer frustration. The potential consequences are too painful to even contemplate, and if the proposed construction of pylons across the countryside goes ahead, selling our house would be impossible, so we are effectively trapped.

“If the Government were to abandon its slavish adulation of the wind industry and pursue the biomass option, converting Moneypoint power station to biomass boilers, it could save over three billion euro. Imagine how many state-of-the-art facilities for people with intellectual disabilities could be built with that sort of money.”

A Department of Health spokesperson says: “According to international literature, no direct health effects have been demonstrated in persons living in close proximity to wind turbines. However, it is agreed that there is a need for additional, well-designed studies in this area. The Department of Health advises that anyone who believes they are experiencing any health problems should consult their GP promptly.”

In its draft development plan, Westmeath County Council required any new wind farm development to implement a setback distance of 10 times the height of the turbine from residential dwellings, but the Department of the Environment intervened. Under Objective PWin6 of the plan, a turbine measuring 180m, for instance, would be sited at least 1.8km away from any house, while according to the Department’s wind energy guidelines, a distance of 500m is deemed sufficient. Minister of State for Planning Jan O’Sullivan wrote to the council instructing it to reexamine the setback distance.

“We received over 5,600 submissions from constituents who supported PWin6, which would have kept the setback distance in place,” says Westmeath County Council chairman Peter Burke. “We informed the Minister of State that we felt the Department’s guidelines were not adequate and she appointed an inspector to carry out an independent review.”

Last month, that inspector’s report recommended against the inclusion of the PWin6 objective on the grounds that it “would be contrary to section 28 of the Planning and Development Act 2000.”

At the time of writing, the Department’s final decision on the matter is pending.

—

Safety first: Are turbines and pylons dangerous?

Now that Ireland’s plan to export wind energy to Britain has been scrapped, the public has been left a little breathing space to focus on a simple question: Are wind farms and their related pylons and overhead power lines safe or not?

The Department of Health’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Colette Bonner, has said that older people, people who suffer from migraine, and others with a sensitivity to low-frequency vibration, are some of those who can be at risk of ‘wind turbine syndrome’.

“These people must be treated appropriately and sensitively as these symptoms can be very debilitating,” she commented in a report to the Department of the Environment last year. We asked Dr Bonner for clarification.

“Presently the World Health Organisation does not classify Wind Turbine Syndrome as a disease under the WHO international classification of diseases,” she said. “Current research in the area suggests that there are no direct health effects of wind turbines. However, there are methodological limitations of many of the studies in this area and more high quality research is recommended.”

Side by side with the controversy over wind farms comes concern over the high voltage pylons which distribute the electricity generated by the wind turbines to the national grid. Chief Medical Officer in the Deptartment of Health, Dr Tony Holohan, has stated that he does not think there is a health risk associated with people living in vicinity of pylons.

But not everybody agrees; according to British physicist Denis Henshaw, people have every reason to be concerned. Emeritus professor of human radiation effects at Bristol University and scientific director of the charity Children with Cancer UK, he recently told a public health meeting in Trim, Co Meath, that high voltage power cables are linked “beyond reasonable doubt” to childhood leukaemia and other diseases.

“It has been shown again and again that there is a definite risk of childhood leukaemia and other diseases near these lines,” he says. “The link is so strong that when a childhood leukaemia occurs near these lines there is a greater than 50pc chance that the leukaemia is due to the line. This raises the prospect of legal action for corporate manslaughter against those involved in putting the line there. The Irish government and EirGrid need to take care of their citizens and acknowledge the known health risks in people near these lines.”

A spokesman for EirGrid says: “We’re not doctors, but having taken advice from experts at the World Health Organisation, along with the chief science adviser and the chief medical officer, it is clear to us that there is no evidence to link overhead lines with adverse health effects.”

The Government report ‘Health Effects of Electromagnetic Fields’ 2007 says: “Given that there is still uncertainty about whether longterm exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields could cause childhood leukaemia, use of precautionary measures to lower people’s exposure would therefore appear to be warranted.

“As a precautionary measure, future power lines and power installations should be sited away from heavily populated areas to keep exposures to people low.”

Source:  By Celine Naughton | Irish Independent | Published 9 June 2014 | www.independent.ie

Asthma NOT Caused by CO2. You’ve got to read this!

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Johns Hopkins proves up the Hygiene theory of Asthma? Big surprise?

Posted on June 9, 2014 by 

So for years the decline of air pollution has been associated with an increase in Asthma.

 

Idiots from the green left all the way to the White House, say more air pollution regulation will decrease asthma.

Now they conflate one target with another, calling carbon dioxide carbon pollution. Acting like reducing carbon dioxide emissions will reduce asthma.

LIES LIES LIES.

Bob Greene, my comrade here at JunkScience just put up a fine example of how stupid the fanatics can be–ignoring the evidence and suppressing the proper interpretation of the decline in air pollution/increase in asthma phenonmenon.

The news article discussed the research finding from a group at Johns Hopkins Med School.

Dunn notes are in perens.

Thanks for putting this up, Mr. Greene.

It is really important stuff to know.
Too-Clean Homes May Encourage Child Allergies, Asthma: Study
Exposure to a little dust, dander in infancy might prime tots’ immune systems, research finds

Too-Clean Homes May Encourage Child Allergies, Asthma: Study
By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, June 6, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but a home that’s too clean can leave a newborn child vulnerable to allergies and asthma later in life, a new study reports.

Infants are much less likely to suffer from allergies or wheezing if they are exposed to household bacteria and allergens from rodents, roaches and cats during their first year of life, the study found.

The results stunned researchers, who had been following up on earlier studies that found an increased risk of asthma among inner-city dwellers exposed to high levels of roach, mouse and pet droppings and allergens.

“What we found was somewhat surprising and somewhat contradictory to our original predictions,” said study co-author Dr. Robert Wood, chief of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore. “It turned out to be completely opposite — the more of those three allergens you were exposed to, the less likely you were to go on to have wheezing or allergy.”

(Dunn note: I have known about the hygiene theory of Asthma for many years, and an allergist at Johns Hopkins is “stunned” to find out this basic immunological phenomenon? Desensitization is the bedrock of allergist treatment and he didn’t know what???)

About 41 percent of allergy-free and wheeze-free children in the study grew up in homes that were rich with allergens and bacteria. By contrast, only 8 percent of children who suffered from both allergy and wheezing had been exposed to these substances in their first year of life.

The study was published June 6 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The findings support the “hygiene hypothesis,” which holds that children in overly clean houses are more apt to suffer allergies because their bodies don’t have the opportunity to develop appropriate responses to allergens, said Dr. Todd Mahr, an allergist-immunologist in La Crosse, Wis., and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Section on Allergy & Immunology.

Prior research has shown that children who grow up on farms have lower allergy and asthma rates, possibly due to their regular exposure to bacteria and microbes, the researchers noted in background material.

(Dunn note: another well known thing. Now do you think the green machine thugs are going to pick up on this if it jeopardizes their case against air pollution?)

“The environment appears to play a role, and if you have too clean of an environment the child’s immune system is not going to be stimulated,” Mahr explained.

As many as half of all 3-year-olds in the United States suffer from wheezing illnesses, and recurrent wheezing and allergies are considered a risk factor for asthma in later life, researchers said. According to the American Lung Association, asthma remains one of the most common pediatric illnesses, affecting about 7 million American children.

The new study involved 467 inner-city newborns from Baltimore, Boston, New York City and St. Louis. Doctors enrolled the babies in the study while they were still in the womb, and have been tracking their health since birth, Wood said.

Investigators visited the infants’ homes to measure the levels and types of allergens. They also collected dust in about a quarter of the homes and analyzed its bacterial content.

They found that infants who grew up in homes with mouse and cat dander and cockroach droppings in the first year of life had lower rates of wheezing at age 3, compared with children not exposed to the allergens.

Wheezing was three times as common among children who grew up without exposure to such allergens, affecting 51 percent of children in “clean” homes compared with 17 percent of children who spent their first year of life in houses where all three allergens were present.

Household bacteria also played a role, and infants in homes with a greater variety of bacteria were less likely to develop allergies and wheezing by age 3.

Children free of wheezing and allergies at age 3 had grown up with the highest levels of household allergens and were the most likely to live in houses with the richest array of bacterial species, researchers found.

(Dunn note: When do I hear an apology from those who have made all these false claims about asthma. Asthma is an allergic disease air pollution is not the cause of asthma. Robert Phalen PhD air pollution specialist at UC Irvine, says that we need dirtier air to reduce asthma, not cleaner. I agree.)

“The combination of both — having the allergen exposure and the bacterial exposure — appeared to be the most protective,” Wood said.

Both Wood and Mahr cautioned that these findings need to be verified, and that parents shouldn’t make any household decisions based on them.

For example, parents shouldn’t adopt a dog or cat assuming that its presence will help immunize their kids against allergies and asthma, Wood said. At the same time, they shouldn’t ditch their family pet, either.

“We would not take any of this as information we could use to give advice,” Wood said. “Please don’t get an intentional cockroach infestation in your house. There’s no reason to think that would help.”

There are a number of other factors that could influence the likelihood that an inner-city kid will develop asthma, including tobacco smoke, high levels of household stress, or even exposure to the same sort of potentially beneficial allergens too late in life, past their first birthday, Wood said.

“This is by no means a simple story,” he said. “There could be a lot of factors going on.”

(Dunn note: they are pretending like this is realy new and revolutionary stuff. This is old news.)

Mahr said the findings could someday lead to treatments that would help infants build up resistance to allergies. “I can see someone coming up with a spray. You’d spray the crib that the kid sleeps in every so often, and let the kid crawl around in it,” he said.

(Dunn note: That’s what allergists do, they desensitize people–why is he, why is this group being so hesitant about something well known in the immunology and allergy community. Why are you acting like this is revolutionary talk?)
More information

Find out more about indoor allergens at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

SOURCES: Robert Wood, M.D., chief, Division of Allergy and Immunology, Johns Hopkins Children’s Center; Todd Mahr, M.D., allergist-immunologist, La Crosse, Wis., and chair, American Academy of Pediatrics’ Section on Allergy & Immunology; June 6, 2014, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology

 

More Information on the Mink Farm Tragedy, in Denmark!

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Mink farm disaster
See our press release of June 7th 2014



Document Nº 1


Here is an article from Denmark dated 16 January 2014, together with a video, about the visit of the owner of the Vildbjerg mink farm, Kaj Olesen Bank, to the Danish Parliament, where he was received by the Parliamentary Environment Commission:http://www.tvmidtvest.dk/indhold/mink-amok-over-vindmoellestoej (see translation further down). This was regarding the 1st incident, which occurred last fall when the wind turbines first began to turn. About 100 mink had to be put down at the time, because of the wounds inflicted when they turned aggressive and attacked one another.


The Danish media are, however, auto-censoring on the second incident which occurred at the mink farm in May 2014: the 1,600 miscarriages. Such news could hurt VESTAS badly, which is arguably Denmark’s biggest employer and exporter. The company has deep pockets, and is an object of national pride. All of this, plus the pressure applied by the powerful Green lobby, motivates the Danish media to look the other way.


Free translation of the article:


Mink crazy from wind turbine noise


Mink breeder Kaj Olesen Bank’s animals are behaving in a completely crazy way. This started to happen when four giant wind turbines were erected close to his farm.


Aggressive animals and deafening mink war – this has become commonplace at Kaj Olesen Bank’s mink farm, after the erection of four giant wind turbines near his residence not far from the village of Vildbjerg.


“I could hear it perfectly from inside our room, and I was shocked when I walked around the farm – there was fighting everywhere”, says Kaj Olesen Bank.


From the day he had four giant wind turbines for neighbors, his mink completely changed behavior. They are now so aggressive… Many of them had to be put down because of the deep bites they inflicted to one another. The farmer is now fearing for his farm’s production.


“It was a nightmare. It is also a mental challenge. A whole production system, one’s livelihood is at stake. And it’s not small amounts we are talking about. We fear the worst, because we know that mink fighting – bites, trauma, fur damage – will cost us millions of kroners”, he said.


Kaj Olesen Bank has now applied for permission to move his fur farm further away from the giant wind turbines.


End of translation


Latest news: the municipality of Vildbjerg has denied him the right to move his mink farm, even though it would still be on his own land. Says our Danish correspondent: “the authorities are having a love affair with the wind industry. But we, the people, must pay the consequences.”


Document Nº 2


Report of the veterinarian from DANSK PELSDYR LABORATORIUM who was called when the second incident occurred, that of miscarriages en masse.


Original in Danish: “BESOGSRAPPORT_5-5-2014_Kaj Olesen Bank”


Translation:
“REPORT FOR CONSULTATION”

Climate Alarmists have an Agenda. They Make the Models, Fit their Theories…..

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Consensus is irrelevant in science. There are plenty of examples in history,

where everyone agreed, and everyone was wrong.

Posted on 07/06/2014by 

Gore and Pachauri collect their Nobel Peace Prize for the IPCC in 2007

The IPCC created a monster, or they are the Monster. Al Gore perpetuated it and continues to do so. Rajendra Pachauri is the High Priest. Strange description? Maybe, but how else do you describe something that has become a world wide cult. Climate Change is certainly not science so what can it be but a religion with fervent followers that vilify opponents with words like Deniers; as in Holocaust Deniers; and spit out the word Sceptic as though a disease. One of the key ingredients of true science is Scepticism. All part of Critical Thinking. The thorough, open-minded, logical effort to examine a claim in the light of applicable evidence. Something that is demonstrably absent from the Climate Debate. Perhaps the Nobel organisation should remove their award although of recent years many of their awards have been more politically motivated than gained by true worth.

I have pleasure in presenting an article by Richard Tol, in the Guardian no less; how did it get past the censors; that shows how the Consensus on Climate was ‘engineered’ to fulfil a prophecy. World wide cult religion has been proven to destroy critical thinking in a form of mind control that puts political control such as seen in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia, in North Korea and other totalitarian states into the amateur league. Politicians and journalists became ‘infected’ with cognitive dissonance. The tendency to resist information that would conflict with an illusion that they have bought into and act in ways outside of their comfort zones, i.e. “Admit they were Wrong”. The majority of Journalists, save those in the BBC and the Guardian/Independent, have belatedly woken up to the scam but not before infecting a whole generation of the so called urban ‘elite’. The lower echelons of politicians are likewise accepting some elements are working against their best interests. When will the rest smell the coffee? An awful lot of vested interests to overturn.

Dana Nuccitelli writes that I “accidentally confirm the results of last year’s 97% global warming consensus study”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I show that the 97% consensus claim does not stand up.

At best, Nuccitelli, John Cook and colleagues may have accidentally stumbled on the right number.

Cook and co selected some 12,000 papers from the scientific literature to test whether these papers support the hypothesis that humans played a substantial role in the observed warming of the Earth. 12,000 is a strange number. The climate literature is much larger. The number of papers on the detection and attribution of climate change is much, much smaller.

Cook’s sample is not representative. Any conclusion they draw is not about “the literature” but rather about the papers they happened to find.

Most of the papers they studied are not about climate change and its causes, but many were taken as evidence nonetheless. Papers on carbon taxes naturally assume that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming – but assumptions are not conclusions. Cook’s claim of an increasing consensus over time is entirely due to an increase of the number of irrelevant papers that Cook and co mistook for evidence.

The abstracts of the 12,000 papers were rated, twice, by 24 volunteers. Twelve rapidly dropped out, leaving an enormous task for the rest. This shows. There are patterns in the data that suggest that raters may have fallen asleep with their nose on the keyboard. In July 2013, Mr Cook claimed to have data that showed this is not the case. In May 2014, he claimed that data never existed.

The data is also ridden with error. By Cook’s own calculations, 7% of the ratings are wrong. Spot checks suggest a much larger number of errors, up to one-third.

Cook tried to validate the results by having authors rate their own papers. In almost two out of three cases, the author disagreed with Cook’s team about the message of the paper in question.

Attempts to obtain Cook’s data for independent verification have been in vain. Cook sometimes claims that the raters are interviewees who are entitled to privacy – but the raters were never asked any personal detail. At other times, Cook claims that the raters are not interviewees but interviewers.

The 97% consensus paper rests on yet another claim: the raters are incidental, it is the rated papers that matter. If you measure temperature, you make sure that your thermometers are all properly and consistently calibrated. Unfortunately, although he does have the data, Cook does not test whether the raters judge the same paper in the same way.

Consensus is irrelevant in science. There are plenty of examples in history where everyone agreed and everyone was wrong. Cook’s consensus is also irrelevant in policy. They try to show that climate change is real and human-made.   It is does not follow whether or not, and by how much,  greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced.

The debate on climate policy is polarised, often using discussions about climate science as a proxy. People who want to argue that climate researchers are secretive and incompetent only have to point to the 97% consensus paper.

On 29 May, the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the US House of Representatives examined the procedures of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Having been active in the IPCC since 1994, serving in various roles in all its three working groups, most recently as a convening lead author for the fifth assessment report of working group II, my testimony to the committee briefly reiterated some of the mistakes made in the fifth assessment report but focused on the structural faults in the IPCC, notably the selection of authors and staff, the weaknesses in the review process, and the competition for attention between chapters. I highlighted that the IPCC is a natural monopoly that is largely unregulated. I recommended that its assessment reports be replaced by an assessment journal.

In an article on 2 June, Nuccitelli ignores the subject matter of the hearing, focusing instead on a brief interaction about the 97% consensus paper co-authored by… Nuccitelli. He unfortunately missed the gist of my criticism of his work.

Successive literature reviews, including the ones by the IPCC, have time and again established that there has been substantial climate change over the last one and a half centuries and that humans caused a large share of that climate change.

There is disagreement, of course, particularly on the extent to which humans contributed to the observed warming. This is part and parcel of a healthy scientific debate. There is widespread agreement, though, that climate change is real and human-made.

I believe Nuccitelli and colleagues are wrong about a number of issues. Mistakenly thinking that agreement on the basic facts of climate change would induce agreement on climate policy, Nuccitelli and colleagues tried to quantify the consensus, and failed.

In his defence, Nuccitelli argues that I do not dispute their main result. Nuccitelli fundamentally misunderstands research. Science is not a set of results. Science is a method. If the method is wrong, the results are worthless.

Nuccitelli’s pieces are two of a series of articles published in the Guardian impugning my character and my work. Nuccitelli falsely accuses me of journal shopping, a despicable practice.

The theologist Michael Rosenberger has described climate protection as a new religion, based on a fear for the apocalypse, with dogmas, heretics and inquisitors like Nuccitelli. I prefer my politics secular and my science sound.

• Richard Tol is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex

 

This is Absolutely Horrific. Just Think What it is Doing to Humans….

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Danish mink farm
Above: Danish mink farm


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 7th 2014


1,600 miscarriages at fur farm near wind turbines



Denmark: 1,600 animals were born prematurely at a mink farm last month. Many had deformities, and most were dead on arrival. The lack of eyeballs was the most common malformation. Veterinarians ruled out food and viruses as possible causes. The only thing different at the farm since last year has been the installation of four large wind turbines only 328 meters away.


still-born minks
Above: some of the 1,600 minks born prematurely



The wind farm consists of four 3 MW turbines, VESTAS model V112, reaching out to 140 meters in height at the tip of the blades. When they became operative last fall, a first mishap was reported by the mink farmer, who was heard about it at a parliamentary committee on wind farms in January this year (1). The World Council for Nature (WCFN) reported the incident earlier: “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, and resulting in many deaths” (2).

dead minks at Danish wind farm
Above: dead minks at Danish wind farm

 

mink injured in a fight
Above: injured mink in a cage



Both incidents are alarming, as they constitute definite proof that wind turbines are harmful to the health of animals living in their vicinity. And they are not the only ones. In the letter mentioned above, WCFN quoted more of them, all leading to the conclusion that low frequency vibrations emitted by wind turbines can cause serious ill-effects on health, including altered behaviour, deformities, miscarriages and premature births (2).

deformed mink fetus

Above: a deformed mink foetus



It goes without saying that humans are exposed to the same risks. In view of this new evidence, lying to the public pretending that wind turbines are harmless to people becomes a criminal act. Politicians, and wind industry shills who, like often-quoted Mike Barnard or Simon Chapman, deny the risks to health, are now liable to be successfully sued by wind farm victims. And so are governments, as they still refuse to measure infrasound emitted by modern wind turbines.


It is indeed criminal to deny health risks where there is so much evidence, starting with official studies published in the 1980’s, which have been shelved to protect the wind industry (3). Dr Sarah Laurie, CEO of the Waubra Foundation, wrote: “Dr Kelley and his co researchers at the Solar Energy Research Institute in the US, closely connected with the US Department of Energy and NASA, identified in 1985 that the source of the annoyance for the residents living near a single downwind bladed turbine was “impulsive infrasound and low frequency noise, which resonated within the building structures” ” (4).


The wind industry, their friends in government, and self-serving professionals benefitting indirectly from the huge subventions, all have been denying any health problem linked to wind farms. But there is now sufficient evidence to warrant:

  1. A moratorium on wind farms,
  2. Comprehensive epidemiology studies,
  3. Quantification of vibrations emitted by wind turbines, as measured inside the homes of resident neighbours, at night, on windy days, encompassing all frequencies down to 0.1 Hz.



Short of taking these health-saving measures, governments will be liable to be sued for damages, and criminal charges could be laid against decision makers.


The World Council for Nature hopes that the political class will take this public health issue seriously, more so than that of wildlife conservation, for instance. We have denounced before that governments are letting over 100 million birds and bats be sacrificed annually on the altar of this expensive, intermittent energy of doubtful practical value (5). So we can only pray that human health will receive more consideration from our leaders.


Media contact:


Mark Duchamp
Chairman, WCFN
Tel: +34 693 643 736+34 693 643 736
www.wcfn.org
wcfn@live.com



References:


(1) – www.maskinbladet.dk/artikel/tidligere-miljominister-vil-aendre-vindmollebekendtgorelse


(2) – wcfn.org/2014/03/31/windfarms-vertebrates-and-reproduction


(3) – Kelley, N et al, 1985 “Acoustic Noise associated with Mod 1 Turbine; its source, impact and control”
waubrafoundation.org.au/resources/kelley-et-al-1985-acoustic-noise-associated-with-mod-1-wind…


Kelley, N 1987 “A Proposed Metric for Assessing the Potential of Community Annoyance from Wind Turbine Low-Frequency Noise Emissions”
waubrafoundation.org.au/resources/1987-problem-with-low-frequency-noise-from-wind-turbines…


Hubbard, H 1982 “Noise Induced House Vibrations and Human Perception” (1982) 19:2 Noise Control Engineering Journal 49
waubrafoundation.org.au/resources/hubbard-h-1982-noise-induced-house-vibrations-human-perception


(4) – waubrafoundation.org.au/resources/laurie-s-wind-turbine-noise-adverse-health-effects-and…


(5) – wcfn.org/2014/05/21/bullet-news-3

Climate Alarmists Have An Agenda! They NEED to Scare You!

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Why Climate Change Doesn’t Scare Me.

Guest essay by Walter Starck

Be scared, the experts tell us, be very scared. Well there is certainly cause for concern, but not about those “rising” temperatures, which refuse to confirm researchers’ computer models. A far bigger worry is the corruption that has turned ‘science’ into a synonym for shameless, cynical careerism

Despite the increasingly shrill insistence by climate alarmists that we face an imminent  catastrophe, reason and evidence continue to indicate otherwise. Both the theoretical understanding of anthropogenic global warming (a.k.a. climate change) and the empirical evidence remain highly uncertain, tainted by dubious claims and manipulations.

 

While the basic physics of infrared heat absorption by CO2 is well established, both theoretical understanding and real world evidence strongly indicate the effect of increased CO2 in the complex dynamics of the global climate system has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of back-radiated infrared energy from the planet’s surface is limited and is not increased by more CO2 in the air above. Although a small amount of CO2  in the air results in significant warming, this effect is quickly saturated. At pre-industrial levels of CO2 the portion of the IR spectrum in the absorption bands of CO2 was already 99.9% absorbed within a few tens of metres of the surface. Although doubling CO2 must halve the distance over which such absorption occurs, any increased heating near the surface is continuously distributed into a much larger volume of the atmosphere by wind, convection and turbulence. How close to the surface initial warming occurs has minimal effect on the total amount of heat energy being absorbed or on the temperature of the much larger volume of atmosphere into which it is being mixed.

However, concentrating the initial heating nearer to the surface must also strengthen both convection and evaporation which, in turn, increases transport of heat away from the surface to higher in the troposphere, where the increased evaporation then results in increased condensation.  In this process the latent heat of evaporation absorbed from the surface is released high in the atmosphere, where the thinner gases permit it to radiate into space.  At the same time more cloud cover and precipitation also results, acting as a further negative feedback to cool the surface.

A shadehouse is not a greenhouse

To call the warming induced by CO2 a greenhouse effect is highly misleading.  A greenhouse affects its warming by enclosing the air inside with walls and a roof.  Without a roof only very limited warming is possible before convection wafts away heated air like a hot air balloon.  A greenhouse with no roof or walls, where the warm air is free to blow away with the wind or drift into the sky is something only an academic could imagine. (Note to climate experts: a greenhouse without a roof does not work.)

A better analogy for the effect of increased atmospheric CO2 might be that presented by an absorption refrigerator – an old-fashioned gas or kerosene fridge. In such systems a heat source is used to drive an evaporative cooling cycle, much as the warm surface temperature of the planet drives convection, augmented by the evaporation/condensation cycle, to cool the lower troposphere and transport heat to greater altitudes where reduced gas density permits it to radiate away.

The so called greenhouse effect is limited. No heat is being “trapped” by a greenhouse with no walls or roof. The real world effect of more CO2 is much more like that of a shade house equipped with evaporative cooling.

Dubious evidence of anthropogenic warming

The prime physical evidence for AGW is the global temperature record.  Declaring an emergency because some researchers claim to have detected an average warming of three-quarters of a degree over the past century (amidst a highly variable and extremely noisy record spanning over 100 degrees) borders on hysteria. For a start, the amount of warming being claimed is less than the margin of uncertainty.   A similar amount of warming commonly takes place many mornings while we eat breakfast. It also occurs with a decrease in elevation of about a hundred metres, or with a decrease in latitude of about 2° (ca. 200 km). Orders of magnitude warming occur seasonally, even daily in many places. Not only is the purported amount not alarming, we have no idea how much of it is due to CO2 and how much may be attributable to measurement error, the urban heat island effect, ‘adjustments’ to the record, natural cycles or other natural causes of variability. Even more absurd is that the only global effect of increased CO2 about which we are reasonably certain is that there has been a significant and very beneficial greening of arid regions, plus an enhancement of food production.

The mild warming trend from 1978 to 1998 which prompted the global warming hysteria followed a period of cooling which excited similar alarm about a coming ice age. This warming ceased almost two decades ago and mild cooling now appears to be taking place. In recent years the rate of sea-level rise has also declined. Hurricanes and tornadoes are at record lows. Polar sea ice is increasing. Blizzards, droughts and floods are below past extremes.  Attributing every vagary of weather to anthropogenic climate change is not reasonable, not science and definitely not honest.

Conflicting evidence ignored

Other “evidence” claimed for climate change is equally dubious. Two recent studies, for example, have received wide news coverage. The first maintains that trade winds are driving surface heat into the ocean depths, where it cannot be measured, and this explains the lack of recent warming. The second study claims to explain the “collapse” of the West Antarctic ice sheet.  Both these studies fail the fundamental scientific requirement in their refusal to address conflicting evidence.

If the missing surface heat was indeed being driven into the deep sea this would have to appear as distinct deep water warming in the record from the global network of ocean monitoring buoys. It does not. It would also have to appear as an increased rate of sea level rise, due to the thermal expansion of the oceans which would necessarily accompany any such warming. To the contrary, the rate of sea level rise has declined in recent years.

The so called “collapse” of the West Antarctic ice sheet is likewise claimed to be caused by melting due to warming seas; however, the thirty-five year record from satellite monitoring of sea ice around Antarctica presents a clear trend of increasing ice cover with the recent extent at record highs. A better explanation for any increased glacial flow might be that the increasing snowfall, also recorded, is increasing the flow of ice as the Antarctic ice cap is already at the level to induce plastic flow. The more snow and ice that falls on the ice cap, the higher will be the pressure driving glacial flow. When glaciers retreat, climate alarmists say it is due to global warming. When they advance, alarmists re-badge it as “acceleration”, and that too is claimed to be evidence of warming.

In view of the uncertain and conflicting evidence, the claim that there is a 97% scientific consensus regarding climate change says more about the corruption of science than it does about any change in the climate.

Models are not evidence

Projections from computer models of the global climate have been presented as firm “evidence” for future warming, but models are not evidence. There are about a hundred different climate models. None has been verified, no two agree and none reproduce the actual temperature record. Moreover, the range of uncertainty in the estimates used for various inputs permit “adjustments” which can result in widely varied results. For some important inputs there is even uncertainty about whether their net effect is positive or negative. In the end the models represent nothing more than an elaborate personal guess by the modellers.  Although models may provide insights into the possible dynamics of the climate system they have no credibility for use in predicting future warming. Ironically however, they do support the claimed 97% consensus in one respect.  About 97% of the models yield exaggerated warming well above the actual temperature record and the few exceptions closer to the record are obscure models which receive no credence from climate change researchers.

Real problems ignored

Meanwhile, back in the real world, major problems with chronic deficits, ballooning debt, unaffordable health care and education, debasement of basic rights, malignant over regulation, uncontrolled immigration, an ageing population, economic stagnation and growing unemployment are all being left to fester while governments tilt at climate windmills in a desperate search for popular approval. These are all hugely more certain, pressing and addressable problems than is some highly uncertain degree of possible climate change a century or more from now.

Fantasy vs. Reality

Fossil fuel reserves are limited. Most of the low cost high quality deposits are already depleted and the rate of new discoveries is decreasing. Maintaining production increasingly depends upon non-conventional sources and advanced technologies with low production rates and high costs resulting in increasing prices for end users. At the same time technological advances are making alternatives more effective and affordable.

At present we could not feed, clothe and shelter the existing population without fossil fuels, nor could we maintain the economic health necessary to develop effective alternatives.  Trying to force wide scale adoption of premature technologies is a recipe for disaster as has been every other attempt at central planning of economies.

Both theory and practice indicate that complex interactive systems (e.g. climate, ecosystems, and economies) incorporating numerous non-linear relationships cannot be managed from top down but can effectively self-organise if permitted to do so. Despite the sometimes messy self-adjustments, free markets have repeatedly proved to be the best way we have found to do this in the economic sphere. Failing to recognise this and mindlessly repeating to attempt a centrally planned approach proposed by self-anointed “experts’ is beyond simply foolish. It requires wilful ignorance compounded by unbounded self-regard.

Trying to implement the climate alarmist’s half-baked theoretical solutions to imaginary problems can at best only result in economic stagnation and delay. More likely the harm would be even greater as the recognition of failure and the necessity to change course then determining what to do next would all be impeded by political resistance, uncertainty and compromises while the damage continues to intensify.

Although the danger from climate change itself appears to have been greatly exaggerated the economic impact of ill-conceived measures to control it are already real, substantial and on-going. These include significant increases in the cost of energy and food, job losses, large scale environmental degradation from wind farms and bio-fuel production as well as the diversion of hundreds of billions of dollars from other far more real and urgent needs.

Biggest threat is corruption, not carbon

Perhaps the greatest harm of all has been the damage to the integrity and credibility of science itself.  This affects not just science but also our ability to effectively govern ourselves in the increasingly complex technological world we are creating. Gross scientific malpractice has become endemic in climate science. Misleading or even false claims, cherry-picking of data, hiding or ignoring conflicting evidence, unexplained manipulations of data, refusal to permit independent examination of methods and evidence, abuse of peer review to supress adverse findings and vicious personal denigration of dissent have all become widespread practice in climate research. Worse yet, when such conduct has been exposed, the response of alarmists has not been to condemn it, but to first try to deny it, then to attempt to justify it and finally to pretend to dismiss it as trivial and of no consequence. In the most prominent examples a post script has been to announce some prestigious sounding award to the miscreants thus appearing to erase the taint of any impropriety.

The climate change bandwagon has afforded a tantalising shortcut to generous funding and expert status for any third rate academic willing to abandon the scientific ethos and many have done so. For the unwilling, any public dissent means a level of professional ostracism and personal denigration few are willing to bear.

Research is not a license for fraud

The evidence of widespread corruption in climate and other environmental science is clear and abundant. The harm done has been great and is increasing. Relevant laws against fraud, professional misconduct, misleading parliament and other offences are being blatantly violated. The research institutions involved have also routinely made false claims in press releases widely reported in the mainstream media. It is past time to begin to demand professional honesty and apply the relevant laws to academic researchers that are applied to all other activities. Terminating both current and future government funding of those found guilty of serious violations of scientific standards could be a simple effective cure to treat the malaise now infecting environmental science.  To continue to ignore it can only assure more disastrously poor decisions in the future.

The idea that we must take drastic steps now for the benefit of our great grandchildren is also emotive nonsense.  History clearly shows that the problems faced by future generations and the means to solve them are almost certain to be very different from anything we can predict. If we leave them a healthy economy and uncorrupted science, they will be equipped far better than we to decide if climate change is indeed becoming a problem and what to do about it. If we cripple our economy and debase our best tool for understanding the world we live in we will be doing our descendants no favour and they will not be thankful for our foolishness.

Discussion About the Parasitic Wind industry!

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Exposing wind industry “vampires”: Alan Jones and James Dellingpole

June 6, 2014 by 

 

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James Dellingpole was interviewed by Alan Jones on 2GB  last week about the economic, environmental and social fraud of the wind industry.

Alan has a little radio show that more than just a few Australians tune into each morning. Syndicated through over 77 Stations and with close to 2 million listeners Countrywide – AJ as he’s known – is one of those people that leads the political charge on many issues that really affect ordinary Australians and which the rest of the press ignore.

To hear the interview click on the player below. The transcript follows.

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Transcript

Alan Jones: Well I told you yesterday, there’s been more damning evidence if any was needed, that this renewable energy rubbish, the Renewable Energy Target scheme, propping up the so-called “clean energy” sector (whatever that means) is sheer economic madness. Economic vandalism. Economic waste.

There’s now an economic analysis of the scheme, commissioned by the Mineral Council of Australia, but it is an independent analysis, suggests that there will be job losses as economic activity slows in the face of ever increasing power costs, caused by these ridiculous Renewable Energy Targets. Now you’ve heard me on about this for years and years. The economic analysis argues that the scheme’s opportunity cost, that is, money that could have been invested elsewhere will be more than $36 billion in six years time. That subsidies to the scheme could reach between $19 and $21 billion – your money in six years time. It finds that solar panels and wind farm subsidies will cost you, the electricity consumer, nearly $22,000,000,000 by 2020, six years time.

The Renewable Energy Target scheme of Rudd and Gillard is another ‘Building the education revolution’, another ‘Pink batts’, another ‘Broadband’, another harebrained idea of the utterly discredited Rudd and Gillard regimes, and it is now, as we warned, reeking its havoc.

Tony Abbott has an expert panel reviewing the scheme. That is compromised because the Federal Energy Minister, this bloke Macfarlane, is in bed with the wind industry. He dines with them, and that day is not far away when I will start naming some of those people and the occasions on which Mr McFarlane has been both their guest and their host. Talk about ICACs! Quite frankly, this whole renewable energy nonsense should be abandoned now.

The former Queensland Labour Treasurer Keith De Lacy, who is now a significant business figure, has said it is plain crazy to have schemes such as this-solar feed in tariffs and carbon tax that are driving up power bills. He said the Australian public keep complaining about the increases in the cost of living and this is become even more so. One of the biggest increases he said, is the price of electricity. He said it is the most fundamental of services to the Australian public. Now the most brain-dead aspect to all of this, and you’ve heard me say this a million times before, it that this wind power and solar power can only survive with massive taxpayer subsidies. And of course it is seeking to demonise coal fired power which has been the source of our international competitive advantage.

It was Terry McCrann who said to me years ago on this program, that if we de-carbonised the Australian economy, we are writing for ourselves, his words “a national suicide note, albeit by slow strangulation”. And of course it’s not just the decarbonisation that is the so-called carbon tax, well it’s not a carbon tax, that’s a lie too, its carbon dioxide tax, it’s this abject persistence with the so-called Renewable energy targets. The mistaken and dishonest view is that Australia’s energy needs can be met by sources other than coal-fired power.

And that was always the source of our international strength.

Now the fact that we have to feed solar power and wind power into the national energy grid, together with the carbon dioxide tax – are the reasons people can’t afford to have the heater on at night. It is the reason why manufacturing is locating overseas. It is the reason why thousands and thousands of jobs have been lost in the manufacturing industry. 60% of the increased cost faced by business in recent times were a direct consequence of the combination of the carbon dioxide tax and the Renewable Energy target. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, and we would most probably be prepared to cop it, if the science weren’t so obviously flawed.

It’s not just Tony Abbott who has a review and privately believes, as does Joe Hockey, that these Renewable Energy Targets are rubbish. Joel Fitzgibbon, when Labour were in government, has said that the Renewable Energy Target should be dismantled. So we have got wind farms around the country, which can’t survive unless they are subsidised to the tune of about half $1 million per turbine. Billions and billions of dollars are wasted in Renewable energy certificates for wind turbine farms that are non-compliant.

Forget the destruction that they do to the environment, to public health, and all those other things we’ve discussed, now here we got proof of the pudding that subsidies for renewable energy schemes, such as rooftop solar panels and wind farms will cost you the consumer almost $22 billion by 2020.

Well James Dellingpole-well I should just say before we go to James, how can we say, rightly as a government and as a community that we are not going to follow Holden and Toyota and SPC Ardmona down the road with an open cheque-book – yet here we are tipping billions into entities – wind power, wind turbines which are only jacking up the price of energy to you and to business, putting business and people out of work and they couldn’t survive without massive taxpayer subsidies.

Well James Dellingpole, I’ve spoken to him before, an English writer – tough bloke, and fearless broadcaster and he has expressed and written his opposition to this. It wasn’t long ago that in an extraordinary article he wrote and he said, and you’ve got to say this slowly- in Britain, every wind industry job costs the taxpayer 100, 000 pounds a year in subsidies. James Dellingpole is on the line from Northamptonshire. James -good morning.

James Dellingpole: G’day Alan, good to be back on your show.

Alan Jones: Thank you, lovely to have you. How much longer can we tolerate this nonsense?

James Dellingpole: It’s going to take a very long time to turn this oil tanker around. Because there are so many people with their snouts in the trough. And in Australia as I know from the last time I visited your beautiful country, and God knows I want to come back soon, I was astonished to discover how heavily the ALP is involved in this scam. A lot of the pension funds are heavily invested in these wind turbines. I don’t know if you caught that fantastic speech a few months ago by Senator John Madigan?

Alan Jones: I did, We talked to him at the time.

James Dellingpole: Talking presumably under Parliamentary privilege, because I know from my experience – when ever you speak out against the wind industry in Australia you get very nasty threatening lawyer’s letters. Because these guys don’t like the truth and they’ve got various tame academics supporting them, they’ve got …. It is as you’ve rightly said, it’s an industry which can only survive with heavy taxpayer subsidies. And what this kind of industry does is it attracts the very worst kind of people. People who don’t want to make an honest buck. People that just want to live like vampires off the taxpayer. So this is what is going on and John Madigan in this speech pointed out one example about the Waubra wind farm in Victoria. I mean it was an absolute disgrace

And the one thing I think you can console yourself with in Australia is that you really are ahead of the game in fighting back. I don’t know whether it’s that you Aussies don’t take it like other people do, but you are really fighting back hard. And I was looking today actually at the website of the Waubra foundation – this wonderful thing by Sarah Laurie.

Alan Jones: Just for my listeners’ sake, James, James is speaking in his Northamptonshire accent there – that is W-a-u-b-r-a and we have talked about that often here. Waubra, but might’nt have come through, but that is where it is, in Victoria. But of course, Napthine is the Premier of Victoria, and these things are all is in, many of these things are in his electorate.

James Dellingpole: Yes. I was reading the extraordinary story of a guy – he wrote – various people have written letters describing their experiences with the wind industry, and one of these guys actually was conned into having wind turbines on his land and he was told there was going to be no health consequences, no noise, etc. etc. Anyway, once he had signed the deal in blood and there was no escape from it, he discovered that on the contrary, these things ruined his life. To the point where even when he was sleeping 5 km away, 5 km away from wind turbines they were  destroying his health. I’ve spoken to loads of people who have wind turbine syndrome and I can tell you it is a miserable experience. It has all sorts of terrible effects.

And we haven’t even gone to the environmental damage these things do. The number of birds and bats they chop to pieces. I call them bat-chomping eco-crucifixes – because that’s what they are. They are just kind of a symbol of the green movement but they don’t actually do anything useful for anyone other than the rent seekers who’ve got their snouts in the trough.

Alan Jones: It’s frightening isn’t it? I mean even if it were economically viable, which it isn’t, its unpredictable, it’s inefficient, it’s intermittent, you can’t rely on it …I mean it has government protection like no other in a day and age where we are saying we are winding all of this protection stuff back so you’ve now got a large scale wind turbine developer can make nearly half $1 million in taxpayer subsidies, and they call them renewable energy certificates.

James Dellingpole: Yes. The point I think that some people don’t understand. You get some idiot, some naive idiot saying “we are just harvesting nature’s free bounty”, “wind is free”, wind energy is free”. No it is not free and there is a very simple reason for that which you can tell by the fact that wind does not blow all the time. Wind blows when it feels like it. Wind doesn’t blow when you want to take a hot shower. It doesn’t blow when you want to use your air conditioning. It blows when it wants to. So in other words the energy that the wind industry produces is essentially worthless because you can’t have a situation where the supplier decides when to supply you. I mean what kind? … How does that work in a free market?

Alan Jones: When do you think people are going to wake up to the fact that this has destroyed our once comparative manufacturing advantage because we had cheap energy and cheap electricity it has been destroyed now. We can’t compete internationally because of energy costs.

James Dellingpole: Well part of the problem of course is that apart from all these rent seeking politicos and corporations which are involved in these dodgy deals, is that also you’ve got organisations like Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, you’ve got all these organisations are pumping out eco-propaganda saying that renewable energy is the only answer. These organisations are multi-nationals ….

Alan Jones: But James,that shouldn’t matter – if you’ve got a government that listens and understands what the issues our-we’ve got a federal energy Minister in bed with these people.

James Dellingpole: Yes. Well I mean at least Tony Abbott is beginning to turn the tide.

Alan Jones: Yes he knows – And so does Hockey, Hockey knows too. But you’ve got to do something about it.

James Dellingpole: Yes, when I was last there, somebody called Julia Gillard was in charge and would you prefer her back?

Alan Jones: Don’t start me there, thank you very much. But the people listening to you our funding all of this dramatically.

James Dellingpole: Yes.

Alan Jones: Maurice Newman, Maurice Newman is a man I’m sure you know him.

James Dellingpole: I love Maurice Newman – he is a hero.

Alan Jones: He is a very respected Australian businessman, and he called wind farms, quote, “an obscene wealth transfer from the poor to the rich”. He called it “a crime against the people”. Now the people listening to you James this morning are all battlers out there in Struggle Street. They’re having money ripped out of their pockets so some Thai company, or Chinese wind turbine company is going to make a big, big quid.

James Dellingpole: Yes, I know. It is an absolute obscenity. And the depressing thing is that across the world these dishonest political leaders – you know like President Obama. President Obama has built the second term of his administration on creating “green jobs”. Well you’ve seen what’s happened to America. You have the example, for example of Solyndra, this company run by his friends into which he poured $500 million dollars-half a $1 billion of taxpayer’s money down the drain. And there has been research from all over the world. The Spanish economy has pretty much been destroyed by renewable energy. In fact it was a Spanish economist who came up with the shocking statistic that for every green job created by government so called “investment”, 2.2 jobs were killed in the real economy. And in Britain they did a survey and it was even higher – 3.7 jobs killed for every “green job” created.

Alan Jones: And Germany has had a gut full of it.

James Dellingpole: Oh yes.

Alan Jones: I must say last time that you were here, you said this, and it might be a good spot to end, James, James Dellingpole said, “God I wish I could be there at the barricades with the protesters in Canberra today – if ever a cause was worth fighting for, this is the one.

James Dellingpole: Yes.

Alan Jones: It is isn’t it?

James: It is, absolutely. I mean I only wish that – no I can’t say this, I can’t say this – I wish that some Tornado would come along and blow them all down. I’m not going to advocate terrorism but sometimes it is quite tempting.

Alan Jones: Lovely to talk to you. We’ll keep in touch. Okay, there we are, so there we are. Now there is a review of this. Tony Abbott does understand that he has and Achilles’ heel here in that the Federal Energy Minister in Macfarlane is in bed with these people. How this review is objective – I don’t know. But why do you need review? There is any amount of evidence out there – the whole thing needs to be scrapped. If people can make it pay without taxpayer’s money-away you go. But not one cent of our money should be spent. Another Rudd and Gillard failure that has to be dismantled.

Wind Turbines Destroy the Fabric of Rural Communities!

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Wind Farms & “Community Division”: Tales

from Rye Park (NSW) & Northumberland (UK)

June 4, 2014 by 

Money Wasted

Naked greed, institutional corruption and State-sanctioned corporate bullying and thuggery are part and parcel of the wind industry, wherever you go. We recount below a tale from Northumberland that could have been written anywhere giant fans have been slung up anywhere in the world.

In tales like these the phrase “community division” often appears. However, the term appears to suggest the rural communities concerned are equally divided – in the same way that 18 players line up against each other in the AFL. Nothing could be further from the truth. Communities set upon by wind industry goons divide roughly (and unequally) into three groups.

The first is the tiny minority who hope to profit directly: farmers in contracts with the developer paid to host the turbines; gullible local business people who (foolishly) believe that they’ll snaffle work surrounding the project (construction and engineering work is almost exclusively the preserve of large, well-oiled outfits like Transfield or Leighton – the fans are built in China, India or Denmark); the local volunteer firefighters (CFA/CFS) promised a brand-new fire-truck by the developer (never mind that the fire unit will be reserved to look after the developer’s fans ahead of local properties); and the local footy club, promised a little cash and brand-new footy jumpers (featuring the developer’s “stylish” logo, of course).

The second group is by far and away the majority and includes those whose lives will be the all worse for the short-sighted greed of the few mentioned above. This group obviously includes the many who will end up as neighbours, whose homes will become sonic torture traps: hard-working people who will be driven mad by shadow flicker and the incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise, night after merciless night. As part of the so-called “green” energy “bargain”, the value of their properties will be smashed, if it were even possible to find a buyer for their (soon to be uninhabitable) homes (see our post here).

A pretty fair example of the division outlined above was given a week or so ago at a “community consultation” held by Epuron – an outfit hoping to develop what it calls the “Rye Park” wind farm (north of Yass and east of Boorowa, NSW).

Epuron sent a “pretty young thing” equipped with not much more than a Marketing Degree and the developer’s “spin sheet”. This young lass found herself way out of her depth, as locals grilled her on the wild and unsubstantiated claims she made about her bosses planned giant fans. You know, the usual stuff about “powering” 100,000 homes; reducing CO2 emissions; creating thousands of wonderful “green” jobs; and, best of all, lowering retail power prices. Locals hammered her on all of these classic furphies: in trying to defend the indefensible, she didn’t get off to a great start – it quickly became evident that she had no idea what a Renewable Energy Certificate was, let alone the cost impact of RECs on retail power prices or the (critical) benefit of that subsidy to her employer. Oops!

On a show of hands, the 32 present “divided” as follows: 23 locals, firmly against; and 9 in favour – 4 of whom were employed by Epuron, 2 were contracted as turbine hosts and 3 were “unknowns” (check out this video of the count).

And that brings us to the third group. Quite often a few “unknowns” turn up at “community consultations” to voice their loving support for giant fans. These aren’t “locals” and, even if they live in the vicinity, will never actually live anywhere near that (or any other) wind farm. They’re pretty easy to spot: beards are essential, as are socks and sandals. They turn up to the meeting, rant about the mortal perils of “climate change” and disappear into the ether, never to be seen again. Think Dave Clarke of delusional “ramblings” fame. You know, the type that says having a couple of hundred giant fans speared into YOUR backyard is a sacrifice that THEY’RE willing to make.

Take out rent seekers (like the developer and hopeful turbine hosts) – and rent-a-crowd ideologues – and the “division” in communities set upon by plans for giant fans soon disappears.

Remember, that it’s only ever been about the money.

Chop the fat pile of taxpayer and power consumer subsidies directed to wind power outfits and “community division” will soon resolve. The developers will disappear in a heartbeat; the prospective hosts will go back to doing what they were doing before they entered contracts they neither read nor understood; and the locals will return to the peaceful and untroubled lives they deserve.

Here’s The Daily Mail on how mountains of pointless subsidies fuel the utterly rotten and corrupt wind industry; and sustains its parasites.

Dirty tricks, greed and a ruined idyll that proves the wind turbine plague ISN’T over after all: ROBERT HARDMAN on the stormy issue of green subsidies
The Daily Mail
Robert Hardman
24 May 2014

The last time tempers were this high around here was almost exactly 500 years ago at the Battle of Flodden — the biggest Anglo-Scottish punch-up in history. And not much has changed in this stunning corner of Northumberland since then.

The big house is still Ford Castle, where James IV of Scotland spent his last night alive, carousing on the eve of battle. A couple of miles down the road is Etal Castle, where the English army celebrated victory.

Going back further still, there are 60 sites of prehistoric interest in a three-mile radius — including the Geordie answer to Stonehenge.

The views are much the same, across to the Cheviots, the Scottish borders and what is now Northumberland National Park.

But, this week, all that has changed. The diggers and pile drivers have just arrived, along with a lot of heavies in hi-viz jackets.

By Christmas, a great swathe of this ancient and enchanting border country, including the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, will be overshadowed by the Barmoor Wind Farm — six wind turbines, each 360ft tall and with a blade span the size of a Boeing 747.

Thought we’d heard the last of the onshore wind farm? Remember last year’s ministerial pledges to ‘roll back’ those barmy green subsidies for landowners and companies which desecrate the countryside?

As this week’s scenes in wildest Northumberland testify, it’s business as usual.

This racket, which already adds £3billion a year to all our fuel bills, is as lucrative as ever. The planning applications are pouring in, even though Britain has comfortably met its wind energy targets for 2020.

Oh for the days when the worst to fear was a wall of leylandii. It’s a story familiar to rural communities all over Britain. And, with just six turbines, Barmoor is actually at the smaller end of the wind farm spectrum.

But it’s important for several reasons. First, it shows that nowhere, however beautiful, is safe from the predations of developers masquerading as environmentalists.

Second, even the energy company now building these things acknowledges that ‘amazing’ tactics were used to ram through this development in the face of overwhelming local opposition.

Third, the bulldozers have started tearing up the soil here in the very week that Britain’s only overtly anti-wind farm party — UKIP — has made giant strides across the political landscape.

Down on the edge of Brackenside Farm, I find a building site, a digger and several men in hi-viz jackets scratching their chins. It’s the new site for EDF Energy’s Barmoor sub-station. A security guard becomes rather aggressive the moment we start taking photographs, even when I point to the public footpath sign next to me.

‘It’s a hard-hat area and it’s dangerous,’ he shouts.

Three EDF officials appear and say the same, though two must be in mortal danger for they are without hard hats, too.

Eventually, they concede that they have no powers to shut down a public right of way and choose not to engage in further conversation. We go about our business.

A mile further on, I meet another digger ripping up a field to create a new access road from the B6525 to the wind turbines. The sight of our cameras prompts two men to jump in to a van and race over the field to confront us as we stand on the public road.

‘Can I help?’ asks one, in tones presaging the answer ‘no’. He marches off when I explain I am from a newspaper.

As soon as I start exploring the background to this project, I begin to understand why these EDF contractors are so jumpy.

It has taken 11 years of legal battles, bad blood and festering anger to create a hideous eyesore which will, ultimately, generate just 12 megawatts — on a windy day.

That’s enough electricity to power a few villages in the right weather. Yet, as I shall explain, it will pay out a £50 million jackpot over 20 years.

The Barmoor saga began when wind farm developers Force 9 Energy and Catamount persuaded three local farmers to sign up to a deal, which was all sorted before the public had any inkling of what was going on.

The locals, as locals do, formed an action group called Save Our Unspoiled Landscape (SOUL) and produced a few leaflets.

To their astonishment, Force 9 hired a swanky London PR firm and then made a formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority arguing that the locals had exaggerated the threat from the turbines.

Quite why it was the ASA’s business to adjudicate on a planning dispute is anyone’s guess, but the judges ruled in favour of the developer.

Meanwhile, the action group bought a bright orange helium-filled blimp which they tethered at the proposed site to show people across the region just how visible the turbines would be.

Soon after it was raised aloft, its moorings were mysteriously cut and the local authorities spent several days warning North Sea air traffic to be aware of a large orange UFO with ‘NO!’ written on it.

The local council threw out the project after receiving more objections to this plan than any it could recall.

But, shortly before the 2010 election, the Labour government ruled in favour of the development on the grounds that ‘it involved proposals of major significance for the delivery of the government’s climate change programme’.

Job done, Force 9/Catamount started looking for a buyer and sold the project for an undisclosed sum (thought to be around £10million), via Duke Energy, to EDF Energy Renewables in March. And now work begins.

Politicians love to bang on about ‘vibrant communities’, but this one has just been torn in half. How can the footling energy output from a minor get-rich-quick scheme justify the long-term pain felt by so many?

People who wouldn’t get planning permission for a garage extension must now see their views desecrated and the value of their homes slashed in order to enrich a handful of their neighbours.

Based on the projected output of the plant, the highly respected think tank, the Renewable Energy Foundation, expects the wind plant (how can anyone call this thing a ‘farm’?) to receive a £1.15million annual subsidy on top of £1.4million a year for electricity generated over a 20-year contract.

How is it shared out? The terms are always confidential, but the going rate for a landowner in this situation is £10,000-£20,000 per turbine per year, plus a slice of the pie every time the site is resold.

The locals now realise that there is nothing more they can do.

Nick Maycock smiles grimly outside his comfortable guest house, the Friendly Hound, which overlooks the site. He doesn’t even want to contemplate the effect on his trade.

‘Those farmers have been offered a goldmine. How can they turn it down?’ he asks.

I find only one of the farmers today. Sandy Rievely will have two turbines on his land, but will only say he is not allowed to discuss it under the terms of the contract. So what do his neighbours think?

‘I’d prefer not to say,’ replies Dr John Ferguson, 73, a former GP whose retirement has been consumed by the 11-year battle to stop his cottage being dwarfed by these monstrosities.

‘Well, I will then,’ says his wife, Ann. ‘It’s just completely wrong that a handful of landowners can do this to all their neighbours. I avoid even talking to them now because I’ll lose my temper . . .’

Her voice cracks, the conversation halts and we all look awkwardly out of the kitchen window across the sheep and the fields to the distant treeline. In a matter of months, six giant fans on six masts many times the height of the trees, will look back at her.

Now is probably not the moment to remind Ann of the immortal words of the former Energy Secretary who inflicted much of this unhappiness on the countryside in the name of fluffy Polar bears and saving the planet. ‘It is socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area,’ declared Ed Miliband the last time Labour was in power, ‘like not wearing your seat belt.’

The very man who now attacks grasping energy bosses for fleecing the poor is none other than the Minister who thought it would be a wise and noble idea to make the rest of us pay dukes and developers an overall £200,000 annual bonus for every single skyscraper-sized windmill they planted in the middle of the countryside.

For these things really are the size of skyscrapers. Each one of the wind turbines going up by the Fergusons’ home near Flodden Field is going to be the height of a 30-storey office block — taller indeed than anything in, say, Edinburgh.

If they were buildings, they would automatically enter the list of Britain’s top 50 highest.

After more than a decade of sleepless nights and legal battles costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, the residents are well-used to the arguments: that they are simply Nimbys, that it is our duty as human beings to place the greater needs of the environment ahead of selfish local considerations.

They’ve heard all this stuff. And they know it’s tosh. These landowners and EDF wouldn’t be doing any of this if it wasn’t for the staggering inducements.

I go for a drive with local farmer Andrew Joicey, 58, whose elder brother runs the family estate covering 15,000 acres in this area, including mighty Ford Castle (now leased to the local council).

He points out that the estate was offered the usual big bucks to sign up for the scheme, but rejected it. And Andrew has devoted a large part of the past 11 years to fighting local wind farm proposals, seeing off three others — but not this one.

‘What is particularly galling is the way these things are just bought and sold without any regard for local feelings,’ he tells me.

Just this week, he had a long meeting with a senior EDF ‘director of construction’ as part of the company policy of ‘engaging’ with the community.

To his astonishment, the executive admitted that he had heard how the developers had persuaded local farm workers to sign meaningless contracts for a few hundred pounds (wind farm noise restrictions do not apply to people deemed to be ‘financially involved’). Force 9/Catamount was unavailable for comment yesterday.

The EDF executive also agreed that it was ‘incredible’ that the local action group had been reported to the ASA.

As for the Government’s claim that this 12 megawatt site was of ‘major significance’ to Britain’s climate change programme, he shook his head and admitted: ‘It doesn’t even feature.’

So there we have it. Lives and livelihoods are being blighted by a project which even the owners concede is of little consequence.

An EDF spokesman points out that it will give £60,000-a-year to community schemes as a gesture of goodwill.

But it’s a gesture which impresses no one, any more than the latest Tory promise, four weeks ago, to cut wind subsidies after the next election.

For these locals are already having to fund yet another legal battle to stop yet another wind project. In January, a government inspector approved a scheme to put a turbine in front of Northumberland’s ancient Duddo Stone Circle.

Next month, they are taking the Government and the farmer concerned to the High Court in a bid to overturn the decision.

As UKIP — with its clear anti-wind farm agenda — toasts its council successes and looks forward to tomorrow’s Euro election results, there is a clear message here for the eco-zealots in all the main parties.

But is anyone listening?
The Daily Mail

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