How green is this? Golden eagle ‘transitions’ to wind power.
One issue that annoys RE zealots, like a burr under a frisky pony’s saddle blanket, is the wind industry’s rampant bird and bat slaughter. It’s an inconvenient truth to be sure. But, as with everything that the wind industry does, if you can’t keep a straight face while lying about it any more, then pull out all stops and cover it up.
The wholesale slaughter of millions of birds and bats – includes rare, endangered and majestic species, like America’s iconic bald and golden eagles. The default response from the wind industry is to lie like fury and – when the corpses can no longer be hidden and the lying fails – to issue court proceedings to literally bury those facts (see our post here).
The hackneyed retort from the wind cult is that cars, cats and tall buildings kill more birds than their beloveds.
Attempting to compare an utterly pointless power generation source – abandoned centuries ago for very obvious reasons, that wouldn’t exist without massive and endless subsidies – with automobiles and skyscrapers is risible.
Motorcars and high-rise buildings both serve useful purposes, providing meaningful and independent mobility to the masses and permitting the high levels of urban density needed for modern cities. Whereas, wind turbines provide power in occasional, chaotic spurts – delivering power less than 30% of the time, at totally random intervals – require their entire generating capacity to be matched by dispatchable sources, such as coal and gas, and accordingly serve no meaningful purpose, other than harvesting endless subsidies.
And for all the talk about cats killing more raptors than wind turbines, try and find a single verified account of a moggy bringing down a healthy Wedge-Tailed Eagle, Hawk or Kite.
Now, as to the fate of such raptors, an Indian study has detailed the appalling scale of the wholly unnecessary carnage, and what it means for the ecosystem, as a whole.
Wind farms are the ‘new apex predators’: Blades kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites that live nearby, study shows
Daily Mail
Harry Pettit
6 November 2018
Wind turbines are the world’s new ‘apex predators’, wiping out buzzards, hawks and other carnivorous birds at the top of the food chain, say scientists.
A study of wind farms in India found that predatory bird numbers drop by three quarters in areas around the turbines.
This is having a ‘ripple effect’ across the food chain, with small mammals and reptiles adjusting their behaviour as their natural predators disappear from the skies.
Birds and bats were assumed to be most vulnerable to the rise of the landscape-blotting machines.
But their impact is reverberating across species, experts warned, upsetting nature’s delicate balance.
The news is particularly worrying as most wind farms are built on wide open plains and other environments where birds are typically found.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru studied lizard and bird populations at three wind turbine sites in the Western Ghats.
They found almost four times fewer buzzards, hawks and kites in areas with wind farms – a loss of about 75 per cent.
In areas without turbines around 19 birds were spotted every three hours, while nearer to the machines this number dropped to around five.
This led to an abundance of the fan-throated lizard, a species only found on the Indian sub continent and a favourite snack of the predatory birds.
The reptile also had lower levels of the stress hormone corticosterone and this changed how it lived.
For instance, humans were able to get much closer than usual before they ran off, as without predatory birds around, they had become less fearful.
The analysis has implications for wind farms all over the globe – including Britain, where the top predators include many birds of prey such as owls and eagles.
Study coauthor Professor Maria Thaker said: ‘We have known from many studies that wind farms affect birds and bats.
‘They kill them and disrupt their movement. But we took that one step further and discovered that it affects lizards too.
‘Every time a top predator is removed or added, unexpected effects trickle through the ecosystem.
‘What is actually happening here is the wind-turbines are akin to adding a top predator to the ecosystem.’
The study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution compared populations of raptors and lizards on a plateau that has had a wind farm for around 20 years to an adjacent valley that has no turbines.
It also took blood samples from 144 lizards captured on the two locations in the northern area of the mountain range.
Wind turbines are known to kill large birds, such as golden eagles.
A recent study by an international team of scientists found the decline of apex predators is ‘arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world.’
These include wolves and lions on land, whales and sharks in the oceans and large fish in freshwater ecosystems.
There have also been dramatic falls in populations of large herbivores like elephants and bison. The trophic cascade has moved down the food chain.
Daily Mail
Lizards vote for wind
About stopthesethings
STOP THESE THINGS 
Once again, far too many of the self-styled “Green” movement are, wittingly or not, becoming the “outsource” for Fossil Carbon’s justifiable fear of the only thing that can replace it, civilian nuclear fission. No person with an intuitive feel for simple arithmetic, and access to actual data that they can understand, would imagine that wind turbines can displace the sail driven ships that coal and then petroleum products ousted.
The enthusiasts for capricious RE are either monstrously ignorant of the history of the Industrial Revolution, or driven to it by the factually false apparent connection between nuclear weapons and civilian power.
That’s like not using Clydesdale and Shire horses because they’re direct descendants of war horse breeds.
Or not using nitrate fertilisers for your ethanol-corn-crop, because Haber and Bosch used their technology also for explosives.
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.
DO NOT VOTE for coal or even “clean natural gas”, a.k.a. Carbon Tetrahydride.
CO2 is also Carbonic Acid Gas, which in the ocean can turn calcium carbonate shells into calcium bicarbonate, which dissolves in water. Result: dead coral reefs and dying oyster and clam beds.
Global Warming is a FACT, caused by fossil carbon dioxide at 400 ppm capturing more infrared radiation than at its previous tens of millennia-long value of 280 ppm.
The Deception is actually a romantic nostalgic DELUSION, that the SUN’s energy, which was slightly inadequate when fossil solar energy reserves (carbon and the oxygen to burn it) became the popular Industrial Revolution. Among other things, it made slavery obsolete.
The only way to retain the benefits of that revolution is nuclear power, which the Fossil Carbon Industry, and NOBODY else, has reason to fear (and detest).
Infrared radiation must necessarily escape to outer space to balance the energy of the solar radiation the planet receives. This is what cools the night-side part of the Earth, which is dark precisely because humans cannot see infrared.
BTW, Leaks of methane (CH4) absorb far higher amounts of infrared radiation even than carbon dioxide.
Vote instead for the decommissioning of the Nuclear Regulatory (or Refusal or Ruination) Commission.
About Tim Ball and the BC Green Party. Free speech is good, and lawsuits are not the way to correct false statements.
But Tim Ball is wrong about Global Warming, and most of the people with the effrontery to call themselves ‘green’ are as _green_ about fixing the problem as Polonius thought his daughter Ophelia was about Hamlet.
Wind propelled generating devices (they aren’t turbines) are worthless not because the problem doesn’t exist, but because they cannot possibly fix it.
The fact is, that the Great Barrier Reef is in chemical danger from Australian humans burning fossil carbon. As Dr. Alex Cannara states, the oceans are chemically threatened by the fact that CO2 is ALSO “carbonic acid gas”
Mollusc shells, and coral reefs, are dependent upon organisms that need an alkalinity slightly more than pH=8.0, in order to create CaCO3, the carbonate of calcium. its bi-carbonate Ca(HCO3)2 forms and dissolves when there is more than a minimum level of carbonic acid. The problem is that
H2O+CO2 H2CO3, carbonic acid, which is either two H+ ions and one double-negative CO3– ion, OR just one H+ ion and a bicarbonate ion, HCO3-
The ridiculous thing about wind and solar in Australia is that if they were seriously intended as a way to reduce the rate at which the seas are being acidified and the CO2 content of the atmosphere going up (it used to be 280 ppm, and is now 400) there would be some attempt to cut down both on coal burning and coal mining.
There is no sign of that, so wind turbines are not even intended to reduce CO2 emissions by non-living sources.
Coal is filthy, but nuclear is far cleaner than anything else.
The infamous Chernobyl “disaster” killed fewer people than wind turbines have since then.
Air pollution from coal, in a year, kills more people than that, but possibly fewer raptorial birds.
We DO need to get rid of coal, AND “natural” gas, and Nuclear is what we need.
“The infamous Chernobyl “disaster” killed fewer people than wind turbines have since then.”
I’m anti-wind-power but how do you arrive at that claim? Long term exposure to radiation is said to have killed tens of thousands in the region.
Wind turbines are mainly killing scenery and wildlife, along with health effects on people, as well from toxic rare earth mining impacts (akin to slow deaths from radiation).
Let’s stay realistic with facts if “these things” are to be stopped.
Noting you can’t put a figure on the number of radiation deaths actually caused by the Chernobyl incident, here’s some ‘realism’ for you.
Despite the hysterical overreaction to the Fukushima incident – a result of damage caused when a monster tsunami knocked out the power plant’s power supply – not one single soul was lost during the incident or in the 5 years since.
Compare that fatality free “disaster” with the number killed and wounded by the wind industry.
The wind industry has been flapping about for not much more than 20 years (producing a trickle of unreliable power, even today) and has killed more than 180 people – including the two Dutch wind turbine mechanics incinerated by a self-immolating Vestas, depicted above.
There have been thousands of ‘accidents’ causing hundreds of serious injuries and 184 have been killed, of those:
112 were wind industry and direct support workers (divers, construction, maintenance, engineers, etc), or small turbine owner/operators.
72 were public fatalities, including workers not directly dependent on the wind industry (e.g. transport workers). 17 bus passengers were killed in one single incident in Brazil in March 2012; 4 members of the public were killed in an aircraft crash in May 2014 and a further three members of the public killed in a transport accident in September 2014. This includes several suicides from those living close to wind turbines.
Contrast that with nuclear power, which has been a serious power generation contender for over 50 years and (in a single accident at a military facility, Chernobyl) killed 56, most of whom were fire or rescue workers (see our post here). And, unlike wind power, nuclear power just works: without backup, pumped hydro, mythical mega-batteries and the like.
For more on the safest and most efficient, stand-alone generation system there is:
https://stopthesethings.com/2018/11/03/want-affordable-power-think-co2s-a-problem-nuclear-power-is-the-only-soultion/
To STT: I stand corrected. I was going from several worst-case theories that were popularized and assumed to be true. But nuclear will always make people uneasy because of its war legacy and the potential for terrorism. It’s far from harmless in the wrong circumstances.
https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ (no apparent motive for them to under-report that danger)
The new compact reactors that can be buried underground with little or no maintenance seem like a portable alternative to wind power. Still, anything less than nuclear fusion is based on finite resources, which is the predicament that quasi-renewables aim to solve. No proof exists of abiotic oil, etc. We should be burning as little as possible but it’s being treated as a money-based commodity with consumption rising and falling on current prices, not long-term wisdom.
Dear “Respect Silence” this reply started as a response to your quoting estimates of long term deaths from the Chernobyl management blunder. They did what was specifically warned against in the operations manual.
28 brave emergency workers died of acute radiation traumas. UNSCEAR estimates the actual and likely cancer deaths at from 40 to 140.
I note that you have been informed of the fearmongering and lies about Fukushima-Daiichi.
Wildly exaggerated guesses from the anti-nuke brigades have been made on the basis of the counter-factual LNT conjecture (Linear No Threshold) All living organisms have defenses against chromosome damage regardless of what causes it.
It turns out that low levels of nuclear radiation, just like solar UV (which CAN be fatal) induce a corrective response.
Oddly enough, the levels of “natural” radon exposure in the Rocky Mountains, which are higher than the level at which EPA and others, using the LNT hypothesis, warn against, seem to be associated with a lower level of lung cancers than the places which are exposed to lower levels of this ferociously radioactive gas.
This is called “hysteresis” and resembles, vaccine response, or even response to very low injections of snake venom. It apparently alerts the repair response of the body.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
Who needs birds anyway??? They just clutter up the skies.
Reblogged this on ajmarciniak and commented:
One issue that annoys RE zealots, like a burr under a frisky pony’s saddle blanket, is the wind industry’s rampant bird and bat slaughter. It’s an inconvenient truth to be sure. But, as with everything that the wind industry does, if you can’t keep a straight face while lying about it any more, then pull out all stops and cover it up.
The wholesale slaughter of millions of birds and bats – includes rare, endangered and majestic species, like America’s iconic bald and golden eagles. The default response from the wind industry is to lie like fury and – when the corpses can no longer be hidden and the lying fails – to issue court proceedings to literally bury those facts (see our post here).
The hackneyed retort from the wind cult is that cars, cats and tall buildings kill more birds than their beloveds.
Attempting to compare an utterly pointless power generation source – abandoned centuries ago for very obvious reasons, that wouldn’t exist without massive and endless subsidies – with automobiles and skyscrapers is risible.
Andreas, “abandoned for obvious reasons” hits the nail upon the head. My Facebook profile picture is a copy of part of Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire being tugged…” by a dirty little coal burner.
But we, including Australia, need to be rid of coal, gas, and petroleum burning. That can even be expressed more compactly as carbon and hydrocarbon burning.
Russia, China, and South Korea are taking the problem seriously. They do not have ignorant (or malicious) pseudo-environmentalists like the Sierra Club and too many of the California Democrats. Nor do they have Koch Brothers nor Loy Yang.
But contrary to what I believe is still the law in Australia, the correct replacement for these chemical energy sources is NOT direct solar and its immediate derivatives. it is the energy of massive fissile nuclei, and of similar “fertile” nuclei that can be made fissile,
My own electricity supplier, Dominion Power, gets over 45% of the energy it provides, emission-free, from reactors of the Rickover-era PWR type, which environmentalists who are uninformed or “moles” of the fossil carbon and “RE” industries erroneously charge with killing people. There is ZERO evidence of that accusation. Nobody died at the reactors either at TMI or at Fukushima-Daiichi. Those who died of being separated from their homes in Fukushima, by the government or their own fear, were victims of ignorance, not radiation.
The infamous Chernobyl was a different kind of reactor, with a known instability and standard operating instructions to prevent it, which were ignored. Immediate deaths of emergency workers totalled 28, and about 40 people definitely died of cancer from radioactive iodine release, which could have been prevented by administration of potassium iodide, except that Soviet authorities tried not to let the news of the meltdown be broadcast.
On Feb 13, 2018: The judge dismissed all charges in the lawsuit brought against Dr Tim Ball by BC Green Party leader Andrew Weaver. It is a great victory for free speech.
‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’.
“Human Caused Global Warming”, ‘The Biggest Deception in History’.
https://www.technocracy.news/dr-tim-ball-on-climate-lies-wrapped-in-deception-smothered-with-delusion/
http://www.drtimball.com
Talking about man causing the decline of apex predators, there’s a fascinating story about the re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995, after the last ones were killed off in the 1930s. Reintroduction of the wolves transformed the ecosystem AND the rivers.
There’s a fascinating account about it here:
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem
And you can watch a short on the above web page or on youtube:
This makes me very concerned about how widespread installation of industrial wind farms on fragile uplands will affect fragile upland ecosystems around the world
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
WIND lobbyists say bird deaths are small compared with millions that collide with windows etc. This is a fallacy. The argument ignores affected species. If 50 pigeons fly into windows, it has no effect on population. But, when a breeding Raptor is chopped, it represents a significant loss for the species.
THIS latest study of wind-related predatory bird slaughter will be conveniently buried by ‘environmental’ groups and sycophant mainstream media.
BIAS by omission – the mainstream media’s favourite form of propaganda. Disgraceful.
All gov departments have been compromised by the windweasels
Evidence from South Australia’s own Environmental Protection Agency indicates departments are not only ‘compromised’. In fact they provided a vocational recruitment pathway for the Wind Industry.