This is just awful. The Wildlife Society estimates 83,000 raptor fatalities at wind farms in the USA for 2012.
“I used national averages from hundreds of carcass placement trials intended to characterize scavenger removal and searcher detection rates, and I relied on patterns of carcass distance from wind turbines to develop an adjustment for variation in maximum search radius around wind turbines mounted on various tower heights. Adjusted fatality rates correlated inversely with wind-turbine size for all raptors as a group across the United States, and for all birds as a group within the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area, California. I estimated 888,000 bat and 573,000 bird fatalities/year (including 83,000 raptor fatalities) at 51,630 megawatt (MW) of installed wind-energy capacity in the United States in 2012.”
sunshine hours 
One wonders what the response of the eco community would be if it could be shown that ‘man-made global warming’ directly killed 83,000 raptors.
But the reality is we will hear nothing from them on this issue. ‘If it doesn’t fit the agenda, it doesn’t count.’
Yup … it is sad.
That would be interesting. However the Migratory Bird Act in the USA is quite clear about what is illegal and what isn’t.
When coal or oil companies get caught killing the wrong kind of bird, they get charged and have to pay a heavy fine and make efforts to prevent it from happening again.
“Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay $600,000 in penalties after approximately 85 migratory birds died of exposure to hydrocarbons at some of its natural gas facilities across the Midwest.
The fine amounts to about $7,000 per dead bird.
The oil company pleaded guilty to causing the deaths of waterfowl, hawks, owls and other protected species, which perished around natural gas well pits or water storage areas in Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas over the last five years.
The deal was struck with the Justice Department in a federal court in Denver. Exxon had been charged with violating a 1918 federal law designed to protect migratory birds.”
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/exxon-fined-for-causing-bird-deaths/?_r=0
So, in all fairness then, the wind power folks should be paying 83,000 x $7,000 in fines. Are we ever going to see this? Of course not! Another example of the eco-wacko movement getting a break. It’s all chickenfeed anyway compared to the billions the global warming industry makes EACH YEAR out of the longest-running scam since The South Sea Bubble. Who is paying for all this? Check your energy bills folks.
If you were bright, it would tell you I’m not on anyones payroll, and do not have an infinite amount of time to spend. But someone has to point out the horror and hypocrisy of “renewables”.
The solution is obvious.
Greenpeace get to work (as soon as they’ve outlawed chlorine of course) knitting massive geodesic mesh domes out of tofu which they erect around every wind turbine blighting our countryside. This would eliminate bird deaths, provide export business for Asian tofu makers, and empower Eco warriors to become champion knitters.
If this is the first of many prosecutions to come, the future of this kind of power generation is in jeopardy. This whole wind energy thing wasn’t thought out very well or they would have scrapped it before it ever got out of the drawing room. I see more bankruptcies on the wind.
Sunshinehours1 is spot on talking about the hypocrisy of the renewable movement. There is no economic basis for their proposals : every proposal they make results in higher cost for net energy produced, masked where they can by huge subsidies, protected by unconstitutional laws and administration-made arbitrary rules, and cloaked in a many-hued carapace of pseudo-science forecasting world-wide doom next Wednesday if we don’t abandon our wicked ways with hydrocarbons and carbon because all that CO2 ‘pollutant’ (!!!) is frying the globe.
The day of reckoning is nigh (we hope) for those who’ve made fortunes on the global warming gravy train. More and more people are seeing through their expensive baloney. There will be carnage among their numbers when at last society understands the massive amounts they’ve wasted pushing their global warming/renewables cult down our throats at a time when investment is sorely needed in a renewed infrastructure, proper healthcare, schools without leaking roofs etc.
I have time. So lets go through Todd Tanner’s list.
How many eagles were chopped up due to farmers? My guess would be roughly none. Zero zip nada. Eagles have nothing to fear from big ag.
How many raptors were done in by coal mining and electric power generation. I imagine a few landing on power lines. But wind turbines require power lines and more of them, to reach the remote locations. So the wind farms have more miles of high tension cables causing just as many and probably more accidental bird electricutions as the distribution lines from coal plants.
That’s apart from the 85 K raptors big wind has chopped from the sky. Big coal has no comparable mechanism for producing that type of carnage.
Same applies with drilling for oil. When you do it correctly no birds are involved.
Habitat loss doesn’t really apply for a bird. I mean they can up and move if the pickings get thin in one place or another. The land owner with the largest holdings in the country is the Fed. If eagles are running out of real estate the blaim would have to fall on federal mismanagemnet of public holdings. Perhaps we should lobby them to sell so the land is managed competently.
Ocean acidification. That Todd brings this up tells to me all I need to know. Find the acid ocean on a map. I dare you.
Oh! that you were right about scientists not fleecing the public. Of course, many are honourable. But, here’s the thing, many have proven to be gravy-train riders with a self-printed season ticket, paid for by Joe Public. Over the past 2 decades there has been a clear, unambiguous campaign by a few hundred ‘scientists’ in positions of power to (a) invent ‘facts’ supporting their agenda that man-made global warming is occurring, accelerating and must be stopped at any cost, (b) to hide any real evidence they discover themselves that throw a spanner in the works of their nutcase theories, (c) to suppress work by scientists that do not support the agenda, (d) to malign scientists who disagree with them, (e) to use unscientific approaches to confuse a public who should be able to rely on science to be objective (principally by claiming climate models to be infallible when they can’t even forecast accurately for next Wednesday, and by stating correlation is the same as causation – thus a reduction in the lower toothed furry lizard in the Amazon rainforest proves global warming is happening). As a scientist, this is one of the aspects that upsets me the most: that these unscrupulous individuals have dragged the scientific method through the wet and mucky to achieve personal objectives. One day they’ll all be exposed for the errors of their ways, but can science ever again be relied on to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
Todd,
Show me the pH tests for your spot somewhere near Seattle with a trendline of the change over a couple decades.
Here’s mine. From the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which as an organization is a big time believer in global warming.
Not a hostile witness by any stretch. The Aquarium uses sea water pumped from the bay for it’s exhibits, and by necessity regularly monitors the pH.
Click to access 100240_167.pdf
Or was it your point that no amount of evidence would or could move you from your position, so I might as well not bother?
papertiger: unfortunately for the interests of scientific integrity as a whole, and the general public who have to pay for all this global warming scaremongering with higher bills and more controls over daily life (try buying a 50 cent filament lighting bulb these days), you have your finger on the big issue so far as I am concerned, in that the data doesn’t matter! It simply doesn’t matter what the actual data says: if it doesn’t support the agenda, it gets suppressed, ignored, distorted or ignored. This is because ‘global warming’ isn’t a science at all, it’s a cult belief-faith system. Richard Feynman summed the process up succinctly when he said if experiments do not support your hypothesis, then you are wrong. Period. But as you will surely know, you can’t use this argument in the religious arena (as an example of another faith based system), where no amount of contrary evidence will have the slightest effect on a believer. Faith, it seems, doesn’t require evidence.
Todd Tanner: your post is so full of inaccuracies that it defies a detailed response within the confines of a blog.
(1) mankind is responsible for 6% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants, oceans, natural microbial decay, volcanoes cause 94%.
(2) CO2 is responsible for 4% of atmospheric warming, water vapour for 94%, methane and others for 1%.
(3) mankind has ownership therefore of 6% of a 4% contributor to atmospheric warming. Atmospheric warming is a GOOD thing: we’d all freeze if the heat absorbed from the Sun radiated back out into space.
(4) CO2 has been at levels of 4000 ppm in the past and the Earth prospered. This is not surprising: CO2 is an essential plant food. More CO2 = more plant growth. We’re at 400 ppm now.
(5) CO2 molecule responds to energy changes LOGARITHMICALLY, not linearly. As an example of what this means: at 20ppm CO2 is at 50% of its ‘capacity’ compared to its capacity at 300 ppm. It takes the other 280ppm to ‘absorb’ the other 50%. Increasing the level of CO2 therefore has a RAPIDLY diminishing effect on the capability of CO2 to ‘absorb’ energy. It’s just not possible for CO2 to be responsible for the temperature increases postulated by the wildly inaccurate climate models on which the global warming industry depends.
(6) CO2 has increased consistently for the past 100 years, during which time the earth has cooled AND warmed. It is currently in a cooling trend and has been so for the past 15 years. There is NO statistically valid basis for saying increasing CO2 leads to increasing temperature. The geologic record, in fact, shows unambiguously that in the past an increase in global temperature LED to a subsequent increase in CO2 (the lag being some 600 years or so). The hypothesis is that a warmer earth means more plant growth, which will create more CO2 as part of the photosynthesis cycle, and more when it decays as the earth cools, as it does regularly.
(7) the 97% figure of ‘consensus’ scientists has been debunked enough times not to require repetition. It’s bunkum.
(8) seeing ‘with your own eyes’ has been shown to be a PR exercise, devoid of science. That lone polar bar stranded on an ice flow? Check it out: polar bear population has been increasing for the past 5 decades. Desertification? The Sahara edges are blooming. Correlation is NOT causation. Even if you see something valid you cannot claim its cause is manmade global warming without objective proof. Arctic ice is melting? That’s global warming?? No, it’s a shift in the warming Gulf stream currents. Icebergs breaking off Antarctica: global warming? Give me a break. The Antarctic is -30 celcius… what effect would 0.25 celcius have? None at all. Antarctica sheds floes all the time.
(9) Hiding an identity? That’s normal behaviour for blogs. There’s no conspiracy, but I don’t want my email flooded with crank mail from true believers. I’m a contributing physicist to SEPP. Check out the science at sepp.org. There are about 50,000 scientists contributing to, or reading SEPP material. I don’t make a cent from my efforts and have no agenda except to resist the prostitution of science by eco-warriors, CO2 traders, chancers like the ‘inventor of the Internet’ (Al Gore) or anybody else. If I saw a scintilla of scientific basis for the idea that man-made CO2 is harmful to the earth and its citizens I’d have no hesitation in saying so.
Right on and groovy man!
Todd, here is why you are wrong. CO2 does not cause global warming. End of argument!
https://www.google.com/search?q=log-graph-lindzen-choi-web.gif&client=firefox-a&hs=8Gg&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=jn-TUsORDsfmoASu14KQCA&ved=0CEQQsAQ&biw=1280&bih=551&dpr=1
Todd,
The CO2 increase we are seeing in our atmosphere as measured at the Mauna Loa monitoring station, is from a warming ocean. As the ocean recovers from the LIA, CO2 is being released from the ocean to the atmosphere. As CO2 leaves the ocean there will be less to form carbonic acid. A warming ocean will have an increasing PH. Just sayin’!
Todd was getting personal instead of using facts IMHO. So I unapproved all his comments. I appreciate all who stuck to the facts.
I love a good factual argument, but making it personal is not nice.
I also like a good factual argument, but part of that is displaying the otherside’s vacuous personal attacks when the facts are not with them.
I think it’s useful to show the nature of the beasty climatus hypocondrius in it’s unguarded moments.
How else is the public to learn about them?
Todd Tanner: nobody is hiding behind anything. What you find so disconcerting is the data I have presented. Focus on that and you might gain enlightenment. Of course, since your income depends on peddling nonsense to sportsmen on the supposed evils of global warming, it’s unlikely any amount of inconvenient data would persuade you of the error of your ways. You are just one of hundreds of thousands who now depend on the continuation of the man-made global warming scam to put bread on your table. Do you imagine knowing my name would change the logarithmic law for the behaviour of the CO2 molecule? This is clutching at straws in order to preserve some imagined dignity by implying I have something to hide. A childish argument.
Sunshinehours1: I concur with your view on ad hominem attacks. What matters here are the data and its analysis.
Well that makes us look like we’re arguing with ourselves. I’m a tough boy. Not much tht Todd could say would hurt my feelings.
Apropos oceans and CO2. Oceans hold 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere. If the oceans absorbed ALL atmospheric CO2 this would represent a very small increase in ocean-bound CO2. Why is this fact relevant? Well, the latest effort by the global warming industry to wriggle out of the unfortunate fact that the Earth has NOT been warming for the past 15 years (yes, even they have had to admit this fact eventually), despite the hundreds of super confident ‘forecasts’ from ‘brilliantly accurate’ climate models, is to claim that the atmosphere is, in fact, warming (cooling = warming, get it?… no, neither do I) but all this heat is being absorbed into the oceans via a newly invented CO2 absorbtion mechanism. Watch out! they cry. One day the oceans will not be able to hold this ‘huge’ temperature increase and a massive bubble of heat will escape, ruining your perfect day. If it wasn’t so expensive for this impossibly implausible scenario to further prolong the life of the global warming scam, then it would just be a huge laugh for anyone who can see the emperor has no clothes.
Quite right, you’re bloody well right!
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.