“When they’ve got scientific evidence on their side, green campaigners spew hate speech about the evil science deniers on the other side. But the moment a scientific consensus attacks some cherished green myth (organic good, GMO bad, for example), they spew hate speech against scientists as corporate shills.”
Yup. Ever try and argue with a greenie that banning DDT killed millions? They get ugly really quick.
The bunch of clowns on the MV Akademik Shokalskiy had to have known the ice was highest it has ever been. And the BBC propaganda arm still claims the voyage was to study “melting ice”.
Way back on October 16 2013 the Antarctic supply ship Aurora Australis set sail for summer season and they were interviewed:
“Voyage leader Tony Foy has told Radio National the weather forecast was not good for the start of the journey and there was a lot of ice to get through.
“We’re expecting thick sea ice on the way, but as I told the expeditioners yesterday they’ll get the full Southern Ocean experience which I’m sure they’ll all want,” he said.
“Microwave data we got last week shows the ice concentration this year is as high as it’s been since we started taking readings back in the late 70s.
“I think we can expect it to be pretty slow when we hit the ice edge.”
BBC January 2 2014:
“Despite being trapped, the scientists continued their experiments, measuring temperature and salinity through cracks in the surrounding ice.
One of the aims was to track how quickly the Antarctic’s sea ice was disappearing.”
(h/t EUreferendum)
Andy Revkin has posted an attack on the researchers who sailed into infamy in the Antarctic on the ill-fated MV Akademik Shokalskiy.
He is using terms like “bungled trip” , “unessential expedition” , “misadventure”, “distraction from serious research” and “tarnish the wider field of Antarctic science”.
But reading between the lines, it is clear to me what Revkin is really trying to say.
1) He has never gone to Antarctica and therefore managed to avoid reporting on record sea ice in Antarctica.
2) The attention brought to record sea ice in Antarctica has “energized climate change contrarians“.
I would translate the term “distraction from serious research” as meaning “brought attention to the wrong pole” … the one with record sea ice.
If the bunglers in charge of the expedition had found open water and managed to blame it on climate change, he would have jumped in with both feet trumpeting their success.
The Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy has been stuck in the Antarctic Ice since Monday. The Chinese Ice Breaker Xue Long, or Snow Dragon got within six miles and it too was stopped by thick ice.
“It got stuck in the ice on Monday night — 15 days after setting out on the second leg of its research trip.
According to Turney, the ship was surrounded by ice up to nearly 10 feet (3 meters) thick. It was about 100 nautical miles east of the French base Dumont D’Urville, about 1,500 nautical miles south of Hobart, Tasmania.
The Russian expedition ship is carrying scientists and passengers led by an Australian climate change professor.”
I find it ironic the “climate change professor” led the ship and passengers into 10 foot thick ice. He’s kind of thick. But maybe 10 feet thick ice in the summer is unusual?
A paper in the Journal For Nature Conservatism points out that the level of Red Kite deaths at wind turbines in German is very high. They estimate 308 deaths in 2012 out of 9972 individual Red Kites.
With the projected increase in wind turbines, and the fact it is young breeding pairs being killed, the whole population may be threatened.
“Mortality from collisions with increasing numbers of wind turbines is a potential hazard to raptor populations, but the actual effects on a population scale have rarely been studied based on field data. We estimated annual collision numbers for Red Kites Milvus milvus in the German federal state of Brandenburg (29,483 km2). A hierarchical model considering carcass persistence rate, searcher efficiency and the probability that a killed animal falls into a searched area was applied to results of carcass searches at 617 turbines. Collision risk varied significantly with season. The model estimated 308 (95% CrI 159–488) Red Kite fatalities at 3044 turbines operating during 2012, representing 3.1% of the estimated post-breeding population of 9972 individuals. Using the potential biological removal (PBR) method, mortality thresholds of 4.0% were obtained for migratory Red Kite populations. This level of mortality may be reached when turbine numbers increase within a few years. Since wind turbine collisions may affect Red Kites throughout the global range, a more detailed assessment of the actual impacts on populations is needed, especially because the PBR does not account for the predominance of adult birds among the collision victims.”
Yup. Thats why I call the AGW Cult a cult.
“Lord (Nigel) Lawson, chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, partly lifts the veil on a curious “secret meeting” held at the House of Lords between a team from his GWPF and six scientists from the Royal Society. ”
“As one present put it, “it was like talking to members of a cult”. What particularly struck the GWPF team was their opposite numbers’ refusal to discuss the policy implications of their beliefs”
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.”
Have you heard about the funnel effect? It appears solar plants can draw in millions of insects and fry them. And then migratory birds drop in to eat the insects and the birds then get fried too.
“USFWS also noted an issue ReWire hasn’t covered before, and we suspect it has something to do with that funnel effect: the mortality of insects. The agency says the Palen solar project may have a serious effect on insects, based on experience at BrightSource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) site, now nearing completion in San Bernardino County. “Staff with the CEC reported large mortalities of insects killed during flux testing at the ISEGS site,” says USFWS. “[A]mong those documented include migratory monarch butterflies and dragonflies.”
A subsequent passage in the note on insects is an important summary of the relevance of insect mortalities to risk to other wildlife:
The ecological effects of mass insect mortalities have not been investigated
and may lead to greater levels of mortality than have been anticipated. In particular,
concentrations of insects are likely to draw insectivorous and omnivorous migratory
birds, including many raptors, which may increase the risk of bird mortalities.
If you have a facility that both attracts an entire food chain and then poses a risk of mortality or injury to individual animals at any level in that chain, then you’ve created an ecosystem-wide population sink that can metaphorically “funnel” individual animals from a wide stretch of habitat to a single spot where they meet their demise.
“Some animal rights activists are wondering just how many birds green energy may unintentionally kill as more and more birds turn up dead at solar energy facilities throughout California.
A recent article by Vice author Lex Berko notes that dead birds are being found with “singed wings” around several California solar energy facilities.
It happens that many of California’s solar plants are, the article claims, in the path of “the four major north-to-south trajectories for migratory birds” called “the Pacific Flyway.”
Birds are dying in one of two ways. In some cases, they imagine the shining solar panels to be bodies of water and dive straight into them. There they die when they smash into the panels from the sky.
Others “feel the wrath of the harnessed sunlight.” The ultra polished solar mirrors bounce sunrays strong enough to burn the feathers off birds that quickly crash to the ground, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Many of the fowl dying as a result of their unfortunate flight paths over solar facilities are birds protected by the federal government under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/11/12/Oops-Solar-Energy-Plants-are-Killing-Rare-birds
sunshine hours 