![wind-turbine[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/wind-turbine1.jpg?quality=83)
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Two contradictory medical press releases have been issued within days of each other, concerning the impact of climate change on health.
According to The Australian, German Doctors have demanded for a moratorium on building wind turbines, because of concern about the dangers infrasound poses to human health.
The “parliament” of Germany’s medical profession has called on its leaders to support a halt to further wind farm developments near housing until more research has been undertaken into the possible health impacts of low-frequency noise from wind turbines.
The issue was debated at the German Medical Assembly in Frankfurt on Friday and transferred to the executive board of the German Medical Association.
Association policy adviser Adrian Alexander Jakel confirmed a motion calling for research had been forwarded to the board “for further action”.
On almost the same day, a medical climate advocacy group in Australia has demanded more action to address climate change, because of the alleged danger climate change poses to human health.
GPs and specialists need to train and prepare for the “inevitable increase” in childhood sickness and pressure on health services linked to climate change, leading epidemiologist Professor Fiona Stanley says.
A new report on child health and climate change, released by Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA), warns that Australia’s federal and state governments must take immediate steps to curtail rising global temperatures or risk an increased burden of disease, particularly for children.
The report, No Time for Games: Children’s Health and Climate Change, presents key research findings that predict a frightening future for children and the healthcare system.
Read more: http://dea.org.au/news/article/grim-future-for-children-global-warming-report
Who to believe – a group of Australian doctors basing their concerns and call to action on climate model fantasies, or a group of German doctors concerned about the effects of wind turbine trauma, about the impact of infrasound pollution on real people who live adjacent to turbine installations?
The German doctors say nothing about climate change. We’d have wind turbines regardless. Fossil fuels are finite, and wind is free.
Free? Is that why the government pays the wind farms massive subsidies and our electricity bills have gone up 25%?
Those, and others to numerous to list, second-order effects might be too complex for Nick.
Nick must be having an off day.
“Wind is free”, is just plain goofy, even for him.
It is much worse than this. A consolidated report (2000 thru 2013) that summarizes the U.K., Germany, and the U.S. shows that the actual power output versus the planned power output of both wind and solar is 1/7th of the plan. This makes the real cost 7X that of the planned cost (2X or 4X). Further, this ratio does not change much over the 13 year history. Therefore, the real cost of solar and wind somewhere between 14X and 28X that of fossil fuels. Even this 1/7th portion of the power cannot be stored. The net result is that these countries must have fossil fuel or nuclear back-up to cover the 6/7 miss as well as covering the non-linear output of solar and wind.
We’ll have nuclear power regardless. You will not get base load power from turbines. Storage of the magnitude the future requires is a fruitless quest.
Radioactivity is free.
Wind is free. And like most things that are free, you get what you pay for. Wind is unpredictable and variable. You’ll need far more wind turbines to make up for the variability that could easily be handled by a few nice coal fired plants.
and wind is free.
So are gas, oil, coal, hydro, nuclear, solar and butterflies.
It is the harvesting, management and transmission/transport of the end use product (fuel or electricity) that costs all the money.
The only one that wind beats on the cost effectiveness metric would be the butterflies.
Nick if it’s free then why all the fuss about the RET nonsense and so why pay billions $ every year in subsidies. And please explain how any of this helps to mitigate your CAGW that the evidence can’t find?
Finite, perhaps, but coal is free too….you just have to dig it up and transport it. Same as harnessing the wind…the cost is in the applying. So should we spend money on harnessing intermittent wind that we need backup power stations for as well for the other 90% of capacity, or coal which we know will be efficient and effective, all the time?
petroleum is free too Nick….
want a shovel?
Nick’s just galloping backwards around the track today. Wants to see if anyone is paying attention.
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Yes Nick, the wind is free but the cost of extracting energy from such a low energy density, tomprally and gepgraphically variable source is absurdly expensive not even considering the fact that it has to be supported by parallel investment in back up generation capacity typically using good old stable, storable, transportable, high energy density ‘fossil’ fuels.
That sort of wasted capital is not free.
Take it and it’s no longer free. And those downwind suffer the deprivation, and that is all of us. If ever a significant amount of energy is taken from the wind, it will effect weather and climate downwind. The value of the energy taken out cannot compensate for the value of the energy within the wind, and there is a large class of the downwind damaged who may object, and lodge complaints.
The sun, the wind and the water are Earth’s natural climate regulating mechanisms. It’s neither sustainable nor prudent to rob the Earth of the wind for man’s energy needs, much more easily supplied elsewhere, anyway.
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+10.
I have been saying this for some time. The wind turbines are taking energy from the system. Some one down wind, like another farm of wind turbines are going to be worse off.
Search ‘Boedele Depression’. Strong wind from a mountain gap to its East raises dust that nourishes the Amazon, half a world away; and critically nourishes it. Imagine had there been a population of wind turbines capturing the energy in that wind gap, which happens to be one of the world’s finest spots for such a facility.
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Well, if nothing else, you could come up with a nice plot for an epic ‘Clash of the Hemispheres’ movie.
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And Paris a ‘Clash of the Continents’ plot. Rev ’em up, Ronan. Gentle scared out of your pants alarmists, start your search engines.
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“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” — John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001
Energy from wind is expensive and small quantities and is not for the society we live in.
So is every other form of energy. What cost money is converting it into a form that is usable.
Free? Sure its free, all you need to do is build and expensive tower and put a complicated windmill and generator on top, run the electricity through a transformer and then wire it into the grid. Don’t forget to provide some kind of reliable alternative source of electricity for those times the wind does not blow.
If we were to follow your “logic”, coal, oil and natural gas are “free” too. All you need to so is get it out of the ground and burn it,, Convert the combustion products into a mechanism to turn a generator, aka steam, and voila! Free Elllectricity.
@Nick Stokes
A few days back, a colleague of yours by the name of Russell was abetting a sexual predator. Now you are saying that it is ok to inflict maladies on untold numbers of human beings on account of the alleged availability of an energy source. He was unapologetic. I hope you are.
Please explain the connection between your observation and the medical studies linked in the post. Thank you.
Nick, The German doctors do say something about emissions. Oh the irony!
It said the health effects of infrasound (below 20 Hz) and low-frequency sound (below 100 Hz) in relation to emissions from wind turbines were “still open questions’’, as were “the effects of noise below the hearing threshold or lower frequencies with increasing exposure duration”. The assembly said the erection of more turbines close to settlements should be stopped until there was reliable data to exclude a safety hazard.
I get the feeling this infrasound scare is pseudoscience… but what the heck, if the climate alarmists can use pseudoscience to bolster their arguments we need a little of it as well.
I work as a consultant with a company that has done work for several years with turbine noise. it was difficult to measure but they developed a technique to filter the sound of the blade passing the tower from all the ambient noise. At hundreds of yards from the turbine outside of homes. It’s real.
Surely the “precautionary principle” would prevent the building of wind generators if they had not been proven to be safe and harmless?
Fossil fuel is finite, but we have enough to last for at least another 1000 years.
Wind may be free, but wind turbines are so expensive that they can’t last long enough to pay back the investment.
Nick Stokes just made a “drive-by” and he probably drank something funny.
You are likely correct. Still, the microsecond trolls we’ve been seeing are a naive admission of defeat.
Wind is indeed free, but wind energy is not.
Wind is indeed free and a wonderful way to power yachts. now if I can only convince Beneteau to give me a free 10 m Oceanis that would complete this fantasy….
Good one!
OK Mr Stokes, you try living here then.
https://youtu.be/rIn-5vnQ1PY
Stunning video! I understand that even the Germans are re-thinking some of their “green” measures. I hope they see this video and act on it before people get killed by falling windmills as the machines age and wear out.
Coal is free, somebody just has to pick it up and ignite it.
lightning is free!
Nick: You really are an ignorant troll if you think ‘wind is free’ and that ‘we’d have wind turbines regardless’. Wind turbines produce very expensive electricity based on a technology that became a historical redundancy 200 hundred years ago because it relies on an unreliable low energy density source of fuel.
Nick, surely you can’t be that ignorant. Power generated from wind is never free.
Gold and diamonds, like wind are also free, just laying around to be picked up.
In that case we can remove all subsidies on renewables – right ?
I would like to see an energy audit comparing a 17th century windmill with a modern one.
Equating for the swept area of the blades, compare the work done at the grindstone of an old windmill to that done at a grindstone of a modern flour mill and calculate back through the efficiencies of the electric motors, the substations, the transmission lines, the other substations, the inverters and the generators.
I reckon that the old windmill is more efficient.
By the way Nick, there is a good reason that we abandoned wind and water power generation for coal and steam in the 18th century. When the wind stopped blowing and the rain stopped falling, people starved.
The wind may be free but wind turbines aren’t.
Wind may be “free” but that is also true of combustible fuels. Unfortunately, it is significantly more expensive to convert the energy in wind for our purposes than it is to burn combustible fuels. As for the question of finiteness, neither are infinite. The slow transmutation of carbon-12 assures us that this fourth most abundant element in our universe, will remain available to us as a source of energy for as long as the wind blows, and far beyond our need for windmills.
Wind is of course finite. Entropy is inexcapable. Who’s working to solve that problem?
Wind isn’t free, and the climatic consequences of relying on wind power could be drastic.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063.300-wind-and-wave-farms-could-affect-earths-energy-balance.html#.VW2vjjHF-yg
“Using a model of global circulation, Kleidon found that the amount of energy which we can expect to harness from the wind is reduced by a factor of 100 if you take into account the depletion of free energy by wind farms. It remains theoretically possible to extract up to 70 TW globally, but doing so would have serious consequences.
Although the winds will not die, sucking that much energy out of the atmosphere in Kleidon’s model changed precipitation, turbulence and the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface. The magnitude of the changes was comparable to the changes to the climate caused by doubling atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (Earth System Dynamics, DOI: “
Ah, you need to catch up with real time. Fossil fuel, coal, is in great abundance and is the only limited carbon fuel. Carbon.hydrogen fuels, gas and oil, are abiotic and originate from Earth’s core. It percolates up from the core constantly, which is we find these, either gas or gas and oil everywhere we drill deep enough. This is a renewing resource, even as we speak. This also explains why gas and oil wells in Texas that went “dry” many years ago are now found to be recharged with gas and oil.
If we went to Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), we would clearly never run out of coal, gas, or oil, and we will never run out of thorium. By the way, molten salt reactors simply cannot melt down as they are already liquid. These reactors can be made completely automatic and self-leveling. LFTR’s could be placed outside towns or large buildings, made in almost any size, even for individual houses, and render our extensive power grid completely extraneous. We could then recycle all the materials of the whole grid and never be subject to major blackouts and such events.
The oceans, the earth and sun are finite as well. So what? Being finite is meaningless by itself. The sun is finite and is predicted to explode in ~4 billion years, but way before that it’s increasing energy output will make life on earth first miserable then untenable. To save humanity, it may take a 100,000 years or more to develop interstellar flight, to be safe shouldn’t we begin today? Why not if the sun will go from sustaining all life to destroying all life with a relatively tiny increase in its energy output?
While as general concept “fossil fuels are finite” is true, all projections of the “finite-ness” of fossil fuels have been wrong, in any practical sense the statement is meaningless.
BTW wind is free, electricity is not.
“The sun is finite and is predicted to explode in ~4 billion years”
This is serious, we need a “Solar Tax” to fix this. Where is Gordon Brown when you need him?
Fossil fuels are “free” too.
“wind is free.”
Disingenuous in the extreme.
All energy sources – coal, oil, gas, nuclear, whatever – are free until you come to process them to extract the energy and transform it into a usable form.
Why do you lot never acknowledge that?
Nick,
Normally you are at least plausible. This comment was just nutty. We have coal for at least a few hundred years, and more shale gas and oil than that. Then nuclear is fundamentally unlimited with current technology. The whole “runnung out scare story” is only suited to children stories.
There is zero need for wind turbines and in a free market we would have none on the grid.
(I have been pro alternative tech since 1970 or so and studied all this in great detail. Wind is suited to off grid use with batteries, and in small units on boats.)
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/uranium-from-seawater-advances/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/whole-new-layer-of-oil-depth/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/oil-boom-in-the-americas/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/theres-oil-on-that-ocean-bottom/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/clathrate-to-production/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
Wind is free, oil is free, gas is free, water is free, coal is free. What’s your point? It’s all free until it’s turned into a commodity by a multi-billion dollar corporation. And just because one industry was savvy enough to call their product (industrial wind turbines) green, you fell for it hook, line and sinker.
right Except the devices and infrastructure and materials used to harness it is hardly free. (And mostly intrusive and disruptive of local wild life) count the dead birds!
I still have 1.5 trillion barrels of karogen in my back yard just waiting to be harvested, with a couple of trillion more laying in Wyoming and Utah. An asteroid will probably kill all of before the Greens will allow us to us it.
We are not running out of useable carbon anytime soon.
Good to see some research into the impact of wind farms on nearby residents. Of course the Australian statement is pretty much par for the course. We’ve only got a population of 20mill. Remind me again the effect on total global temperature if Australia ceased 100% of human caused CO2, let alone a 5 – 10% reduction. As I recall it was a decimal point followed by a couple of zeros. I do not believe there has been any quantifiable impact on Australia weather patterns and local or regional climate from any purported temperature increases, let alone personal health impacts. Personally I’d like to see all London Plane Trees removed from our roads and parks and then see if our rising Asthma rate declines. Horrid, messy tree especially with a wind.
I didn’t see one shread of evidence to supporth the claims of the DEA.
Co2 induced global warming new PR game – “Co2 induced global warming causes health problems”. Now watch tax payers hard earned taxed $ going to Co2 induced global warming causes health problems” type of “research papers”.
Agreed. And….
“GPs and specialists need to train and prepare for the “inevitable increase” in childhood sickness and pressure on health services linked to climate change, leading epidemiologist Professor Fiona Stanley says.
A new report on child health and climate change, released by Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA), warns that Australia’s federal and state governments must take immediate steps to curtail rising global temperatures or risk an increased burden of disease, particularly for children.”
That, then, must already be obvious – children must be very unwell during summer warmth and much healthier during the cold months.
Yes, and people lived longer during the little ice age too.
As one moves away from the poles, where people are inevitably the healthiest, they inevitably get sicker and sicker, especially kids.
And I am sure she can show us the stats demonstrating how much more disease there has been each year than the year before, due to all the warming she and her ilk are constantly bleating and moaning about.
The US EPA regulation of CO2 is based on an “Endangerment Finding” that CO2 is harmful to humans.
http://epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/
I’m constantly trawling what I call the evil blog – google news Germany frontpage – and not a peep of this. German media doing what it does best, not reporting on anything that goes against their red-green utopia.
Yes, this is the whole trick in a nutshell.
The Germans are basing their concerns on evidence in need further study. The Australians are basing theirs on
an unproven theorya hypothesisbeliefs.VicV says:
“The Germans are basing their concerns on evidence in need further study. The Australians are basing theirs on beliefs.”
Nonsense. Steve Cooper an acoustic engineer was one of the first in Australia and elsewhere to point out the presence of infrasound and its possible health effects. The reason the establishment and others dismissed this was because the prevailing standard measurement devices cut off their testing frequencies well above those required for infrasound. So lets not have any more that it was all based on beliefs.
http://aefweb.info/data/Are%20wind%20farms%20too%20close%20to%20communities.pdf
Did you actually read what was written? The Australian doctors are not saying anything about infrasound but generic health effects based on a belief in the results of computer games.
David Chappell (3:39 am) ▬ Yes, exactly.
Chappel and VicC. None so blind as those that will not see. You really need to talk with the individuals who have been affected. I bet you have not.
I seem to recall that the US EPA recently released a policy paper in the interests of better “climate Communications”. Seems that policy paper explicitly called for the linkage between “Climate Change” and asthma specifically, and chrildren’s health more generally. This looks like a coordinated effort roll out this policy globally.
Yup, coded through the word ‘Pollution’ which starts with ‘P’ and it rhymes with ‘C’ and it stands for Carbon. Same ol’ method, though, an appeal to fear and guilt, and as usual, based not on fact or science. Par for the progressive climate science and policy course.
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The fraudsters realized that their Polar Bear strategy wasn’t working, so they switched to health and especially affecting the Chillllldren (more direct emotional content to sway the imbeciles).
What’s tragic, and for the deliberation bordering into evil, is that cheap energy improves the lives of all children, the poor and the better off alike.
This campaign is backwards. The madness, it runs deep. That old dibbuk fibber, he keeps on rollin’, along.
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Sure hope nobody is paying you to do any kind of science or engineering, Nick Stokes.
Wind may be “free” but wind turbine blades and gearboxes aren’t. Is that what you mean by renewable energy? You get to renew the blades, turbines and supports regularly?
By your reasoning fossil fuels are free. You just dig them out of the ground.
Can I pick “none of the above”?
Doctors for the Environment appear to believe that atmospheric carbon dioxide does not cross political boundaries.
Bingo!
I just followed the given link to the DEA article to see if they mentioned just what they are so concerned about.
Well, look at that, number one on the list is “children’s asthma”. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
But notice the last item on the list, electrocution.
Everybody, add this one to the WarmList. “Climate change causes an increase in children’s electrocution”.
Yeah, you beat me to it.
Aside from the silliness of electrocution, note the second last entry as well, which is hypothermia. So, global warming is going to cause…cold?
I like the next to last one…hypothermia. Global warming is already causing a rash of deaths from freezing.
but it’s magic….
Global warming caused the drought…and the increase in CO2 caused global warming to make it rain again…all without changing the temperature….or something like that
http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-boosts-rain-africas-sahel-region-study-160140969.html
Barrie Trower has been trying to bring peoples attention to the dangers of microwaves (not the kitchen app) for some time and nothing has been done , so why does anyone think that the powers to be will listen ? This vid is a must watch . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z99_SzoXZdY
That’s what tin foil hats are for.
Alarmism about things like microwaves or RF from cellphones or magnetic flux from power lines begets just one response:
Where are the bodies?
I’ve expected for a long time that the low frequency vibrations from windmills would ultimately help sink them. It’s not just humans; all the biome is affected, detrimentally. Probably, even the plants, and I don’t think it would be hard to show it.
Ask the rabbits. They thump pretty regularly about it, and the coyotes?
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They put some massive wind generators in Souris, P.E.I. and the locals were all exited about getting in on the green bandwagon… until milk production in their cows became erratic, farm animals stopped reproducing at the expected rate, and the locals started developing a variety of ailments including depression.
This was with a group that was totally receptive to the state-of-the-art generators and doing their part for renewables.
Since that time, they are not so receptive or excited about having these machines grinding away at their quality of life or that of their livestock.
But but … what do Doctors Against the Environment Australia have to say about this? What you say? There is no Doctors Against the Environment Australia? Next thing your going to tell me is there isn’t a group called Union of Unconcerned Scientists.
If there was a Union of Unconcerned Scientists, would anyone care enough to join it?
LOL Max Photon is rubbing off on you.
…”the dangers infrasound poses to human health.”
Makes a musician think about the beat frequencies and harmonics that develop below the threshold of hearing when many wind turbines, each with unique internal resistances and drag factors are exposed to varying winds. Thinking about how out of tune wind chimes grate your nerves… only this is at ~2-20Hz, if I understand correctly, very low frequency.
Yes, this is subwoofer (20-200 Hz), and so-called sub-base (<60 Hz) territory, down to the generally accepted limit of human hearing around 20 Hz, and even lower.
Rap, Hip Hop, Dubstep and other popular music genres feature such heavy bass and sub-base lines. To each his own, but to me it's just loud, and very unpleasant noise, which I avoid when possible. Because these low frequency vibrations travel readily through solid objects, I consider those creating these low frequency vibrations to be assaulting me with their sound.
Perhaps you've experienced the so-called boom cars, or subwoofer assault vehicles with a big honking subwoofer mounted in the trunk, and capable of making the ground shake, and commonly blasting ugly music audible for blocks around, and disturbing the peace and quiet everywhere they go.
http://www.chronicleonline.com/content/subwoofer-assault
At least these sub-base morons are usually just passing through. It's more difficult to imagine the fate of people whose space has been invaded by a row of the monstrous thumping whirligigs, which don't move on. but just stick around spinning haphazardly, gumming up the grid, making everything more expensive in the process, ruining views, chopping birds, and making the very earth tremble.
How low can they go? The jury's still out on that one.
Yes, and how does LF affect wildlife? Is it a constant indicator of danger (like a rumble of an earthquake) to animals, or something that they can become accustomed to? You would think that true conservation-minded naturalists would be very opposed to this method of generating power because of it’s potential collateral damage… or have they thought that far?
Think of the plants’ grandchildren.
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See upstream: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/01/duelling-doctors-contradictory-climate-reports-from-medics/#comment-1951149
FrankKarrvv June 1, 2015 at 8:40 pm
[…]Steve Cooper an acoustic engineer was one of the first in Australia and elsewhere to point out the presence of infrasound and its possible health effects. The reason the establishment and others dismissed this was because the prevailing standard measurement devices cut off their testing frequencies well above those required for infrasound.[…]
http://aefweb.info/data/Are%20wind%20farms%20too%20close%20to%20commun
I’m reminiscing now about when I worked in a power plant (~1980) and bringing a 50 megawatt steam turbine online; the entire plant vibrates as the turbine approaches 3600 RPM, the speed that the other operating units are running. The beat frequency slows until synchronization is complete. If any of the turbines, once online and under load experience a disturbance in steam flow, the beat frequency starts and can very quickly sound like everything is going to fly apart. We also once had a generator motorize its turbine coming off-line (OCB failure) and nearly burned the paint off of the (hydrogen cooled) generator and exciter set. the vibration was enough that we had trouble focusing on the turbine board instruments and the charts all showed smeared lines until we got the boiler back online.
Of course the scale of wind generation is different, it would take around 2000 acres of wind turbines to generate 50 MW. http://www.aweo.org/windarea.html That gives many more chances (on a smaller scale) of beat frequencies due to variations in performance and wind supply. It’s also not safe to be near them in case of mechanical failure. Did I mention that they completely ruin a natural vista and destroy raptor birds and migrating waterfowl, sometimes without actual physical contact?
“We also once had a generator motorize its turbine coming off-line (OCB failure) and nearly burned the paint off of the (hydrogen cooled) generator and exciter set.”
Was that one of the sets at Aberthaw ???
meanwhile the earth is cooling ? all the power from wind farms will have to be used for heating
Tango, meanwhile the wind farms will be introducing chaos into the grid and costing energy provider’s profits by requiring intense monitoring of the random loading of the grid and compensation by Gas, oil and pulverised coal units to balance the grid loading.
Oops, should have put monitoring the random input to the grid.
Maybe the earth is cooling because of all those giant fans 😉
Increased chance of drowning and electrocution due to climate change!! I think we should have climate change disaster training in schools, clearly when the sea rises a lot of people who can’t swim will be effected.
Folks who like Will scribe (Rhyme after Rhyme) might enjoy this from aweo.org:
I expect National Windmill Days eventually, when the populace decorates the standing relics with flowers, and releases birds.
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“…a frightening future for children and the healthcare system.”
Yes, that’s what we should expect from a return to draconian existence!
Having progressed through the industrial revolution, humanity now awaits the propulsion revolution…
Banana benders (Queenslanders) are doomed!