From Wiley:
While renewable energy sources such as wind power will play an increasingly important role in climate change mitigation, new research reveals that the breeding success of species such as the white-tailed eagle can be significantly reduced by wind power generation on a large scale, possibly due to collision mortality.
“As wind farms are expected to expand in the future, we need to be aware of their potential negative effects on various species,” said Fabio Balotari-Chiebao, lead author of the Animal Conservation study. “The implementation of preventive measures aimed at the protection of species that are vulnerable to turbine-related incidents will allow the use of this energy source without compromising the local biodiversity.”
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The full test appears to be at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acv.12238/full
Who cares.
Wind Farms Cause Drought
http://t.co/i8tRtjTM1v
Would this not turn out to be the ultimate irony…the final slap by Gaia at the California eco loons…if it is their precious windmills that are causing the awful droughts in their already desertish land?
This makes me sit up straight.
Well, there’s no doubt that wind farms disrupt wind patterns in the immediate area, but then, a building, wheich there are more of, many of which have larger cross sections, and heights, have been around for a lot longer, haven’t generated similar claims.
Funny people going out of their way to slag wind mills on these types of issues with rather flimsy evidence when the real killer is that they produce intermittent power which must be supplemented by conventional sources that cost more, and produce more CO2 than the wind mills save.
Its sorta like CO2 being logarithmic and cooling response of the planet being exponential, which should have been the end of the CAGW meme all by itself, but somehow we get dragged into all these side issues, many of which don’t have merit.
Some time ago, before they had begun to build many of these new generation of large windmills, I wondered how much wind energy there was in a given wind belt, and how much energy could be extracted before affecting weather, by redirecting or actually slowing the wind.
Wind blows in response to pressure gradients, and other forces affect the path taken. If wind energy is extracted, does the gradient remain and more wind just materialize to compensate…or is the pressure gradient diminished? Or is it somehow increased, but displaced geographically?
Windmills do not just deflect the wind, they extract energy from it.
And whatever affect one or two has, or that many of them widely spaced has, may not be the same as long lines of them, densely packed and in several tiers.
Besides, we already know that cities affect the weather…we are just not sure how much.
And few cities have long lines of tall building laid out specifically to capture as much wind as possible.
What must be considered is not how many we have now, anyway…but how many are planned to be built.
My understanding is that the people building these things have in mind that we are only just getting started.
In order to meet the goals we hear about, there will need to be tens to hundreds of times as many as there are now…virtually a coast to coast and north to south packing, anywhere they can put ’em.
Or am I wrong about this?
It’s not just California. Its a global phenomenon. Wherever wind farms are located drought soon follows.
For example, Western India first got wind farms in 1996. Drought followed immediately. There were protests. Some even went so far as to attempt to tear down the turbines. Investigations were conducted and leading meteorological “experts” were brought it. They concluded that the farmers were mistaken, misguided, delusional. That was 2004. The drought has continued unabated. Since then over 800 farmers in that one region, Maharashtra, have committed suicide.
Even Brazil–a RAINforest–is experiencing drought!
And the issue has more to do with meteorology’s understanding of storm origins (convection theory) than it does environmental whackoism.
If you want to get a sense of the stubborn stupidity that permeates ALL of meteorology I suggest reading all of the comments at the end of this story:
El Nino: When will it start raining in California?
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_28941058/el-nino-when-will-it-start-raining-california
I hope this link works. If not try Googling it. It’s on Mercury News of Silicon Valley. Be sure to scroll down to the comments.
The only language jet streams understand is boundary layers. (That is why they are found along the tropopause.) Destroy the boundary layers and jet streams have no pathway to deliver the energy of storms. (BTW, storms have nothing to do with convection–nothing whatsoever.) Unfortunately wind turbines destroy boundary layers.
davidmhoffer:
“Well, there’s no doubt that wind farms disrupt wind patterns in the immediate area, but then, a building, which there are more of, many of which have larger cross sections, and heights, have been around for a lot longer, haven’t generated similar claims.”
I think the difference is that trees, buildings, and mountains don’t mine energy from the air and, therefore, they don’t introduce turbulence that destroys the integrity of surface layer smoothness as a body of moist air is pulled up and stretched out by normal wind flow. Or, at least, they don’t do so as much.
Boundary layer smoothness is critical to storm initiation. Storms depend on distinct boundary layers as the pathway to deliver the energy of storms. (Meteorology is genuinely (institutionally) ignorant about storms.)
Also, people don’t generally site buildings at locations that have the highest wind flow.
Whatever the case, the small amount of benefit that we get from wind turbines does not offset the risk to crop failure from drought. Drought is a big deal. Birds, noise, and money, are not, IMO.
Ultimately, the real issue is that meteorologists are plainly misguided on what causes storms. So their advice is less than worthless. Meteorologists are all brain dead stuck on convection theory, even though not one of them can explain why.
Trying to get a meteorologists to discuss storm theory is like trying to get a climatologists to discuss CO2 Forcing. One can never get a straight answer out of them, assuming you can even get them to answer at all.
Anthony Watts is a meteorologist. He refuses to discuss storm theory. (Trust me, I’ve tried.)
With meteorology’s absurdly non-scientific storm theory the problem isn’t with liberal climatologists. The problem is with both liberal and conservative meteorologists.
Can Anthony Watt answer these questions? Can any meteorologist:
http://disq.us/8pk0a2
Can You?
I think I remember you now…you are the “Moist air is heavier than dry air” and “There is no such thing as convection” guy, aren’t you?
There are no jet streams where hurricanes form…strong wind aloft prevents them from forming.
Almost all the rain we get here in the tropics is pure convective activity…there are no jet streams…the sun heating the ground causes air to rise rapidly.
Case closed.
Are we sure it isn’t Nestlé causing California’s droughts? Last I heard their licence ran out a few decades back and they STILL pump out millions of gallons per annum so they can sell it back to the population who originally owned it.
California drought is caused by same thing as the droughts which occur in all desert and semiarid regions…sometimes they get no rain.
How about the California Condor? Condors eat carrion. Carrion is at the feet of windmills due to other bird and bat strikes. The windmills will attract and then kill California condors, the rarest and largest bird in North America.
I guess we will NEVER be able to release them back to the wild.
I’m pretty sure the comments on this story will overload your sarcasm meter, Anthony.
I have yet to see a bird without lightning fast reflexes. How the hell they would get ‘hit’ by slow turning turbine vanes is beyond me. I ahve several times stopped along the road where the wind farms were close and looked and never seen a dead bird yet – somebody must be highly efficient in clearing them up.
I would imagine living under one might be annoying and even contribute to psyhiological distress, but again, I haven’t seen any that close to housing. Cows and sheep seem blissfully unaware of the hazards posed by the noise of the vanes and hum of the turbines.
And personally, I think they look pretty good across the green hills – if you’d spent any time around Morwell (Victoria, Australia) I’m sure you’d find them a vast improvement over an open cut coal mine. 😀
“How the hell they would get ‘hit’ by slow turning turbine vanes is beyond me.”
Twaddle.
The tip velocity of those “slow turning turbine blades” is likely to be in excess of 150 MPH.
Exactly.
It is an optical illusion caused by the shear size of the blade and their height.
Those planes way up in the sky sure look like they are creeping along too, don’t they?
Finally a rational comment! Trafamadore at 1059 points out that birds kills as a result of power should be considered in the larger context of all bird kills.
This is in fact a regulatory requirement. The US power industry is required to produce electricity safely and with insignificant environmental impact. We do this 24/7/365.
Armchair quarterbacks love to point out insignificant or isolated failures. Of course the safety and and environmental implications having of power outages are huge.
I consider seeing wild turkeys a special occasion. Yesterday driving through Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area (created by evil dams), we got to see more wild turkeys than we could count. Later we were driving through dryland wheat fields which is good habitat for wind farms. Our trip ended ten miles from the nuke plant I worked at before there were thousands of wind turbines in Washington State.
My point is that those who ‘do’ on a daily basis are a lot smarter than the who explain what ‘could’ happen if we do not not do our job right. Please spare me any Califonia examples. Yes, there are lots of stupid people in there making it hard for the rest of us.
When evaluating the environmental impact, the three most important factors are location, location, location, location. Wind turbines and raptors in Finland, may only be of interests to Finland.
Well said.
Poppycock…if you want reliable power you want to get rid of the wind turbines.
I want to hear from you when you are expected to produce a stable grid with more than a few wind turbines here and there and no more coal plants or gas fired backups at the ready.
Menicholas,
Perhaps you should read more and comment less. The topic is not impact to grid reliability from wind generation. It is impact to bird populations. One has nothing to do with the other.
Had you paid attention you would have noticed that nowhere did I state an opinion on the viability or desirability of continuing to add wind generation to the grid. I don’t intend to, as there is a lot of information I’d want to know before offering one. I can note that our utility, which owns the 2nd highest amount of wind generation (by rated mw hour) of any utility in the country, has no future builds in the current 20 year plan. We even sold our remaining leases from the last project after building out about a 1/4 of the footprint.
There’s a multitude of life forms that reproduce by splitting in two.
I seem to recall from my old biology text books that birds and bats are not among them.
Obviously biology text books need to be adjusted.
Reproduce by splitting in two?
Let me tell you about this girl Maryanne I used to know.
She was about 4’9″ tall, and…well… maybe I better not talk about this here.
Poppycock? Who said anything about getting rid of coal, nuke, hydro or gas power plants? In the PNW, BPA balances wind generation with hydro.
http://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
For more than 20 years I have been listening to Washington State watermelon governors talk about closing the state’s only coal power plant. The action is always the same. An agreement to close the plant many years after leaving office. Centralia is now slated to close in 2025.
I suspect by 2025 there will be more broken wind turbines in Washington state than operating ones. Coal, nukes, and hydro plants will have completed another major overhaul to run to 2045.
After getting their promise on closure of Centralia plant, they decided, with the encouragement of Sierra Club and other environmental groups, to go after plants outside of the state, namely Coalstrip in Montana.
We have customers in well heeled places like Bainbridge Island who want carbon free electricity. I’m fine with that, so long as they are willing to pay the difference in cost. (Interesting to note I never hear anything about carbon free home and water heating. Were it me, I’d say secure electricity, secure gas and let them cope on their own.)
Should note these are the same folks who don’t allow us to trim trees near our lines or resist plans to build a new transmission line to serve the Island and improve reliability. Who wants to take bets they are the same people who complain the loudest when service goes out in a storm.
There is no such thing as ‘carbon free’ power. Life cycle analysis show this. Green power is a marketing scam. It is not about reducing the environmental impact of making electricity. It is about marketing to the ‘well healed’.
If you look at the last two major power outages (1996 west coast 2003 Ohio to New York, DC), failure to ‘trim trees’ was one of the root causes.
This may sound harsh, but left coast utilities are poorly managed. I hate to hear excuses from the power industry. My family did not lose power in the above two blackouts because my power came from well managed part of grid. Good utilities educated customers and regulators what is needed to keep the lights on.
Ice storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes will take out power lines but good utilities restore power fast. While eating lunch at a power plant in Michigan one coworker complained that his power had been out for 5 days. The rest of us had had power back in a few hours. Turns out not one person in his rural subdivision called to report the outage. I suspect the reason was that the local new from the big city ran the poorly managed excuses for taking a week to restore power.
Lived in boondocks Pennsylvania. PP&L never failed us. In the mild climate California, PG@E routinely lost power to our house. Good management also applies to running coal and nuke plants.
Kit,
I know that and you know that. It’s the well heeled morons and elected officials (like our President and the Governor here in WA), who appear to be clueless.
YIKES!
Failure of rotating equipment is not a disaster. It is foreseen and expected. 99.9% of the time safety devices prevent failure but hanging around turbines of any kind is a bad idea.
Hi all.
I need to give some credit here. Kip Hansen posted the following image on 9 October in WUWT ‘test’. I hadn’t seen it before. If you click on my link, you get taken to WordPress’s hosting of the image; not the original source. I presume the url on the picture is the compiler of the barchart. They cite their source:
Okay, credit aside, it’s surely relevant to this discussion. Others have raised the same point in discussion without the graphic.
?w=720
I must say the graphic has caused me to change my mind a bit. I used to be antagonistic against windfarms for their environmental damage. A trenchant phrase I used was “Windfarms are equal to ten Exxon Valdez disasters every single year.” That’s probably an understatement given that the graphic gives details only for the US and Canada. Still, the graphic indicates that they are not the significant ecological calamity i had thought.
OMG, another ninja cat army warning?
Gimme a break.
Anyone who can look at these numbers and not be able to dismiss them with some quick mental arithmetic is seriously enumerate.
If you do believe this, let me know, and I will attempt to talk you off the ledge of this particular insanity.
There is no secret hidden army of 60 million wild cats in the US.
The non-existent secret army is not killing 2.4 billion birds per year.
Persisting in delusional beliefs is very unhealthy to the psyche.
Hi Menicholas.
I agree with you “There is no secret hidden army of 60 million wild cats in the US.”. But that’s not what the claim is.
It’s alleged by National Geographic and the University of Georgia that DOMESTICATED house cats are perpetrating mass avian slaughter. Here’s a great comic on the topic. The site has been popular for a while, but I just learnt about it; ‘the oatmeal’. Check it out. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill
The site has great material, and has caused me to do much rethinking, always a good thing.
I neither endorse nor deny the numbers, I merely affirm I’ve done my best to accurately transcribe and credit them. But without being innumerate, the numbers I posted above are conservative compared to the calculations shown.
Once again – for those who missed/ignored it the first time, are the conclusions of the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who actually know something about such matters.
No evidence
Despite the large numbers of birds killed, there is no scientific evidence that predation by cats in gardens is having any impact on bird populations UK-wide. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease, or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds.
We also know that of the millions of baby birds hatched each year, most will die before they reach breeding age. This is also quite natural, and each pair needs only to rear two young that survive to breeding age to replace themselves and maintain the population.
It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season, so cats are unlikely to have a major impact on populations. If their predation was additional to these other causes of mortality, this might have a serious impact on bird populations.
Those bird species that have undergone the most serious population declines in the UK (such as skylarks, tree sparrows and corn buntings) rarely encounter cats, so cats cannot be causing their declines. Research shows that these declines are usually caused by habitat change or loss, particularly on farmland.
http://www.rspb.org.uk/makeahomeforwildlife/advice/gardening/unwantedvisitors/cats/birddeclines.aspx
It seems there are a lot of cat haters out there with very vivid imaginations and little understanding of statistical mathematics.
A bit like AGW True Believers, in fact.
The proof of the pet cat’s predation has been captured on videotape from kitty-cams.
“I think it will be impossible to deny the ongoing slaughter of wildlife by outdoor cats given the videotape documentation and the scientific credibility that this study brings,” said Michael Hutchins, Executive Director/CEO of The Wildlife Society, the leading organization for wildlife professionals in the United States. “There is a huge environmental price that we are paying every single day that we turn our backs on our native wildlife in favor of protecting non-native predatory cats at all cost while ignoring the inconvenient truth about the mortality they inflict.”
http://abcbirds.org/article/kittycam-reveals-high-levels-of-wildlife-being-killed-by-outdoor-cats/
I think I remember you now…you are the “Moist air is heavier than dry air” and “There is no such thing as convection” guy, aren’t you?
Convection is a myth.
Right. I’m the guy that figured out tornadoes. http://www.solvingtornadoes.com. You are another science pretender. Science is about what you can prove, not what you believe.
There are no jet streams where hurricanes form
Yes, this is true. Obviously you haven’t the slightest idea why.
…strong wind aloft prevents them from forming.
Bullshit. That’s a made up explanation based on speculation. But that’s what the weather channel claims. Likewise the simpletons proclaim that high pressure ridges block storms. All meteorological explanations are nonsense. Moist air is heavier than dry air. Meteorology is for dumb people.
Almost all the rain we get here in the tropics is pure convective activity…there are no jet streams…the sun heating the ground causes air to rise rapidly.
Case closed.
All storms, even those that occur at the tropics and even those that occur hundreds or even thousands of miles from “the” jet streams are caused by jet streams. Jet streams AND THEIR TRIBUTARIES supply the energy of storms. Tributaries to the jet streams exist high, running along the boundary with the stratosphere.
Does the fact that meteorology has never measured the weight of moist to dry air and refuses even now bother you at all?
Menicholas, tell us why you believe in convection theory. Tell us what other alternative theories you’ve considered. Tell us what empirical evidence (that means reproducible experimental evidence) convinced you of the validity of the convection model of storm theory. Tell us how the convection model explains the existence of the jet streams. Tell us how the convection model explains the existence of the violence that exists at the top of thunderstorms that can, and has, knocked aircraft out of the sky. Tell us how convection explains the rotation witnessed in storms? Why do you think it is that all tornadoes generally track the same direction at the jet stream lays? Coincidence?
Where does the energy of storms come from? How does it arrive at a particular location and why is its arrival so abrupt?
Tell us why the, supposedly, lighter moist air does not immediately rush up through the cooler, drier air above when it first evaporates of the surface of a body of water.
Can you explain the structure that is plainly evident in a tornado votex? (I can. You can’t.)
Why do you believe moist air is lighter than dry air? Have you ever measured it? If so where is the data and the methods? Are you concealing it/them from the public? If not then why do you believe something you’ve never measured? Put up or shut up.
Do you agree the boiling point of H2O is 212F? Do you agree that, therefore, the moisture in the atmosphere is never above its boiling point? Do you believe the H2O in moist air is steam (monomolecular H2O)? Or is it little droplets? Tell us how you know. Have you measured it? Then how do you know?
Do you consider the uplift that is withnessed in thunderstorms to be evidence of convection? Why? Have you considered other theories? What empirical methods did you employ to eliminate these competing hypotheses?
Do you consider yourself an scientist?
Do you think somebody that doesn’t do experiments should consider themselves a scientist?
Indisputably clouds are heavier than moist air, right? Tell us your own words why they don’t come dropping out of the sky.
You will have no real answers to any of the questions. Other than myself, no meteorologist does. You are all dingbats when it comes to the fators that underlie storms. Most meteorologist never deal with any of these issue in their whole career.
When it comes to storm theory, meteorology is a pretend science. You yourself have already demonstrated as much right here in this thread.
Can you explain how convection causes the low pressure witnessed in storms? Go ahead, nitwit, this is our second chance. Make my day.
As you will demonstrate with your inability to answer any of these questions, all meteorologists (accept myself) are brain-dead believers who don’t have the slightest idea why they believe what the believe. You just believe.
Answer all of these questions, you evasive twit.
I predict you will not answer even one of these questions.
Believers believe. Scientist measure and test.
You are not a scientist, you are a believer.