Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Al Jazeera has made an outrageous claim that climate “denial” is helping to kill 400,000 people every year.
According to Al Jazeera;
“Other conspiracy theorists make fools of themselves, but they don’t harm anyone else. That isn’t the case here. Because climate change costs lives. Climate change deniers are undermining the battle to save those lives. They may be nuts, but its still no laughing matter”.
See the video: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/2015/10/reality-check-climate-change-conspiracy-151031081029315.html
How can climate change possibly be killing 400,000 people per year, when the green movement can’t even produce one legitimate climate refugee?
Blaming Climate Change is a terrific scapegoat for corruption and incompetence, of which there is no shortage in many parts of the Middle East. WUWT recently reported how the former governor of Alexandria tried to blame Climate Change for the lethal floods which swept his city, in an apparent effort to deflect accusations of poor civic infrastructure management.
The terrorist Osama Bin Laden once attempted to conflate climate change and hatred of the West, perhaps he was just a bit before his time. Now Al Jazeera, the news service backed by the hardline Qatari dictatorship, appears in my opinion to be trying to finish what Bin Laden started.
Let us hope Al Jazeera don’t succeed in their apparent efforts to fan the flames of mindless hatred.
Only the biggest of fools can claim that a world that hasn’t warmed any in decades is killing people because of warming.
The Al Jazeera newsmakers aren’t the fools. They know how to use propaganda. The fools are the unthinking masses that uncritically accept it,
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/rapprochemont-or-civilization-surrender-how-to-force-human-solidarity-starting-with-preschool-education/ calls attention to the International Decade of the Rapprochement of Cultures. CAGW is one of the needed false narratives to get the “support of the people” via a manufactured consensus through education. Another is how Islam is described and its adherents treated, whatever the facts.
RoC is a UN initiative launched in 2013 with Saudi Arabian financial support and Kazakhstan sponsorship. It needs to be on all of our radar because it admits that this refugee crisis all over the world is a crucial component of the POst-2015 agenda, just like education and CAGW.
Lots of incentive in RoC for Al Jazeera to say this, especially since the media globally are explicitly called on to support the desired narrative.
…and report their propaganda!
Of course we aren’t talking about the sub-Saharan Africans that die in the millions because of no access to DDT and control of Malaria…
The green fear is healthy, happy, prosperous dark skinned people..
Al Jezzera can kiss my skinny Scots/Cherokee arse…
Yep and they’ll get support in Paris!
OK, here are the lives lost. It’s worse than I dreamed.! We must act now!
“How our allies in Kuwait and Qatar funded Islamic State”
Al Jazeera is oil funded. Its OIL funders (Qatar state) like to fund certain things that are unprecedented. I always cringe when I watch Al Jazeera ATTACK shale oil et al in the USA AND FAIL TO MENTION they are oil funded. Sad. PS I am not a US citizen.
After all that jazz with the Al Jazeera journalists in Egyptian prison it turns out that Al Jazeera was sued by one of their jailed journalists. Jailed journalist stated that Al Jazeera did not tell him the full facts about their license to report from Egypt. Al Jazeera, he stated, did not have a license.
mubasher.aljazeera.net MIGHT BE what the aforesaid journalist objected to. 😉
Al Jazeera says that journalism is not a crime. I agree. Lying in journalism should be a crime though. Shame.
I do not know where the “400,000 lives / year” comes from:
Does it come from 2012?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/27/climate-change-kills-400-000-a-year-new-report-reveals.html
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/jschmidt/global_warming_is_already_caus.html
I very vaguely recall Kof Annan mentioning something similar but I can’t be sure.
Death creeps on us all. Be worried. Be very worried about carbon dioxide. The FAO reported that there was global record cereal production in 2014. It’s worse than I thought?
How many fvcking live have been SAVED by coal and oil? = winter heating, ambulance gas transport, medical manufacturing an so on……………….
So about the same number as moslem radicalism does ?
Here is the UN report (below) behind the numbers. Notice that lack of electricity (Indoor Smoke) kills 3 million a year. By far the largest cause of deaths, and is predicted to remain the largest killer in 2030 as well. Evidently the report is predicting that the poor of the world are not about to get electricity any time soon.
So, if the UN was serious about reducing deaths, they would be rushing to make sure that everyone on the planet had electricity before they worried about climate change. Because as the UN’s own numbers show (below), lack of electricity kills millions more people each year than does climate change. And by the UN’s own numbers, this is not going to change any time soon.
Yet here we have the UN proposing that we make climate change the number 1 priority, with electricity a far distant priority. Also notice that the report blames hunger on climate change. As though people never starved to death before global warming. Tell that to the 30+ million Chinese that died of starvation during the global cooling of the early 60’s.
http://daraint.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/CVM2ndEd-FrontMatter.pdf
NUMBER OF DEATHS
2010 2030
Climate
Diarrheal Infections 85,000 150,000
Heat & Cold Illnesses 35,000 35,000
Hunger 225,000 380,000
Malaria & Vector Borne Diseases 20,000 20,000
Meningitis 30,000 40,000
Environmental Disasters 5,000 7,000
Carbon
Air Pollution 1,400,000 2,100,000
Indoor Smoke 3,100,000 3,100,000
Occupational Hazards 55,000 80,000
Skin Cancer 20,000 45,000
World 4,975,000 5,957,000
the numbers above are from page 18 of the UN’s own report. So yes, I call BS on Al Jazeera and the UN, along with the Climate Negotiators heading to Paris. These deaths are on your heads.
You have completely ignoring the millions killed every year because people do not have access to low cost electricity. And instead you are proposing that we not provide this electricity any time soon, so that we can prevent climate change. Climate change that kills only a small fraction of the number of people killed by lack of affordable electricity.
Look at the UN’s own numbers. Million killed every year because they lack access to low cost electricity for heating and cooking. And the UN and the leaders of the world propose to make the problem even worse.
That is the real Obama legacy. Add it up. Millions of people will die needlessly of indoor smoke because they lack access to affordable electricity. In return, thousands of people will be save from dying of Climate Change. And the problem will not bet any better. Tens of millions of unnecessary extra deaths by 2030, all in the name of saving the world.
And these are the UN’s own numbers.
I have read elsewhere that 2 million die annually from lack of potable water and good sanitation. Electrification would help greatly with those too. If this was really about helping humanity, all the warmists would be demanding that a 1000 coal plants be built in Africa and Asia.
all the warmists would be demanding that a 1000 coal plants be built in Africa and Asia.
===========================
it is the white man’s burden to save the black and brown people of the earth from the ravages of climate change.
thus the world bank is limiting financing of coal power plants. now that whitey has electricity, no reason to let anyone else have it. having eaten a huge piece of pie, and taken an enormous dump on the table, we can’t let anyone else have any pie in case they also feel the call of nature. lets all meet in Paris and outlaw anyone else eating pie.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/16/us-worldbank-climate-coal-idUSBRE96F19U20130716
@ferdberple has quoted the right report but the wrong section, that’s why they add up to 5 million, not the 400,000
The figs above are for a combination of climate change and “Continuing today’s patterns of carbon-intensive energy use is estimated, together with climate change, to cause 6 million deaths per year by 2030, close to 700,000 of which would be due to climate change. ” (the DARA report explains)
BTW look at how they try to pin indoor smoke on fossil fuels when the vast majority of such deaths are due to cooking using Climate friendly wood burning .
He says the figs originate from page 18 of a UN report ..but I can’t find such a report.
climate “denial” is helping to kill 400,000 people every year.
Don’t blame us for sloughing off. It isn’t our goal to reduce the population to 1/6 of current, that is the Green Blob leadership. [/s]
Also in the playbook of the warmers.
The original Al Jazeera channel was launched 1 November 1996 by an emiri decree with a loan of 500 million Qatari riyals (US$137 million) from the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa. Due to billions of dollars in surpluses from the oil and gas industry, the Qatari government has directed investments into United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
Wiki ref:
Hey Mehdi Hasan, you work for a CO2 polluting OIL COUNTRY.
It’s ironic how world hunger has FALLEN. It was reported just this May by the WFP UN.
Oooops! The hottest years evaaaah are ravaging cereals. No more Cornflakes!
FAO again on global record cereal production in 2014
Global warming is costing lives!
WorldNetDaily is reporting that there is going to be a vote in Paris on creating a climate change “tribunal” with enforcement powers were victims of climate change can force guilty countries to pay up.
Agreed, arther4563, but what you are misreading is that this may well be the truth when you realize that “climate deniers” are the “green” idiots, and their policies might well be killing people, but probably not at the stated rate.
Al Jazeera are partly OIL FUNDED – aren’t they? Qatar. Al Gore sold his ‘Current TV’ to them in the last few years.
I often watch Al Gorzeera for their other documentaries. I note they tip toe around Qatar, ISIL and all that jazzzzzz. Hey, that is for another day. They are good, as long as it does NOT INVOLVE OIL. It is a stain on their bad character. I will stop here for now.
Lives lost!!!!!! Oh phuleaaaase. The world has a problem. It is not over-population. The problem will make itself seen as early as 2050 – just ask China which has just decided that TWO kids is better than ONE. Why? Do your own research for that. See fertility rates since 1960s.
Here are the lives to be lost due to ‘global warming’:
Success!
It does beggar belief. In any case how can we “disbelievers” be costing 400000 lives when we have absolutely no influence in the corridors of power???
Obama blamed it as an excuse advance his agenda.
They’re blaming it to excuse their favorite sons.
(It wasn’t bullets or bomb shrapnel thats killing all those people. Those are thermometers sticking out of their bodies!)
Good point – govts are now 100% owned by warmies. (Well maybe not Putin this week, but he ratified Kyoto before even KRudd.)
$300bn pa is being flushed on “abatement” schemes that almost always need conventional backup.
Other than the mere holding of a personal opinion, specifically what harm do they believe “d@niers” have enforced? What policies have been blocked (other than AUS replacing carbon pricing with the more effective Direct action)? How much incremental CO2 and therefore temp at your preferred sensitivity resulted? And what fatal events resulted from this fatal temp?
Sounds like a ploy to declare a group of people guilty of a capital crime solely by virtue of their beliefs. Has that ever happened before?
Sure. In Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi and probably other countries, apostasy (i.e. ceasing to believe in Islam) is punishable by death. That’s the background to thinking around Qatar (if not in it).
BTW, Al Jazeera English is a handy source for what’s happening around the world. A bit too much knee-jerk anti-americanism, but if you can see through that you can actually learn stuff that you would not get anywhere else.
This is really very simple. There is a large bloc of Arab nations lined up to gather the reparations from the sins of the Western World.
Clearly the answer is for ISIS and all the Arab states to stop pumping oil and gas.
That should fix a few conflicts.
Isn’t this the network that Al Gore sold to “big oil”?
BBC August 2014
Former American Vice President Al Gore is suing Al Jazeera America over the sale of a TV network he founded.
Mr Gore and his partners agreed to sell Current TV to the Qatari-owned broadcaster last year.
But Mr Gore and other former shareholders in the company claim Al Jazeera America is trying to retain $65m (£39m) of the purchase money.
They have filed a lawsuit claiming the terms of the contract have not been honoured.
Mr Gore’s lawyer, David Boies, said in a statement: “Al Jazeera America wants to give itself a discount on the purchase price that was agreed to nearly two years ago.”
Are we sure that they haven’t kept Al Gore on as a consultant?
Nigel S
November 1, 2015 at 2:55 pm
“The end justifies the means.”
When “pot meets kettle”, only the green matters.
Not ISIS – Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Isn’t Al-Jazeera sponsored/owned by one of these sovereign states? Or at a minimum, is owned by a person who derived ALL their wealth from oil/gas?
Reblogged this on Canadian Climate Guy and commented:
Climate Deniel Kills! No, not really. But that doesn’t stop people from making such a ludicrous claim.
You can’t blame your fellow Moslim on wars of Middle East – thus, you have to find an external Western or Christian scapegoat. Of course it is ‘climate d3nialists’, not for example coal in China or Arabic oil.
Besides, the whole story is dumb. 400,000 victims? Where? Caused by denialism? How?
400,000? Name one.
Pete W,
You beat me to it.
Put up or shut up, Al Jazeera.
Are they counting the people doused with fuel and burned by ISIS as causalities of man-made warming caused by fossil fuels? It wouldn’t surprise me.
Guess Mr. Gore left some kool-aid in the office fridge.
Ha! Nice!
399 999 Arabs and a blonde.
“How can climate change possibly be killing 400,000 people per year, when the green movement can’t even produce one legitimate climate refugee.”
Now that Eric brought it up, some group of warmunistas will ‘surprisingly’ find one. I’ll bet.
The irony of the climate refugee claim by the alarmists is that the Administration and much of the alarmists are virtually numb while dealing with thousands of real refugees caused by ISIS including the consequences for those who have to live with the invasion into their countries.
Perhaps they think that by out-stupiding Al BBC et al on global warming they will be taken more seriously as journalists. Herd mentality.
Or could just be the “journalist” responsible thinks it might help get him/her a job with one of those organisations.
…not forgetting the possibility of straightforward cash-for-story, where an external source pays for an article to be written. They’re getting pretty frantic before Paris, and are well funded.
When, at the direction of the Sun, the climate swings toward the next Ice Age then you will be able to pin deaths from hunger and exposure to naturally occurring climate change.
400,000 on an annual basis is a very small number.
For the year to date-hour-second there have been over 49,998,700 human deaths.
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Even if 400,000 is correct, I doubt it, such is astronomically small and hardly a mention in the NY Times.
But then I have doubts about 50 million too.
But it is All Saints Day after all.
Ha ha
I dare them to show their math…all of it.
The IPCC sixth assessment report needs some new statistics to use in its upcoming release.
400,000 on an annual basis = .05%
Check latitudes math. Our 21st century public school math education in action. High school graduates with 8th grade reading and 4th grade math proficiency. Better the world think you’re a fool then to participate on comment boards and remove all doubt.
I come up with 0.67% give or take a body or two.
2015 world population ~ 7.3 billion
7,300,000,000 X .05% = ~365,000
I blame my poor math on the time change…. ;)..lack of coffee…..and not really giving a flying ****
.005% X 7,300,000,000 = ~400,000
400,000 on an annual basis is a very small number.
==============
the UN report from which this numbers were takes says there are 3 million deaths each year from indoor smoke. so if the UN was serious about saving the world, they would make sure everyone had low cost electricity for heating and cooking.
Instead, to save 400,000 from climate change, they are willing to sacrifice nearly 10 times as many due to lack of electricity.
(Sockpuppet’s comment deleted. -mod)
Proper ventilation of their cooking stoves would suffice.
===========
only works if you are the only one cooking. the problem is the fuel itself. dung makes a shitty fire. 1 million cooking fires and you have the Great London Fog all over again. The smoke settles back down and you breathe it all day and night.
SE Asia minimized the problem by switching over to low cost bottled gas. Electricity allows you to do one better.
To get “proper ventilation” you would need electricity.
If the UN would let these people have electricity, they wouldn’t need to cook over open fires in the first place.
Isn’t that when they all dress up as their favorite saints and do the “bless” or treat thing and go to somber parties?
Cyclone “Nilofar” should make land-fall on the Southern Arabian coast on the 2nd or 3rd. It is a huge CAT-5. The projections are well North of 150 MPH. Maybe, Al Jazeera’s target is a ratings increase. Nilofarhas been discussed for several days.
Having left the snark above, I’ll pray for those in this monster’s path.
Sorry,
Chapala is this year’s monster. I’m watching the Giants and Saint running up a basketball score in a football game. The score is Gmen 49 – Saints 42 with 7 minutes left!
I see surface winds of 182 km/h.
all cyclones are cat 5 now it seems. all you need is an estimate from satellite pics, and you have whatever number you choose carved in stone for future generations to be misled by. just look at every cyclone here in Australia for the last 5 or 6 years, overstated and never confirmed by ground stations apart from those that generate enough rain to be called dangerous in that sense.
Has any WUWT reader commented on this paper by a group of French mathematicians
http://www.scmsa.eu/archives/SCM_RC_2015_08_24_EN.pdf
The title of the paper reads:
The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade
I wonder if they’ll be asked to speak at the upcoming conference.
John Finn:
Yes, two have here.
You could, too, if you wanted to.
Richard
Sooo… Can we send Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley as our representative then? I think not. GK
G. Karst:
Your question is surreal.
John Finn asked
I answered
and you have responded saying in total
Who is the “we” who want to “send a representative”?
To whom do you want to send that “representative”?
And why do you think Christopher Monckton can not be that representative of whomever your “we” may be to whomever you want to be represented?
Richard
Sorry R.C. I misunderstood the exchange. I somehow understood – anyone could attend, and I thought – anyone but our rascally skeptic- Lord Monckton (who has been banned). Sorry, I erred and confused. GK
Wasn’t that llitle dead boy on the beach this summer killed by climate change. Pretty certain I heard that reasoning.
Sea level rise.
(Sorry. It disgust me to say that. But that’s along the lines of the kind of stuff being said. That boy wasn’t a “Climate Refuge”.)
Too warm in Turkey? But it was under. Foot of snow last winter!
But you don’t understand Andrew. While it is true that the Global Average Surface Temperature hasn’t changed in the last twenty years, people do not live in the average anything. Everybody lives in “Right Here Right Now”© so in the places where it is too hot it is now, due to Climate Change, even too hotter and thus people are dying from the EXTRA, climate change, heat. In the “too cold” places it is now, due to Climate Change even too colder so people are dying from the Climate Change coldy. Climate Change means too hot and too cold AT THE SAME TIME. Simple.
The extra hot and the extra coldy balance out and the GAST remains the same, but the climate has changed and extra people have died due to the change.
acementhead
Serious or sarcastic?
Seriously??? LOL(truly) I thought that I’d been too obvious.
acementhead: You can’t out bizarre the alarmists, no matter what you may write, I can guarantee you, one of them has written worse.
Yes, it is very hot in the summer in Turkey and certainly cooler in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, the UK. Since he died because his parents were attempting to leave the safety of Turkey and illegally enter the E.U., we must assume that they were motivated by temperature differential. (sarc)
No he was killed by his people smuggling father. The MSM has kept very quiet abot this.
http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/2015/09/well-well-well-looks-like-abdullah-kurdi-is-a-liar-and-a-people-smuggler/
They were Syrians….who left a safe home in Turkey where they had been living for three years.
They were traveling to his sisters house in Canada for a visit in order to get tree dental care.
Climate change causes dental disease and prevents people from seeing doc in their own countries and paying for it themselves.
You may have got to the root of the problem. On the other hand, and I feel like a sap for pointing it out, but trees don’t have teeth.
I’ve lived in Canada since 1969 and I have yet to see any sign of free dental care. Or tree. Had to change dentists because our old one was too darn pricey. New one is a nice Thai lady. She has small hands, like most Asian women, and that means she can do stuff inside your mouth that bloated males of European descent cannot. Oh my, I’m getting off topic.
But we have free medical care. Actually it isn’t free at all, we pay for it through our taxes. Better that than enriching a bloated insurance company that devotes huge amounts of your money to denying your claims, wouldn’t you say? I think so. We’ve had absolutely top notch medical care in crisis situations. No questions were asked.
They were travelling to Europe because Canada had denied their refugee application.
So instead of subsidizing a bloated insurance industry, you subsidize a bloated govt that makes money by denying claims.
There’s a reason why Canadians who can afford to, come to the US for medical care.
Prior to MLO the atmospheric CO2 concentrations, both paleo ice cores and inconsistent contemporary grab samples, were massive wags. Data at some of NOAA’s tall towers passed through 400 ppm years before MLO reached that level. IPCC AR5 TS.6 claims uncertainty in CO2 concentrations over land. Preliminary data from OCO-2 suggests that CO2 is not as well mixed as assumed. Per IPCC AR5 WG1 chapter 6 mankind’s share of the atmosphere’s CO2 is basically unknown, could be anywhere from 4% to 96%. (IPCC AR5 Ch 6, Figure 6.1, Table 6.1)
The major global C/CO2 (not CO2 per se, C is a precursor proxy for CO2) reservoirs, i.e. oceans, atmosphere, vegetation & soil, contain over 40,000 Pg (Gt) of C/CO2. Over 90% of this C/CO2 reserve is in the oceans. Between these reservoirs ebb and flow hundreds of Pg C/CO2 per year, the great fluxes. For instance, vegetation absorbs C/CO2 for photosynthesis producing plants and O2. When the plants die and decay they release C/CO2. A divinely maintained balance of perfection for thousands of years now unbalanced by mankind’s evil use of fossil fuels.
So just how much net C/CO2 does mankind’s evil fossil fuel consumption add to this perfectly balanced 40,000 Gt cauldron of churning, boiling, fluxing C/CO2?
3. That’s correct, 3. Not 3,000, not 300, 3! How are we supposed to take this seriously?
IPCC AR5 attributes 2 W/m^2 of unbalancing RF due to the increased CO2 concentration between 1750 and 2011. In the overall global heat balance 2 W (watt is power, not energy) is lost in the magnitude and uncertainty of: ToA, 340 +/- 10, fluctuating albedo of clouds, snow and ice, and the absorption and release of heat from evaporation and condensation of the ocean and water vapor cycle. (IPCC AR5 Ch 8, FAQ 8.1)
IPCC AR5 acknowledges the LTT pause in Text Box 9.2 and laments the failure of the GCMs to model it.
The sea ice and sheet ice is expanding not shrinking, the weather (30 years = climate) is less extreme not more, the sea level rise is not accelerating, the GCM’s are repeat failures, the CAGW hypothesis is coming unraveled, COP21 has all the makings of yet another embarrassing fiasco, IPCC AR6 will mimic SNL’s Rosanna Rosanna Dana, “Well, neeeveeer mind!!”
Al J really mean to say that Islamist deniers have compelled Islamists to kill 400,000 people. It was just a typo.
Anthony, Scott, Lord Christopher, Mark Joe etc will be in orange coveralls having their heads sliced off after they are prosecuted under sharia RICO by the UN. This is in the news every day now. This isn’t 700 year old folk stories, this is here and now.
Christians are killed hourly now in Syria and Egypt. Homosexuals are hung in Iran. In the USA the left, already having begun the campaign of ridicule and prosecution of Christians, will start by jailing them, and then intellectuals, and the infirmed. The socialists did so in the 1930s and in Cambodia. How is man any different in 2015? Then they will begin the exterminations, just about when the middle eastern hoards cave-in Germany the Netherlands, and great Britain.
Anthony et al may make it to old age only to have their graves blown up by the Islamists.
I won’t bother linking to the live leak videos, you all know where they are.
Al Jazeera, very well known for balanced and precise scientific journalism, indeed!
And of course,- fairy tales from the Arabian Nights!
A 1001 of them promises a long read into the future.
The Warmists always move on to the next gullible and backward tranche of the population. Barak Obama did it in the USA, evangelising the poor and ill educated. The Arab world offers almost unlimited potential for those who wish to sell their lies to the poor and ill educated.
Just a thought
“Forty-six Muslim countries combined contribute just 1 percent of the world’s scientific literature; Spain and India each contribute more of the world’s scientific literature than those countries taken together. In fact, although Spain is hardly an intellectual superpower, it translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years.”
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
very true
Governments and cultures that are based on destruction and taking by force are not conductive or supportive of creating, making, producing or pioneering. Energy and creativity are only expended in survival techniques and avoidance.
Another reason why there are so few Arabic books is that Arabic writing consists only of consonants, there are no vowels. Because of this, writing that has only consonants must be understood before it can be read (ie comprehended), while writing that has both consonants and vowels reverses this process.
In other words, with consonantal writing “interpretation precedes decipherment,” while with alphabetic writing “decipherment precedes interpretation.
See http://www.newenglishreview.org/Colin_Wells/Why_Arabs_Hate_Reading/
They would have us all reenter into a new Dark Age for mankind.
Of course, we must not forget who gave Al Jazeera a bigger outreach to advance his own personal “green” agenda.
Albert Arnold Gore Jr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore
“Let us hope Al Jazeera don’t succeed in their apparent efforts to fan the flames of mindless hatred.”
===================
Gotta be careful when you call upon the devil.
Or any imaginary character.
Yep. I figured I overstepped my bounds with that one.
Musta been the devil within me.
I was entertained last night when our Aussie government broadcaster SBS ran this Al-Jazeera piece on the evening news. It was about wind turbines massacring golden eagles. That is surprising since SBS is generally as green as grass, so allowing a news item which goes against the doctrines of Gaia is unusual.
Having a wholly owned arm of the Qatari government criticise wind energy is less surprising. One always needs a higher oil price when one is a sheik on a budget.
They are specifically attacking ON-SHORE wind.
It is the currently the cheapest source of renewable energy, after hydropower.
We are being steered in the direction of high-costs and failure and dependence on oil imports.
You forgot the /sarc tag.
I was making a generally sensible point.
In “relative terms”, on-shore wind is cheaper than the really expensive stuff.
But to put that into context here is the last comment that I made on the topic:
“Last time I checked – the UK wave subsidy was still set at approx. 10 times the wholesale electricity rate.
The subsidies are scaled to reflect the stupidity of the concept.
More stupidity begets more subsidy.
The system is designed to create a level playing field in which stupid ideas can compete with sensible ones.
Wave and offshore wind are truly bonkers and so they get the highest subsidies of all.”
When the wind is blowing, it’s cheaper. The problem is that you have to build and run oil based power so that there is something ready to take over when the wind stops blowing.
ON-SHORE wind doesn’t reduce fossil fuel power production.
Absolutely – it’s gas generation that supports it here in the UK, mainly.
But the costs of additional infrastructure are difficult to calculate and therefore often ignored.
As you point out.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/27/climate-change-kills-400-000-a-year-new-report-reveals.html