From the NoTricksZone
By Kenneth Richard
Of California’s 23 vulnerable bird species studied (barn owls, golden eagles, road runners, yellow-billed cuckoos…), scientists have found 11 are now experiencing at least a 20% decline in their population growth rates because wind turbines and solar panels are killing them and/or destroying their limited-range habitat.
California’s mild-winter Mediterranean climate is home to some of Earth’s rarest bird ecosystems.
But California is also where some of the most ardent supporters of “green” energy policies reside.
Disproportionately due to California’s activist-level insistence on converting their energy infrastructure from fossil-fuel-based to renewables-based, the US as a whole has facilitated a 300% to 9,400% increase in wind and solar energy generation, respectively, from 2009 to 2019. Nation-wide, the solar power industry alone is poised to detonate from a 0.4 GW energy capacity in 2009 to 75 GW by 2025.
Too few proponents of explosive wind and solar energy expansion are focused on the effect this unprecedented change has had on local ecosystems – especially vulnerable wildlife populations.
To have a “population-level effect” on a vulnerable bird species, the authors of a new study have clarified that fatalities generated by wind and solar energy in California must induce a “greater than or equal to 20% decline in the population growth rates” for the 23 prioritized bird species they analyzed.
A deeply concerning 48% (11) of these species are already experiencing population-level effects on their growth rates due to wind turbine and solar panel killings.
Image Source: Conkling et al., 2022
To put this into perspective, marine biologists report that to date (2017) there have been no unambiguous demonstrations of any population-level effects that “anthropogenic ocean acidification” has had on the population abundance or distribution of any laboratory-studied marine species.
What about this science Griff?
Bullshit is what it is.
Next question?
Well researched analysis and so well stated!!!
Your $hitassery never ceases to amaze.
Ban green prayer wheels!
Not going to work, obviously.
A much more plausible path is to use existing mechanisms. The nastiest of those (and most reliable due to ever-present interested parties) is a petty power grab. Don’t bother with legislation. Instead, helpfully point this problem out to the Red Tape Army. Then they would merely have to comprehensively demonstrate for all those bureaucrats that this specific type of Green Prayer Wheel is safe for birds of this specific area every time they try to build one more. This process may prove slightly non-trivial. (see also: https://web.archive.org/web/1/www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/26/why-americans-dont-trust-government/)
“population-level effects”
For this, the greens – including The Guardian’s Griff – fixate on the non problems of the Polar bear; even to the point that they proclaim it’s ‘worse than they thought’ for female Polar bears.
[Apparently] We need wind and solar to save the planet – even if that means wiping species out, which it clearly does.
Each time I hear or read the alarmist phrase ‘worse than they thought’, I laugh because it suggests the alarmist doesn’t think too much.
Regards,
Bob
It also indicates their “Settled Science” is wrong.
Or, at the least, unsettled.
If it is always “worse than they thought”, then they initially thought incorrectly. That makes all predictions and projections derived from their thoughts wrong as well.
People who form policy should address why they continue to use faulty thought processes as the basis for their policy, which by their own admission is unreliable..
Apparently you guys don’t think at all, given that bald eagles quadrupled in population over the last decade. That is empirical data, not model bullshit.
Try again, with actual scientific facts this time.
The Ukrainian population has grown in the last decade too. So eliminating some of them for the greater good of Russia is OK .
There is absolutely no difference in your thinking or Putin’s except for the species.
Try it yourself. If you think your comment debunks the article, you need to gain a basic understanding of science.
I am 65 and have been a heavy smoker since age twelve.
That does NOT prove tobacco is good for you.
“Our new model is worse than our last model predicted!!”
It is at least worse than we thought
Not only is global warming (er, I mean climate change) not happening, it’s not happening even FASTER than we previously thought!!!
“We look even more stupid and unhinged than models predicted!”
RIP renewable energy contracts up. When they can be proven to be illegitimate contracts, with not only misleading and false science supposedly requiring them, including nefarious backroom deals with political operatives for profit, the contracts would have no legal standing to be enforced or compensated.
In any event, they will be bankrupt when the contract comes up for renewal, as they will never get that subsidy a second time. However, the tech only lasts about 20 years before requiring replacement, so we will probably never see the first generation equipment get replaced with new equipment, especially if there is no subsidy. Now we see the original proponents selling them to hedge funds, who then scam some international carbon credit scheme for a further rip off of the consumer.
This will be how this story unfolds, as renewables will never make a meaningful contribution to our energy mix. On the contrary, solar and wind are net negatives to the grid, with junk asynchronous electricity that has priority over firm spinning reserve base load, including the same back-up capacity required for when the Sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. And no amount of batteries are ever going to store this much energy required to get through any extended absence of renewable generation. This is all a net loss to the good Earth.
‘Renewable’ grid sized electricity is really a crime against humanity, birds, wildlife and the environment.
‘Renewable’ grid sized electricity is really a crime against humanity, birds, wildlife and the environment.
________________________________________________
Same for driving up food prices by turning
corn into ethanol for the nation’s gas tanks.
Double crime…the ethanol in every 2 stroke engine I own has ruined every carburetor if I don’t remember to drain the carb if going to let it sit longer than a few months. Used to be able to buy marked premium gas that had no ethanol content whatsoever, but now they stopped that too.
If they have to do this ethanol for the farmer vote, then at least burn the damn crap in its own boiler to make electricity. Or find some other use for it, than mixing it with gasoline.
Biden’s last disaster was to increase ethanol mandates, while the good Earth is about to experience real food shortages because Ukraine can’t ship grains, and might not get much of a crop in this year. More evidence of the deliberate destruction of America by the Biden crime family.
And it doesn’t do anything good for my ’89 Jeep, either.
It is designed to wreck as many legacy vehicles as possible.
There is no chance rare earth mining to replace 2 billion ICE and the rest of the manufacturing will cause less pollution.
And conversion of ICE to LPG has been easy and cheap for fifty years and more, and definitely would drive down pollution.
You can buy 2 cycle fuel with no ethanol in it. I just bought a gallon of Trufuel for my 2 cycle weedwhacker. OK, it was $27 dollars, not cheap, but thats cheaper than replacing the internal carburetor parts.
Funny how government regulators always screw up years of standard engineering because of some perceived crisis of the week.
There is something called ‘Aspen’ which comes in both 2 stroke and 4 stroke variants, for sale in the UK. It is expensive, but I have been using it for the garden machinery, having been told that it was ethanol free. I had a conversation with the chap at the garden centre, about how we might put a cost to the damage caused to petrol engines world-wide by ethanol mandates. That cost should go in the Great Global Warming Ledger, somewhere.
It has recently become obvious that the main goal of ‘government regulators’ is to screw up as much of our economy and country as possible.
Prove me wrong.
Seems that way for small Briggs & Stratton engines but I didn’t consider ethanol to be the culprit.
I think Russia left the farming areas alone so that they could get on with planting. They are not interested in occupying or destroying Ukraine for that matter, but to satisfy that their legitimate security angst be addressed & negotiated in good faith, unlike the signed Minsk Accords that Ukraine reneged on before the ink was dry, at the behest of the USA, whose intention appears to be regime change in the Kremlin, if it takes fighting to the last Ukrainian & risking WWIII. But Putin isn’t Saddam Hussein & it wouldn’t matter if he was. Any Russian leader would do the same as Putin has done just as any POTUS wouldn’t tolerate Mexico forming an alliance with China with the Chinese installing offensive weaponry just across the Rio Grande, which would be the case if Ukraine joined Nato. The West doesn’t understand the strong historical, cultural & familial ties between Russia & Ukraine going back centuries, back to the Kievan Rus established before 900 AD. The cartoon villainy of Putin is Hitler is absurd & extremely dangerous.
Which pollutes more and gets less mpg.
Which, as it turns out, is even ‘worse than we thought’ for internal combustion engines!
“Now we see the original proponents selling them to hedge funds, who then scam some international carbon credit scheme for a further rip off of the consumer.”
Hmmm Earthling. Would one of these funds be Brookfield Renewable Resources with major interest in the Altamont Pass wind project and controlled by Brookfield Assets Management where Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action is Vice Chairman in Charge of ESG and Impact Investing Strategy? Last year he had to retract his claim that Brookfield is carbon neutral. The Audubon Society is suing the county over the approval for The Altamont Pass project. As a Canadian I apologize for burdening the world with this clown.
Politics put them in place, politics will keep them in place as long as politicians derive benefits from them. There is probably only one solution:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
After the war of 76, a good many judges and lawyers were left hanging out (of trees, lamp posts, etc.) or so I’ve read.
On the other hand, renewables are great for Van Life, and stopping Gates and company’s Real Estate Monopoly is a noble goal.
Plus, done right it is big fun spending money for yourself instead of a landlord.
The usual comeback about tall buildings, cats and power lines doesn’t stand up to scrutiny either. If tall buildings were the killers they maintain, city streets would be littered with dead birds, but they’re not. I’ve had about 15 cats over the last 30 years, mainly on the farm, many dumped by city slickers, and I can’t recall a one of them bringing home or coughing up one little sparrow or chickadee. Power lines same as buildings. The wind turbine carnage is appalling and unforgivable.
Go green until birds are not seen. What a terrible quandary for the tree-hugging, tofu eating, Stone Age wannabes.
“Save the Whales!”
(We’ll need sperm whales’ oil for our lamps.)
Denial is strong in those ones.
Good posting of an alarming aspect of the CAGW nonsense. As a personal witness to birds killed by windmills (NE of Casper, Wyoming) and solar reflectors to sodium canister on a tower (near the Barstow, California airport) I can readily confirm the severity of the problem. There is simply no other activity that kills our flying friends, anywhere near this degree, and would be allowed to continue. CAGW nonsense? Wait a minute, some kind of political strategy is involved here, and it’s an alarming trend.
Has anyone else noticed a large increase in the number of large birds from roadkill along highways? Hawks and seagulls are two of the more common I’ve seen. Both usually spend a good amount of time gliding around. Perhaps they are being pushed out of their normal habitats from all these windmills.
woods hole did a study of reef growth on high co2 low ph reefs and were surprised ( disappointed ) to find the reefs thriving . this contradicted all their previous lab experiment results . in effect the main thing the study showed was that laboratory experiments are useless for predicting real world results .
The Lab studies manage to get an example piece of the eco system to barely survive, and then they stress it somehow and it dies off…big surprise. Meanwhile real ecosystems are much more robust, at least until a bunch of marine biologists go out of their way to disturb it because they do not understand some natural cycle taking place.
Things like agricultural runoff and drag-net fishing are real problems. They can be solved. Temperature change is a natural process and should be left alone. Ecosystems will change, adapt, and thrive.
“Marine molluscs have very specific environmental requirements and are extremely sensitive to climate change, as revealed by previous studies across Atlantic Europe22,23”
One of their citations is for Crisp’s British study on the severe winters of 1962-63. 62 was a severe northern Gulf fish-killing freeze, as also 2021, fish-eating birds still mostly avoiding the mainland. Freezes are difficult to study, statistically and otherwise, requires freedom from other commitments. Oysters were also killed, but species is harvested from Prince Edward Island to Yucatan.
Miller, A. W., et al., 2009, (Shellfish face uncertain future in high CO world: Influence of acidification on oyster larvae calcification and growth in estuaries. PLoS ONE. 4 OA
https:// doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005661) concluded that — “ Both species [Crassostrea virginica and ariakensis] demonstrated net calcification and growth, even when aragonite was undersaturated, a result that runs counter to previous expectations for invertebrate larvae that produce aragonite shells…..These findings demonstrate the physiological capacity of oyster larvae to withstand prolonged exposure (up to 28 days) to high pCO2 and aragonite undersaturation, and run counter to expectations that aragonite shelled larvae should be especially prone to dissolution at high pCO2.”
It is still a negative paper, first sentence–“Human activities have increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by 36% [in the paper “approximately 0.1 of a unit”] during the past 200 years”. Three of the four authors are from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, Maryland.
Probably should have put it there but left out the first paragraph reference from the previous post on “Human forager response to abrupt climate change at 8.2 ka on the Atlantic coast of Europe” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10135-w
Looking forward to the day when the rabid environmentalists start blowing up wind turbines to save the birds. They love burning down new homes under construction, burning down car dealerships, spiking trees, and other such destructive activities.
I sometimes wonder what one of those real quiet .22 cal small chunk of lead would do to a solar panel? I don’t advocate for that, as I have a few kW of panels for remote off grid applications.
Or what a larger calibre chunk of lead would do a wind turbine blade. Would a few holes in the blade unbalance the blade enough to make it go into orbit? I have some experience balancing turbine shafts, and a few thou out, and things wear out much quicker.
Again, I don’t advocate for any of this, since believe in the rule of law. The law should be changed to renewables being paid a wholesale feed in tariff for surplus random non firm generation, which it is. Currently that rate is in the 3-4 cent kW/hr range, in the Pacific North West MID C region. May be higher or lower depending what jurisdiction you may be in.
There should be no derogation for killing birds. Every one they swat out of the sky -> crippling fine.
Mr. 2: Outrageous!!! Shooting firearms at wind turbines and solar panels!!!!! What if you miss, and hit an eagle? Those windfarmers would hunt you down for harming a bird!!
This is a very important problem but there are lot worst concerns related to materials. Mostly neodymium, therbium, dysprosium and copper. The impacts of mining these four ones dwarf any possible positive impact that these wind turbines could have. All this for devices that, at best, have 15 years of use. The world just got mad and blinded by all this ongoing alarmism…
I’m sure 60 Minutes, Paul Krugman, and the LAT will investigate this and report promptly. /sarc
NPR: What birds?
/sarc
NPR is concerned about bird deaths, just not from the rocking of this particular hobby horse:
April 9, 20228:01 AM ET
I’ve seen the evidence of what avian flu can do to small populations of Canada Geese and it affects all birds, not just the ones unfortunate enough to fly through the windmills or the CSP arrays. Milllions of domestic birds have already been culled this month – and since you mention NPR, here’s their report, but it’s getting coverage everywhere.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091491202/bird-flu-2022-avian-influenza-poultry-farms
“…up to 20% of specific populations of wild birds.”
Wind and solar are not suitable for grid power. They are only good for niche applications where dependability is not required and infrastructure is difficult to attain.
To meld the unreliable power generators with reliable sources is an engineering complexity that is totally unnecessary and detrimental.
If I hear someone talk as if climate change is viable threat to humanity, I conclude that their cognitive abilities are substandard and conduct interactions accordingly. Over the past couple decades, I have attempted to challenge their assertions and have had little success in changing their minds due to their emotional attachment to their belief that has been force fed to them by the propaganda spewed by the schools and media.
I fear that only a truly catastrophic event will wake people up to the lies that have been fed to them for decades.
Next year will be rough. Reality bites hard.
Some scavenger species will be benefitting from the kill , just the same as roadkill.
Not if they fly.
Haven’t you seen those videos of crows dragging away the corpses of dead avians from around windmills? I bet those environmentalists are happy to have the help of some of nature’s scavengers in destroying evidence.
Renewable capacity should only be sanctioned ans subsided if the capacity is available 24/7.
The Green blight… the Green gauntlet.
The Green Death.
Yes, the tripartite Green New Deal.
not just birds!
“This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion”
If any of these cases ever reach the US Supreme Court, don’t expect any good rulings. The new Affirmative Action Appointee will not be able to define “Bird.”
Lol. They can always ask Kamala…that woman is smart.
Hmm, and here I am still puzzling over the breathless remark “space connects us all…”. That might explain why the 6-foot distancing rule didn’t stop Covid-19.
The military institute in Wuhan recommended 3 m, wash your hands, avoid black holes, and wear goggles.
Anyone who has been near an eagle in the wild should be horrified by the killing efficiency of wind turbines on raptures. It is remarkable that this has been allowed to continue without consequences.
They think that they can abort the baby, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon pollutants, and have her, too. Are they wrong?
Not entirely unexpected. But will not lead anywhere, unfortunately. I won’t be surprised to see some jackal grab this, gut it and run with “Climate Problematictrouble makes the birds fly into bird mincers!!1” tomorrow. Because after this Maxwell Demon magick supposedly made polar bear and penguins forget how to swim, well, anything goes. So, we can only hope the birds hang on until the current strain of Lysenkoism collapses along with its owners.
The illogic is that global warming requires windmills to make electricity, ergo the decline in bird population because of windmill kills is because of global warming right?
The fake ocean acidification crisis is just pseudoscience.
Craig Idso at CO2 Science has AUTHENTIC science that completely debunks it.
Here’s more on him, his site and this topic:
http://www.co2science.org/about/chairman.php
http://www.co2science.org/data/acidification/acidification.php
http://www.co2science.org/data/acidification/background.php
http://www.co2science.org/data/acidification/results.php
From the abstract:
“Bayesian hierarchical models suggested that 48% of these species were vulnerable to population-level effects from added fatalities caused by renewables and other sources.”
So I am guessing that everyone who stops reading articles when they see the word “model”
and proudly post that fact will do the same here. Or is it just models that produce unliked results that get neglected?
It’s a deal. We’ll discount this one study (despite the abundant physical evidence in the form of dead eagles) if you discount the entire corpus of thousands of Climate Change Alarmism papers based on computer models.
Funny you say that given that bald eagle populations are increasing at an accelerated rate to the highest ever seen since active counts began, quadrupling in number in the last decade.
Facts are such stubborn things
The increase in Bald Eagle population is largely artificial as there is a big captive breeding program.
Reminds me of that old song: “They paved paradise and put up a Windmill Farm, with a concrete base, annoying hum, and KILLIN’ BIG BLADES…”