Some experts think there may be only 1,000 of these eagles left, our largest bird of prey, and yet in the last 12 years some 272 of them have been killed or injured in the vicinity of Tasmanian wind towers. That’s at least as far as the maintenance crews have noticed, and not that they were specifically looking…
So the number can only go up, and other types of birds are getting the chop too.
The Tasmanian Wedge-tailed eagle has been known to have a wingspan as large as 2.8m (9ft 3in). They mate for life, and a single nest can be 1 – 3 meters across.
Tasmanian wind farms and transmission lines have killed or injured 321 threatened eagles in 12 years, but the real figure is likely far higher, a new study finds.
The peer reviewed study, published in Australian Field Ornithology, uses data from wind farms, TasNetworks and eagle rescuers to identify the death or injury of 272 endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagles and 49 vulnerable white-bellied sea eagles.
It found that from 2010 to 2022, 268 eagles were recorded killed and 53 injured by wind and transmission energy infrastructure, with the state’s four wind farms reporting 38 deaths, TasNetworks 139 deaths and raptor rescuers 91 deaths.
Mr Pullen’s study points to estimates from some of these experts that less than 1,000 Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagles remain …
Ornithologists and conservationists (but not the Federal Greens) are calling for a moratorium on new industrial wind plants. Apparently the Australian government will try to protect migratory birds but it’s bad luck for the local residents. Some wind farms are not even required to monitor and report bird deaths anymore.
For the unwashed masses though, killing a wedge-tailed eagle is illegal.
Things just aren’t going well for the windfarms (or the eagles)
Tasmania is theoretically going to be home to the largest wind plant in the Southern Hemisphere, the Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory — but it only got approval to operate if it shut down for five months of the year so it didn’t hurt the Orange Bellied Parrot.
The other bright idea was to use a high-tech detection system to spot the eagles and shut the turbines down when birds approached. (Imagine if we had to turn off the coal plants every time an eagle visited?) But last month the news came out that the bird avoidance system at Cattle Hill Windfarm had still killed eight endangered wedge-tailed eagles in less than four years (plus some other birds too). It may not sound like much but there are plans to build nine or ten new sets of turbine “parks” across Tasmania, and if one tower misses, the next one will get them…
Sydney is getting five warm days in a row and the Sydney Morning Horror is warning that it could be deadly. Even newspapers in Belgium think their readers need to know there’s a warm spring in Australia — 10 – 15 degrees above average. It’s not even a record. Not even “the hottest in history” — just by golly, a bit warmer than a similar September heatwave, you know, nine years ago.
Sydney is due to hit 30 degrees on Sunday and Monday, but will reach new highs of 32 on Tuesday and Wednesday. The city hasn’t experienced consecutive days of 30-degree-plus weather in September since 2014. This week will be 10 degrees hotter than Sydney’s August average.
Driving a car could be deadly today too, but we don’t put it in a headline. The psychological effect is to generate fear of warm weather.
What is exciting is that Sydney didn’t even reach 32C last summer, at all, so after one of the least warm not-hottest 12 months on record, Sydney is finally getting some beach weather. But don’t mention that in 163 years there has not been a longer period where Sydney didn’t break 32 degrees C.
In the capital Canberra it can reach 28 degrees on Monday. There the record for September is at 30 degrees.
According to the meteorological institute, it is very exceptional that a heat wave is observed so early in the year. Summer is expected to be the hottest since 1996. Australia is therefore holding its breath for a summer like the one from 2019-2020. Then large parts of the country were burned to ashes by forest fires, killing some thirty.
The Sydney Morning Herald is a bigger public danger than the heatwave because they only report the half of the news that suits them:
Western Sydney University senior researcher Thomas Longden said short sharp heatwaves, like the one Sydney is experiencing, are the most dangerous because the body struggles to acclimatise and people are less likely to change their behaviours to stay cool when the weather shifts suddenly. His work has found about 2 per cent of deaths in Australia each year are heat-related.
Even in sunny warm Australia about six times as many people die of the cold as of the heat. (Cheng et al) When will the Sydney Morning Herald point out that expensive electricity in winter kills far more people than a warm week in Spring? Indeed, the best cure for heat deaths is air conditioning. What we need is the cheap coal fired power grid we used to have (the one without all the unreliable expensive generators added on).
The number of people killed by 30 degree days in Sydney is almost nothing. (Gasparrini et al). When will “journalists” do some research instead of phoning up the local tame professor of global nonsense?
The news has become a gaslighting advert to justify more subsidies and profits for industrial giants, the deep state and asset managers with $9,000 billion dollars to buy media companies.
Good friends don’t let good friends read The Sydney Morning Herald without a health warning.
Apple aims at customers with too much money and a desperate need to feel smug
You too can save the world, by spending two-grand on the latest tech-wear — not because it’s lighter, better, faster, bigger, or more useful, but because you want to look like you care about stopping bad weather and bush fires. Signal your virtue to the world! Wear your smug-watch and smile. It’s carbon neutral, and you are the leading carbon-show-off in the class. (Pretend you care about the kids mining cobalt in the Congo, or the Uighur camps in Xinjiang. Oh nevermind.)
There is a spiritual void out there in 2023 and Apple wants to fill it. But this religion is a world of shallow consumerism and point-scoring, pretending it is deeply philosophical and generous. Apple are this close to turning their brand into a teachy-preachy pagan apostle of Gaia.
And did Mother Nature say she controls the weather? Oops. What are all the windfarms for?
Mother Nature is a bossy black woman, wouldn’t you know, and the word for the advert is “cringeworthy“.
This adverts sums up everything about the motivations of the average climate acolyte. Like a Gucci handbag, it’s all for show but who cares what it can carry? Will solar panels stop the storms or wind turbines hold back the tide? Doesnt matter, as long as you can fake it.
As Heel versus Babyface says: “Best advert for android I’ve ever seen.”
…
h/t Stephen Neil, John Connor III
For most of our lives, scientists have been among the most trusted community leaders. But not any more.
For nearly fifty years, more than four out of ten Americans said they had a “great deal of confidence” in the people running our institutions of science. This was the strongest possible answer people could give. But all that has changed in the last few years with public opinion on science now splitting along political lines. Faith in the institutions of science has collapsed among conservative voters.
The goodwill, the trust and esteem built by things like The Manhattan Project and the Moonshot carried on for decades, but when Covid arrived, and science was the number one public topic of debate, many scientists sat silent on the sidelines. The lab leak theory came and went and then turned out to have been true all along. When ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could have saved lives, scientists said nothing. When vaccines were sold as “safe and effective”, researchers who knew there were risks, sat on their hands. When borders could have been shut to stop bioweapons, Trump was left on his own. When universities failed the nation, scientists mostly sided with the academics.
The price for spineless silence is that now among Republicans, half the confidence is gone. It was the greatest hour of need, and scientists were missing in action. Wait til the public finds out about climate science…
It’s a remarkable fall among conservative voters in the US: dropping from 45% in 2018 to just 22% in 2022 who still “have a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community.
While Democrats were more likely than Republicans to trust science before the pandemic, what was a 10% point gap in 2018 is now a 31% gap between different groups of voters. During the pandemic Democrat voters briefly became more confident in the scientific community, but that returned to the baseline the following year. The fall in Republican faith shows no sign of leveling off.
It’s hard to believe the effects of this will not translate to other areas like climate change. Once people have admitted scientists can be politicized, bought, blind, or wrong on one topic, it’s hard to see how “Trust the Science” rings true in any other arena.
The General Social Survey was started in 1972, is run by NORC at the University of Chicago every year, and surveyed 3,500 people in 2022.
For fifty years, science was trusted
While faith in medicine, education and “the press” had been eroding over the last fifty years, science had maintained its position. The latest collapse in trust is a marked change from the long term steady trend line.
Faith in medicine also fell, and a partisan gap emerged:
While Democrats confidence in medical institutions did not change, Republicans saying they had a great deal of confidence dropped from 40% to 26%. For most of the years of the survey there was no political divide. This is a new phenomenon.
Modern Science looks more like a Medieval Guild every day
Back in May humans did the first ever study quantifying Earth System Boundaries, which was incredible luck. After two hundred thousand years of homo sapiens stretching the bounds of the planet, we barely discovered “Earth System Boundaries” in time to find out we hit the limit 12 weeks later. What are the odds?
It’s almost as if a whole twig of science was invented in order to write scary press releases? It’s another unauditable, unaccountable collective of Experts who can never be wrong, only “useful” to the bureaucratic machine. They call themselves scientists but their predictions will never be tested, only marked against the Department wish-list.
We can all appreciate the talismanic symbolism (and marketing value) below, where segments of the sacred arcs are tainted blood red, as Earth progressively descends into the anthropogenic abyss year upon year.
Red Agate pendants cut-to-match will no doubt be ready for Christmas.
Meanwhile the same climate models that can’t predict any of the last two thousand years, or next months floods, droughts and rains — can somehow tell us exactly what the limits are on these complex systems.
Only 7,000 years ago humans survived sea levels that were one to two meters higher than today, and they did it all without a single satellite, iphone or Planetary Boundary Advisor.
It’s all about respect apparently — pretty soon we’ll be carving Venus figurines to protect us.
A new study updates the planetary boundary framework and shows human activities are increasingly impacting the planet and, thereby, increasing the risk of triggering dramatic changes in overall Earth conditions.
For over 3 billion years, the interaction between life (represented by the planetary boundary, Biosphere Integrity) and climate have controlled the overall environmental conditions on Earth.
Respecting and maintaining interactions in the Earth system so that they remain similar to those that have controlled Earth conditions over the past ~12,000 years are critical for ensuring human activities do not trigger dramatic changes in Earth conditions—changes that likely would decrease the Earth’s ability to support modern civilizations.
The Earth’s ‘blood pressure’ is too high
The trend of increasing transgression of the boundaries is worrying explains Katherine Richardson, professor at Globe Institute, Leader of the Sustainability Science Center at the University of Copenhagen, and leader of the study, “Crossing six boundaries in itself does not necessarily imply a disaster will ensue but it is a clear warning signal. We can regard it as we do our own blood pressure. A BP over 120/80 is not a guarantee of a heart attack but it increases the risk of one. Therefore, we try to bring it down. For our own—and our children’s—sakes we need to reduce the pressure on these six planetary boundaries.”
Like some people with high blood pressure, human civilization needs to go on a diet: we need fewer bureaucrats, and less government funded witchcraft.
I was lucky enough to spend some time with the wonderful Professor William Happer the last few days thanks to the IPA. The man is a living legend of science having worked on the StarWars program in the Cold War and with the White House in the 1990s and in the Trump era. His talk had something for everyone, speaking about the need for bravery in dangerous times, and the psychology of crowds and yet with enough detail on emission spectrum calculations to appeal to the true science nerds as well. His work on adaptive optics with lasers in the atmosphere was considered so important to national security it was classified as a military secret. Despite that he was one of the first casualties of the political war on science – losing his position as Director of Energy Research in the US Dept of Energy in 1993 for speaking his mind on ozone.
Happer conveys an enthusiasm for physics, astronomy, the Earth that is infectious.
Book Now — and don’t forget the IPA offers a program for 15-25 year olds called Generation Liberty — with membership for just $10 a year and free admission to some events like this one. This is a chance to share that moment with children or grandchildren. Send this link to anyone you know doing science or engineering at university.
Melbourne at the Ritz-Carlton on Friday 15 September, Sydney at the Four Seasons on Monday 18 September, and in Brisbane at the Sofitel, on Wednesday, 20 September.
Each event will start at 5:30 pm and there will be a Q&A session following.
The new study on stalagmites in caves of the Pyrenees shows that modern climate change is nothing compared to normal fluctuations in the last 2,500 years, when it was at times much hotter, colder, and more volatile. Rapid shifts between temperatures were common.
The researchers looked at 8 stalagmites in 4 caves and local lake levels, but they also compared their results with other European temperature proxies and reconstructions and the pattern is consistent across the region. The Roman Warm Period was much hotter than today, and for hundreds of years as well, even though coal plants were rare. Apparently, there was a reason Romans were dressed in togas.
The Dark Ages were very cold, especially around 520 – 550AD — which may be related to what the researchers call a “cataclysmic” volcanic eruption that took place in Iceland in 536AD. It was followed by two other massive volcanic eruptions in 540 and 547AD. This effect is apparently visible in European tree rings which showed “an unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling”.
Indeed, the researchers declare that volcanoes and solar variability appear to be the main drivers of the climate in SouthWestern Europe.
So finally we see one long continuous proxy record from ancient Greek times right through until 2010. The big question is why these sorts of studies are not done everywhere and all the time. It’s not like we don’t have plenty of caves with stalagmites to analyze. If the climate really was “the biggest threat to life on Earth” why are these extraordinary datasets not the top item on the wish-list of every institution that claims they care about the climate?
There will be more to say on this remarkable paper:
Some passages from the paper discuss how these results match other studies from Europe:
The cold event at ca. 540 AD (the coldest of the speleothem record) may be related to a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that took place in Iceland in 536 AD and spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere, together with the effect of two other massive eruptions in 540 and 547 AD (Sigl et al., 2015). An unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling was observed in European tree-ring records associated with these large volcanic eruptions, corresponding to the LALIA period (Büntgen et al., 2016).
Some passages from the paper discuss how these results compare with many other studies from Europe and with stark moments in history.
Wind energy is so cheap and profitable that last week, investors abandoned the annual UK auction to build industrial wind plants in the oceans around the UK. Exactly no one offered to spend money building turbines even though electricity prices are burning hot. Apparently prices for building the machinery to collect and transmit low density erratic energy are not “free” like the wind. Even after decades of advances, sacred green electrons still cost a lot more than war-afflicted-fossil-fuel electrons do.
The free market has spoken and it said “No”. At The Guardian though – it was, of course, all the Governments fault. That and the dreaded Hand Of Inflation. It’s so unfair:
Lack of interest was widely expected after government failed to heed warnings about soaring costs
Jillian Ambrose
None of the companies hoping to build big offshore windfarms in UK waters took part in the government’s annual auction, which awards contracts to generate renewable electricity for 15 years at a set price.
The companies had warned ministers repeatedly that the auction price was set too low for offshore windfarms to take part after costs in the sector soared by about 40% because of inflation across their supply chains.
Electricity from wind isn’t cheap and it never will be
The latest auction of rights to build offshore wind farms failed to attract any bids, despite offering higher subsidised prices. That alone indicates that wind is not cheap or getting cheaper.
But the real reason for the lack of interest in the auction is that, for the first time, bidders are not free to walk away from their bids when it suits them. In the past, they could put in low offers, boast about them being cheap, then take the higher market price later. The Government has at last called their bluff, so they are having to admit that electricity prices need to be higher to make wind farms pay.
The cost of subsidising wind is vast. Then add the cost of getting the power from remote wind farms to where people live. And the cost of balancing the grid and backing wind up with gas plants for the times when the wind drops. And the cost of paying wind farms to reduce output on windy days when the grid can’t take it.
And yet the wind industry is complaining that today’s high electricity prices are not high enough, and without more subsidies they will stop building
The true cost of adding wind power to the electricity grid was always hidden with complex schemes.
It’s a catastrophe
At The Guardian, this auction was described as “catastrophic”, so we know it’s good news:
Sam Richards, the founder and campaign director of Britain Remade, which campaigns for economic growth in Britain, said the “catastrophic outcome” of the auction was “the direct result of the government’s complacency and incompetence”.
The government didn’t listen to the industry:
Industry insiders said the three offshore wind developers behind these plans – SSE, ScottishPower and the Swedish company Vattenfall – were forced to sit out the bidding after ministers refused to heed their warnings.
Now if the Government had listened to Exxon that would have been evidence of the planet-wrecking influence of Big Oil, but if the government didn’t listen to Big Renewables, it was incompetent.
Things are so bad, the wind industry is abandoning current half built projects:
Apparently the British government should have taken more money from citizens or forced the prices of electricity up for customers in order to “deliver low cost energy”, whatever that is:
Keith Anderson, the chief executive of ScottishPower, said: “This is a multibillion-pound lost opportunity to deliver low-cost energy for consumers and a wake-up call for government.
This “Low Cost Energy” seemingly refers to some mythical electrical kilowatthours that only show up on academic reports not on consumer electricity bills.
Sept 8th, 2023: The Government has today announced the results of the fifth auction of Contracts for Difference subsidies for renewable electricity generation. Its has been a failure, and may represent a landmark moment for renewables policy.
Only 3.7GW of new capacity has bid successfully, mostly through small projects, as compared to nearly 12GW last year. There were no bids for offshore wind, the UK’s flagship renewable generator.
Vivek Ramaswamy has a plan. It’s quite something to listen to. He has an extraordinary combination of skills.
This is a man who is only 38, and has studied molecular biology*, made millions in biotech, understands Big Pharma, but he’s also done a law degree at Yale. He is that rarest of combinations — the CEO who understand biology and science, and the lawyer who reads the constitution, and the investor who has played and won on Wall Street. He is all of these things.
I’ve never heard a Presidential candidate speak like this — with an eight year plan grounded in the legal foundations of the nation. He knows employment laws make individuals unsackable, but whole departments can be razed. Nothing can stop the President from dismantling the FBI if he wants to. Ramaswamy is already assembling a team, picking the players. He can list what he will get done by 2033 when he leaves office and his youngest starts high school.
Last week I played a small extract of this interview with Shawn Ryan — where Ramaswamy described how the FDA is captured by Big Pharmaceutical firms. ( “Big Pharma is the worlds biggest lobbying organisation”) But the whole interview is compelling and I’ve listened to interviews before about his books, about Woke Inc, about Strive (the Capital Fund he set up that runs counter to BlackRock and ESG) but this is about Ramaswamy himself, and his plan for the US, the Deep State and this strange moment in history. As the child of Indian immigrants he can explain what makes America Great better than many Americans can.
His role in this campaign will surely change it — his competitors must be listening to interviews like this, taking notes.
“It’s a machine that we are up against”
Ramaswamy describes the Deep State as a machine which needs puppets to represent them — the people we elect to run the government are not the ones who run the government. It’s no accident we have a gerontocracy, he says. It’s designed to be that way. The real laws of this country are not made in Congress, they’re made in the halls of bureaucracy.
The machine in the Monster that we have created. There are many good individuals doing what they think is a good job inside the machine. The waterfall of power flows from the President to the administrative state, to executives in social media, to managers in third party firms to AI. The decisions are not even being made by humans. The AI has learnt to spot US Flags in social media as a risk factor.
We the People cannot be Trusted to run the country
In the old world, Ramaswamy says, people got together in smoky rooms in the back of Palace Halls to decide how to run countries. Now it’s the enlightened elite making these decisions. We the People cannot be Trusted to run the country and decide about issues like climate change or racial injustice. The real divide now is not Republican or Democrat, it is between the managerial class and the citizen.
We fought a revolution to say Hell No to that theory and that We The People in this constitutional republic must be the ones who decide.
Now that old monster is rearing its head again, he says, except this time the power is diffused. We might think the power is at the back of a three-letter-government building in Washington DC, but there’s no smoking hall there. Maybe the power lies at the corner office of BlackRock, but it’s not quite there either. Instead the power is woven into a machine of the managerial class. It’s very hard to identify. It’s very pervasive…
It’s a two hour interview. You can convert it to Mp3 and listen as you jog, drive or cook. It was compelling starting from 3 mins in.
*Molecular biology is my favourite science — it’s not possible to understand the human condition, life, viruses, medicine and biotechnology without it.
Some experts think there may be only 1,000 of these eagles left, our largest bird of prey, and yet in the last 12 years some 272 of them have been killed or injured in the vicinity of Tasmanian wind towers. That’s at least as far as the maintenance crews have noticed, and not that they were specifically looking…
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