Ten bogus climate claims and more from April 2024 debunked here.
via JunkScience.com
May 9, 2024 at 03:20AM
Month: May 2024
The rampant slaughter of millions of birds and bats – includes rare, endangered and majestic species, like America’s iconic bald and golden eagles, and Tasmania’s extremely rare wedge-tailed Eagle.
Faced with outrage from real environmentalists, to date, the default response from the wind industry is to lie like fury and – when the corpses can no longer be hidden and the lying fails – to issue court proceedings to literally bury those facts (see our post here).
them handsomely to help varnish over inconvenient facts – namely mounting piles of carcasses smashed to smithereens by wind turbine blades with their tips clocking over 350kph.
Most sign on as ‘team players’, who merrily use bogus carcass ‘searches’ and equally fake fatality figures to allow their masters the claim the high moral ground. While and endless stream of dead Eagles, and other predatory birds and bats simply litter the ground.
Now and again one of those team players break ranks, such as ecologist Shawn Smallwood who, as this piece from the Cowboy State Daily suggests, still retains something like a conscience.
Meet The Expert On Turbine Eagle Deaths The Wind Industry Turned On
Cowboy State Daily
Pat Maio
6 April 2024
Back in the late 1990s, ecologist Shawn Smallwood didn’t think much about connecting avian and bat deaths with the whooshing blades of wind turbines.
It was a concept foreign to him.
But then a long-distance jogging partner he worked with at the University of California-Davis asked him to tag along in a “fatality search” with dogs to sniff out dead bird and bat carcasses caused by the thousands of turbines that dot the picturesque Altamont Pass, a low-lying mountainous region located about an hour’s drive east of San Francisco.
“It was a game-changer for me,” said Smallwood, who said his “mapping skills” of predatory birds launched his career, including secretive trips in coming years to Wyoming to provide “technical data” needed in litigation against the wind industry.
Besides the Altamont Pass and California, Wyoming is considered the other major destination of eagles where their carcasses have been found on a regular basis at the base of wind turbine towers in the United States, Smallwood said.
The first eagle carcass Smallwood found was in a ravine in the Altamont Pass on his initial trip in 1999. That eagle was electrocuted by a power pole that connected with a field of turbines.
“The feathers were burned and frizzled on the ends,” he said. “Eagles are big birds, and I thought, ‘What a waste.’”
‘I’m Not A Team Player’
Smallwood, who had earned a doctorate in ecology from UC Davis, went on to do what academicians who have doctorate degrees do in specialty fields.
He wrote nearly 900 professional reports on ornithology and wind turbines, peer-reviewed 100 journal articles for publication and has been hired by the wind industry to come up with better ways to reduce kills of eagles, predatory birds and bats.
In time, however, the industry began turning on him when he stood his ground on contrarian points of view. Some even labeled him as a fraud who fabricated data.
Cheyenne-based Western EcoSystems Technology Inc. (WEST), a wind energy consultancy, even approached him once with a job offer — but backed off.
“I’m not a team player,” he said of himself when WEST asked him if he could go along with their team approach.
No Single Fix
Smallwood maintains that he’s learned a few things over the past few decades.
For instance, painting a single turbine blade black or adding stripes does nothing to improve the perception of eagles or other predators, and thereby cut down on their deaths.
They still get whacked as they sometimes circle and soar into the blades — especially at night, he said.
Neither does it help cut down on eagle deaths to push for fewer and larger wind turbines that are spaced farther apart, as some in the industry have suggested.
While this approach might cut down on some measurable eagle deaths, he conceded that evidence seems to show that bat deaths increase due to a vacuum created with larger blades that sucks them into the path of the blade.
More Transparency Needed
Smallwood also said that he’d like to see more transparency on the sharing of reports and data on avian deaths, and that money be used to conduct meaningful research rather than removal of “silly things like roadside carcass removal” and eagle prey — like squirrels and prairie dogs.
Smallwood admitted that his reputation in the wind industry has suffered over the years because of his controversial take on big policy issues.
Even so, Smallwood has been on the payroll of many wind energy companies.
He was once hired by alternative energy company NextEra Energy Inc. to provide consultancy advice on ways to lower bird and bat kills at the Florida company’s 162-megawatt North Sky River wind project in California’s Mojave Desert.
And he even got paid to evaluate whether now-bankrupt Ogin Inc.’s approach was promising for keeping birds alive with its shrouded turbine.
About Those Wyoming Eagles
Even while his resume in California is largely public, Smallwood’s secretive work in Wyoming is a mystery.
For instance, wind farms in Wyoming have faced high-profile fines for killing eagles as part of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, an international convention protecting a long list of wild birds.
He’s been involved in two of the cases, one of which he has signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the U.S. Department of Justice.
He confirmed providing “technical data” to the DOJ in a probe that led to a U.S. District Court in Wyoming finding that electric utility giant PacifiCorp violated the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
Because Smallwood said that he signed an NDA, he declined to discuss details of what technical data he provided to the law enforcement agency for wind farms owned by the Berkshire Hathaway-backed PacifiCorp.
“I can’t talk about this,” he said.
In December 2014, PacifiCorp was sentenced to pay fines, restitution and enroll in community service totaling $2.5 million for causing the deaths of 38 golden eagle and 336 other protected birds — including hawks, blackbirds, larks, wrens and sparrows — at the company’s Seven Mile Hill and Glenrock/Rolling Hills wind projects in Carbon and Converse counties between 2009 and 2014, according to a DOJ statement issued a decade ago.
Works Best In The Dark
In the second case, Smallwood said that he served as an expert witness.
In April 2022, NextEra Energy pleaded guilty to violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and was ordered to pay more than $8 million for wind farms in Wyoming and northern New Mexico.
In this case, Smallwood said he was issued a subpoena by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in California to provide data on an assessment of NextEra Energy’s placement of wind turbines in the North Sky River project.
“NextEra hired me to minimize the impacts to migratory birds on the project,” but they didn’t follow the recommendations, he said.
Smallwood said that he’s not sure his testimony in the NextEra Energy case ever went anywhere since the California wind farm wasn’t mentioned in the $8 million fine.
Today, Smallwood is easy to spot when he’s doing field work — if you’re out at night, his preferred time to watch things.
He likes the dark because that’s when bats come out, and coyotes, foxes, squirrels and other predators zig-zag around on the ground underneath the wind turbines to find dead carcasses to feast on.
He’s the lone guy, sitting still in the dark, watching. Nearby is his pricy $34,000 thermal camera to see animal movement at night, binoculars and a GPS device that he uses to map the location of carcasses and animals.
“The early bird catches the worm,” he said.
Cowboy State Daily
via STOP THESE THINGS
May 9, 2024 at 02:30AM
“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”
– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615
It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.
This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.
Guardian (May 8, 2024)
We begin with The Guardian US story by environmental editor Damian Carrington, “We Asked 380 Top Climate Scientists What They Felt about the Future … They Are Terrified, but Determined to Keep Fighting. Here’s What They Said
An exclusive Guardian survey of hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts has found that:
- 77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above pre-industrial levels, a devastating degree of heating;
- almost half – 42% – think it will be more than 3C;
- only 6% think the 1.5C limit will be achieved.
So the Guardian contacted every available lead author or review editor of all IPCC reports since 2018. Almost half replied – 380 out of 843, a very high response rate.
Quotations in Article
“Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken. After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”
“We have seen these extreme events happening everywhere. There is not a safe place for anyone. I find it infuriating, distressing, overwhelming…. I got a depression.”
– Ruth Cerezo-Mota (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
“I’m relieved that I do not have children, knowing what the future holds.”
Anonymous expert
“It looks really bleak, but I think it’s realistic. It’s just the fact that we’re not taking the action that we need to.”
“Scientists are human: we are also people living on this Earth, who are also experiencing the impacts of climate change, who also have children, and who also have worries about the future. We did our science, we put this really good report together and – wow – it really didn’t make a difference on the policy. It’s very difficult to see that, every time.”
Lisa Schipper, University of Bonn
“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south. The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.”
African scientist (anonymous)
“Running away from [unescapable reality] is impossible and will only increase the challenges of dealing with the consequences and implementing solutions.”
Joeri Rogelj, Imperial College, London
“Humanity is heading towards destruction. We’ve got to appreciate, help and love each other.”
Scientist, Pacific Island nation (anonymous)
“It is the biggest threat humanity has faced, with the potential to wreck our social fabric and way of life. It has the potential to kill millions, if not billions, through starvation, war over resources, displacement. None of us will be unaffected by the devastation.”
James Renwick, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
“I am scared mightily – I don’t see how we are able to get out of this mess.”
Tim Benton, Chatham House
“Most people do not realise how big these [tipping point] risks are.”
Wolfgang Cramer, Mediterranean Institute of Biodiversity and Ecology.
“[Climate change] is an existential threat to humanity and [lack of] political will and vested corporate interests are preventing us addressing it. I do worry about the future my children are inheriting.”
Lorraine Whitmarsh, University of Bath, UK
“The tacit calculus of decision-makers, particularly in the Anglosphere – US, Canada, UK, Australia – but also Russia and the major fossil fuel producers in the Middle East, is driving us into a world in which the vulnerable will suffer, while the well-heeled will hope to stay safe above the waterline…. Civil disobedience [is the next step].”
Stephen Humphreys, London School of Economics
“The enormity of the problem is not well understood. So there will be environmental refugees by the millions, extreme weather events escalating, food and water shortages, before the majority accept the urgency in reducing emissions – by which time it will be too late.”
Ralph Sims, Massey University, New Zealand
“I feel resigned to disaster as we cannot separate our love of bigger, better, faster, more, from what will help the greatest number of people survive and thrive. Capitalism has trained us well.”
US scientist (anonymous)
“… our societies will be forced to change and the suffering and damage to lives and livelihoods will be severe.”
Michael Meredith, at the British Antarctic Survey
Paul Ehrlich: 1960s Forward
A half century ago, the Malthusian mainstream, the establishment, was equally alarmed.
“At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump. We do know that very small changes in either direction in the average temperature of the Earth could be very serious. With a few degrees of cooling, a new ice age might be upon us, with rapid and drastic effects on the agricultural productivity of the temperature regions. With a few degrees of heating, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps would melt, perhaps raising ocean levels 250 feet. . . . In short, when we pollute, we tamper with the energy balance of the Earth.”
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Cutchogue, New York: Buccaneer Books, 1968, 1971), p. 39.
“As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”
Paul Ehrlich, The Machinery of Nature, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986, p. 274
MIT/Club of Rome (1972)
“If all the policies instituted in 1975 in the previous figure are delayed until the year 2000, the equilibrium state is no longer sustainable. Population and industrial capital reach levels high enough to create food and resource shortages before the year 2000.”
- Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), p. 169.
“Although we have many reservations about the approximations and simplifications in the present world model, it has led us to one conclusion that appears to be justified under all the assumptions we have tested so far. The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.”
- Donella Meadows et al. The Limits to Growth, p. 142.
“Limits to Growth … ‘astonishingly young’ (the oldest was 30) authors were true believers. Dennis and Donella Meadows retreated to a New Hampshire farm after completing the book ‘to learn about homesteading and wait for the coming collapse.’ ‘We definitely felt like Cassandras,’ Donella Meadows added, ‘especially as we watched the world react to our work’.”
- Quoted in Robert Bradley, Capitalism at Work; Business, Government, and Energy (2009), p. 234.
And older …
“Climate apprehension did not begin in 1988 or in 1957, or even in 1896. There were colonial, early modern, and even ancient precedents. . . . We have arrived, late in the twentieth century, at a climate discourse that is again saturated with metaphor, values, and apprehensions.”
- James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 136.
“‘Something is wrong with the weather’ is the title of a recent article in U.S. News and World Report, and an article in Saturday Review asks, ‘Is man changing the climate of the earth?’ The layman, and the nonspecialist on reading these articles and the many others in the newspapers will probably be convinced that the climate is changing, for the accumulating evidence is considerable. He will probably be confused also, for the reasons given for the change are as varied as the authors. One author will blame the change on sunspots, another on the consumption of fossil fuels producing an increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Still another author will suggest air pollution as a significant cause, and another maintains that a complicated feedback of energy between sea and air is sufficient to produce irregular climate fluctuations. . . . Who is right?”
- Reid Bryson, “‘All Other Factors Being Constant . . . ’ A Reconciliation of Several Theories of Climate Change,” Weatherwise, April 1968; reprinted in John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), pp. 78-79.
“The debate over climate change, both from natural causes and human activity, is not new. Although the Baron C.-L. de Montesquieu is undoubtedly the best known Enlightenment thinker on the topic of climate determinism, others, notably the Abbe Du Bos, David Hume, and Thomas Jefferson, observed that climatic changes exerted a direct influence on individuals and society and that human agency was directly involved in changing the climate.”
- James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 11.
“As public awareness of global warming reached an early peak in the mid-1950s, the popular press began to carry articles on climate cooling. Fortune published an article in 1954 entitled ‘Climate: The Heat May Be Off,’ and in 1958, just as the IGY was winding down, journalists Betty Friedan wrote an article for Harper’s Magazine on the coming of a new ice age. Her article was a review of a recent theory by Maurice Ewing and William Donn which held that climate warming could lead to a breakup of the Arctic ice pack.”
- James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 131-32.
[1] States Mann, “hot takes, hyperbole, and polarizing commentary best generate clicks, shares, and retweets. I often encounter, especially on social media, individuals who are convinced that the latest extreme weather event is confirmation that the climate crisis is far worse than we thought…. increasingly today we see it with climate doomists…. This is not true, or at best partly true.”
The post Alarmism Now – and Then (Modern Malthusianism in its 6th Decade) appeared first on Master Resource.
via Master Resource
May 9, 2024 at 01:15AM
The Wall Street Journal recently published an incisive analysis regarding the economic and operational challenges of adopting electric trucks in the logistics sector. The report, based on a study by Ryder Systems, casts doubt on the prevailing enthusiasm for zero-emission vehicles in the freight industry and presents a detailed critique of the assumptions underpinning this shift.
Evaluating the Economic Feasibility
Electric trucks, especially the heavier models, present a substantial economic challenge compared to traditional diesel vehicles. Robert Sanchez, CEO of Ryder, highlights a significant disparity in the cost-effectiveness of these vehicles: “The economics just don’t work for most companies”. This statement reflects the broader industry reluctance to invest in electric trucks, which, despite their potential environmental benefits, fail to offer a viable economic case under current conditions.
The WSJ article points out that even with the promise of cleaner operations, the actual numbers tell a different story:
“As trucks get heavier the difference in operating costs between battery-electric vehicles and diesel trucks grows more pronounced,”
Detailed Cost Analysis
The article provides a state-specific analysis, revealing how transitioning to electric trucks could significantly increase operational costs. For instance, converting a fleet in California to electric would raise annual operating costs by 56%, amounting to an additional $3.4 million. Such figures pose serious concerns about the impact on a company’s bottom line and the broader economic effects, such as potential contributions to inflation and heightened transportation costs:
“Converting a typical mixed fleet of 25 commercial vehicles, including about 10 heavy-duty trucks, from diesel to battery power in California would raise a fleet’s annual operating costs 56%, or $3.4 million a year. The same transition in Georgia would raise annual operating costs 67%, or $3.7 million.”
The Reality of Long-term Savings and Operational Efficiency
The supposed long-term savings from lower fuel and maintenance costs are frequently cited by proponents of electric trucks. Yet, the WSJ report questions these claims, noting the lack of sufficient operational history to validate the durability and cost-efficiency of electric trucks over time. Additional operational hurdles exacerbate these concerns:
“Battery-electric trucks cost about three times as much to purchase as a diesel rig… Truckers say battery-electric truck operations are too difficult to set up and too expensive and inefficient to run,”
Regulatory Pressures Versus Industry Backlash
Amid these economic challenges, regulatory pressures are increasing. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, has introduced mandates for greater sales of battery-electric trucks. Similarly, California’s aggressive regulations aim to fast-track the adoption of zero-emissions vehicles. However, these governmental directives meet resistance from within the trucking industry, where many argue the financial burden is too great:
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently released a rule effectively mandating that manufacturers sell more battery-electric trucks by the end of the decade,”
Highlighting the tension between regulatory ambitions and practical economic capacities.
Conclusion
The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the high costs associated with electric trucks in the logistics sector brings critical scrutiny to the practical and economic viability of the transition being shoved onto industry by the current administration. It challenges the assumption that environmental benefits automatically justify significant investments in new technologies, urging a reevaluation of whether the push for “sustainability”, whatever that might be, may be outpacing the reality of current technological and economic conditions. As the industry confronts these challenges, it becomes clear that any transition must be grounded in a realistic appraisal of costs, benefits, and scalable feasibility.
HT/moriarty
via Watts Up With That?
May 9, 2024 at 12:09AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 