Wind Farms' Dirty Secrets

It's not enough that they kill large numbers of birds and bats and that they are eyesores ruining the landscape and seascape.

Wind farms are being investigated in Scotland for their possible harm to human health.

The Scottish government has commissioned a report studying the effects on over 33,500 families living near 10 wind farms North of the Border, just a sample of the 2,300 wind turbines in Scotland. Its results will be known in autumn.

The research was prompted by campaigners who claim that some people living near the wind farms and suffering ill health don't realise that the cause may be infrasound emitted by wind turbines: noise at such a low frequency that it cannot be heard but can be felt.

A local resident is Andrew Vivers,

"an ex-Army captain who has suffered from headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, raised blood pressure and disturbed sleep since Ark Hill wind farm was built near his home in Glamis, Angus."

Medical examinations and tests failed to find the cause of his symptoms.

"Mr Vivers, who served almost 10 years in the military, said the authorities had so far refused to accept the ill effects of infrasound despite it being a 'known military interrogation aid and weapon'.

"He said: 'When white noise was disallowed they went on to infrasound. If it is directed at you, you can feel your brain or your body vibrating. With wind turbines, you don’t realise that is what’s happening to you.'"

In addition, "Mr Vivers said he has also witnessed an 'incredible number' of dead hares on the moors around Ark Hill and believes they may have succumbed to 'internal haemorrhaging and death' as a result of the turbines."

Mr Vivers believes that infrasound low frequency noise monitoring should be mandatory before and after turbine erection.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/497525/An-ill-wind-blows-as-the-surge-of-turbines-stirs-fears-of-silent-danger-to-our-health

Scotland had been involved in the discovery, earlier this year, of environmental damage caused by wind farms:

"Scotland’s environmental watchdog has probed more than 100 incidents involving turbines in just six years, including diesel spills, dirty rivers, blocked drains and excessive noise.

"Alarmingly, they also include the contamination of drinking water and the indiscriminate dumping of waste, with warning notices issued to a handful of energy giants."

http://www.sundaypost.com/news-views/scotland/special-investigation-toxic-wind-turbines-1.282890

It will be interesting to see if environmentalists and celebrities respond to any ruinous effects of one of their pet "renewable energy" projects with the same ardour and vigour with which they've been attacking fracking and fossil fuels.

Judging from their weak reaction to the massacre of birds and bats by wind farms, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Richborough Roman Port and Global Warming

I'm honoured that one of my websites has been quoted and linked to in a comment to an article in the famous website Watts Up With That?, considered the world's number one scientific site taking a critical approach to global warming and climate change.

The article in question is "Sea Levels are Never Still", and it explains something of which people, used to the alarmistic noise about rising sea levels due to "climate change", may not be aware:

Sea levels have been rising and falling without any help from humans for as long as Earth’s oceans have existed.

The fastest and most alarming sea changes to affect mankind occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Seas rose about 130m about 12,000 years ago, at times rising at five metres per century. Sea levels then fell as ice sheet and glaciers grew in the recent Little Ice Age – some Roman ports used during the Roman Warm Era are now far from the sea even though sea levels have recovered somewhat during the Modern Warm Era.

One such case of a Roman port now disappeared is that of Richborough, in Kent, which was the main port of Roman Britain, linking the British province to the rest of the Roman empire. My travel website Britain Gallery describes it in the article "Sandwich, Deal, Walmer, Richborough", and a comment to the Watts Up With That? post quotes from it:

Not far from Walmer are the remains of the Richborough Roman Fort and Amphitheatre, considered by English Heritage possibly the most symbolically important Roman site in Britain, “witnessing both the beginning and almost the end of Roman rule here”. Although it is now 2 miles from the sea because silted up, Richborough was in Roman times a major natural harbour providing a safe route from Europe to the Thames estuary.

Going back to the scaremongering tactics of the warmists, it's to be observed that from 15,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago sea level rose about 14mm a year, whereas it is currently rising at about 1mm a year, and this rate has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945.

There are many factors changing the sea level - melting of glaciers; warming and expansion in volume of the seas; extraction of groundwater ending up in the sea; sediments and debris washed into the sea by rivers, storms and glaciers; even tectonic forces -, and human emission of CO2 has hardly a role in them.

Figure by Robert A. Rohde made available under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Himalayas Are Melting. Or Maybe Not

Mount Everest's Ice Is Melting, Live Science headlines an article that begins with "Earth's global thaw has reached Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak", pointing to the fateful global warming syndrome.

But if you then carry on reading the report you'll find:

The researchers suspect that the glacial melting in the Everest region is due to global warming, but they have not yet established a firm connection between the mountains' changes and climate change, Thakuri said in the statement.

While Everest isn't the only Himalayan region seeing the effects of climate change, not all of the region's glaciers are melting. The Karakoram Mountains, on the China-India-Pakistan border, are holding steady and may even be growing. But shrinking glaciers in the rest of the Himalayas have drawn significant global attention, because the glaciers provide water and power for roughly 1.5 billion people.

Shrinking glaciers always draw more attention, because they fit in with the anthropogenic global warming theory, whereas new glaciers being formed or growing, which are just as numerous, contradict it.

Al Gore Complains about Media Not Addressing Global warming

If Al Gore is mad about media, public figures and people not talking about global warming anymore, it is a very good sign.

In fact, I've noticed that in the last year or so there has been little mention of climate change: even in the face of extreme weather events which only a few years ago would have been attributed to climate change.

The reason is that even the mainstream media had to realize that many of these attributions had proved totally wrong, so now they are obviously more cautious.

Generally speaking, the global warming theory, having been discredited in so many different ways - chiefly because of computer models based on it predicting higher temperatures, when temperatures globally have been decreasing for several years, but also due to the odd and unreliable behaviour of so many Western universities' and UN's "climate scientists" - is gradually, maybe tacitly, being put aside.

New Study Shows Half of USA Global Warming is Artificial

Meteorologist Anthony Watts, author of one of the best known and most widely read global warming skeptical blogs, Wattsupwiththat, has released a scientific discussion paper challenging the data used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to support its climate change claims.

Watts and the study's other authors concluded: "reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward." [Emphasis added]

Breitbart interviewed one of the paper's co-authors, Dr. John R. Christy, climate change expert of international fame, who said:

In 2010, the World Meteorological Organization adopted a new standard for temperature collection stations. This discussion paper is the first to apply that standard. The finding is that when the new class scheme was applied to weather stations, the stations considered compliant had cooler trends than non-compliant stations. [Empahsis added]

The first application of the recent WMO-approved standard, then, led to a correction of the temperatures downward.

The study's lead researcher Anthony Watts' decision to pre-release it as a discussion paper for public review, before peer-reviewed journal submission, is new in academic research. Climate change "converted skeptic" Richard Muller is the only researcher to have done this before.