A goodly number of visitors to this website come to read an old post (July 7, 2013) titled “14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines Litter the United States”…The turbines pictured were in Hawaii, and you really should note the date on posts you are reading, even mine!
The idea, of course, is that CLIMATE CHANGE is an approaching disaster (it is not) and that we must DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW to save us all. Not true. The Swedish child was dramatic, came to scold the United Nations, which she did, but was totally misinformed about climate. There is no climate crisis. In the last 100 years, the climate has warmed by barely one degree, and the earth is always warming and cooling a little, controlled by the action of our sun. We have had ice ages, and warm years, hot summers and cool summers. Do not take my word for it, but refer to the climate scientists who monitor the temperatures of the world for NASA with satellites and weather balloons, who report to Congress regularly. Refer to Christiana Figueres, who was General Secretary of the IPCC and told a press conference back in 2013 that Climate Change was our best weapon for getting rid of dreaded Capitalism. There are lots of websites run by climate scientists, and those listed in the sidebar also list other scientific sites. Even President Obama’s own climate scientist is currently trying to explain that there is no crisis.
Interest in climate, inspired by a Davos meeting, meant a lot of sleepy labs in major universities awakened and found that the new interest meant government grants, new equipment, maybe even an assistant, so they suddenly got very interested in climate, and fired up their computers. They entered what they knew about climate, which wasn’t really all that much, and what they thought was probably true, and some educated guesses and some probabilities, and discovered that made them experts on the new crisis.
If I am dubious, it is because I grew up in the mountains of Idaho at about 4000′, mostly outdoors, on 400 acres surrounded by National Forest and BLM land. That provides one with a fairly common sense relationship to the great out-of-doors. Heard cougars scream, bears came for the crab apples when they ripened, and had to shoot a lynx that was trying to kill my dog as well as a porcupine that was trying to get in my bedroom window, right next to the bed.
Wind turbines seemed like a dandy idea, we all grew up with the romantic notion of Holland and their canals, with windmills peacefully turning in the wind, never having been there. Their windmills were for the purpose of grinding grain, not producing a society’s energy, and it turns out that they are not that effective in producing energy anyway. The wind does not obligingly blow at a steady 35 mph, but blows occasionally mostly in pleasant modest breezes. When’s the last time you went outdoors to find the wind blowing heartily with things flying around? We’ve tried locating wind turbines in our windiest places without much success. It costs something over $35,000 to take down a single turbine, and nothing can be recycled, but everything has to go to a landfill. The idea, of course, is that there is something dreadful about fossil fuels, and we have to find a more benevolent substitute. There isn’t, and we don’t.
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