In keeping with the planting theme, here’s a recent TED talk by LA Guerilla gardener Ron Finley.
Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”
If you get struck from behind in an auto accident, a common mechanism of injury would be “whiplash”, as your head snapped back and forth violently. Standard safety measures to protect auto drivers and passengers against whiplash effects: seatbelts and headrests.
“Whiplash” is the word more and more meteorologists are using to describe the violent swings in extreme weather that we have been seeing in the northern hemisphere, especially since the rapid and unforeseen decay of arctic ice cover that began in 2007.
Does anyone make a headrest big enough for, say, Iowa?
Dr. Jeff Masters in Weather Underground:
Weather Whiplash–a term originally coined by science writer Andrew Freedman of climatecentral.org to describe extreme shifts between cold and hot weather–is also a excellent phrase we can use to describe some of the rapid transitions between extreme drought and floods seen in recent years. I brought up a remarkable example in mid-April, when a 200-mile stretch of the Mississippi River north of St. Louis reached damaging major flood levels less than four months after near-record low water levels restricted barge traffic, forcing the Army Corp to blast out rocks from the river bottom to enable navigation.
As the climate warms, the new normal in coming decades is going to be more and more extreme “Weather Whiplash” drought-flood cycles like we have seen in the Midwest and in Georgia this year. A warmer atmosphere is capable of bringing heavier downpours, since warmer air can hold more water vapor. But you still need a low pressure system to come along and wring that moisture out of the air to get rain. When natural fluctuations in jet stream patterns take storms away from a region, creating a drought, the extra water vapor in the air won’t do you any good. There will be no mechanism to lift the moisture, condense it, and generate drought-busting rains. The drought that ensues will be more intense, since temperatures will be hotter and the soil will dry out more.
Continue reading “Fasten Your Seatbelt – Weather Whiplash is the New Normal”
Windbaggers, do I have your attention? Apparently so, after the rash of negative votes on recent blog postings, looks like I’m on the Koch Brother’s hitlist.
Good. Now let’s continue.
More great news for wind investment in two key midwestern states, Kansas and Iowa.
Iowa is becoming our own home-grown Germany, with a wind power penetration of over 20 percent. Iowans, having seen wind energy up close, and seeing how it keeps their electric bills lower than neighboring states, give over 80 percent approval to wind as an energy source. Is there anything that gets more than 80 percent approval in our fractured society?
Ok, background checks for firearm sales, but never mind.
Point is, overwhelming numbers of Americans, having seen the positive benefits of renewable energy, want more energy that is clean, reliable, safe, and cheap. Fossil funded Windbaggers do not.
Gov. Terry Branstad announced Wednesday that MidAmerican Energy will make a $1.9 billion investment in Iowa for wind energy projects that will be the biggest single economic investment ever in the state.
“As wind energy goes, so does Iowa’s economy,” said Branstad, who spoke enthusiastically about the plans. He added, “Remember, once they make this investment it will be here for the next 40 or 50 years.”
MidAmerican officials said no sites have been selected yet, but they hinted the sites would be in northwest Iowa and south of Interstate Highway 80 in western Iowa.
Branstad, speaking at a late afternoon news conference, said MidAmerican Energy Co. will add up to 1,050 megawatts of wind generation, consisting of up to 656 new wind turbines, in Iowa by year-end 2015.
The wind expansion will enhance economic development and provide in excess of $360 million in additional property tax revenues over the next 30 years, officials said. Landowner payments totaling $3.2 million per year also are expected as a result of the expansion.
In addition, the expansion is planned to be built at no net cost to the company’s customers and will help stabilize electric rates over the long term by providing a rate reduction totaling $10 million per year by 2017, commencing with a $3.3 million reduction in 2015, MidAmerican officials said.
Continue reading “Despite Fossil Fueled WindBaggers, Kansas and Iowa Blast Ahead in Wind”
The inaudible sound caused by wind farms is no worse than that from other rural and urban environments and does not affect human health, a review by the Victorian Department of Health has found.
Some groups claim the inaudible noise from wind turbines, known as infrasound, can trigger health problems including dizziness, headaches, and insomnia. Together, the syndromes are sometimes described as ”wind turbine syndrome”.
The Health Department review, released late last week, assessed the evidence and found it does not ”support claims that inaudible sounds can have direct physiological effects. Physiological effects on humans have only been detected at levels that are easily audible.”
The report says infrasound is generated by many sources, such as trains, breaking waves and airconditioners. The department found the evidence showed wind farms produced no more infrasound than the background level in other environments.
”Humans have been exposed to high levels of infrasound throughout our evolution, with no apparent effects,” the report says.
Uh oh. There’s a problem. You’re assuming Windbaggers believe in evolution.
Simon Chapman, a professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney, has been collecting anecdotes heard and seen on the internet about purported wind turbine effects. They include “vibrating lips” and herpes. Chapman writes:
I commenced building this collection of ever-growing claims made about health problems in humans and animals that wind farm opponents attribute to exposure to wind turbines in January 2012. All the claims below are referenced to their web sources, mostly websites of opponents of wind farms and submissions they have made to governments.
Opponents of wind turbines have reacted badly to this list which has been downloaded many thousands of times. They argue that by publishing it and regularly updating it with new claims, I am thereby “ridiculing” people who say they are ill.
This is a peculiar claim which suggests that those who actively publicise these alleged problems want to walk on both sides of the street: on the one hand, they continue to publicise particular symptoms and diseases because they wish to promote awareness about the harms they believe are being caused. They then cry that it is disgraceful that all such complaints should be placed together here, because … well … it invites ridicule to see almost every conceivable health problem being attributed to wind turbines, especially because in regions like Europe, turbines are very common in many nations.
Some windbaggers insist that turbine effects can “rock stationary cars even further than a kilometer away from the nearest wind turbine..” and extend outward for a hundred kilometers.
Does this mean wind turbines can cause herpes in space?
Further research needed.
Dear Mainstream Media,
Does the phrase “Biggest Story of the Millennium” mean anything to you?
Let’s play word association. For instance, if I say, “trees”, you might say….
“forest”.
C’mon guys. I can’t do this all by myself.
Your buddy,
Greenman
ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN devoted 74 full segments to flooding in the Midwest, but only one—on CBS Evening News—alluded to the fact that heavy downpours have increased (one percent of coverage). That segment did not explain that scientists have attributed this to climate change, and did not feature any scientists. MSNBC and Fox News were not included in this analysis because transcripts of their daytime coverage are not available in Nexis. [CBS News, 5/2/13]
Another brilliant video piece from a young German who explains the impact of wind power on the German transformation to a renewable economy.
Best Movie ever? Best Marvel Movie ever? Best example of how to reinvent a character and a myth?
Or maybe just exactly the movie I needed to see at the very moment I needed to see it.
Remember. A myth is a story that’s true even if it never happened.
If wind turbines were as “bad” for you as windbaggers in the US would like you to believe, there should be a lot of body bags piling up in places like Germany, Denmark, and, well, Iowa – places that have large penetration by wind generated electricity. Or at least, one would think, there’d be an increased incidence in the headaches-to leukemia-to-herpes complex of symptoms that the looney right has identified as part of “wind turbine syndrome”. But of course, there is not.
Why?
The answer of course, is, that Germany does not have the highly funded, focused and professional anti-wind disinformation machine that has been launched here in the US.
We know who they are, we have their memos and strategy.
A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama‘s energy agenda.
A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.
Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using “subversion” to build a national movement of wind farm protesters.
The strategy proposal was prepared by a fellow of the American Tradition Institute (ATI) – although the thinktank has formally disavowed the project.
The proposal was discussed at a meeting of self-styled ‘wind warriors’ from across the country in Washington DC last February.
Among the action items included in the memo:
Continue reading “Wind Turbine “noise” No Biggie for Germans. Why?”
In 1989 as the most credible warnings ever published about climate change became global news, and action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions began to be seriously discussed, General Motors was one of several large, mostly American companies to join something called the Global Climate Coalition – basically one of the world’s first large scale platforms for climate science denial.
The Global Climate Coalition (1989–2002) was a group of mainly United States businesses opposing immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The group formed in response to several reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A major scientific report on the severity of global warming by the IPCC in 2001 led to large-scale membership loss.[1] Since 2002 the GCC has been defunct, or in its own words, “deactivated”.[2]
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
The group distributed the disinforming backgrounder until the late 90s, when new versions of the document “included language that conformed to the scientific advisory committee’s conclusion.”
By that time the group was in dissarray, and losing some of its most important members, including GM. Wiki says,
“From 1997 a number of prominent members left. Partly in response to a public relation move to acknowledge global warming and attempt to reduce their carbon emissions (see Business action on climate change).[citation needed] Dupont and British Petroleum left in 1997, Shell Oil (US) in 1998, Ford in 1999, and DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, and Texaco in 2000.
A major scientific report on the severity of global warming by the IPCC in 2001 led to large-scale membership loss.[1]“
How times change.
Continue reading “What’s Good for Climate is Good for General Motors (and other things)”
