U.S. Climate has already changed

Ultimately as a species our fate will be decided by our actions and if our choices are bad, neither "spin" nor our deity will save us. Savings is for the ones smart enough to learn and make good choices, not fool ourselves. And even that does not guarantee our survival from the asteroid with our name on it.

 

Here we go again.

We need to build more bird killing fields.

 

Yup. We just have to keep pounding FACTS into your head until you accept them.

 

war on America’s eagles; his eco-genocide; successful weaponization of solar farms.

Seriously.

 

Did your head come out of the sand to make this statement or am I mistaken?

I'm always wonder how a conservative mouth piece such as the "Washington Free Beacon" would handle this story if it was the Romney Administration? Usually it's not the conservatives who are crying about dead animals, just how the opportunity was lost to make money off of them.

Aside from that I've never understood how birds can fly into a wind generator, because they don't rotate that fast and the blades are visible.

Killing eagles? Having trouble buying that. Regarding the mirrors, I didn't know that kind of a project is used for electrical generation. I thought primarily solar panels are used to absorb sunlight, not reflect it. And if it's being reflected it would be to something like a single point collector like a dish setup would it not?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility





Yes, the reflecting mirrors are all flat, so they simply reflect sunlight up onto the receiver tower, "unconcentrated". However, all those sunlight beams from the mirrors start to overlap/converge as they approach the tower, so the closer you get to the tower in the beam path, the more beams you're illuminated by. It could easily kill eagles or anything else.

But who cares? (a) This is a tiny patch of desert, and (b) what, coal-fired power plants don't kill birds by the millions every year?

 

What percentage of the total annual bird population is 328,000? If you don't know, then how would anyone know if that number is significant or not?

Your sources show no actual eagle deaths. Not even the original Bloomberg article the others cite as the original source.

At first I thought FreeBeacon.com was satire, after seeing the ridiculous photoshopped picture. Then I realized I was experiencing Poe's Law.

 

It appears that wind power does kill birds – at an average rate of maybe one bird per tower per year.

 

So is all this global warming/climate change talk based on bad science and bending of the numbers to fit a political agenda? Do scientist bend the numbers to look good for political grants? Is John Coleman full of it?

Climate change issue aside I do think we should continue to work towards the use of more environmentally friendly energy resources but I don't think weather patterns we are experiencing now has anything to do with the climate change hype.

 

Nope. 97% of climatologists agree that (a) climate change is happening at the most rapid pace ever, and (b) humans are the vast majority of the cause of that change.

If you can't trust 97% of the experts in a scientific field, who can you trust?

Got any evidence of that? Let me remind you that the "climategate" scandal has been refuted over and over and over, and the scientist in question has been exonerated over and over and over.

What political grants? You know who decides which scientists get grants? Other scientists (who typically do research grant review/approval for a year or two at NSF or NIH or whatever and then go back to academia)! Not politicians.

And really, at this point I think a scientist would get much more notoriety if he had solid data showing anthropogenic climate change was bunk. Because no one has that.

He's either mistaken, lying, or both. He has a degree in JOURNALISM, and is not even a meteorologist, let alone a climatologist.

Again, listen to the 97% of EXPERTS on the climate.

Agreed.

Get back to me when you have a PhD in climatology.

 

Is this supposed to be more efficient than solar panels I wonder?

 

Dude, the guy was a TV weather anchor.

From wikipedia (uncorroborated) ...

Sounds "full of it" to me.

 

Ok with that reasoning then Al Gore is full of it too. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

I will get too much pleasure as time passes and you become increasingly marginalized by your non-scientific beliefs.

 

"human induced"

all of it?

 

No. I think it's pretty well established that CO2 existed before humans.

 

Thank goodness for that! I was starting to believe the thousands of qualified climate scientists and reputable international organisations. Your gut feeling changes everything. Phew. Dodged a bullet there.

 

... And humans have introduced huge amounts of green house gases into the atmosphere.

 

Yes, the vast vast majority of it.

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Al Gore has 97% of climatologists backing him up. Maybe he misspoke sometimes, but that's because he's a layman.

Just go straight to the scientific articles! It's not hard.

 

No, solar panels are photovoltaic, meaning they convert incoming photons into electrons (turn light directly into electricity); this facility is using sunlight to heat water to steam to drive turbines that turn generators. Overall, it is somewhat less efficient than solar panels because if the number of steps it has to go through to turn sunlight into electricity – including the power that the heliostatic mirrors must use to track the sun in order to stay focused, as well as the inevitable power transmission losses (few power users live in the Mojave, most of that power has to travel to LA, SD or LV, as opposed to your solar panels which are mere meters away from where the power is used).

 

Birds kill themselves in stupid ways all the damn time. Last year alone, I saw 4 birds break their necks by flying headfirst into large plate glass windows, and one smack up against the side of a building so hard, it's beak actually embedded into the wood. They're pretty dumb animals.

For birds that kill themselves by flying into turbines, I suggest we do to them what we do for bird-window deaths: we collect them and eat them.

Free meat from the sky. The circle of life continues.

 

Well, and the birds that die from flying into massive solar installations, hey, they come pre-cooked.

 

Ideally it could be minimized, but in the quest for a post-petroleum era of energy, a few birds would be a small price to pay.

 

It's enough to make you wish chickens could fly.

I'm honestly surprised they haven't found a way to do it yet. It almost seems that something as simple as changing the color of the blades would be enough.