And You Thought “Wind Turbine Cancer” was Bad..
December 6, 2020
A MediaMatters review of greatest hits of Fox News hysteria about Wind Turbines.
We know that Wind turbines have been blamed for everything from hernias, to hemorrhoids to herpes, but the is the first time I’ve heard them blamed for UFO crashes..
Below, the truth from those that live with turbines.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
December 6, 2020 at 11:56 am
wind disease list
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/10501/Wind_Disease_List.pdf;jsessionid=9325E674E04BC79AAA25C7CD9991F9F9?sequence=5
December 6, 2020 at 11:59 am
I’m not seeing my own wind disease on there.
December 6, 2020 at 11:27 pm
You’re telling the truth in that short list, but today’s poser environmentalists don’t respect the legacy of environmentalism. They forget it’s always been about curbing harm to nature, not building stuff all over it, or adding to wildlife deaths.
Their casual answer is to pretend it doesn’t matter now, since we’ve got a bloated civilization to keep growing with low-density energy. What else could possibly be more important? Restraint? Downsizing? No way! Power those Model Ys with Big Wind!
Wind power rides on the superficial appeal of “the wind is free!” without noting that giant machines harvesting said wind are anything but free. It’s the air-based equivalent of hydro-power dams, which environmentalists have long protested.
Neo-Greens can’t admit that it’s all destructive, just affecting different parts of nature. They’re now telling us which parts to respect and dismiss as useless for human utility.
December 14, 2020 at 12:07 am
Wind turbines don’t bother ground-based wildlife, and the number of bird deaths is a tiny fraction of a percent of those killed by coal emissions, flying into buildings, and cats cats cats.
There’s a difference between whether something is an eyesore to humans (and their delicate sensibilities) and whether it damages wildlife environments. A beer bottle or a section of concrete pipe in the woods might bother hikers and nature photographers, but the wildlife doesn’t care.
Focus on things that damage habitat, like pipeline breaches, plastic waste and fragmentation of land area. Illegal pot farming can do more damage than wind turbines by far. Don’t pretend you care for the environment if you care more about wind turbines than all of the damage fossil fuel extraction, processing and combustion produces every single day.
December 7, 2020 at 12:06 am
Correction: I originally missed the snarky context of that list and see that you’re a shill as well, though the only claim that seems wild is the part about rocking cars at long distances. It’s not entirely far fetched since wind turbines are huge structures messing with airflow.
Trump claiming they cause cancer is an easy mark, but even that has a kernel of truth, since stress can lead to cancer and wind turbines DO cause stress for those who live around them in specific topography. Cherry-picking people nearby who got luckier (or paid to host machines) is a 20 year-old tactic now.
See my other comment here with a list of well-documented problems that honest environmentalists don’t evade. Too many Greens now act like carbon is the sole problem affecting the planet just because it’s the one society fears most.
Fossil fuels literally saved the whales (from having their oil burned) but “clean energy” won’t save us from the fossil fuels that build it and enable so much land & ocean space to be developed for ugly machinery. This is lost on shills who see open space only in “__ gigawatts of installed capacity”
There’s also the sobering fact that the bulk of “renewable” energy is biomass, often from logging, masking the feeble output of wind power. I’m OK with solar if it’s not new sprawl, but that’s also unrealistic.
This summer’s most important documentary needs to be kept in the light: https://falseprogress.home.blog/2020/05/17/planet-of-the-humans-2020-film-review-and-commentary/
December 8, 2020 at 1:41 pm
We really need to drastically increase the subsidies for heat pumps and heat pump retrofitting. Using natural gas or burning wood to heat our homes is not ideal, to say the least.
December 8, 2020 at 8:07 pm
And drastically reduce population/economic growth, which of course won’t happen.
The only “way forward” for the average green poser is to build our way out of it, creating “new markets” and so on. That’s why these shills get so defiant when you tell them the scheme isn’t working and is just destroying nature.
One of my favorite cartoons shows what their mindset leads to, of course not entirely literally: https://www.wind-watch.org/alerts/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/l24wind-farm-promoter-game-over.gif
December 8, 2020 at 8:37 pm
Stop lying about energy and population, aß.
December 8, 2020 at 9:01 pm
How exactly am I “lying about energy and population…”? Say something meaningful or stop wasting my time in replies.
I’ve noticed very few posters here care about providing logical arguments. They just yell something and duck away. Very similar to the tactics of global warming deniers, if you’ve been paying attention.
December 8, 2020 at 10:07 pm
You’ve demonstrated over and over and over you have no interest in facts or reality. You use dishonest nonsense to lie about not just energy but everything: energy, antifa, BLM, me, police… Everything you’ve said that I’ve seen has been a lie—and an utterly boring, predictably lunatic right wing lie at that.I don’t care whether it’s dishonesty or delusion; it’s all the same. I have no interest whatever in following you down the rathole of your own design (rather, Koch, Exxon, ALEC, Republican design) consisting of an infinite regression of lies, which is the absolutely certain result of trying to discuss facts with you. Stop lying, aß.
December 8, 2020 at 9:14 pm
The film is an egregious piece of lying crap using decades old disinformation and lies about every part of the problem and solutions. It offers no solutions of its own. It and every reference to it is miserable straw person horseshit. Stop lying about energy, aß.
youtube[DOT]com/watch?v=cDqZVjAiAvs
December 8, 2020 at 9:41 pm
According to YOU, of course it is. You have the critical thinking and energy analysis skills of an Antifa screamer. I can tell by your hysterical writing style; 90% insults and 10% pseudo content. Hint: more actual content makes you look smarter.
Did you once use the handle, dumboldguy?
December 8, 2020 at 10:10 pm
Stop lying, aßhole.
December 8, 2020 at 11:02 pm
Why do you ask if someone once used the handle dumboldguy?—-I am DOG and the only one who has ever used that handle here. I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t commented here for a while.
Do you have some stupid bone to pick with anything I’ve said in the past? Like my support for nuclear power and dismissal of idiots who worry that turbines destroy the view while AGW cooks the planet to death? (And yes, domestic cats DO kill far more birds than wind turbines—-that is FACT).
December 10, 2020 at 2:17 am
Well, you popped out of the woodwork quickly, though that’s not proof. You have a multi-forum reputation for insults minus real content. Easy to Google.
I wouldn’t have guessed a zealot like you would support nuclear, and math shows it’s a far cleaner energy source than wind, if done right. Much more reliable with high density vs. sprawl. I’m only OK with Big Wind on limited farmland or industrial space with a promise to dismantle it when nuclear fills the void. But it’s been hard to even get even two wind turbines removed for quality-of-life, e.g. Falmouth, MA.
Again, you spit on the graves of founding environmentalists by dismissing landscape ruin as trivial, even if it could slow AGW much. There’s no way a guy like John Muir would have called them green, and his Trust in Scotland is major critic: https://www.johnmuirtrust.org/search?&q=wind+turbines
It’s just a fact that these machines encroach like armies, and they’re the biggest threat to bats ever invented (USGS et al). They kill bird species that other things don’t, and the house-cat diversion needs to stop. When’s the last time a domestic cat killed an eagle unless it was trapped in a cage? What sort of fool thinks gigantic machines in flyways are trivial?
The closest physical analogy might be much smaller ski-lifts, which have often been protested on mountains. Ski lifts don’t provide an energy source, so aesthetic arguments tend to play better there. Once something is deemed utilitarian, people spin the hell out of it.
Go ahead and ignore all of the above, as usual. Nothing gets learned in this joint.
December 9, 2020 at 1:47 pm
actually, J4Zonian is on target.
If you listen to the “Michael Moore’s Former fact checker” piece above, that came about because of the piece that I wrote about my personal experience with Moore, and how I knew recent statements of his to be incorrect.
https://climatecrocks.com/2020/05/10/michael-me/
The fact checker contacted me after reading the above piece, and we had a long conversation by phone and email, resulting in
https://climatecrocks.com/2020/05/12/michael-me-just-went-boom/
So, yeah, when you see someone referencing the Moore movie as some kind of source, you know right off that they are at best a misinformed tool, or worse, a deliberately misinforming bad actor.
December 10, 2020 at 4:48 pm
I’m fully aware of critiques of “Planet of the Humans.” People who don’t care about energy sprawl say it contains outdated info, but the real problem of the world being covered with machine-arrays is getting worse!
The main “outdated” info is marginal gains in solar panel efficiency, plus bigger (and uglier) wind turbines. Calling the film “inaccurate” on that basis is like saying a film showing older cars means traffic jams are obsolete. You people can’t be that dim. But again, you’re fine with building junk all over the planet because you claim AGW is all that matters now.
The total weight of man-made materials may now exceed that of all living things on Earth. It’s proof of what I explain to wind power zealots who treat the planet as an industrial park except when they lament CO2. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2020/12/human-made-materials-now-equal-weight-of-all-life-on-earth/
Moore/Gibbs also brought up the issue of biomass energy being mostly from forest products. If you look at charts of “renewable” energy you see biomass has a far bigger role than wind & solar, masking the small energy gains from their huge footprint.
December 6, 2020 at 10:57 pm
I won’t miss Trump, who gave anti-wind-power forces a bad name, but you’re again setting up straw men by highlighting “fringe” criticisms of wind power and ignoring documented ones that real environmentalists care about.
1) Industrialized landscapes with millions of acres of views already corrupted.
2) Bird & bat deaths, growing with each new “farm” built (basic math).
3) Audible noise & infrasound has caused health problems, even if not cancer directly. People have moved away, and animals can’t lodge complaints.
4) Shadow flicker when blades spin between homes and the sun. Another factor in lost home values.
5) Flashing red lights all night; worse for space than Starlink satellites in many ways.
6) Disruption of rock, soil and peat from vast new road networks. Mountaintop turbine projects are the biggest insult, literally carving out their spines.
7) The necessity of more natural gas backup plants, sometimes running more than the turbines in weak wind areas.
8) General futility of building huge structures with fossil fuels while trying to replace said fuels. Long-term ERoI is a concept lost on wind warriors.
You could easily find hundreds of YouTube videos of people who hate living around wind turbines, but you choose only shills.
Joe Biden is towing that same line now. Can’t say I’m enthused about his presidency, but he’s not against nuclear power, the true clean energy, if done right.
https://falseprogress.home.blog/2020/11/12/hey-joe-biden-where-you-gonna-put-60000-more-wind-turbines/
December 7, 2020 at 12:09 am
Load of poop, at best, problems to be mitigated. The world is going to COOK! Why the hell do people treat it as problem to be addressed, when it is convenient, and will not disturb a blade of *f& grass. The damage of CAGW will be orders of magnitude worse than preventing it.
December 7, 2020 at 12:47 am
The world is going to cook AND get considerably uglier as it does so! You just assume it will be saved by these invasive, oil-built structures. You don’t want to believe otherwise, just like the global warming deniers. Tribalism is easy to spot.
Instead of slinging “poop” replies to anyone who laments wind blight, spend time reading about the sheer scale needed to replace fossil fuels, and how we can’t do it with machines built BY fossil fuels.
CMO (Cubic Mile of Oil) is a good way to boost your knowledge. It takes an obscene amount of wind turbines to even begin to touch the world’s 3 CMO of annual energy use. And since they’re built and maintained with fossil fuels, it’s a self-limiting prospect for the future. It could get too costly to build more wind turbines this very decade if/when shale fracking peaks. Look at a truck trip for just one giant blade, not to mention all the mining, manufacturing, loggng and road-building to set up these Goliaths.
You folks never explain how you can simultaneously call yourselves environmentalists and witness the biggest build-out of open space ever undertaken. All you do is claim it “must” work, therefore it will, while the world keeps getting uglier and more dangerous for wildlife (cumulative impact of all energy technologies).
https://falseprogress.home.blog/2019/03/10/the-green-new-deal-is-a-raw-deal-for-scenery-wildlife-and-rural-ambience/
December 7, 2020 at 5:43 am
You talk as if there is a choice. Well there is. To cook or not to cook that is the fundamental choice. Neither your rationalizations, piety or lack of wit changes that fact. The damage of CAGW dwarfs all other considerations.
Go nuclear.
December 8, 2020 at 4:36 am
I fully agree that nuclear (SMR and elusive fusion) is the only thing that can really save civilization, landscapes and wildlife. Obviously it has to be done right, and it’s laden with old fears.
There seems to be an urgent effort to finally make fusion work within this decade, since people act in desperation. Scientists who’ve run the CMO-equivalent math see the folly of wind power. Solar appeals to me but it can’t scale up enough, either. Always intermittent, both. I think the expenses put into Big Wind should have been thrown at nuclear 20+ years ago.
A 12/6/20 post on another blog about Tim Garrett says we can never decarbonize, which I tend to agree with, but nuclear is far better than bleak gauntlets of industrial scenery covering the world’s wind belts. Environmental groups need to stop riding the wind train to nowhere.
December 8, 2020 at 12:56 pm
False,
I want to thank you.
For picking such an appropriate name,
hiding your lies in the beam of a spotlight on your lies,
reposting the utter crap you posted, because without you doubling down on such reprehensible 30-years-too-late, ten-thousand-times debunked offensive idiocy, it and you might have faded as simply one more dishonest/deluded shdullp (Is s/he a shill? A dupe? No way to tell…on the internet, mental illness and lying are often indistinguishable) spewing nonsense out of an inability to refrain from pushing the world toward complete destruction.
for taking a pronuclehead position, (complete with fusion, no less!) because obviously no amount of rational argument has done as much to discredit the failed and dangerous (and nonexistent) radioactive technologies as such a complete tool associating him or herself with them.
for demonstrating so perfectly the denial, cherrypicking, No True Scotsmanning, appealing to false authority, crocodile tearing, basic outright lying and other tacticing used by the Koch-Exxon-ALEC-Republican-et al climate (and ecology, and tobacco, and evolution…) denial machine.
Thank you. Just by being the mentally ill richard you are, you’ve helped us immensely.
December 8, 2020 at 8:01 pm
Did you generate that empty set of paragraphs using this old site? None of it addresses the eight well-known wind power problems I listed. You’re the very fool you claim I am, and I can spot mindless zealotry by its prose.
https://www.pakin.org/complaint
You come off like one of those Antifa scumbags who just wants to yell at anything they can’t form a logical refutation of.
December 8, 2020 at 8:29 pm
Stop lying about energy, aß.
December 8, 2020 at 8:45 pm
Let me explain how your small mind works. I know this from observing Antifa/BLM and other screamers who think they’re righteous but don’t think their agenda through to its final conclusion. “Abolish the police” is a lot like abolishing fossil fuels, but for different reasons. Neither is pragmatic when you look at the evidence.
YOUR MINDSET: The very second you see anyone criticize your beloved landscape-wrecking, bird & bat killing wind turbines, you immediately stop reading for content and assume they favor Koch Industries, Trump and all the rest. You’re so stuck on climate being the only environmental problem worth caring about that you’ve stopped respecting other aspects of nature.
That attitude is civilizationism, not environmentalism. Nature itself can adapt to AGW (with losses) but people will have a much harder time moving entire cities and farms, so they cling to techno-hopium like Big Wind. Most zealots on the Left or Right are incapable of perceiving shades-of-gray and context. Republicans are actually chest-deep into Big Wind (Texas wind sprawl) so Trump’s criticisms are ironic.
I criticize wind power not because I’m pro fossil fuels, but because it’s an ugly non-solution to a problem rooted in the growing scale of economies. Wind power is the poster child for runaway sprawl, and has little to do with saving nature, just Man’s ego and big construction profits. Lots of logging, road building and crane rigging goes into those pseudo-farms. The people building them can also be found on fracking jobs.
Look up the term “energy sprawl” and read what the Nature Conservancy says about “siting wind right.” Their approach to me is futile (finite acreage left to build the damned things) but at least they’re not in denial like you and other parrots who frequent this blog.
Odds are you’re not wise enough to separate what I just wrote from your automatic rejection of anti wind power arguments, but I gave it the old college try. I’m also a he, and the term “False Progress” describes the things I criticize, which takes a moment of subtlety to figure out.
December 8, 2020 at 9:26 pm
I have only one thing to say to you, Rusk,
Stop lying about energy..
December 8, 2020 at 9:28 pm
Sorry, you lying trolls are all the same to me. Stop lying about energy, FALSE.
December 7, 2020 at 9:40 pm
dude, they had a bad name long before Trump.
Uncanny resemblance to the “death panel” protests about Obama care.
(and dissipating the same way as people find out it’s all BS)
Wind turbines have been blamed for everything from hemorrrhoids to herpes.
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?
more research needed, obviously
December 8, 2020 at 3:34 am
It’s a possibility, since the blades definitely do break. Many heads of birds have been bashed in, but windiots change that subject to house-cats, further proving their indifference to nature. “Gotta solve the climate thing, whatever we destroy along the way” (even though you can’t replace fossil fuels with machines built WITH fossil fuels).
Also, the blades aren’t recyclable, and actual environmentalists (vs. pinwheel-heads) care about such things.
https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2020/05/07/not-so-green-energy-hundreds-of-non-recyclable-fiberglass-wind-turbine-blades-are-pictured-piling-up-in-landfill/
December 8, 2020 at 3:53 am
I posted a list of well known problems with wind turbines and you ignored it by bringing up straw men. Nobody with green depth is fooled by such tactics. But that’s all I ever get in this crocky echo-chamber.
You people can’t admit that wind power is just another vain attempt by Man to build our way out of a mess caused by previous overbuilding. The problem is growthism, hubris and desperation, not lack of technology.
Previous non-anthropogenic warming & freezing cycles were ridden out by other species without covering Earth in giant machine arrays. Wind turbines aren’t being built for nature, just human civilization. The big denial is that low-density energy can replace the scale of high-density energy. Fusion might do it, but it’s not simple. Note the increased effort in that area, e.g. MIT’s SPARC and other tokamaks. Behind the scenes, scientists know wind power is a farce.
Is your blog partly funded by the industry? I post out of irritation at “progressive” hypocrisy on the environment, as well as the right-wing idiocy we agree on. Trump vs. wind energy is a fluke, but he highlights a lot of eco-posers on the topic.
https://falseprogress.home.blog/2019/06/21/wind-energy-shills-capitalize-on-trump-criticisms/
Carry on with your empty sarcasm.
December 7, 2020 at 1:18 pm
15 years of essentially full time research, and degunking psychologically and ideologically stunted birdbrains who are against everything that will keep the world alive, have sandblasted all confidence I had that humanity will act rationally before it’s too late. False’s gish gallop contains not a single true thing, but responding is pointless, either respectfully, or disrespectfully, with facts or emotional appeals…. because False, like all other trolls, refuses to respect facts, evidence, or anyone using them. Any response will just cause the lies to multiply. Dishonesty and manipulation rule the day as long as they’re allowed to keep commenting on the few places we can control.
and finally we see the real motivation for False and others like him or her: keeping humans from disrupting rocks.
…
Oh yeah, and pushing nucklehead reactors.
December 7, 2020 at 9:17 pm
Yipe, agreeing with J4Zorastian again. Except it is me pushing world saving nukes. Thumbi anyway.
December 8, 2020 at 4:17 am
Below (again) is the list I posted the other day, which you didn’t write a damned thing to actually refute. Let’s see you try instead of just dishing out another word-salad. I’m sure you’ll change the subject because you’re a tech-addict who’d probably cover national parks with wind turbines for utilitarianism. That’s the sick state of environmentalism these days.
Again, some big problems with wind power:
1) Industrialized landscapes with millions of acres of views already corrupted.
2) Bird & bat deaths, growing with each new “farm” built (basic math).
3) Audible noise & infrasound has caused health problems, even if not cancer directly. People have moved away, and animals can’t lodge complaints.
4) Shadow flicker when blades spin between homes and the sun. Another factor in lost home values.
5) Flashing red lights all night; worse for space than Starlink satellites in many ways.
6) Disruption of rock, soil and peat from vast new road networks. Mountaintop turbine projects are the biggest insult, literally carving out their spines.
7) The necessity of more natural gas backup plants, sometimes running more than the turbines in weak wind areas.
8) General futility of building huge structures with fossil fuels while trying to replace said fuels. Long-term ERoI is a concept lost on wind warriors.
This post goes into a lot more depth: https://falseprogress.home.blog/2016/08/29/windturbineslandscapes/
My overriding point is that people obsessed solely with climate change are superficial environmentalists. “Civilizationists” is a better word, since they want to save man-made infrastructure far more than nature. I’m hardly the only one to notice this trend among mainstream green groups.
Your kind also ridiculed a solid documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” and got it temporarily banned from YouTube on a footage technicality. Critical reviews found below have the same dismissive attitude as this blog. They fail to discuss energy sprawl and scale, making unfounded assumptions that fossil fuels can be replaced by machines that can’t exist without them. When it comes to bird & bat deaths, they just wish the problem away with more techno fixes.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=planet+of+the+humans
December 18, 2020 at 12:30 am
2016, eh?
Did it ever occur to you that some of these problems are being addressed?
Regarding 2) Killing bats and birds
– The high end estimate for current US onshore bird deaths is less than 0.25 million/year. Compare that to window strikes (100 million low end), feral cats (100s of millions), high-tension wires (more than 150 million), pesticides (>70 million), and cars (>50 million). Climate change is expected to blow the doors off those numbers.
– They’re already finding ways (both technical and policy) to reduce bird and bat deaths. The American Bird Conservancy finds existing crop farms to make good turbine sites from a wildlife perspective. Restrictions on migratory flyways have already been put in (including removing an early wind farm found to be in the middle of one), and keeping them a mile away from high-density bird habitats. Bat “boombox” technology has already been found to reduce bat kills by more than 20% and leaving turbines idle until the wind is about 12mph cut down bat deaths by 60%. They know that there are better colors than white (purple looks good) to prevent attracting yummy insects, and shining UV to make bats avoid them.
Regarding 7) Needing more gas backup plants
Follow the money: Wind power projects are cost-effective to power-distribution industry which has to look at the whole picture (both baseload and handling peaks). They’ve got a quick turnaround on design and construction, are scalable, require moderate maintenance and operation skills, and give a quick ROI. And as grid storage is added, an existing wind farm can increase in value to the grid.
Regarding 8) Using fossil fuels to build replacements
This one is so very, very stupid. So what if the first generations of wind turbines are made using fossil fuels? ERoEI for modern wind turbines are better than coal plants, and combined with the accelerating competition among grid storage technologies, will be handed an even better ERoEI from the grid’s improved ability to use the energy.
I’ve ignored the aesthetic complaints. Nothing wind turbines provide is any worse than power line cuts, highways, tens of thousands of old service station tanks, fracking fields, oil sands extraction, open pit mines, and modern mass agriculture for wildlife.
December 7, 2020 at 10:28 pm
What about being speared thru the head by shattering wind turbine blades! Be careful out there!
December 10, 2020 at 11:36 pm
https://climatecrocks.com/2020/12/06/and-you-thought-wind-turbine-cancer-was-bad/comment-page-1/#comment-118042
This is why no one bothers answering the troll’s tired strawpeople, conspiracy theories, no true Scotspeople and other lies.
An incomplete list of the list’s list:
outright lies 1
absurd exaggerations 1, 2, 5
crocodile tears 2
mote and beam fallacy 1, 2, 3,
cherry picking 2, 3, 5*, 6,
outright lies 2
misattribution fallacy, hostile attribution error (aka narcissistic paranoia) 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7,
outright lies 3
RUFKM? fallacy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
outright lies 7
outright lies 8
“big problems?” 1, 3, 4!, 5!…
and the throning glory (the flush the porcelain throne asap fallacy):
failure to correctly calculate the lack of unicorn power to build things in a world dominated by fossil fuels if we’re not permitted to use fossil fuels to build things and the rulers have specifically outlawed the breeding of unicorns. (And prevented the building of wind and solar power.) AKA weaponized projective identification.
*I worked at a camp built on an old coal mine, complete with acid pits hidden in the back, along the hiking trails. A pair of smokestacks called the Mabunga Snakes were the dominating feature of the view, blinking all night AND spewing pollution, from other mines, high into the strong winds tall turbines are there to infinitely more benignly reach.