Climate Change in Australia (Part 1)

Im starting a new thread on this, and Im hoping we can keep this about what is happening in Australia on a scientific level, and more importantly a political and social level.

Its not about Global Warming, or mans hand in it, its about the undeniable fact, that for what ever reason, the climate is changing.

I will kick things off

You may remember in 2013, that Abbott government de-funded the Climate Council which was made up of Australia’s best climate scientists, economists and energy experts, because they could not justify the 1.5ml a year it took to run it, well they have just spent $4m on getting Bjorn Lomborg a world known climate skeptic to set up a “consensus center” now before you all go, well maybe they are looking to get a bipartisan argument, so getting someone like him might be a good thing, it needs to be known that this dispicable person only has a degree in political science and has 19 countries he has published him, file charges for scientific dishonesty.

and we gave this ■■■■ 4 mil.

to work in WA, probably on a site that’s filed for indigenous community closure.

thoughts?

And just on the devaluing of house prices, my folks house value went down the tube when the east link extension went in, they are now 300 meters from the freeway of 1.5 million cars and trucks a day and the old man is dieing of respitory disease, so they can’t move cost the house is worth ■■■■, and they had no say. Maybe they can complain so they shut the freeway down?

Wind turbines, Tone is offering half a mill to anyone who can prove him right.

I can show you the people who are ill, and it has all happened since the massive farking turbine was built 517 metres from their home. Their Doctor says it is the turbine; the Accoustic Engineer says the noise is way above industrial standards and all the poor folk want is for it all to go away.

Their only asset is their home, and now it is devalued and they have no alternatives.

So fark Tone, fark the wind industry and fark all you tossers who just want to ridicule poor folk who are suffering.

Yes if they are making people sick there should be guidelines as to where they can be in relation to residences. World over people are trying to find the link because the damage is if there any done by the the inaudible noise.

However, you show me 5 people made ill by them and I will show you several thousand who are ill from the effects of fracking and its contaminating their water supply.

That is the far bigger problem, right now, and government are handing out permits for those like confetti.

Then there is the whole debate on the health effects on people living near coal fire power stations.

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Wind turbines, Tone is offering half a mill to anyone who can prove him right.

I can show you the people who are ill, and it has all happened since the massive farking turbine was built 517 metres from their home. Their Doctor says it is the turbine; the Accoustic Engineer says the noise is way above industrial standards and all the poor folk want is for it all to go away.

Their only asset is their home, and now it is devalued and they have no alternatives.

So fark Tone, fark the wind industry and fark all you tossers who just want to ridicule poor folk who are suffering.

not a lot of union members currently employed in wind farming?

Wind turbines, Tone is offering half a mill to anyone who can prove him right.

I can show you the people who are ill, and it has all happened since the massive farking turbine was built 517 metres from their home. Their Doctor says it is the turbine; the Accoustic Engineer says the noise is way above industrial standards and all the poor folk want is for it all to go away.

Their only asset is their home, and now it is devalued and they have no alternatives.

So fark Tone, fark the wind industry and fark all you tossers who just want to ridicule poor folk who are suffering.


An actual real doctor is claiming something completely unproven to cause any form of illness whatsoever is the cause of their serious illness?
It will be interesting to read this research paper documenting this, when it’s published & peer reviewed.
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I like it when people call the the wind power industry 'Big Wind'
Or the lobby group opposed to Big Wind - Farmers Against Rotating Turbines

I like it when people call the the wind power industry ‘Big Wind’

Wind turbines, Tone is offering half a mill to anyone who can prove him right.

I can show you the people who are ill, and it has all happened since the massive farking turbine was built 517 metres from their home. Their Doctor says it is the turbine; the Accoustic Engineer says the noise is way above industrial standards and all the poor folk want is for it all to go away.

Their only asset is their home, and now it is devalued and they have no alternatives.

So fark Tone, fark the wind industry and fark all you tossers who just want to ridicule poor folk who are suffering.

A friend lives in an area set for turbines, it has utterly split the community between those who can get the turbines on their property and the ensuring subsidies they receive and those who cannot and whose land will substantially devalue due to this. The whole thing is set up as a massive rort with very limited positive impacts to the community and not really providing a decent amount of electrical supply.

Wind turbines, Tone is offering half a mill to anyone who can prove him right.

I can show you the people who are ill, and it has all happened since the massive farking turbine was built 517 metres from their home. Their Doctor says it is the turbine; the Accoustic Engineer says the noise is way above industrial standards and all the poor folk want is for it all to go away.

Their only asset is their home, and now it is devalued and they have no alternatives.

So fark Tone, fark the wind industry and fark all you tossers who just want to ridicule poor folk who are suffering.

1 Like
Wind turbines, Tone is offering half a mill to anyone who can prove him right.

What, that they make people sick? This ■■■■ has been doing the rounds for years and study after study has come up with jack all. How coincidental. Politician with heavy connections to coal is worried that a competitor with better tech is going to make people sick. Fark off.

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Much more likely to be the sub-audio low freq component messing with peoples inner ear I would think - not the high freq stuff? #ignorant

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If a wind farm is exceeding industrial noise standards, it's a big problem and badly needs to be fixed, but on the plus side it should be easily provable. Industrial and background noise is a well-known problem in a range of industries, and there are established means of redress. A windfarm that exceeds industrial noise limits should be shut down until it can operate legally, just like any other industry.

But as for the broader panic and claims about about ‘wind farm syndrome’ where there’s all these poorly documented claims of all manner of bizarre illnesses from deafness to chronic fatigue to cattle miscarriages being caused by wind farms/low frequency infrasound/whatever, well, that’s been pretty thoroughly disproven again and again and again. I don’t have the exact numbers at my fingers, but I do know that

  • the great majority of claims of disorders caused by wind farms have no proposed physiological mechanism of action, much less a scientifically tested and proved one
  • statistically, reports of windfarm syndrome seem to be a trailing indicator, but they don’t trail the building of windfarms, they trail the campaigning of anti-windfarm activists
  • reports of windfarm syndrome are pretty much unknown among non-english speaking people - especially those into whose language anti-windfarm material has not yet been translated.
  • Windfarm syndrome is basically unknown in those people who are getting paid to have windfarms on their property.
  • sufferers of Windfarm Syndrome have been interviewed and tested, and have claimed to detect disturbing/sickening infrasound/low-frequency vibration from windfarms even when the turbines have been deactivated for maintenence.
  • The effects of Windfarm Syndrome have never been associated with any other source of low-frequency sound or air vibration, and nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily explain what is so special about windfarms that they cause it while other sound sources don’t
  • In Australia especially, reports of windfarm syndrome track the activities of the Waubra Foundation, a supposedly ‘grass-roots’ anti-windfarm campaign group that actually used the same PO box address as a fossil fuel lobby group until they got caught out a couple of years ago and changed it in a hurry.

There’s been inquiry after investigation after report about this, by all sorts of different people. They consistently find that there is no evidence linking windfarms to any health effects at all, but of course some people see this as the Big Wind Conspiracy At Work Covering Up The Truth. Pfft. From everything I’ve read, a more likely explanation that better fits the evidence, is that people are worrying themselves sick about windfarms, with the assistance of scaremongering rubbish from the fossil fuel lobby and other anti-windfarm activists. People who don’t worry, either because they’ve done their own research prior to allowing turbines on their land, or because they haven’t yet been exposed to (or have ignored) the more hysterical anti-windfarm material out there, don’t get sick. Stress-related illness is a very real thing. Psychosomatic illness is a very real thing. Industrial-noise related hearing problems etc, yeah, they’re very real too. Windfarm-related illness … is probably not.

Yep HM, continue to believe what is written in the media…

The research is inconclusive, even the NHMRC say that more research is needed, and it must be independent as most done is funded by either side with their vested interests.

The facts are that people are becoming sick once turbines are built near them. The way you and others ridicule them, call them liars, allege they are just after money and have a closed mind is contemptible. I don’t know why, and I don’t really care if it is wind turbine or voodoo illness, but it is real, I have seen it.

I have no vested interest other than caring about the wellbeing of those affected, and calling out those like you who just want to write people off.

there's no scientific consensus?
The real hard scientific work just has not been done. and it is hard, as it involves so many unknowns and crosses over medicine and engineering and probably many other things. The best research into infra-sound was done by the Soviets apparently as they were trying to develop a weapon and the Yanks probably did it as well but it is still a big secret.

When I was Mayor, we tried to get our local University to do a research project into actually measuring the sounds and vibrations. One difficulty with this was that there were no instruments available that could actually measure the noise, so they would have to develop and build them.

Instead of this being a public health question, it becomes this defence of renewable energy and anyone like me is labelled a coal-lover or a climate change sceptic. The issue divides communities and not actually always over money, but over rights. The Wind Industry are clever (like the Miners) and use this division to further their case.

I am not actually asking you guys to believe that Windfarm Syndrome exists, because I am unsure, but to have a little compassion for people like the old couple I know in rural Victoria who live 517 metres from a 150 meter wind turbine, have no options to leave and no-one to fight for them. They really don’t like anyone anymore and trust no-one, except their Doctor. They just want their lives back, and the Windfarm Company should just buy their property and let them get on with life.

I find that really, really, really hard to believe. Sound has been around for a while. Vibrations have been around for a while. Tools to measure them have been around a while. There are seismographs (which record in the sub-100Hz range) which have been running for a century, measuring for earthquakes.

Low frequency noise travels easier than high freq through apertures. If we’re talking from two things basically in the open that’s not going to make much difference.

Recording sound (at whatever level) and filtering out all the noise, to just get the underlying, constant wind turbine sound is a piece of ■■■■ with today’s computers and software.

Are you sure you’re not getting your wires crossed? Are you sure you’re not being told “we can’t measure any appreciable sound/vibration from the generators”, rather than “we don’t have any tools to measure sound/vibration” ??

Like natural gas, can’t be polluting as it is natural. So is arsenic.

From The Economist

To see how bright the future of solar energy is, look to the developing world
Apr 16th 2016 |

THE sun is the world’s battery pack. Photosynthesis captured the energy that is burned in fossil fuels. The sun drives the wind and ocean currents. And in an hour and a quarter the amount of sunlight that threads through the clouds to the Earth’s surface could power all the world’s electricity, vehicles, boilers, furnaces and cooking stoves for a year.

Yet solar power produces less than 1% of the world’s commercial energy. For a long time it was dismissed as a luxury only the rich could afford; it spoke volumes that Germany, a place where the sun shines for less than five hours on an average day, used to lead the world in installed solar capacity. Now, however, solar is coming of age.

Solar power garnered $161 billion in new investment in 2015, more than natural gas and coal combined. A trend that began in northern Europe, where electricity demand is stagnant and clouds proliferate, is taking root in countries where power needs are growing fast and the sun shines brighter. For the first time last year, developing countries attracted more investment in renewable energy than rich ones. Poorer countries, from China to Chile, are increasingly getting their electricity from giant solar parks in arid places linked to their national grids. This year America hopes to triple the 3 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity it added in 2015; China, the new world leader, and India each plan to add about 100GW in the next four and six years respectively.

Lower costs help explain this extraordinary expansion. The price of solar panels, which are produced almost exclusively in China, has fallen by 80% in the past five years. A new business model is proving just as beneficial. Grid providers are offering long-term contracts to private firms to produce large amounts of solar energy, which in turn helps those firms secure cheap finance and cut prices. A recent tender in Mexico will generate electricity at a record low cost of $40 a megawatt hour—cheaper than natural gas or coal.

That is good news for almost everyone (oil firms may beg to differ). The industry is expanding in hotter climes mostly without lavish subsidies; China is an exception, but it plans to cut its feed-in tariffs in June. The sun provides power when it is needed most, during daylight hours when air-conditioning systems are running at full blast. And by reducing the need to import carbon-burning fossil fuels, solar power helps the planet as well as the balance of payments in such countries.

Flying closer to the sun
When industries sizzle like this, some caution is usually warranted. Bids to provide power may prove to be too ambitious. Two stricken renewable-energy providers, America’s SunEdison and Spain’s Abengoa, provide salutary lessons on the dangers of financial engineering and taking on too much debt in order to expand quickly.

Bottlenecks in energy infrastructure are another problem. Developing countries will need to invest more in building transmission lines to connect the solar power being generated in far-flung deserts with its users. Makers of solar panels should focus not just on slashing their cost but on improving the technology so that more of the sun’s energy is converted into electrical power. The intermittency of the sun will remain an issue. But if storage costs continue to decline, the possibility of combining batteries on land with energy from the giant battery pack in the sky could be unbeatable.

Correction: A previous version of this piece gave the cost of new energy in Mexico as $40 a megawatt per hour. This should read “$40 a megawatt hour”. A megawatt hour is equal to a megawatt of electricity used continuously for one hour. The error has been corrected

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21696935-see-how-bright-future-solar-energy-look-developing-world-new-sunbathersThe new sunbathers

Bill Shorten ‏@billshortenmp 2m2 minutes ago

LIVE on #Periscope: Visit to the All Energy Australia conference https://www.periscope.tv/w/aORONTIzNzEyMjV8MUx5eEJQWnJuYXBHTiX-FGVl4qikkTT8erY8v2sFBtBG-Udm4RE3ecCA957w

Global warming: World sweats over July breaking warmest month record, 2015 hottest year so far Updated about an hour ago

PHOTO: NOAA said many countries and the world’s oceans experienced heatwaves in July. (ABC News)
MAP: Australia
Australians may be surprised to hear July was the warmest month ever on record worldwide and 2015 has been so far the hottest year.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-21/global-warming-july-hottest-month-on-record-2015-hottest-year/6713686


Impossible. July was the middle of winter.

The impact of this has been rather graphic.

The wet season up north has almost gone 12 months long. There actually hasn’t been a dry season.

The fires in California all the northern summer have been catastrophic. And now we are finding bushfires in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia on the back of a dry winter here. Not a good sign for the summer to come.

There’s probably scientists who do the actual research and research assistants who churn the data and engineers who do the actual work on the formulae (ie the nuts and bolts) of the model/s.

the question im asking how did he actually get on the original panel and who else was in the panel…how did he get there in the first place.

anyone else care to share some light on makeups of groups people that do the modelling>

If a wind farm is exceeding industrial noise standards, it's a big problem and badly needs to be fixed, but on the plus side it should be easily provable. Industrial and background noise is a well-known problem in a range of industries, and there are established means of redress. A windfarm that exceeds industrial noise limits should be shut down until it can operate legally, just like any other industry.

But as for the broader panic and claims about about ‘wind farm syndrome’ where there’s all these poorly documented claims of all manner of bizarre illnesses from deafness to chronic fatigue to cattle miscarriages being caused by wind farms/low frequency infrasound/whatever, well, that’s been pretty thoroughly disproven again and again and again. I don’t have the exact numbers at my fingers, but I do know that

  • the great majority of claims of disorders caused by wind farms have no proposed physiological mechanism of action, much less a scientifically tested and proved one
  • statistically, reports of windfarm syndrome seem to be a trailing indicator, but they don’t trail the building of windfarms, they trail the campaigning of anti-windfarm activists
  • reports of windfarm syndrome are pretty much unknown among non-english speaking people - especially those into whose language anti-windfarm material has not yet been translated.
  • Windfarm syndrome is basically unknown in those people who are getting paid to have windfarms on their property.
  • sufferers of Windfarm Syndrome have been interviewed and tested, and have claimed to detect disturbing/sickening infrasound/low-frequency vibration from windfarms even when the turbines have been deactivated for maintenence.
  • The effects of Windfarm Syndrome have never been associated with any other source of low-frequency sound or air vibration, and nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily explain what is so special about windfarms that they cause it while other sound sources don’t
  • In Australia especially, reports of windfarm syndrome track the activities of the Waubra Foundation, a supposedly ‘grass-roots’ anti-windfarm campaign group that actually used the same PO box address as a fossil fuel lobby group until they got caught out a couple of years ago and changed it in a hurry.

There’s been inquiry after investigation after report about this, by all sorts of different people. They consistently find that there is no evidence linking windfarms to any health effects at all, but of course some people see this as the Big Wind Conspiracy At Work Covering Up The Truth. Pfft. From everything I’ve read, a more likely explanation that better fits the evidence, is that people are worrying themselves sick about windfarms, with the assistance of scaremongering rubbish from the fossil fuel lobby and other anti-windfarm activists. People who don’t worry, either because they’ve done their own research prior to allowing turbines on their land, or because they haven’t yet been exposed to (or have ignored) the more hysterical anti-windfarm material out there, don’t get sick. Stress-related illness is a very real thing. Psychosomatic illness is a very real thing. Industrial-noise related hearing problems etc, yeah, they’re very real too. Windfarm-related illness … is probably not.

Yep HM, continue to believe what is written in the media…

The research is inconclusive, even the NHMRC say that more research is needed, and it must be independent as most done is funded by either side with their vested interests.

The facts are that people are becoming sick once turbines are built near them. The way you and others ridicule them, call them liars, allege they are just after money and have a closed mind is contemptible. I don’t know why, and I don’t really care if it is wind turbine or voodoo illness, but it is real, I have seen it.

I have no vested interest other than caring about the wellbeing of those affected, and calling out those like you who just want to write people off.

there's no scientific consensus?

The real hard scientific work just has not been done. and it is hard, as it involves so many unknowns and crosses over medicine and engineering and probably many other things. The best research into infra-sound was done by the Soviets apparently as they were trying to develop a weapon and the Yanks probably did it as well but it is still a big secret.

When I was Mayor, we tried to get our local University to do a research project into actually measuring the sounds and vibrations. One difficulty with this was that there were no instruments available that could actually measure the noise, so they would have to develop and build them.

Instead of this being a public health question, it becomes this defence of renewable energy and anyone like me is labelled a coal-lover or a climate change sceptic. The issue divides communities and not actually always over money, but over rights. The Wind Industry are clever (like the Miners) and use this division to further their case.

I am not actually asking you guys to believe that Windfarm Syndrome exists, because I am unsure, but to have a little compassion for people like the old couple I know in rural Victoria who live 517 metres from a 150 meter wind turbine, have no options to leave and no-one to fight for them. They really don’t like anyone anymore and trust no-one, except their Doctor. They just want their lives back, and the Windfarm Company should just buy their property and let them get on with life.

we'll have to agree to disagree but respect for keeping the discussion rational and unemotive

Ok, i have just checked, the acceptable level, or the current standard if you will of noise made by a wind turbine at a distance of 500 meters is 40db.

do you have a decibel-o-meter? go round and check it, if its above that you have grounds to get that shut down immediately. Now im not saying its only the noise that could be causing these peoples sickness, but its a start.