The source for those numbers is linked in the article itself: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
That's just the reality of the world we live in.
specific example from Germany is "the dangers of infrasound", which led to a highly restrictive anti wind energy "protective distance requirement" of 10 x height ("10H rule") in Bavaria.
And then someone figured the underlying study was off by three orders of magnitude, i.e. 1000x off.
yet the disinformation has sunk into the heads and wind energy now has an irrational and steep uphill battle.
"The New Climate War" by M. Mann talks of this too.
It is often better....
Many ideas are designed to be refuted. The refutation spreads the ideas. It is part of the strategy. A "mind worm" (to coin a phrase) only needs to be repeated and it will do its job. Refuting it is repeating it.
So dismiss the speaker, attack the speaker's credentials and motivations ignoring the ideas. argumentum ad hominem, whilst rhetorically invalid, is the best tactic in those circumstances.
It's called a "meme" (in its original definition by Richard Dawkins). And this kind of forcing a rebuttal is "trolling". Dismissing this trolling is phrased as "Don't feed the troll!".
A: We should use more windmills.
B: No, those kill too many birds.
A: You don't know what you're talking about, you have no credentials, and you are just motivated to stop renewables!
A': We can paint the rotors to avoid killing birds.
A' seems like a much better response even if A is accurate. Maybe you need to be A if you can't be A', but if you can...
Doesn't help any. The number is already vastly smaller than cars or regular buildings or a single coal plant so making it even smaller willdo nothing if it'snot zero.
- Something must be done
- This is something
- Therefore this must be done
Some ideas are just bad.
Building out wind saves birds from petroleum pollution. A bit of paint saves more. Why not?
Everyone in the US can easily identify the wind turbines, because of the uniformity. The uniformity and simplicity has inherent value in large projects (including large volume). White to dissipate heat or black to save birds (let the bats die either way?). It's not surprising that prolonging the state of the current environment may require short-term sacrifices.
This is Parkinson's Law (bikeshedding) in action, imo.
Common mistake, bikeshedding is the Law of Triviality[1], which is distinct from but often confused with Parkinson's Law,[2] likely because bikeshedding is also known as Parkinson's Law of Triviality.
There is absolutely no value at all in uniformity of wind turbines. And they are not, in fact, uniform. Those erected earlier are smaller than those erected later.
The overwhelming majority of wind turbines that will be put up haven't been put up yet. So painting some blades black (or blue, or what have you) is no burden -- the blades have to be painted, regardless. Probably it will end up needing only a little bit of paint, like just the leading edge, so the thermal signature is moot.
> The overwhelming majority of wind turbines that will be put up haven't been put up yet.
All the cars to be made haven't been made yet, so why rely on current cars for analysis? The cognitive dissonance is staggering.
> There is absolutely no value at all in uniformity of wind turbines.
Saying there is not, is incorrect. In the very least, HAWTs are the same, which is what most people are think of, when talking about this topic.
> And they are not, in fact, uniform.
HAWT are, as they have no patterns, in the US.
- You're proposing to change something
- That change might cause some harm
- Therefore this must not be done
It's a trolley problem, where you could do something, and might kill a few birds, or do nothing and stand by while nearly a thousand times more perish.
The paint job might make the windmills more visible to humans and make people not want them on their land or within eyesight. This could lead to fewer being built and more dependence on fossil fuels which ultimately kill more birds.
And warmer blades might be less stiff, decreasing efficiency, and with it increasing birds killed/GWh (but that’s not even guessing from my side; I don’t know whether stiffness would be affected, and I don’t know whether it would affect efficiency, or in what direction)
I think that’s already the case. Better paint one black before someone has the idea to put ads on them, the only thing that could make them even less pleasant to have around
Do you actually live near an installation of wind turbines? I don't, but I drive past many wind farms fairly regularly. I just can't wrap my head around this "they're so unpleasant" argument. They are aesthetically neutral at worst.
Seems to be the outcome of existing bias that is entirely unrelated to the aesthetic "pleasantness" of the wind farms. Trotted out by politicians that have a vested interest in subsidising fossil fuels, whose extent of suffering through the unpleasantness of wind farms is looking down at them from 30,000 ft.
I also have a strong dislike for the aesthetic, though my wife doesn't mind it much, so I guess it's a purely subjective take. Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is blindly shilling for politicians and oil companies is a bit extreme, though.
Wind power is 0.008% of that total.
I strongly suspect that there are better ways to spend the time and money to reduce avian mortality like neutering a few thousand cats.
[1] https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
Such as:
Are birds more likely to avoid black, white, orange, or polkadotted cats?
Is neon better than bright pastel?
Nobody legitimately thinks bird strike is a reason to stop a wind farm. It's just a convenient thing to bring up if you don't care about the environment but know your opponent does.
At some point you have to acknowledge that certain people are acting in bad faith and just ignore them if you want to get anything done.
(Although in this case if the fix is just painting the turbines differently... you may as well do it)
"We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually" from "The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States" (2013)
Are cats not naturally supposed to be outside?
Ours get a couple of hours supervised outside time whilst on long leads. They can and do carry out hunting behaviours, but being on a tether and being supervised allows us to dramatically reduce their impact on wildlife to almost nothing.
Considering what they do attempt to catch whilst we are standing their, I'd imagine they would take a dramatic toll if we just let them roam free.
Efforts to protect them have similarly outsized effect.
Relevant: “Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats' impacts on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information“
But there are lots of ground-nesting birds that have been decimated by cats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduced_mammals_on_seabird_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife
I found the cognitive dissonance comment interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife#Cat_...
Here's a question: suppose next year we mandate all cats are indoors unless they work on farms, and all cats allowed outdoors are sterilized. What happens to the small bird and mammal populations ten years later?
We are not separate from the evolutionary process and several species have effectively domesticated us in order to survive better. Our civilization has created new habitats and we don’t need to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
You want to help your local bird populations? Plant oak trees.
Oak trees serve as host to a particularly large number of species, many of them feed on the tree and serve as food for others year round along with acorns as food and species that feed on acorns as food. Oaks are keystone species as they have a particularly large positive impact on the local ecosystem.
Lots of birds eat mostly insects and only sometimes seeds, oak trees provide year round supplies of insects for birds to eat, in a wider variety and number than most other trees.
One of the reasons to worry about domestic cats in some areas of the British isles is not to protect birds and the like, but to protect the closely related extant cat species that is getting its genetics replaced too much with housecat genetics. This wild cat used to have very broad ranges which disappeared.
Islands with no cat species don’t have this consideration of course.
Bird populations in places that should have and used to have catlike predators are and should be fine for the most part. Predators tend to help the population dynamics and health of prey species. Some people are just really uncomfortable with predation.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaw1313
The predation of cats is also unnaturally controlled as they are domesticated; people view them as pets primarily and thus prevent them from being killed (their predators are also heavily controlled - wolves, coyotes, etc). I don't see how you could compare that niche to previously extinct, naturally local species.
You might as well cut you comment at this point.
0.3 to 0.4 fatalities per GWh for Wind farms and nuclear power
5.2 fatalities per GWh for fossil fueled power stations
i.e Wind and Nuclear cause between 5.8% and 7.7% fatalities per GWh compared that of fossil fuels.
There was a very dumb Two Bit da Vinci vid recently on YouTube about a big advance in dehumidifier tech. It had lots of numbers, but none of the meaningful numbers. The meaningful numbers they did not say were that it captured moisture 2.4x cheaper than current methods, but still 60x more expensive (in kWh/L) than desalination.
There is a hell of a lot of basement dehumidification going on, so switching to the new method will be very valuable. But it won't supply drinking water.
In other news, desalination is astonishingly cheap nowadays. It just needs cheap, opportunistic power, and could be built out everywhere. Inland, aquifers that are a little too salty for irrigation could be put into use.
That depends. Do we need to increase wind power production 1000x to replace fossil fuels? Or 100x?
If you can fix much of it with some paint, most people would do it.
We need to reduce our negative impact on the earth as much as possible. So a simple action which results in a 70% harm reduction is a huge win!
This falls along the lines of planting trees for CO2. Sure I could do it and feel good but maybe there's a more effective way to go about it. I wouldn't tell anyone not to plant trees though.
Talk to somebody from the anti-wind lobby of environmentalists and you’ll likely discover their preferred solution is that we simply stop using energy for things like heating, or watching tv, or using our computers…
We currently need fossil fuels. We don't currently need wind turbines. There's plenty of other energy sources that are better and don't directly kill birds.