Windy Promises

Here's an interesting item from Britain. It seems that the windy promises of low-cost wind energy are not exactly panning out. In fact, the rush to build wind farms is not working out very well at all.

Blowing in the wind: Millions wasted on wind farms without a breeze

For anyone building a wind farm, it might seem an unnecessary piece of advice - put it somewhere windy.

Astonishingly, however, many turbines are going up on sites which are simply not breezy enough, energy consultants have claimed.

They say farms are being built in the "wrong places" because of the pressure to hit Government targets in the race to produce green energy.

But the "badly sited and under performing" turbines are not reliable enough to keep the nation's television sets, toasters and lights switched on.

Michael Jefferson, an independent engineering consultant and former economist for Shell, said the industry often exaggerated the amount of energy each farm would supply.

New sites are assessed on the basis of average wind speeds over a year - a measure called the "load factor".

The industry recommends an average load factor of 30 per cent for a turbine to operate efficiently.

Yet although the load factor can be as high as 45 per cent in parts of Scotland and Wales, some farms achieve less than 20 per cent, he said.

Only five wind farms in the east of England achieve load factors of 30 per cent or more: "That's just five out of 25," he said.

"We should be putting our money where the wind is and that is quite often not where the development pressure is.

"Even in a high average-wind-speed area you really have to be absolutely precise as to where you site them.

But that is not the total soy. It actually gets worse:

"When you have a very large number of wind farms on the grid and that happens, you are talking about massive power swings on the system."

To cope with the variation in wind energy over a normal day, gas and coal generators would need to be turned on and off continually.

"They are not designed for that, and the net effect is to put them under mechanical strain and also increase their carbon dioxide," said Mr Oswald.

So, wind power is actually increasing the amount of global warming gasses in the atmosphere. Ahem, I told you there was a problem. This is not even taking into account the premature failures in the wind turbines that have been cropping up.

Look, there are really a lot of issues that require serious discussion. I'd like to see the world stop burning oil for fuel, personally. But a lot - a real lot - of the "solutions" being touted, or actually being rammed down the throat of people the world over, are not solutions at all. They are distractions, sideshows, misconceptions or outright frauds. They may, in fact, do much more harm than good. How many millions have already been wasted on feel-good solutions? How many more will be wasted in the future?

Yankee Doom

In a story fraught with mythological doom, the New York Times waxes poetic on the story of the squirrel at the end of creation.

But more significant, perhaps, was the pesky and distracting squirrel that scampered up and down the right-field foul pole during the game and that, according to Norse mythology, just might have foretold that the Yankees will not prevail over the Red Sox this season.

Believe it or not, the squirrel’s actions closely resembled those of Ratatosk, or “gnawing tooth,” a squirrel in Norse mythology that climbed up and down a tree that represented the world. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic scholar and poet, recorded the story in his 13th-century work “Prose Edda.”

As the story goes, Ratatosk carried insults as it traveled to opposite ends of the tree, fueling a rivalry between the evil dragon residing at the bottom of the tree and the eagle perched at the top.

“Oh, that’s perfect,” said Roberta Frank, a professor of Old Norse and Old English at Yale University, when told of the squirrel’s antics at the stadium.

Frank was born in the Bronx and is a Yankees fan. She said in a telephone interview yesterday that in the Bronx version of this myth, the Yankees would probably represent the eagle and the rival Red Sox would represent the dragon. The Yankees, after all, are the home team this week, more or less making them the good guys. And if there were a sports team identified with an eagle, it has to be the Yankees, who have begun any number of postseason games with a visit from Challenger, the bald eagle who swoops in from center field.

With all due respect to Dr. Frank, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard, being noted scholars of Norse mythology ourselves, know that old Snorri Sturluson got his name because he always - every time - fell asleep during the telling of the myths. When the epics were told in the great hall, old Snorri would be passed out with a flagon of mead in the corner. Hence, he only heard part of any one epic poem. When it came time to write the epics down, Snorri would piece together the various parts he remembered into a single tale.

Ratatosk was actually a beaver and he swam back and forth between the shores of his pond delivering love letters between the eagle and the dragon. (Essentially, Ratatosk functioned as a primitive internet.) As the legend goes (minus Snorri's mead-induced revisions) the Eagle (named Lola) and the dragon (named Herman) are destined to finally meet and consummate their love. Whereupon the world will be annihilated when Lola finds out that Herman is not actually a Rhodes Scholar who drives a Maserati and Herman finds out that Lola is not a former beauty queen and heiress.

Take Out Deer

A deer decided that she had a craving for Chinese food. So she visited the Canton restaurant in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada to get a big dish of beef chow mein.

A deer that found itself in a downtown restaurant was released back into the wild Thursday.

The young female deer crashed in the Canton Restaurant Wednesday morning and sustained several lacerations to her head and limbs.

The animal received medical treatment and was placed in critical care at the Wild at Heart Wildlife Refuge Centre.

"She did very well for her first night, and recovered very nicely," said Dr. Rod Jouppi.

(One wonders how critical the injuries were if she was released the very next day.) The Canton restaurant should probably look into installing a deer takeout window though - unless they want the deer to visit every hour or so when they get hungry again.

“If We Pull This Off, We’ll Eat Like Kings”

The post title is the punchline from one of the all-time best Far Side cartoons. The cartoon shows two spiders who have constructed a giant web across the bottom of a playground slide. What would you do if you walked into such a giant web in the real world? Why not ask folks down in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas? Because they have a web big enough to catch a human strung along a hiking trail.

Entomologists are debating the origins of a massive spider web, which runs more than 180 metres and covers several trees and shrubs, found in Texas.

Officials at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near Willis Point, find the web both amazing and somewhat creepy.

"At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland," park superintendent Donna Garde said. "Now it's filled with so many mosquitoes that it's turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs."

Experts are debating whether the web is the work of social cobweb spiders working together, or a mass dispersal where the arachnids spin webs to move away from one another.

Or it could be one spider the size of a Volkswagen. It is Texas, after all. (That's the theory we're running with here in the Crabitat.) And we all know it's quite possible - we've seen it in the movies.

UPDATE: The New York Times has picked up the story.

Mike Quinn, the state biologist who distributed the online photos, and who runs a Web site about Texas invertebrates, plans to drive to the park from Central Texas on Friday in an effort to get some answers by collecting samples.

Record-breaking rains that flooded Texas earlier this summer inspired outbreaks of crickets and “webworms,” the caterpillar larvae of the white moth. Mr. Quinn said the rains might have something to do with the web, too.

“You’d have to get a lot of spiders together and feed them a whole lot of food to make a web that big,” he said.

Whatever caused the vast web, the sight of it has inspired both awe and revulsion.

“It’s beautiful,” said the park’s superintendent, Donna Garde.

Freddie Gowin disagrees. It was Mr. Gowin, a maintenance worker at the park, who discovered the web this month when, taking advantage of some of the first dry weather, he mowed the area around the nature trail.

“I don’t think there’s anything pretty about it,” he said, though “it’s certainly unusual.”

When Mr. Gowin drives the power mower through the area, webbing wraps across his bare face, causing him to slap at spiders, real or imagined, crawling on his skin.

Don't slow down, Mr. Gowin, don't slow down.

Mount Soledad

My wife and I made it a point to visit the Mount Soledad Veteran's Memorial while we were out in San Diego earlier this week. The memorial itself had been the target of a relentless lawsuit that was finally resolved by the transfer of the memorial to the Federal government. Unfortunately, another suit was promptly filed by the ACLU, this time against the Department of Defense. So it isn't over yet.

The park the memorial is in provides a fantastic view of the San Diego area. It is a beautiful location. The memorial itself has a series of concentric walls where individual, engraved black granite plaques are displayed. There is space for about 3,200 plaques and about 2,100 are already displayed there. My wife and I were fortunate enough to run into one of the trustees of the memorial while we were up there. Mac is a veteran of the Second World War and served aboard the USS Ajax (AR-6).

Mac and his wife, Nona, talked about the memorial, the lawsuit and a constant running battle with defacement of the monument by vandals. Whether the vandalism is politically motivated or just being done by morons, Mac couldn't say. Mac showed me his plaque on one of the walls. My wife and I also helped Mac take down and fold the flag that flies at the memorial.

One of the "solutions" to the cross controversy that the ACLU is proposing is to sell the land the cross sits on to the highest bidder. One woman we spoke to feared that the property, with its magnificent view, would be snapped up for a home at an obscene price that nobody (certainly not the Memorial Association, at any rate) could match - thereby eliminating public access to that view. One has to wonder if that is not the motivation of at least some of the opponents of the cross.

A Nonexistent Consensus

This is a fascinating little revelation, isn't it? A widely cited study from 2004 performed by history professor Naomi Oreskes found a widespread consensus in published papers about global warming. The study has been updated, Using the exact same methodology and the exact same database by medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte. Guess what? No consensus - not even a simple majority of published scientists buy into the "consensus" about global warming. 

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category  (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis.  This is no "consensus."

The figures are important. There is still a very large block of scientists who are not AGW doomsayers. This study tends to strongly undermine the more strident rhetoric coming from the true believers. Because if they do not really have a consensus, they really have no credibility for driving their agenda forward.

I have documented how many of the hysterical "do something" projects that supposedly will mitigate human contributions to global warming are either worthless, fraudulent or actually will cause more damage to the planet. But those projects are still being relentlessly pushed by the true believers. Damn the orangutans, (Bio)fuel speed ahead.

Results like this study show that there is a lot more research needed before we follow Gore and his sycophants in their lemming-like rush over the cliff of economic - and ecological - ruin.

Puffin Away

Here's a rather odd story. A project has been underway since the 1970s to bring puffins back to Maine. The birds were once hunted regularly and puffins disappeared sometime around the turn of the 20th century. But there are now colonies reestablished on several islands in northern Maine.

Puffins, which resemble half-pint penguins except that they can fly, were heavily hunted along the Maine coast for their meat and feathers, and by 1901 only one pair remained, researchers said.

They remained plentiful elsewhere, however, and Kress set out three decades ago to bring them back to Maine's islands, on the southern end of their range around the North Atlantic.

In 1973, with backing from the National Audubon Society and help from the Canadian Wildlife Service, Kress began transplanting 2-week-old puffin chicks from Great Island off Newfoundland, 1,000 miles to the northeast.

These days there are 90 nesting pairs on Eastern Egg, among more than 700 nesting pairs on four Maine islands, Kress said.

Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless, seven-acre island, is a breeding ground for 6,000 surface-nesting birds: puffins, guillemots, laughing gulls, eider ducks, Leach's storm petrels, and three species of terns.

Each summer, biologists move onto the island to oversee the project and to protect the seabirds. Two supervisors spend the whole summer on the rocky outpost, joined by rotating shifts of interns and volunteers.

A human presence is necessary to scare away predators such as great black-backed gulls and herring gulls. The large gulls — black backs have a 5 1/2-foot wingspan — rob nests and eat chicks. Earlier this summer, when five days of fog kept the volunteers away from Seal Island, another puffin nesting spot, the gulls destroyed eggs laid by 2,000 pairs of terns, Kress said.

What does not make sense here is the claim that the human presence is vital to keeping the puffins in Maine. One presumes humans were not protecting the puffins since the dawn of time, so how exactly did they survive? Don't get me wrong here, I think its a good project and it obviously is getting real results if there are 700 nesting pairs. But it seems odd that the project is interfering in the functioning of a natural ecosystem in the way they are, doesn't it? Obviously, puffins are very cute and therefore popular. But isn't being overly puffin-centric skewing the rest of the ecosystem? Just asking.

(Side note: My wife and I have placed bluebird boxes out in our yard for years now and they usually have nesting pairs every year, so we have a history of trying to save species ourselves. But we also tend to let the bluebirds alone. They are fun and interesting to watch, but they kind of have to survive on their own, don't they?)

Wait

Michael Totten has an op-ed up over at the New York Daily News that describes what he saw while he was in Iraq. As usual, Totten describes the situation in Iraq honestly - the good and the bad. And he counsels the hardest thing in the political world: patience.

While American politicians bicker among themselves from eight time zones away about whether the surge led by Gen. David Petraeus is working or not, I returned to Iraq to see for myself.

This trip - from which I returned this month - was my fourth reporting stint in the country since the conflict began. And this time, what I saw was overwhelming, undeniable and, like it or not, complicated: In some places, the surge is working remarkably well. In others, it is not. And the only way we will know for sure whether the tide can be turned is to continue the policy and wait.

I know that's not what many Americans and politicians want to hear, but it's the truth.

On my first stop, I embedded with the 82nd Airborne Division in the Graya'at area of northern Baghdad. There, the soldiers live and work in the city 24 hours a day. Their sector has been so thoroughly cleared of insurgents that they haven't suffered a single casualty this year. I walked the streets without fear and met dozens of genuinely friendly and supportive Iraqi civilians, who greeted the soldiers like friends.

The hitch is that Moqtada al-Sadr's radical Shia Mahdi Army has infiltrated the Iraqi Army unit that shares the outpost. American soldiers are training them while their comrades kill American soldiers elsewhere in the country.

The frank reporting - warts and all - are Totten's hallmark. While there is plenty to be worried about, there are also plenty of hopeful signs. And the only rational course is to give General Petraeus the time he needs to sort out what the end result will be. The alternative, withdrawal, a genocidal bloodbath and a catastrophic hit on national security for the United States is unacceptable.

Losing Vietnam

Robert Tracinski, the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIA Daily, has a thought-provoking piece up over at Real Clear Politics. He argues, pretty convincingly, that the left is rapidly losing control of the Vietnam war. As odd as that sounds, it appears that their control over the narrative of Vietnam is slipping away from them. That is the real danger in President Bush suddenly seizing on the Vietnam war analogy last week. The left has been deftly flanked.

In a speech last week, President Bush surprised everyone by citing Vietnam as an analogy to Iraq. Just as we paid a "price in American credibility" for our abandonment of Vietnam, he argued, so we will suffer an even worse blow to the credibility of American threats and American friendship if we retreat from Iraq.

The New York Times, borrowing "military parlance," described this as Bush's attempt at "preparing the battlefield–in this case for the series of reports and hearings scheduled on Capitol Hill next month." The military terminology is appropriate, since this war will not be won or lost only on the battlefield in Iraq; it will be won or lost in the political battles that will be fought in Washington, DC. And Bush's invocation of Vietnam may turn out to be a brilliant rhetorical flanking maneuver. In one stroke, he has unexpectedly turned the political battle over withdrawal from Iraq into the last battle of the Vietnam War. The effect on the right has been electrifying. One conservative newspaper, the New York Sun, has even taken the step–inconceivable a year ago–of dedicating a page of its website to parallels between Iraq and Vietnam.

This certainly has caught the left by surprise, since the history of the Vietnam War is territory they thought they owned and controlled, which is why they have attempted to fit every conflict since 1975 into the Vietnam template. An editorial cartoon published early during the invasion of Iraq aptly depicted the Washington press corps as unruly children in the backseat of the family car, pestering the driver with the question, "Is it Vietnam yet? Is it Vietnam yet?" They assumed that if Iraq was Vietnam–if it fit into their Vietnam story line about dishonest leaders starting a war of imperialist aggression that was doomed by incompetent leadership and tainted by American "war crimes"–then it was guaranteed to be a humiliating defeat for their political adversaries.

Yet while the left complacently trotted out its same old Vietnam story line, a few historians have been busy revising and correcting the conventional history of the war. The leading work of this school is Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, by Mark Moyar. What makes Moyar's argument interesting is that he had access to facts that the conventional history of Vietnam, written in the 1970s and 1980s, could not have taken into account: the archives in Hanoi and Moscow, which reveal what our enemies regarded as our victories, our weaknesses, and our worst mistakes.

The speech by Bush put the left in a bizarre position. After trying to pain Iraq as another Vietnam since before the invasion of Iraq even started, the left had to start arguing that Iraq was not like Vietnam. John Kerry, Mr. "Jenjis" Kahn himself, even denied the genocide in Cambodia. (That actually occurred before Bush's speech - but made the left look very bad indeed.) Tracinski points out that the corrections now coming out about the real story in Vietnam are undermining the entire narrative the left has foisted on the world for decades. The left kicked the props out from under South Vietnam and forced the defeat - and that is coming home to roost now.