|
|
||||
|
This is a pre-packed lesson in free speech:
What’s the difference between the Western doctors and the CCP-docs? About a year. AHPRA are the communist party of medicine in Australia. Instead of banning doctors who talked about a new form of pneumonia, AHPRA bans doctors who talk about cheap treatments or problems with vaccines. What’s the difference? April 4th, 2022 | Tags: China, Coronavirus, Free Speech | Category: China, Free Speech |  Print This Post | | This supports Jo’s post on wind droughts. The point is that we have to strive for “wind drought literacy” in the general population. Apart from people who mess around in sailboats and people who play sports where the wind has an impact on missiles in flight, most of us take little notice of the wind unless it is blowing our hat off or turning our umbrella inside out. It is really important for everyone to know that the wind is quite often low across the whole of SE Australia due to high pressure systems and sometimes these systems linger for a day or two. Wind droughts are more frequent in individual states. The easiest way to get a fix on the wind situation is to glance at the NEMwatch widget. It is live and it changes every five minutes. You can read it on your phone and this is the kind of picture you will see.
The bars indicate the amount of power that is being generated and consumed in each state at the moment. WA is not connected to the Eastern electricity grid so supply matches demand while in the SE there are flows between the states The generation bar is colour coded with wind in GREEN and the takeaway message is to see how much more green is required to replace coal (black and brown) and gas (red). Windless nights are the real killers because both the sun and the wind are off duty. AEMO RECORDS The AEMO has a continuous record of the power delivered from all the wind farms attached to the integrated electric power grid covering South Eastern Australia (the NEM). Paul Miskelly used that data for the calendar year 2010 to report that the total wind output across the entire grid fell rapidly to zero or near zero on many occasions in the year.
At the time where were only 23 wind farms with a less than 2GW of installed capacity and it was anticipated that the supply would become more reliable as the number of sites increased. Some years later John Morgan reported that the situation was much the same in the 12-month period from Sep 2014 to Sept 2015 when the capacity of the wind fleet was approaching 4GW. He found 29 days in the year with the fleet delivering less than 10% of capacity. The lowest was 2.7% https://bravenewclimate.com/2015/11/08/the-capacity-factor-of-wind/ Mike O’Ceirin, an independent analyst, has unpublished information collated from the AEMO records up to the end of 2020 showing an average of 15 episodes per year when the delivery was 6% or less of the installed capacity. Some of those episodes last for a long time.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF WIND DROUGHTS The system has to be designed to cater for the worst case scenarios of wind and solar input. Obviously the weakest parts are windless nights because WHEN THERE IS NEXT TO NO GENERATION, NO AMOUNT OF ADDITIONAL WIND AND SOLAR CAPACITY HELP. 5, 10 or 50 times next to nothing is still next to nothing compared with the demand in the grid. RE enthusiasts regularly report new records for the penetration of RE into the grid and the South Australia is the star performer because on sunny and windy afternoons RE can exceed the demand in the grid for short periods. They are looking at the system through the wrong end of the telescope because generating an excess of RE power for some short periods, or even substantial periods, will not prevent system collapse on windless nights unless there is 100% of conventional power available or there is massive grid-scale storage that is not feasible with current technology. So read the reports from the Energy Realists of Australia, become a wind-watcher and tell your friends and relations about the NEMwatch widget! If Climate Change was a real threat, the Bureau of Meteorology might even look at their own historic records. When Jennifer Marohasy and Chris Gillham did just that, they found that as bad as the current situation is, it’s happened before:
Now if the BOM looks at this with a supercomputer, they might find an effect from CO2. But if the BOM just used a calendar, like I did, they might find the latest floods started the week after Hunga Tonga volcanic dust rolled across Australia. Maybe that matters? No one needed a supercomputer to read a rain gauge in 1885, and we have excellent long data. Imagine how handy that might be if the BoM wanted to understand, say, Australian flood cycles? There are 137 years of rainfall records in Lismore from 1885 to now, but the BOM said we set a new record for Lismore based on Lismore airport where records started as long ago as… 2002.
The Bureau of Meteorology is guilty of exploiting taxpayers, vandalizing Australian history, and spitting on decades of work by the earliest meteorologists in Australia. And they want us to think they care? Here’s what big rain looks like in Lismore:Like it happens all the time. Australia has always had floods and rain bombs. Well done to Chris Gillham for his help at WAClimateNet. April 4th, 2022 | Tags: Australian rainfall, BOM, Floods | Category: Australia | Print This Post | | Australia now has nearly 10GW of wind power installed on the National Electricity Grid, but look at the monthly minimums — the guaranteed power we can rely on. The good news is that it’s increased by 10% over this time last year. The bad news is that it was only 216MW. From the 10,000MW of windpower we paid to install, at one point in the last month only 2% was working, and that’s not unusual. The true dismal story of wind power is that we need a near total second network of generators just sitting around waiting as back up. Since the back up is reliable, we could use them instead. As a bonus, backup power won’t kill birds, bats and hypnotize crabs and it won’t destroy sleep for farmers and spotted quolls, and it doesn’t create a national security risk either. Handy, eh?  Original graph: WattClarity | Click to enlarge. The monthly average generation is about 30% of capacity. But the world doesn’t run on average electricity. April 3rd, 2022 | Tags: Capacity (wind), Wind Power | Category: Australia, Global Warming, Renewable, Wind Power | Print This Post | | Nuclear’s suddenly the answer to “Net Zero” — Japan wants to triple its nuclear power by 2030It’s the third largest economy in the world, and a large but quiet vacuum of global fossil fuels. Right now it’s the second largest importer of gas in the world after China, and the third largest importer of coal (not that Extinction Rebellion seems to care). Before the Fukushima disaster in 2011, nuclear power generation produced as much as 30% of Japan’s energy mix, but that’s now shrunk to just 6%. Japan has only six operating nuclear reactors left with a total capacity of six gigawatts, down from 54 before the Fukushima incident. Just a few days ago polls showed that that the fear and negativity of nuclear power in Japan has dramatically shifted in the last few months. One little war can change everything. Russia has suddenly given everyone permission to get serious about nuclear power. Now the Japanese government wants to grow back from 6% to 20% nuclear in just 8 years. Japan Sees Nuclear Energy As A Vital Piece Of Its Net-Zero PlanOilPrice.com Prior to the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power generation accounted for almost 30% of Japan’s energy mix. Though some plants have resumed operation since then, nuclear energy currently accounts for only around 6.2% of Japan’s energy mix. To make up for the nuclear shortfall, Japan stepped up imports of natural gas; liquified natural gas (LNG) imports jumped 12,621 thousand tonnes between 2010 and 2011. PM Kishida’s administration …aims to leverage Japan’s nuclear infrastructure to help achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, hoping to have nuclear energy take up between 20-22% of the energy mix by 2030. The Economist in 2020 lamented that the energy transition was not transitioningHalf of those renewables in the graph are from hydropower:
The Japanese government tried to help renewables, but nuclear power was replaced with coal and gas: IN THE WAKE of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, enthusiasm for renewable energy in Japan swelled. Kan Naoto, the prime minister at the time, declared that the country would draw up a new energy strategy “from scratch” and “elevate” renewables. One of his government’s last acts before losing power was to pass a law to stimulate renewable energy. Dozens of small firms sprang up. Fukushima prefecture itself pledged to get all its power from renewable sources by 2040. The hoped-for transformation, however, has been slow. Renewable generation has grown from 10% of the power supply in 2010 to 17% in 2018, almost half of which comes from old hydropower schemes. Most nuclear plants, which provided more than a quarter of the country’s power before the disaster, have been shut down, at least for the time being. But for the most part they have been replaced not by wind turbines and solar panels but by power stations that burn coal and natural gas. They’re all returning to nuclear power – Germany, France and the UK. When will Australia consider it? … The ante was upped Just like that: The US froze Russian bank accounts. It broke all the rules. In return, Russia is freezing gas deliveries unless people pay in roubles. The US played a very big wildcard, and Joe Biden and the USA may lose in a big way. The World’s Reserve currency is the US Dollar, and it’s a powerful tool for the US. But if the dollar were weakened, by say 50 years of inflation, and the trust it is based on was blown, the bluff may be up.
One thing leads to another. Who will blink first?Does Russia need the money more than Europe needs the gas? Europe Is Facing Supply Disruptions As Russia’s Gas-For-Rubles Deadline LoomsOilPrice: Russia’s insistence that its “unfriendly” nations pay in rubles for Russian natural gas risks disrupting European supplies as soon as this week as the deadline set by Putin for moving to ruble payments is drawing closer. Europe, which depends on Russian natural gas for more than one-third of its demand—with some countries, including the biggest economy Germany, depending on Russia for half of its consumption—has rejected the gas-for-rubles idea, saying it would be a breach of contracts to switch the currency in payments. Russia, for its part, says it demands only rubles for its gas and will not ship gas for free. With too much debt there are no good choices left for the US Federal Reserve: How the West Was Lost: A Faltering World Reserve CurrencyBy Matthew Piepenburg, InvestmentWatch As I wrote then, and will repeat now: Debt destroys nations, financial systems, markets, and currencies. … The inflationary financial system is now failing because its debt levels have rendered it impotent to grow economically, react sensibly or sustain its chronic debt addictions naturally. The Fed has driven itself, and hence the U.S. markets and economy, into an all-too predictable corner and historically dangerous crossroads. If it turns to the left (i.e., more money printing/liquidity) to protect a record-breaking risk asset bubble, it faces an inflationary flood; if it turns to the right (and raises rates or tapers UST purchases), it faces a market inferno. … Once trust is broken it may never return: Imagine, for example, if your bank accounts were frozen for any reason. Would you then trust the bank that froze your accounts down the road once the issue was resolved? Would you recommend that bank to others? Well, the world has been watching Western powers effectively freeze Putin’s assets, and regardless of whether you agree or disagree with such measures, other countries (not all of which are “bad actors”) are thinking about switching banks — or at least dollars… If so, the US has just shot itself in the foot while aiming for Putin. As previously warned, the Western sanctions are simply pushing Russia and China further together and further away from US Dollars and US Treasuries. Such shifts have massive ripple effects which Biden’s financial team appears to have ignored. One simply cannot underestimate (nor over-state enough) the profound significance of a weakening Petrodollar world. It would have devastating consequences for the USD and inflation, and would be an absolute boon for gold. Already, Xi is making plans to negotiate with Saudi Arabia, which is China’s top oil supplier. Meanwhile, Aramco is reaching out to China as well. … As of this writing, Arab states are in private discussions with China, Russia and France to stop selling oil in USD. As David Evans points out: Many US dollars used for world trade overseas will return home to the US, where they can still buy something. That will cause major inflation inside the US as many more dollars seek the same number of goods. This is fifty years of chickens coming home to roost, so to speak. US Dollars that were used to buy something a long time ago may finally return to call in that debt. The mighty dollar and “globalization” dreams of the West are slowly witnessing an emerging era of inflationary de-globalization as each country now does what is required and best for itself rather than Klaus Schwab’s megalomaniacal fantasies. The cornered US, of course, will likely try to sanction gold transactions with Russia, but this would require fully choking Russia energy sales to the EU, which the EU economy (and citizens) simply can’t afford. Michael Hudson: Clearing the Fogh/t Snow Leopard Dollar hegemony seems to be the position that has just ended as of this week very abruptly. Dollar hegemony was when America’s war in Vietnam and the military spending of the 1960s and 70s drove the United States off gold. The entire US balance of payments deficit was military spending, and it began to run down the gold supply. So, in 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Well, everybody thought America has been controlling the world economy since World War I by having most of the gold and by being the creditor to the world. And they thought what is going to happen now that the United States is running a deficit, instead of being a creditor. The US was the official printer of global IOU’s: This gave America a free ride. Imagine if you went to the grocery store and you just paid by giving them an IOU. And then the next week you want to buy more groceries and you give them another IOU. And they say, wait a minute, you have an IOU before and you say, well just use the IOU to pay the milk company that delivers, or the farmers that deliver. You can use this as your money and just — [you will] as a customer, keep writing IOU’s and you never have to pay anything because your IOU is other people’s money. Well, that’s what dollar hegemony was, and it was a free ride. And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States grabbed Russia’s reserves having grabbed Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and Venezuela’s foreign reserves and those of other countries. And all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia. So, all of a sudden this last week, you’re seeing the world economy fracture into two parts, a dollarized part and other countries that do not follow the neoliberal policies that the United States insists that its allies follow. We’re seeing the birth of a new dual World economy. Split the world into two currencies: I’ve been talking to people all over the world in the last few days and the consensus is that everybody is now deciding the only place, certainly if you’re China or Russia or Kazakhstan or you’re in the Eurasian orbit, South Asia, East Asia, you realize, wait a minute, if all we have to do is something like Allende did in Chile or all we have to do is refuse to sell off our industry to American investors and they can treat us like they’ve treated Venezuela. So you can imagine that everybody’s watching this and there’s an expectation that as a result of the war in Ukraine, that’s really America’s NATO war, that this is going to create a balance-of-payments crisis throughout the whole Global South as their energy prices go up, oil prices soar, food prices are going to soar and this is going to make it impossible for them to pay their foreign debts unless they go without food and energy. Obviously, this is a political crisis. That is, the only result can be to split the world in two. A moral line in the sand was crossed and there may be no way back: Nothing like this has happened in modern history, even in the 19th century wars. In the Crimean War in the mid-19th century, Russia, England and Germany, everybody kept paying the debts to the countries they were fighting against because the idea is that debts were sacrosanct. And now, all of a sudden, not only are debts are not sacrosanct, but countries can just grab foreign savings. I guess the problem began after the Shah of Iran fell and the United States grabbed Iran’s money and refused to let it pay its bond holders and started the whole war against Iran for trying to take control of its own oil resources. So, all of a sudden, the United States grabbing this has ended what everybody thought was an immutable morality. Not necessarily a One World Order — perhaps a Multi World Order? MH: Well, as President Putin and Lavrov have said, the fighting in Ukraine isn’t really over Ukraine at all. It’s a fight over what shape the world will take and whether the world will be unipolar or, as it now appears, multipolar. Fiat money, based on nothing but trust, imposes little discipline. As voters vote themselves the treasury, and big players eat smaller players, easy money feeds temptation and corruption. Something based only on trust and not on tangible assets can crumble in a moment. April 1st, 2022 | Tags: Manufacturing Money, Money Supply | Category: Big-Government, Monetary History, USA | Print This Post | | Oops. Late. Scheduling of Open threads is subject to change.  … Perhaps the audience doesn’t like being told how deplorable they are? Good to see CNN and MSNBC getting what they deserve. Fox News Makes Gains In 1Q Cable News Ratings While CNN, MSNBC Suffer Steep Declines Fox News Channel was the only cable news network to make year-over-year ratings gains in the first quarter of 2022, finishing the quarter in first place and marking 81 consecutive quarters as the most-watched network in all of basic cable. FNC’s competitors, CNN and MSNBC, both suffered steep ratings declines compared to the same period one year ago. In prime time, Fox News finished the quarter with an average total audience of 2.554 million viewers, up 3% from 2021, according to ratings data compiled by Nielsen. MSNBC finished the quarter in second place with an average total audience of 1.205 million viewers—down 46%, while CNN finished third with an average total audience of less than a million viewers: 857,000 viewers, down a staggering 56% from 2021. Thank the Federal Reserve for mostly useless media. Easy money and big loans means the little media fish were swallowed by giant corporate conglomerates and then all the incentives change. Theoretically, Big owners of media outlets could afford to throw away money on them, while using their media influence to make even more money in all their other ventures. A bit like the way Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million and ran anti-Trump-news non-stop. He’s just protecting the main asset worth $1.7 Trillion. Hands-up who wants to persuade the punters to vote for pagan weather gods, and inefficient, unreliable generators? How about burying lost laptops and high-risk health programs? It only took CNN 532 days to report that Hunter’s Laptop was real. Or maybe owning a media megaphone is just the thing to earn points with Klaus Schwab, who can return the favor some other way? Well, don’t buy adverts on a TV station; buy the station and put your adverts in their news instead. The only problem is lies, propaganda and lectures are boring, and they can’t make us watch it (yet). UPDATE: Why this matters in climate science (or any science) and in Australia too. The Media was always a central pin in the problem in the science “debate”. Skeptics could win the observational evidence war (and have for twenty years) but no one knew it, and the media are the main reason that situation exists. Australian climate policy is set more by the outcome of US elections than it is by Australian elections. We voted for No net Zero and got it anyway. If Trump had won, arguably, we wouldn’t have Net Zero targets now. Australian politicians and journalists need to know how irrelevant outlets like CNN and MSNBC have become. Australian media management need to know how unpopular that messaging is. There is value in raising awareness to the decline of Woke Mainstream media. Even the ABC must be a little bit afraid of losing their audience, even though it won’t cost them money. It costs them influence. People become less afraid of “bad press”. The role of this blog: It’s been 18 months since the Hunter Biden Laptop, and US election irregularities were outrageously suppressed, even by formerly good Australian newspapers. At that point this blog became one of the rare spaces left simply for forwarding news on. Just a cog in a rapidly disappearing network. If the mainstream media here had been covering it, I wouldn’t. He did all the right things but his business, his life’s work has been ruined. Hunter Biden dropped off his laptop to a Mac repair store and left it behind. The whistleblower who owned that store acted legally in every way, but now faces bankruptcy and lives with constant threats. He financially would have been so much better off if he has dropped the laptop in the bin. John Nolte at Breitbart has a long interview with John Paul Mac Isaac about the remarkable efforts he went to to do the right thing. His father is a retired Air Force Colonel, and he also tried to do the right thing but was rebuffed. The whole interview is worth reading. The scandal (above and beyond The Biden family) is the combined failure of the FBI and the media. Repeatedly, the FBI failed the nation, protected the corrupt by sitting on this laptop for months and intimidating the whistleblower. Then the media did the same, covering up for the compromised, blaming it on a Russian hack. All the media that is, except for The New York Post, Tucker Carlson and sites like Breitbart. People need to know what’s going on. Nolte: Hunter Biden Laptop Whistleblower John Paul Mac Isaac — The Breitbart News InterviewBNN: We’re in September 2019 now and your friend is sitting on this letter and your dad is headed to the FBI? JM: Right, Dad went to the FBI in October and the FBI slammed the door in his face, told him to get out of his office, lawyer up, and don’t talk about any of this. BNN: Really? JM: My father describes it as the most embarrassing moment of his life. This is a 30-year Air Force Colonel. To give 30 years of service and have a bureaucrat slam the door in your face… So we sat in the dark for a month scratching our heads, wondering what we do now. But the fear level ratcheted up because now the FBI knows we have this and doesn’t want to do anything. They kept the paperwork we presented [the repair agreement, etc.], but refused to accept the drive. A month later an FBI agent I’ll call ‘Agent Joshua,’ reached out to my father. He wanted to contact me. I did some research on him online. He seemed like a good guy who had focused a lot of time going after child predators. So I trusted him and arranged a meeting at my house. BNN: Where are we at now in the year, when this meeting was arranged? JM: Mid-November. He showed up with another agent I’ll call ‘Agent Mike.’ I voiced my concerns about people foreign and domestic who might want to do me harm over what I’d seen. I told them I wanted a paper trail and the ability to contact them if something happens. They told me they couldn’t take the laptop due to legal concerns, but that they would get back to me. On the morning of December 9, Agent Mike called me for the serial number off the hard drive. Initially, they said they were just going to come in and make a clone of the drive. But they showed up at 10 a.m. in my shop with a subpoena for everything. Which I thought was great. I wanted them to take everything. I wanted it out of my shop. Even the FBI were threatening him: BNN: And at this point, still, after eight months and all this political stuff going on, you had not reached out to the media or any political operatives, like Giuliani? JM: No, it would have been completely inappropriate. Only the FBI. The FBI is where this had to go. So I give them everything and joke about leaving their names out of any book I write, and this is when Agent Mike says, ‘In our experience, nothing ever happens to people who don’t talk about these things.’ BNN: Whoa. JM: I was so happy to get that stuff out of my life, it took me a couple of hours before I realized that was a thinly-veiled threat. He kept expecting to see the laptop turn up in legal hearings, but it never did: JM: This is mid-December [2019]. We get through the holidays. The impeachment hearings begin. I keep waiting for the laptop to be admitted into evidence. I’d seen what was on the laptop. I knew it was relevant to impeachment. At the very least it should have been given to the White House to aid in the president’s defense. So at this time, I can only assume the FBI had no intention of letting that laptop be submitted as evidence. Now I have to worry about myself, my own safety, and identity. I felt even more alone and exposed. By August 2020 it was clear the FBI, Justice Department and Congress were not going to help: BNN: Now you’ve been sitting on this for nine months. Why not go to the media? JM: I wanted to do this right, through the correct channels. I tried the Justice Department. I tried congress. Now it’s August of 2020, I’ve been sitting on this for more than a year, and I decided it was time to go to the president, directly to his attorney. So I came out of the shadows and emailed Giuliani directly. BNN: You waited until August of 2020, you waited 16 months? JM: End of August, around the 24th. BNN: Nine months after the FBI picked it up and did nothing with it? You gave the FBI nine months to do the right thing? After Guiliani and The Post broke the news in Oct 2020, the punishment began: Humans are social creatures, gregarious beings. There is almost no one who is not affected physiologically by this kind of extreme repetitive bullying: Keep reading → March 29th, 2022 | Tags: Corruption, Corruption (Media), Election (corruption), US Politics | Category: Corruption, Election security, Free Speech, Media-matters, Politics, Psy-Ops, USA | Print This Post | | The most devastating thing about this survey is not what it says about energy policy but what it says about our democracy. 70% of Australians think energy policy should be about reliable cheap supply, not about stopping storms, and 70% don’t want to even spend $1 a week saving the world from climate change. Despite this, neither major party stands for that 70%. Imagine what our election campaign would look like if both parties were trying to win over voters? The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) asked 1,007 Australians “How much would you personally be willing to pay each year for Australia to reduce its emissions to zero by 2050?” And 42% said “Nothing at all”. Nine out of ten Australians don’t want to spend much at all. Yet somehow both major political parties agree to spend billions every year on a transition we don’t have to have. We don’t have to have wind or solar power, big batteries, big interconnectors, big Snowy 2.0 and we don’t have to buy international carbon credits. Bear in mind Australians are not paying $50 or $100 a year on climate bills, they’re paying $1,300 a year.* So state and federal governments are spending wildly more than the voters want. Who do they serve? It’s like all major parties are working to keep 3% of the population happy.  …
And 70% of Australians think energy policy should primarily be about getting cheap and affordable energy, not about changing the weather.  … The scary thing is that a bit over 1 in 4 voters (28%) do think that energy policy should try to cool the world. Daniel Wild points out this was much higher a year ago: …What is significant about this finding is how far attitudes toward cutting emissions have shifted over the past year. A similar survey undertaken by the Lowy Institute in April 2021, before Scott Morrison committed Australia to Net Zero, found 55 per cent of Australians believed reducing carbon emissions should be a priority of the federal government, while 44 per cent believed reducing household bills (affordability) and reducing the risk of blackouts (reliability) should be a priority (and 1 per cent weren’t sure). More Australians would be concerned about national security if they knew this: Australia’s entire strategic oil reserve is only enough for 1.5 days of domestic consumption, and we lack the capacity to bulk store fuel resources locally. At the turn of the century, Australia had eight operational oil refineries, enough to almost meet our domestic consumption of fuel, however only two remain today. As it is, Australians want national defence more than “Net Zero”: The same survey undertaken by the IPA found that 61 per cent of Australians agree the federal government should be more focused on national defence rather than meeting Australia’s Net Zero emissions by 2050 target, while only 39 per cent disagree. Thanks To Rafe Champion REFERENCES*Moran, Alan (2020) Australians pay $1300 in hidden climate bills each year. March 29th, 2022 | Tags: Australian Politics, Survey | Category: Australia, Global Warming | Print This Post | | In the Victorian Supreme Court a judge has just ordered that the Bald Hills Wind farm must turn off at night time. After seven years of pain and suffering, two households living nearby will finally get night time relief and some payments of $92,000 and $168,000. “The wind farm noise has been a common law nuisance at both properties.”  Bald hills, Wind Farm, Victoria, Australia. Image: John Englart Flikr CC BY-SA 2.0 This could change everything. These industrial plants close to homes just became even less profitable because they can’t operate at night. They also need to pay damages to people affected by the noise, and do more maintenance to reduce noise — like repairing gear boxes more often, and they may have to pay to make changes at homes nearby to ameliorate the nuisance, or pay compensation. Many properties near the towers have abandoned plans to build new houses there. What stands out in this ruling is how entirely inadequate were any of the attempts by the government that approved the wind plants, or the companies that profited from them, to measure and assess the noise, and to respond to complaints. Despite tens of thousands of windfarms being built, the science of acoustic disturbance from them is practically a vacuum. If the companies that built these machines were at all considerate environmental players they would have many measurements, plus publicly available data. They’d know the effect of different wind speeds and directions, plus temperatures and humidity. For their own sake, they would identify the worst conditions, and shut particular turbines off preemptively so to avoid cases exactly like this (and just to show they were good global citizens). Witness statements include intermittent effects so bad that people take painkillers, install double glazing, and even sleep in their cars elsewhere in desperation. Even during the day sometimes watching TV or talking becomes so difficult that one witness sends text messages to have a conversation. No one even mentions here — if this noise is sometimes so appalling for the humans around these towers, what’s it like for the animals? Landmark Decision Vindicates Victims: Supreme Court Orders Total Wind Farm Shutdownby Stopthesethings In a world-first, neighbours tormented by wind turbine noise have won a landmark victory, forcing the operator to shut down all of its turbines at night-time. Yesterday, Justice Melinda Richards of the Victorian Supreme Court slapped an injunction on a wind farm because the noise it generates has been driving neighbours nuts for seven years, and the operator has done absolutely nothing about their suffering. Her Honour also ordered damages, including aggravated damages for the high-handed way in which the operator has treated its victims. Since March 2015, the community surrounding the Bald Hills wind farm have been tortured by low-frequency noise and infrasound generated by 52, 2 Megawatt Senvion MM92s. After a bruising piece of litigation (where the operator withheld critical evidence from the plaintiffs and its acoustic consultant was caught out ‘filtering’ – ie destroying – rafts of noise data) and a hard-fought trial, these thoroughly courageous gentlemen have established what has been known, all along: everyone has a legally enforceable right to sleep soundly at night in their very own homes; and the wind industry has been destroying that right with impunity, for far too long. What Noel Uren and John Zakula have achieved is not just notable and noble, it reflects the adage about evil prevailing when good men do nothing. Refusing to be [cowed] by the operator’s threats, bullying and intimidation, these men did something and, accordingly, every wind industry victim owes them a debt of eternal gratitude for what they have achieved and placed on the public record. At last. At long last. Vindication. Sweet vindication. Compensation payable(23) What is the proper measure of each plaintiff’s loss and damage, having regard to the answers to questions 15 to 22 above? Mr Uren will be awarded damages in the amount of $92,000, comprising $46,000 for past loss of amenity, and $46,000 for aggravated damages. Mr Zakula will be awarded damages of $168,000, comprising $84,000 for past loss of amenity, and $84,000 for aggravated damages. I find that noise from the turbines on the wind farm has woken Mr Zakula or kept him awake on hundreds of occasions since June 2015. There were nights when he was unable to sleep at all. There were others when he left home and slept in his car at Walkerville beach to escape the noise. On any view, this amounts to a substantial interference with Mr Zakula’s enjoyment of his property at night — specifically, his ability to sleep undisturbed in his own bed in his own house on his own rural property. The interference is intermittent, but ongoing. While Mr Zakula is annoyed by the sound of the turbines during the day, it does not substantially interfere with his enjoyment of his property. [following consideration of the evidence given by Noel Uren, her Honour held]: I find that wind turbine noise disturbed Mr Uren’s sleep, waking him or keeping him awake, or both, on around 100 occasions between May 2015 and December 2018. UPDATE: The final injunction is that Bald Hill Operators have just 90 days to figure out how to abate the noise that keeps the plantiffs awake. Perhaps there will be some combination of certain weather events and particular turbines that allow the wind farm to partially operate at night. But the judge admits “no one knows” what that is, which is really quite the crime. If the management can’t find a partial conditional way to operate they will just have to shut the turbines at night. They’ve had years to figure something out, and clearly have done nothing, so it will be a scramble now. It’s dodgy science from beginning to endThe wind farm operator claimed that they measured the background noise before and after construction of the wind farm. However they found the noise levels were improbably lower after the wind turbines were operating. “It is possible that the sound levels recorded were affected by construction activities, including heavy vehicles on Buffalo-Waratah Road.” [The more likely cause is that MDA did what it always does: it placed its noise loggers close to large trees and/or under bushes during pre-construction noise data gathering (thereby raising the average noise levels at all wind speeds) and, when it returned to gather operational noise data, it placed its noise loggers well away from trees, bushes and other solid objects (thereby lowering average noise levels at all wind speeds, even with the contribution from wind turbines, if, indeed, any of them were, in fact, operating at the time). It’s the oldest trick in the book and it’s been used by MDA and others for years, all over Australia. The other clever trick played by the operator, in this case, was withholding the raw data from the plaintiffs’ acoustic experts, Dr Bob Thorne and Les Huson. Whereas, they were happy to provide the raw data to their own boy, Chris Turnbull, the plaintiffs’ acoustic experts were deliberately deprived of the opportunity to assess and review that data. Her Honour was scathing about that conduct] The MDA wouldn’t provide the data (even under discovery of documents) and wouldn’t explain the “filtering” they used on the data. The plantiffs were “stunned” to find that the data they had requested did exist and was now being used against them: Dr Thorne and Mr Huson both said that they did not know how MDA had filtered its background data, because they had never seen MDA’s datasets. Mr Turnbull volunteered that he had asked for and analysed the raw background data for locations 19, 61 and 66, and had satisfied himself that they had applied the same filtering to both pre-construction and operational data. Dr Thorne was ‘stunned’ to learn that this raw data had been given to Mr Turnbull, when he had asked for the same information 18 months previously and it had never been provided. The raw background data was apparently not discovered by Bald Hills, or produced by MDA in answer to a subpoena served on it in May 2020. The judge described this as “unsatisfactory” and would not accept Mr Turnbulls opinion, given that the plantiffs had not has access to the data. Many witnesses describe the effects of wind turbine noise:Keep reading → March 27th, 2022 | Tags: Wind Power | Category: Australia, Renewable, Wind Power | Print This Post | | Looks like, smells like a Biotech war — and the CCP are not the only playersIt’s like a Robert Ludlum novel, but weirder. Not only were there biolabs in Ukraine near the border with Russia, which held something the US Government was afraid the Russians might capture, but the US Presidents son helped provide the money to build them in 2014. Commenter at The DailyMail: (thanks Richard C) JeffSwanson: If his [Hunter Biden’s] last name were Trump this would be 24/7 news on every station.  A photo from that laptop. Two weeks ago the GatewayPundit reported that Hunter Biden’s firm Rosemont Seneca provided money for Metabiota, one of the firms behind the creation of Biolabs in Ukraine. Before that, Infowars was wondering why the Pentagon needed laboratories in Ukraine. Apparently the US Department of Defense invested in the creation of Biolabs in Ukraine with the help of a firm called Black & Veatch. They in turn funneled money to Metabiota which “ specializes in detecting, tracking, and analyzing potential disease outbreaks.” Meanwhile Hunter Biden, son of the then VP of the US was appointed to the board of a big gas company in Ukraine, for no good reason that anyone can explain. That big gas company, called Burisma was owned by a Ukrainian Oligarch who set it up in 2002 and had the, ahem, good fortune to be the Ukrainian Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources from 2010 to 2012. Handy eh? That billionaire, Mykola Zlochevsky, has also been investigated at various times for alleged money laundering, tax evasion and corruption. Imagine that? The US Government now says the bio-labs were not making weapons but were funded through the “Defense Threat Reduction Agency”. Presumably the US government was just worried the Russians might steal their antidotes? Wait ’til you see who else is connected. It seems Metabiota worked with the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology and the well known EcoHealth Alliance and together they all published a study on diseases from bats in China in 2014. Maybe we’ll get some answers if the US House Republicans win and subpoena Hunter Biden. Like who was “the big guy” he paid a cut to, maybe? |
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets
   
 
|
|||
|
Copyright © 2026 JoNova - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments