Bishop Hill A letter from the Conservative leader
Mar 9, 2012 Conservatives Energy: wind Greens Scotland This is a letter from Scottish Conservative Party leader Ruth Davidson to a windfarm campaigner. It was posted on the Facebook page of the Stop St Andrews University Windfarm group.
Thank you for contacting me about the issue of windfarms.
There is no doubt that renewable energy is a potentially highly beneficial energy source. However it should not be pushed upon the people of Scotland at any cost. Although attaining clean, renewable energy sources should always remain a priority for Scotland, current strategies excessively burden communities, outweighing any possible benefits. In particular, many people feel that their communities are coming under attack as wind farm developers submit increasing numbers of speculative applications for industrial wind farms. The current Government’s obsession with wind energy over all other energy sources and the lack of any coherent strategy to ensure that wind farms are put in appropriate locations, is unacceptable.
The continuing lack of any proper guidance to local authorities from Government on the siting of wind farms is the root cause of much of the anger and frustration felt in communities across Scotland. The cumulative impact of more and more wind farms is becoming almost unbearable for an increasing number of people. It is for this reason that we have called on the Scottish Government to consider a moratorium on further development until the public’s concerns have been addressed.
We should not forget that nuclear power currently provides a large proportion of our electricity needs, yet Alex Salmond has, thus far, failed to include nuclear power in its energy strategy. Nuclear power provides thousands of jobs, which guarantees Scotland’s retention of engineering talent. Despite what the SNP Government might say about the safety of nuclear power, the fact remains that Scotland is one of the world’s safest nuclear power providers. While the wind may not blow, nuclear provides a reliable and secure energy supply.
The Scottish Government has set an ambitious target of sourcing 100% of our electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020, and while that target is questionable in itself, it is even more unlikely to be achieved when the SNP government places greater emphasis on wind power at the expense of other sources of renewable energy. By focusing on wind energy, which is highly unreliable, the Scottish Government is failing to plan to provide Scotland with a secure energy supply.
Thank you for taking the time to contact me and for making me aware of your position.
Yours sincerely,
Ruth Davidson MSP
The suggestion that renewables are good but windfarms are bad seems rather odd in the Scottish context, since there are few other forms of renewables on the table at the moment. I don't know whether this represents the beginning of the Tories backing away from greenery or just standard political two-facedness.
Reader Comments (65)
Richard Drake: the positive feedback is an artefact of the entirely wrong claim that 'back radiation' can do thermodynamic work. All professional physicists know it's part of a stranding wave revealed by shielding the other half. Process engineers know it's wrong because they measure and predict reality.
As for the absence of traditional GHE, that's my own research but there are many others proposing alternatives.
mydogsgotnonose: Mike Haseler; in the 1690s, at the coldest part of the LIA, a quarter of Scotland's population died from cold and poor nutrition. The same may happen in the 2050s, the coldest part of the new LIA.
mydogsgotnonose, the problem is we really don't know the exact number nor the mechanism by which they died. It could be the cold, it could be that the climate was generally wetter and that led to crop failures. It could be that climate changed during a particular season ... i.e harvest.
There is some indication that similar events occurred worldwide. There is also evidence it didn't occur everywhere.
The 1690s really are at the limit of recorded history. It is as if weather recording were a toddler ... there are glimpses of what happened, but you have to treat the records as historical rather than scientific.
So, we don't know e.g. whether if there were a new Maunder Minimum, how it will affect us, whether it would affect only a few places severely (and therefore relief could be shipped in with minimum impact), or whether e.g. it could cause a global food crisis for a few years killing billions of people and leading to political instability which could even trigger a third world war as economies collapse.
We don't know whether the last Maunder Minimum was "the worst we can expect", or "average" or "you haven't seen nothing yet".
We don't even know whether the 1690s were related to the Maunder Minimum or just a coincidental event.
And you know what ... we will continue not knowing so long as the idiots who run science and academic research in this country continue denying there is anything else that affects the climate other than their CO2 gods
The only good news I have, is that whatever does happen, appears to take several decades to materialise.
The bad news, is that even when it is obvious to us something is happening, that the same idiots will remain in charge!
mydog, we're talking past each other. As my sense of proportion is legendary I can only assume that yours is lacking. (That's a joke but the rest isn't.) Either that or you're deliberately avoiding my points. If you didn't use a pseudonym and didn't come out all feisty on named vested interests I'd be more inclined to take a relaxed view. I think you're a bit of a menace. But it's unlikely to matter very much even so, for the reasons I've already given.
Is is possible that forecasts of numbers of deaths due to cold might be as unsupportable as forecasts of deaths due to heat? Is it realistic to suppose that Scots will huddle in their lodgings and do nothing about it?
I'm sceptical.
Mar 9, 2012 at 9:54 AM | Unregistered Commenterj ferguson
And you are right to be sceptical ... and no doubt when the scamsters who profit from global warming wake up to the fact it is over ... they will be all over the maunder minumum scare!!
That is why we need to get the research done first!
However, on deaths. There are yearly records for the excess deaths in winter. These show that UK wide, 23,000 extra deaths occur in the winter compared to other months. Obviously, most of these are elderly people, and one would guess they were not long to live. But the figure is there.
When I analysed the rate for Scotland I found there were around 700 extra deaths per degree centigrade cooler the winter.
Now, it isn't difficult to see how we could test whether the deaths in the 1690s were deaths amongst the elderly or deaths amongst the general population. Skeletons can be carbon dated to give a good estimate of age of death, and the skeleton can be aged.
But, this all costs money, and unfortunately, in the absence of decent information, there are two likely responses from officialdom:
1. Total denial
2. Total panic
Mike Haseler: in 1645 the sun had a 1 in 179 year event, the conjunction of the outer planets, Saturn on one side, the others diametrically opposite. ENSO went into its cold phase. In 2003, we had the same solar event [2x179 years]. it always leads to a low solar magnetic field** and in 2007 ENSO went into its cold phase. This is why Abdussamatov has predicted the 2050s as the same as the 1690s. Others think it'll be a Dalton Minimum with the 2030s being cool. They could be right.
Richard Drake; I disagree with Lindzen about the GHE. He thinks that without convection we could get up to nearly 80K temperature rise because of direct thermalisation. I'm sorry if I come over as dogmatic, but he's wrong as is Ramanathan and Arrhenius. You can''t beat quantum exclusion so the absorbed IR energy quantum bounces randomly through the gas and ends up absorbed at an interface or heads off to space.
To be fair, I am also redefining the concept of temperature as a function of what makes up the Prevost Exchange Energy between the atmosphere and the Earth's surface and it'll probably have to be a better theoretician than me to complete the work.
**http://www.landscheidt.info/
Help. Far to intellectual for a mere Scotsman like me. Looking at Scottish History, Scots died for two reasons. Claymores and starvation. Geo-political necessities force migration during periods of drought and/or crop failure. That is either you stay.starve and die or flee, fight and die. QED
JamesP said;
"During the cold war, I remember reading a reminder to the Americans that while their national game was baseball, the Russians preferred chess."
The great American game is poker, a far more realistic, useful and difficult game.
The 1690s was a period of poverty for the Scots because there were export restrictions to England, the growing season was short and 25% of the coins were foreign such was the shortage of coinage.
The Darien scheme was the attempt to bring back prosperity by strategic foreign investment, but it failed because of disease and Spanish attacks..The English knew of these but did not intervene using troops already in the West Indies. The loss of £500,000 nearly bankrupted the Scottish economy.
The Salmond 100% renewables' plan is just as foolhardy a waste of capital because it cannot work and requires that should the Scots vote for independence, the English intervene by paying over the odds for renewable energy when by then the whole EU will probably have retrenched and to save their economies many of the other countries in the EU will have dumped windmills.
Denmark, Spain, Portugal and Holland have already stopped the madness. Germany has restarted old coal fired plant and is building new ones. The German public has woken up to the fake IPCC science and the green MPs are facing the choice of forcing a new grid to link northern wind with southern power hunger, at enormous cost and disruption.
mydogsgotnonose .... The Darien scheme was the attempt to bring back prosperity by strategic foreign investment, but it failed because of disease and Spanish attacks.
So it was just a coincidence that out of 5 climatic indicators in Mexico, all 5 of them were extreme during the 690s.
It is also a coincidence that the person who guided the Darien scheme had lived there for several years and thought it was an adequate place ... but suddenly when they all arrived it wasn't.
In other words, there is a strong possibility that the climate during the 1690s also affected central America, and as it was a combination of the Darien Scheme and the famines of 1690s that led to the loss of Scottish independence, there is a strong probability that Scotland lost its independence due to climate - which at least in the UK saw snow covering the Grampians year round.
However, to come up with an estimate of the potential impact today we need to tackle this on several levels:
1. To understand how people died in the 1690s ... what caused their death
2. To understand how society was different ... to project what similar conditions would do today
3. To understand the climate in the 1690s ... to know what happened
4. To understand the relationship between solar & that 1690s climate ... was it causal or coincidental or both?
5. To understand present solar activity.
6. To predict future solar activity.
I think, if you put that all together, you can come up with a best estimate of the effects and likely occurrence of a new 1690s type event.
1&2 are purely archaeological/historical
3&4 are archaeo-scientific
5&6 are scientific.
In other words this is a huge inter-disciplinary problem.
Now, as someone during archaeology, with a BSc in Physics, 10 years in renewables/energy/global warming ... I am very well qualified to state the problem, but its such a huge task, that there's not a hope in hell I can come up with any answer.
For example, I can tell you that there's been no effort by archaeologists to understand the effects of climate on Scotland in the 1690s. In contrast, there's quite a bit of effort to understand the highland "clearances" .... the only problem is that records show that throughout the highland clearances, the population of the highlands were increasing.
In other words, there simply isn't the political will to investigate a period which might just show that Scotland lost its independence due to cold ... when the present Scottish government have committed our economy to destruction to stop it getting warmer
Mike Haseler,
Isn't 1690 or 93 when universal reading came to Scotland? Maybe there was such an increase in the activity that people stayed inside reading instead of tending the flocks etc. and starved to death.
i don't doubt the figures that more people die with decreases in outside temperature. The congenial temperatures west of the pond this season have been accompanied by a decrease in the usual rate of departure.
I also don't doubt that there can be fuel poverty, if i've got the name right. My concern is with tying a number to the future undoubtedly adverse effect of what appears to be an insane energy program in the UK. I just don't think it can be done ... yet.
Richard Drake
Given the Mafia connections of mydogsgotnonose, perhaps you should be careful and not upset him.
Otherwise you might find yourhorsehasgotnohead
;-)
mydogsgotnonose, interesting that you should raise Darien. If I recall my Scottish history correctly, that disaster virtually bankrupted Scotland. Wouldn't be surprised to see windmills reprise that financial black hole.
Gixxerboy,
Neat!
Forget about the cold and the 1690's, it was that mad, greedy dash to Darien (at a time when the Scots, indeed, where starving - might 'a little lightness' in the head, ie malnutrition, not be historically constitutive? Interesting) that bankrupted and forced them on their hands and knees before, was it Queen Anne? As I say, five years after Salmons' 'Year Zero', might they not come abegging again?
Gixxerboy: thanks for the warning!
Pesadia said ....
"Canal Mania
Railway Mania
Telecom mania
Windturbine Mania
Will we ever learn"
NO ! - Try The Edinburgh Tramcar Fiasco - click links below
TAXPAYERS face an additional £10million bill
Edinburgh Trams - the "gravy train" uncovered !
How "Green" they are, green indeed !
"Green" in the sense that they are
"Not fully developed or mature" and
"Naive and easily deceived or tricked"
What did the Conservative Leader have to say about that ?