If a company or individual violates either the Migratory Bird Treaty Act or the Eagle Protection Act, they could get fined up to $250,000 or get two years imprisonment per incident.  This is, unless they run a wind turbine installation, an industry which collectively kills thousands of birds and bats each year.

Not a single wind farm operator has yet been prosecuted for killing birds, yet in 2009 ExxonMobil was fined $600,000 for killing 85 common ducks and other birds that flew into uncovered tanks on its property.  “BP oil company was fined $100 million for killing and harming migratory birds during the 2010 Gulf oil spill. And PacifiCorp, which operates coal plants in Wyoming, paid more than $10.5 million in 2009 for electrocuting 232 eagles along power lines and at its substations,” according to the AP.

Ron Arnold, of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, quoting a study by Teresa Platt of the National Center for Public Policy Research, notes that “‘Every year since the 1980s the 5,000 turbines at NextEra’s Altamont Pass in California kill thousands of slow-reproducing red-tailed hawks, burrowing owls, kestrels, as well as iconic golden eagles, and bats.’” The birds Platt mentions are raptors – birds of prey – particularly valued for their agricultural role in killing mice and other crop-damaging rodents. Eagles, both golden eagles and bald eagles, have long impressed Americans for their majesty, and the bald eagle was selected by our Founding Fathers as our national emblem.”  See Arnold’s report here.

The American Bird Conservancy says that Altamont alone has killed more than 2,000 golden eagles.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hedges its annual windmill bird death estimates at between 100,000 to 444,000 dead birds in the U.S.

An article from the Associated Press notes “the administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind-energy company, even those that flout the law repeatedly. Instead, the government is shielding the industry from liability and helping keep the scope of the deaths secret.”  “The result is a green industry that’s allowed to do not-so-green things. It kills protected species with impunity and conceals the environmental consequences of sprawling wind farms.”   “Nearly all the birds being killed are protected under federal environmental laws, which prosecutors have used to generate tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from businesses, including oil and gas companies, over the past five years.”

The failure to enforce the law evenly for all energy producers clearly shows that the Obama administration has a double standard when it comes to his much touted “green energy” projects.

See also:

Wind turbines versus wildlife

Dr. Roy Spencer presents the latest measurements of lower troposphere temperature as measured by two sets of satellites. See his post here. He presents a graph showing measured temperatures versus model predictions.

You can see that actual global temperatures have flattened out since about 1998. The “spaghetti” on the graph represents predictions of 44 models and the black line is the average of model predictions.

Spencer presents three possible explanations for the divergence:

“1) the real climate system is not as sensitive to increasing CO₂ as the models are programmed to be.” (His preferred explanation).

“2) the extra surface heating from more CO₂ has been diluted more than expected by increased mixing with cooler, deeper ocean waters (Trenberth’s explanation)”

The oceans have a high heat capacity and can absorb great quantities of heat. But have they? The subject is controversial. Anthony Watts discusses the problem here. He notes a recent study which says that between 1955 and 2010, the temperature of the global ocean, between the surface and a depth of 2,000 meters increased in temperature by 0.09 C. That’s not much and Watts wonders if we can even measure to that precision.

“3) increased manmade aerosol pollution is causing a cooling influence, partly mitigating the manmade CO₂ warming.”

However, a 2007 satellite-based NASA study shows that aerosols have been decreasing steadily since 1992. In particular, sulfate aerosols have been greatly decreasing since establishment of the 1970 Clean Air Act in the U.S. and similar measures in Europe.

Explanations #2 and #3 seem to have problems. That leaves #1: the climate is not very sensitive to carbon dioxide and is much less sensitive than models assume. The forcing effect of carbon dioxide, if any, is apparently easily overcome by stronger natural forces.

If Spencer’s first explanation is correct, the political war on fossil fuel emissions is futile and will have little or no effect on global temperatures, but that war will cost us dearly by raising energy prices and making our electric grid less reliable.

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Global warming theory fails again

Failure of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis

Methane hydrate is a solid substance in which methane (natural gas) is trapped in the crystal structure of ice. Methane hydrate occurs in marine sediments and crops out on the ocean floor where the pressure is sufficiently high and the temperature is sufficiently low. Technically, methane hydrate is called a clathrate which means that water molecules freeze into a lattice-like structure capable of trapping gas inside. These compounds can also occur in permafrost. The methane is produced from microbial decomposition of plankton which sinks to the ocean floor. See a short explanation from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) here. See also an article at Geology.com here. The map below shows the estimated global distribution of methane hydrates.

Estimates of the total resource vary widely. Gas units are often given in units of one trillion cubic feet (TCF). The USGS says that resources estimates from studies over the last 15 years vary from one million- to fifty million TCF of natural gas. The lower estimate is more than 4,000 times the annual US consumption of natural gas. The lower estimate is also at least twice as much as all other fossil fuels combined.

The big question now is: can these resources be technically and economically recovered?

Last year, the Department of Energy partnering with ConocoPhillips and Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. produced a steady flow of natural gas in the first field test of the new method that injects carbon dioxide into Alaskan permafrost. The carbon dioxide replaces the methane in the clathrate structure.

Last month, Japan became the first country to extract natural gas from methane hydrates in the sea bed. (See story in The Asahi Shimbun here.) According to that story, Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. was able to extract natural gas from a layer 330 meters below a 1,000-meter-deep floor of the Pacific Ocean. Water was pumped out of the methane hydrate sediment layer causing a drop in pressure which liberated the gas. Methane was collected by pipes. The Japanese government plans to establish production technology by fiscal 2018 and then begin production. “The seas around Japan are estimated to hold enough methane hydrate to produce as much natural gas as Japan consumes in 100 years.”

This is still emerging technology that could hold great promise, similar to the vast new resources made recoverable by the “fracking” revolution in shale oil and gas.

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Geologic History: PETM when it really got hot

Methane hydrates probably played a part in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) which was a global temperature spike that happened about 55 million years ago.