payne1000

I forgot to mention cell towers. They kill more birds than wind turbines and solar.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/09/15/wind-turbines-kill-fewer-birds-than-cell-towers-cats/15683843/

son of witless

AS I always say to liberals when they say something unbelievable. Prove it!!!!!!

son of witless

My freakin windows and my cat have never killed a single bird. CASE CLOSED!!!!!!!

W8_4_It

Yeah they do. They chop up everything from the American Eagle, the symbol of our country, to sparrows if they happen to come along.

The 'greenies" and global warming folks don't like to talk about that much. Heh. Freaking hypocrites.

How much CO2 does a rotting eagle carcass give off? They should do a study on that.

payne1000

Do you live in a cave?

http://www.sciencenews.org/article/windows-may-kill-988-million-birds-year-united-states
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/29/cats-wild-birds-mammals-study/1873871/

son of witless

My cats and windows have never killed any birds.

son of witless

Some birds are worth more than others. Raptors. Do more of them get killed from windows and cats.

Voice of Reason Loc: Earth

This is one of the best and funniest articles I've read on the subject:

----------------------------------------------------------------
Strike Back Against Nature! Build More Bird Choppers!
By: Frank J Fleming

On a long road trip with my family, we saw many fields full of giant metal blades spinning in the air. My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter asked me, “What are those?”

“Bird choppers,” I explained to her. “We put up large blades in big fields to kill and chop up birds as they fly by.”

“We don’t like birds?” she asked.

“Oh no; we hate them. They do nothing but squawk and poop on things. That’s why we go to such great effort to build these fields of death and kill them in mass quantities.” I studied the spinning blades for a moment. “They’d probably kill more birds if they spun faster. They really should build a coal plant here and provide more power to these things.”

When we got home, I decided to research these bird choppers and find out why they haven’t built more of them in the flight path of the Canada Geese (I hate those things). I discovered something alarming: They aren’t bird choppers at all. They’re called wind turbines and are meant to generate electricity, and the fact that they chop up eagles is unintentional, and people want to prevent that.

There are a lot of stupid things going on here. First off, why do we care about eagles? They’re supposed to have great eyesight but apparently can’t see hundred-foot, moving blades. And it’s not like eagles help us in any way. They don’t vote or pay taxes or pick lettuce for below minimum wage — they’re completely useless to us.

The second stupid thing is this idea of wind power. I’m sure that was a neato idea hundreds of years ago, and there’s probably some issue of Popular Science from the 12th century with a picture of a windmill on the cover, accompanied by a headline proclaiming, “Man will now have nothing but leisure time, as wind will do all his work!” But people soon found that wind was useful for little more than grinding grain, similar to how we never found much use for solar power beyond cheapo calculators. I don’t know why someone thought to bring back wind power now — I guess it seemed like a cutesy idea to turn all that wind blowing around into electricity — but as soon as someone said, “Now, all we need to do is build tons of 30-story metal structures,” someone else should have said, “This is already beyond stupid. Let’s just stick to tiny, simple-to-use coal.”

But the dumbest part isn’t that we’re worried about the eagles or trying to get electricity from wind — it’s the reason they’re building these wind turbines. People want “green” power that doesn’t harm the environment. That’s why they seem so alarmed that despite their good intentions toward the environment, they’re slicing up birds mid-flight. It doesn’t surprise me, though, because I know a fundamental rule: Nature is our enemy, and everything we do will always be in opposition to it.

Where did we get this idea that we need to save the environment? Has the environment ever tried to save us? No. Since the dawn of time, nature has tried to kill us. Earthquakes, plagues, sharknados — nature is always trying to find new ways to wipe us out. We have like no allies in it. Except the dog. And we have a U.S./Russia-type relationship with the cat. But other than that, basically everything out there — squirrels, salamanders, azalea bushes — wants us dead and would kill us all without a second thought if it could. And humanity has only survived because it can overcome nature. For instance, thousands of years ago, there were lions everywhere on all continents. Everywhere. If you went to the grocery store to buy some Froot Loops, a lion would be right there in the aisle, ready to tear you apart. But we defeated them — it ends up that a lion has no defense against a suplex — and now lions are mostly wiped out, and humans are everywhere.

In fact, humans are so powerful that we can now inflict great harm on nature. So it’s time for revenge, right? No. People want to “save the environment,” and that’s why we’re building stupid wind turbines instead of sensible things like powered bird choppers. We want to be nice to nature to stop that global climate warming change, but nature will not be nice back. All that warming is just another ploy from nature to try to kill us all. But it’s not going to work. We don’t care about a little warming, because we have air conditioning.

It’s time to stop pretending that nature will ever like us. Instead, we need to strike back against it. We need plans to eventually replace as much of nature as we can with robots. People worry about robots turning on humans, but we can program robots to like us. But even as you read this, there are ducks waddling around, thinking, “Kill all humans!”

And that’s how nature is; just because it isn’t very good at killing us now doesn’t mean it won’t get better. When the global warming doesn’t kill us off, nature will probably later try to freeze us out. And I’ll bet nature is hard at work in its underground evolution labs trying to come up with a new animal to take us on — like maybe some sort of gorilla with a bear head that has shark mouths for fists and is bulletproof, i.e., an armored, shark-fisted borilla. I mean, this is the same nature that came up with poisonous snakes, alligators, and honey badgers — it’s always working on new killing machines, and we can’t even imagine what it’s capable of.

Nature is our enemy and always will be. There is no appeasing it. Eventually we will destroy it, or it will destroy us. So let’s stop doing things like making fields full of giant metal blades unless we’re going to use them to chop up Canada Geese in flight. I really hate those things.

payne1000

The big problem with this story is that wind turbine blades turn very slowly--so slowly a bird could most likely land on the blades while they're turning.

Voice of Reason Loc: Earth

Okay then, let's see just how mathematically-challenged you are.

A typical rotational speed for a modern windmill is about 10 rpm. So, if the blades are 100 feet long and they're spinning at 10 rpm, what is the speed of the tip of the blade, in mph?

payne1000

I took the easy way out. I googled it. Some sites say the tips of the blades can turn at 120 to 180 mph. I am surprised at those figures because to the eye they don't appear to be turning fast at all.

There is no doubt that wind turbines do kills some birds. What you might not know is that fossil fuels kill many times more birds.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/08/25/3475348/bird-death-comparison-chart/

JFlorio Loc: Seminole Florida

Dear consumer,
Windmills or turbines do kill many birds especially raptors. We are trying to fix this problem by having government create a know fly zone around the wind turbines. However fossil fuels kill many more birds than wind turbines.
Sincerely,
Maker of wind turbines

Voice of Reason Loc: Earth

An intelligent person would now ask themselves, "If I was so wrong about that, what else am I so wrong about?"

Okay, I'm not going to spend much time on this because I know it won't do any good, but looking at the chart you posted, don't you notice anything wrong? For the things ThinkProgress likes (solar, wind and natural gas) they have high and low estimates for bird-kills. But for the things they don't like (coal and nuclear) they know EXACTLY how many bird-kills, no high-low estimates for them! Just out of curiousity, do you have any idea how they determined that nuke plants kill 330,000 birds/yr?

Second, when reading any kind of statistics like these, it is imperative to know the methodology that was used to determine the numbers. I seriously doubt that coal is responsible for 7.9M bird-kills/year, and I'm sure they're claiming the vast majority of those death are from air polution or global warming, both of which are dubious claims at best.

Third, even if we believe the numbers in the chart (and use the high estimate for wind, because we know they published just the high estimate for coal) then we must compensate for the amount of power that's produced by each. The data in the chart is from 2009, when according to Wikipedia 44.4% of electricity in this country was generated by coal and 1.87% was generated by wind. So that means coal generated 23.74 times as much power as wind while killing (according to your chart) 24 times as many birds.

So according to your own information, windmills kill the same number of birds per unit of power as coal power plants do.

If we then count the mining of the materials used to build windmills and the fossil fuels used to build them, (like they did with the coal numbers), then windmills kill many more birds per unit of power than coal does.

payne1000

It's become abundantly apparent that you're a troll for the fossil fuel industry.

What you ignore pointing out about wind energy is--once the turbines are installed they don't pollute the air and they don't require energy to run as a coal or gas fired plant would. The energy they produce is mostly free.

You also ignore that the coal industry now removes entire mountaintops to get at coal deposits. They then dump the part that isn't coal into streams below. This operation destroys the beauty of the land and destroys habitat for many birds and other creatures.

Fracking for gas endangers our water supply and uses up much of our precious groundwater in the process. It takes an average of 4 million gallons to frack a well. That water is laced with toxic chemicals and any which returns to the surface must be disposed of in deep wells which have been proven to cause earthquakes.

Kevyn

Do you mean that using you tube videos as reference sources for scientific papers is not the norm? After all you just can't trust peer reviewed scientific research when it dosn't agree with your moronic world view.