‘Desultory': Wind farm complaints aren't keeping up with surging industry

The surge in new wind farm developments has failed to produce an upswing in complaints, with just nine of the 79 projects operating in Australia receiving any formal objections, Andrew Dyer, the National Wind Farm Commissioner, has said. 

Lining up: Few operating wind farms in Australia attract complaints.

As of the end of October, the commission had received 54 complaints, for existing projects, with all but two resolved. Four people had relocated as part of the resolution process.

"There are no complaints for recently completed wind farms," Mr Dyer told Fairfax Media.

Victorian wind farms have attracted the bulk of objections, accounting for 31 of the 54, while SA and NSW had 16 and seven complaints, respectively. Operating wind farms in other states have not triggered any complaints, Mr Dyer said.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in today”s Melbourne Age - “‘Desultory': Wind farm complaints aren't keeping up with surging industry.”

One of the oldest climate change experiments has led to a troubling conclusion

One of the regular complaints of climate change doubters and skeptics is that scientific projections of a dire future are too heavily based on computer simulations, or models, which — they say — rest on a variety of questionable assumptions.

Heated and control plots in a long-term soil
 warming study at Harvard Forest, Petersham,
Mass. Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological
 Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mass., and colleagues
began the study in 1991. 

But a major climate change study published Thursday relied not on models but experimental data — a 26-year record of observations, no less — to reach a conclusion perhaps just as worrying. The research, tracking the emissions of carbon from artificially heated plots of a forest in Massachusetts, reinforces fears about the possibility of a climate change “feedback” involving the planet’s soils, one that could pile on top of and substantially worsen the ongoing warming trend triggered by the burning of fossil fuels.

“The study is one of the longest if not the longest climate change ecosystem experiment, beyond the one we are running in our own planet,” said Pep Canadell, an expert on the Earth’s carbon cycle at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia. He was not part of the research.

Read Chris Mooney’s story on The Washington Post -  “One of the oldest climate change experiments has led to a troubling conclusion.”