Windmill saves ski resort $450k/year

More land-using organizations should start putting up wind turbines, if the results from Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock MA is any indication. Putting up a single turbine is saving them $450,000 per year, around 1/3 of their energy bill. Fortunately for them, the windmill produces the most electricity during the winter when it's the most windy, and seeing as they're a sky resort it's also when they use the most electricity (primarily due to their snow-making machines). (I can't help but think that if more companies used turbines, that we'd slow global warming and ski resorts wouldn't need to make fake snow as much.)

Also interestingly during the summer months the turbine produces more electricity than the Jiminy Peak uses. It appears they have not actually worked out a buy-back program for the excess electricity (where their utility company would actually pay *them* if they produced more electricity than they used), so instead the excess power goes into the grid - where it is then used up by local residents, reducing their reliance on the power company, on fossil fuels (coal burning is the primary source of electricity even in the Northeast US), and even their electricity bills. So this project has helped not only the ski resort, but also the local community.

Just don't tell the bats - the action of the turbine results in extremely low pressure air behind the turbine, which then results in internal bleeding. Shame that every improvement in one field leads to a problem in another. Time will tell whether the net good outweighs the net bad.

Why to Take Action

Summary: We can't ever know for sure what the future holds. What we can know is the worst case scenario. If that scenario is bad enough, then we MUST take action to reduce that risk, regardless of what the chances are.



Let's say you're handed a gun with six chambers. You have no clue how many bullets are in the chambers. You are told we have to put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. You have the choice to either (A) do it now, or (B) first pull the trigger once while pointing at the wall, then spin the chamber and point the gun at your head. Which do you do? Of course you should fire at the wall first - if it was an empty chamber you spin it and then point it at yourself, losing nothing; if it was a full chamber you have emptied it, spin it, and then point it at yourself and have gained one additional empty chamber.

What if you were told you could either (A) pull the trigger now, or (B) take 10 lashes, empty one chamber, and then point it at your head? I would still take choice (B). 10 lashes will not kill me. I have no clue how many bullets are in those six chambers, it could be that they're ALL full and my only chance of survival is emptying one of them in exchange for the lashes. It's not worth that risk of my life, so long as the cost (10 lashes) is not enough to kill me either.

That's what this guy is arguing about climate change - even if we had no clue about whether it was happening, the cost of trying to reduce it just in case is so much less than the potential consequences, that we must take that choice.

And there's his various replies here.

Climate Change Report

I recently wrote an email to a colleague with whom I've been debating global warming. We both agree that it's happening, but he thinks we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude it's manmade (via CO_2) rather than solar variation.

My email:

FYI, here's a link to a summary of the IPCC report on global warming from Wikipedia.
And here's the full text.

The summary is in a nice bulleted format with section headers, so you can skip to the parts you're most interested in. The report includes data stating that

1) atmospheric CO_2 and methane levels are higher than at any other time in the past 650,000 years, and

2) since 1750, human activities have resulted in "radiative forcing" of 1.6 W/m^2, while solar variations have resulted in only 0.12 W/m^2.

Page 11 of the full text has a graph, Figure SPM-4, which compares the observed temperature increase since 1900 with computer models assuming only natural sources, and natural plus antropogenic sources - search through the full document on the word "solar" to find relevant sections.

I don't have permission to repost his reply, so I'll try and reword it at another time.

See also this paper on ice ages, this discussion of that paper, and this discussion of that discussion.