Health fear as climate scam heats up

TASMANIA faces an ominous and burgeoning epidemic of chronic disease in its climate change future, the State's Director of Public Health said yesterday.

Dr Roscoe Taylor said the spectre of an influenza pandemic was also very real.

The foreseeable risks to health worldwide had been documented, he said, but Tasmania faced its share of public health concerns brought about after events that could only be attributed to climate change.

He said the increased frequency of extreme weather would cause physical injury and psychological instability, as the population became anxious about storm, drought or extreme heat events.

"With changes in Tasmania's weather patterns, we will see more severe weather events," he said.

‘Unforgiving Math of Accumulating Emissions’ - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

“This not a matter of politics or morality or right or wrong. It is simply the unforgiving math of accumulating emissions.”

Todd Stern, the new United States special envoy on climate change, clearly understands the “bathtub effect” that [alleged] experts say makes the rising human contribution to the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect such a thorny challenge.

Wind Watch: Wind power is too fickle to be relied upon by Ohioans

The Feb. 11 Dispatch article “Winds of change” was misleading. It failed to disclose the three problems with wind energy: It is intermittent, volatile and unreliable. It is also misleading to talk about the number of homes served when describing wind-energy capability. In the first place, homes use only 37 percent of all energy in the United States.

Wind advocates use a figure pulled out of a hat (in this case 4,000 kilowatt-hours per home per year) for the homes-served number. My small home, which is all-electric, uses 20,000 kwh per year. Homes using wind energy must always have some reliable source for backup. The wind must be blowing at the right speed to produce electricity and does not do so reliably when most of the energy is needed. Electricity produced varies with the wind speed.