There Really Is Something Ironic About This

Lately those opposed to constructing wind farms off of our coast have cited the number of dead whales that have washed up on our shores since we started exploring on our shores and building platforms for those wind farms. There is also a move (which I admit I was unaware of) to construct floating solar farms. Aside from any other considerations, how much toxic liquid would a broken solar panel release into the ocean? I have no idea–I am simply asking the question.

On Thursday, Watts Up With That posted the following headline:

The World’s Largest Floating Solar Farm Wrecked by a Storm Just Before Launch

That can’t be good.

The article reports:

h/t Dr. Willie Soon; Who could have predicted acres of fragile floating structures would be vulnerable to bad weather?

Madhya Pradesh: Summer Storm Damages World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant at Omkareshwar Dam (Watch Video)

Indore: A summer storm on Tuesday damaged a floating solar plant at Madhya Pradesh’s Omkareshwar dam. The floating solar plant, situated in the backwater of the dam, is the biggest of its kind in the world. A joint venture between  Madhya Pradesh Govt and National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), the project was nearly completed and ready for its launch. A part of the project became operational last week.

The project near the village of Kelwa Khurd, aimed at generating 100 MW of electricity, with additional capacities of 88MW at Indawadi and 90 MW at Ekhand village. However, on Tuesday, summer storms with the speed of 50kmph hit the project and threw the solar panels all around the place. No employee was fortunately injured.

The article concludes:

Plastics tend to disintegrate under tropical sunlight, especially when in contact with water or water spray. Ultraviolet from the sun drives exotic chemical reactions, which leads to chemical breakdown.

Metal sitting in water is difficult to manage, even stainless steel is not immune to corrosion. All metal structures in contact with water need to be protected with sacrificial anodes or comparable protective measures. Electricity and metal are an especially bad combination, any electrical fault which causes a current to run through metal in contact with water can cause corrosion to occur thousands of times faster than normal.

Let us hope developers and politicians take the hint, and stop throwing our money at inherently flawed ideas like floating solar arrays.

Sometimes things that look really good on paper just don’t work.

 

Some Interesting News From The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

John Hinderaker at Power Line posted a story yesterday about the current draft of the report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The draft has been leaked and contains one very interesting paragraph.

This is the paragraph:

Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.

I am not a scientist, and to me that paragraph is a foreign language, but Mr. Hinderaker is kind enough to explain what it means.

He explains:

It shouldn’t be a surprise that variations in the Sun’s output are responsible, at least in part, for variations in Earth’s temperatures. The problem is that if you simply do the math on radiant heat, the known increase in solar activity during the second half of the 20th century accounts for only a small portion of the assumed increase in temperature over that period. So the alarmists have denied that the Sun plays a significant role. More recent work has strongly suggested that solar radiation plays a role above and beyond radiant heat, by influencing cloud cover, which is a key factor in temperature. Given the strong correlation between solar activity and temperature, this work has been persuasive.

The bottom line here is simple–we didn’t do it! The progress of civilization is not the major cause of global warming–the sun and the sun’s impact on cloud cover play a major role in global climate.

So what is really going on in the IPCC? The United Nations is no longer controlled by freedom-loving countries. It has been taken over by a block of third-world nations who feel that the developed nations of the world should finance the dictators and thugs running their countries. There is no concern here for science, truth, or preserving the planet. The concern is, “How can I get money to build a bigger house for myself while my people starve?” We saw that in the UN-run food-for-oil program in Iraq. Now we are seeing the same corruption in the blackmail attempts under the guise of combating ‘global warming.’

The entire leaked report (and more scientific analysis) can be found at wattsupwiththat.com. Please take the time to look at the leaked draft before it is changed!

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