Why Won’t Greenpeace Admit Wind Turbines May Be Killing Whales?
September 14, 2023
By Paul Homewood
Who cares about whales? Whales might be dying because of sonar surveying, but Greenpeace simply ignores the science that doesn’t suit it.
47 Comments
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Sort of a repost on the stidency of Greenpeace. They claimany possible blame falling on wind turbines are lies.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/how-to-stop-whale-deaths-from-real-threats-not-lies-about-wind-energy/
So I am a geophysicist working in Oil and Gas. I have a degree in Oceanography (just a year or two behind Stephan Rahmstorf at the same University Department!). I work with and understand data from seismic, sonar, piling and have working knowledge of frequency content, energy etc. and the applications for oil and gas exploration, geology, shallow geology and engineering purposes. I have 40 years experience
Google wind turbines and whales and all you get is its not true, of fact checking, or “evil fossil fuel and Fox News disinformation”.
But if you google something like “oil and gas industry seismic sonar”
You get pages like:
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/51688/total-exxon-seismic-testing-whales-dolphins-oil-gas/
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jul/19/whales-us-approves-seismic-oil-prospecting-atlantic
But the best is if you add Greenpeace to that search. Then you get this page:
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/oceans/save-the-whales/seismic-sonar-testing/#:~:text=Seismic%20Testing,-According%20to%20government&text=They%20are%20so%20loud%20that,%2C%20sea%20turtles%2C%20and%20fish.
For which the introductory para is:
“While whales and other marine life are threatened by international whaling and habitat loss, they also face a domestic threat. Navy sonar testing and seismic testing from the oil and gas industry regularly take place in areas where marine species thrive. Find out more about the impacts and what you can do to help.”
Airguns and pile driving will be similar in frequency content ie low. Sonar is, well, sonar and its high frequency.
Pot. Kettle. Black. In my mind definitive evidence of selective lying by Greenpeace, The Guardian et al. But we knew that already.
+1 👍
Logic Polish enigmatic from somewhere where Snowdonian whales frolic and fart. Scientist mmm…? Thinking? Det tenker jeg ikke
Norwegian wood?
WTF?
T’was brillig and the slithey tove
Excellent! Thank you.
It does not surprise me that you get different answers depending on what words one uses when doing a ‘search’.
When searching ‘ocean acidification’ one is informed that corals make their shells from carbonate dissolved in sea-water , which decreases with lower pH, whilst increasing the bicarbonate content. For example here:
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/acidification.html
But if one searches for the biology of calcification in corals, one finds that calcification actually results from the intake of bicarbonate to produce the carbonate.
https://www.coral-reef-info.com/coral-reef-formation/
So much dishonesty to sustain the religion.
MT comment was rather rushed as I was going out, but my main point is how Greenpeace’s own website rails against seismic and sonar when its the US Navy and Oil companies doing it but says it false information when its associated with wind turbines.
Site survey work for wind turbines will include lots of boat activity, sub-sea sampling. They will run side scan sonar (like O&G do for rig hazard work) for sea bed features, they will run sparker and boomer seismic surveys (lower power, high frequency sources for shallow, high resolution seismic) and they will also use conventional seismic boats in some circumstances (high power and low frequency but constantly moving and of limited time duration weeks to months)
Then there is piledriving for turbine foundations. That is serious, steady, constant-location impact and low frequency. Seismic boats with air guns will also be low frequency and continuous when surveys are taking place but there are also significant differences. Seismic surveys are continuously moving boats, towing a very large array of streamer cables and may only be in an area for a relatively short time.
I don’t doubt that there is potential for seismic surveys to affect whales – that is why there are regulations and restrictions. The oil industry never expects to get a free pass and takes its obligations seriously. What pisses me off is the hypocrisy from Greenpeace, The Guardian etc effectively claiming its bad when oil and gas exploration do it, but “nothing to see here” when associated with wind farms. In many cases they are the same operations running with the same boats – that is particularly true for pre-drill rig hazard assessment where the boats and surveys techniques used for that purpose will be identical to those used for wind turbine foundation surveys. Except they will be much smaller footprint and duration for rig hazard assessment than for wind farm surveys. And no pile driving for rigs, unlike wind turbines.
PS There are some very strange comments purporting to come from regular commentators, plus the disappearance of the original post – has this site been hacked?
So much dishonesty to sustain the religion; surely not?!
NEVER in geological history have the oceans EVER been acidic. Not even during the Cambrian when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 7000ppm. Another Arts graduate interpretation of cyense.
Also if an alkali becomes less alkali it is still an alkali! The infamous “experiment” that this nonsense is based on used HCl to speed up the process.
A crock to put it mildly but lies and bullying are the tools of the climate industrial complex. The only science, political science!
Well stated.
I have a cousin who is very on message with whatever is the latest lefty nonsense. She think all the offshore wind should be on no longer required oil platforms. I have pointed out two problems
1) Oilfields are often a very long way from land and have no electrical connection
2) Oil Platforms are designed to take quite modest and entirely compressive loads. Put a large turbine on one and it will fall over.
Tried to justify this so we could avoid abandonment costs on worked out gas platforms in the Black Sea Ooffshore gas platforms are I think rather robust compared to spindly offshore wind towers so no problem with llateral forces but you only get one turbine per platform and you would need to make sure your above platform superstructure is well integrated. Just tel her she is right about this but full of cr##p about the rest of the green mantra
Spindly wind turbines are firmly anchored into the rock.
Oil platforms just stand held down by their own mass. But are not designed to sustain any lateral forces
If I could I surely would
And if might were right the so may you
Bollocks! Loads of pilings to hold the buggers in place but what the hell Best thing to do with old platforms is to leave them in plac , sawn off at 30 feet or so below sea surface. Then you have a benign environment for fish, and a place where no fisherman would risk his nets
Or just leave them
Greenpeace is against human freedom. But it’s hard to sell totalitarianism. So they attack Man indirectly through the animals. They care about animals only to the extent they can leverage it against Man.
They don’t really care about whales. With the British government crippling energy supplies, GP is quite fine with sacrificing the whales on the altar of renewables.
Surely the solution is to harvest the whales for oil and use the oil to generate the electricity?
In fact, it was the extraction of shale oil in Scotland in the 19th century that prevented the extinction of whales.
It is a little-known fact that in the mid 19th century Scotland was the World’s largest oil producing nation.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/James-Paraffin-Young/
The irony being that fossil fuels saved the whales.
Captain Ahab and his mates fromNantucket and Tarwathie tried it 159 years ago Not enough Whales
Actually Catweazel riffraff like the Rockefellers and Getty’s played a part too. Too bad that their foundations are so into lefty Net Zero misanthropy now
Cat, behind the exhibits within museums are veritable vaults of no-see specimens. About twenty years ago, I, in a nearby near disused quarry spoil heap, as fossil fish ‘hunter’, split a big slab of shale to find after a wee bit of subsequent work later, effectively the head bones of a very old fish. Long story is, took it into the lab folks at Glasgow Hunterian and after a fair bit of deliberation it was decided that, hmm… it looks an early Amia but we can’t tell…
Bloomin heck. There’re about fourteen skull plates including both curved occipitals, many squamosals, nasals etc, and attendant stuff that reconstructs – indicating either an early lungfish, or, given its obvious big superbly preserved gill cover, coelacanth-like.
I asked if the Doc. might be interested in keeping it given it wasn’t stuff they’d shown anywhere near a ‘type fossil’ from within their collections or books. Nope, didn’t want it but maybe suspect that because it was likely from deeper than Westphalian-age (or from what was mined about and below the Lower Hirst Coals from below the Forth) as early suggested.
For my sins I spent many a boring day on North Sea seismic boats. On the boat the bang of n airgun at frequency range 10-65 Hz felt like somebody walloping the side of the boat with a very big sledgehammer. One wallop every 10 seconds or so. You get used to it. The airgun array was about 50 metres away. If whales are seriously worried about such banging and clattering then they have enough warning to scarper off somewhere else until those daft humans are finished with whatever nonsense they are up to. Anyway that noise is only a small part of their audio spectrum. Whales hear from 16Hz to 200,000 Hz. Live and let live say most whales so long as you don’t stick a harpoon in me. Likewise porpoises seem to enjoy frollicking around boats with prop noise.
WE also run sub bottom profiling at 2 -20 kHz in short pulses which may sound like intrusive and annoying noise to whales . but again my cetacean frends if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen
I don’t know about low frequency noise from spinning turbine blades 2-10 Hz (and dont forget that most of the time they dont spin anyway) but speaking personally I rather like the swish swoosh of turbine blades and have sometimes thought about using an onshore turbine as the central pillar of an enormous and palatial bell tent where I might live, or even squat. Other advantages are Nice views and (occasionally) free electricity
The problem is that they get disoriented and lose track of ships. Getting hit by a ship is not a good thing
Because Greenpeace is a corrupt organisation.
The big question is the continuous low harmonics produced by the blades, which is a well known phonemonon, does it find it’s way in to the sea via the pillar and foundations?
Over the last few years, I have shared with Doug Parr, Policy Director of Greenpeace, UK, my analysis, of the massively negative environmental consequences to the Earth of implementing the consensus (IEA/UN IPCC) version of the “green energy transition”.
This would, as most of you subscribers to Notalota know, unleash the largest by far, and most fruitless, mining boom in the short history of human life on Earth, nearly all of it in in poor countries. Fruitless because the quantity of metals and minerals required far exceeds the capacity of our Earth to deliver these, not least because, ever since the Bronze Age, the quality of the metal and mineral ores mankind has mined, has been declining.
Of course, Doug Parr himself has never shown the slightest interest and has never replied directly. But the organisation does acknowledge receiving this information by sending me its assurances that the consequences of climate heating (boiling these days!) are so much worse.
I would be happy to share with Notalota some of the truly bizarre replies I have received.
They do away with fossil fuels without a replacement. Millions die.
As Dr Peterson said, when you don’t understand why someone is doing something, look at the result, and imply motivation.
Greens aren’t for nature, they are against humans. They use humans’ love of nature against us.
I’ve made the argument often enough over the last 25 years: the objective is to ‘unpick the Industrial Revolution’. Abandoning fossil fuels with that in mind is “unsaleable”. Demonising CO2, the emission common to all fossil fuels, is a much easier sell, as we have seen.
If you can get otherwise reputable (I’m in a generous mood this morning!) scientists to lie about the effects of CO2 and create computer programs which give spurious but convenient results then you are halfway home.
If you can con the politicians …. well, I mean!!
Windmills are but more lunacy from the Left. Follow the money, follow the control. The Climate Hoax is a system of government perfected in the corrupt, now defunct, democrat-run sinkhole, City of Chicago: Government For the Few, By the Few, at the expense of the Many. For decades Chicagoan’s stood by and watched as the Big Blue (D) Machine churned through their ever-increasing taxes, stuffing their pockets with both hands, as the Once Great City of Chicago became ChiRaq–a lawless hellscape, circling the drain. Don’t become a Whale lest you suffer the same fate.
@ billydick007, with the greatest respect, this ruinous, completely infeasible “green energy transition” is promoted and organized all over the OECD by financial institutions, brokers, asset management companies, pension funds, etc etc, everyone of them claiming to be ESG compliant, if not ESG over compliant!
The ignorant and misguided politicians, whether on the Left or Right, believing themselves to be “moral” for bringing these ruinous policies into Law, are simply doing what they are told.
It’s time to get those pitchforks out!
Because like so many organizations they are a front for a marxist political agenda. Any cause which finds a soft spot in the armour of Western Society is quickly infiltrated and taken over like a virus. They all, all of them spout pious twaddle to get Joe Public to back of an not ask questions so they can push the marxist cause which is of course chaos. None of the modern day causes are about what they claim. None of them have real goals because the real goal is chaos and then who comes along to save us…. the marxists! Net Zero is unachievable because it never was meant to be achievable. Fight climate change the arts graduate “scientists” tell is. When ever they take over a success story like feminism and race and homosexuality which have achieved their goes they quickly go about pretending it has never been worse. Same with the klymutt porn churned out by santa’ s arts graduate helpers at the BBC. This will not end well……
Well stated. Thank you for your thoughtful comment. My hope is the rest of The West will wake up to the Marxist ploy to defeat The West by hollowing out their economies, from within, chasing the chimera that is the Climate Hoax. Since the major backers of the climate lie are the WEF, the UN, the Gates Foundation, Barrator Beijing Biden et al, I am assured this hoax originated in a CCP Unrestricted Warfare conference room, and is being implemented by their captured apparatchiks. This will not end well. Their first victims are Germany, the sick-boy of Europe, and the EU and U.S. auto makers that are circling the drain as we speak. Who will be next?
Correct, Mr breathing.
“The issue is never the issue.”
“An offshore windfarm.
What an amazingly great place to park a nuclear-armed submarine off the coast where there is no way it would be detected by sonar.”
#Russia
Very interesting observation. Perhaps this is yet another part of the CCP’s Unrestricted Warfare plan that is The Climate Hoax?
Paul, you didn’t put a link to the Spectator story
Both links are free
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-wont-greenpeace-admit-that-wind-turbines-may-be-killing-whales/
Direct to disqus comments
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/ill-wind/
“he might also have mentioned (it being closer to home) the stranding of an entire pod of 55 pilot whales on the Traigh Mhòr on the east side of the Isle of Lewis only two months ago on 16 July.
Local commentators at the time mentioned the possible role of wind turbines but this does not seem to have been picked up nationally.”
This story will never be picked up nationally, as it goes against the narrative of the Climate Hoax grift. We have entered to world of narrative over truth. We must never “Get used to it.”
“Windfarms kill far more birds than whales.”
There was a time when the life of even a single whale or eagle mattered to Greenpeace.
Now they watch from the sidelines as wildlife is sacrificed on the altar of climate change
The problem is that whales are long lived and therefore have a low reproduction rate. The raptors that are most likely to die by windmills also breed in low numbers, as do bats.
Girl-bullying mystics pretend that forced reproduction does not increase perinatal deaths among females so coerced. To mystics, reeality is heresy!