A Minor Problem For Sound Science of the Effect of Offshore Windfarms on Seabirds: There Isn't Any.
I've just been leafing through a wonderful book that one wishes didn't have to be written.
It's um, this one: Why Birds Matter
One of my scientific interests is material flows in which I focus on particular elements in the periodic table, and I've collected and read a great deal of literature on that subject. One very important element is the element phosphorous, on which the real "green revolution" - that would be the fertilizer revolution in the 1950's and not the absurd scheme to lace the world with wind turbines and solar cells - depended.
Why Birds Matter is written for our times, inasmuch the argument consists of a great deal of comment on the economic importance of birds, and what it would cost to the human economy if they ceased to exist, and they may cease to exist; many species have already done so, and more are sure to follow.
The only thing we really, really, really care about is, um, money, right and left.
And one of the big economic drivers on this planet is, um, food.
We absolutely must have phosphorous, to feed humanity and for that matter, all living things, whether or not we decide that the only people who should eat are those who can pay for it.
It turns out that one of the most important sources for phosphorous on this planet is, um - well there's no nice way to put it - bird shit. And this is the topic of chapter 9 in "Why Birds Matter."
The island nation of Nauru once had the highest per capita income in the world because it was the chief exporter of bird shit, or what bird shit had become after a few million years, phosphate rock. After Nauru, a small country, dug up all the bird shit on the island and exported it to Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere, the government decided to "invest" all the money, and all the investments went bad, and now Nauru is a very poor country with no resources, very little remaining phosphate, a population with a diabetes problem and an economy based on warehousing Islamic refugees who tried to make it to Australia but who were intercepted by the Australian Navy.
So Nauru needs seabirds to shit on it again. But seabirds are in trouble.
And one of the big trouble for seabirds is, um, wind farms, which are often, to my personal regret, described by people on our end of the political spectrum as "green" and good for the environment.
They are no such thing. I was recently challenged here to produce some um, "peer reviewed" literature (which isn't by the way, magical) on the negative impact of wind farms on the environment, and I pulled some stuff out of my files, and poked around the recent literature on the topic. Here is my response to the challenge: Sure, I'd be pleased to...
After poking around a bit for some more updated stuff than what's in my files, I came across this nice piece: Lack of sound science in assessing wind farm impacts on seabirds (Green et al, Journal of Applied Ecology 2016, 53, 1635–1641) I believe it may be open sourced, so you can read it yourself if you're not in a library. (I'm in a library as I write, so I can't tell if it's open sourced, but I think it is.)
Some text from the paper:
And...
Collision risk models (CRMs) are used to predict the number of fatal collisions of flying birds with wind turbines and per capita additional mortality rates. In the UK, the most widely used CRM is that of Band (2012) (see review by Masden & Cook (2016)). The model requires estimates or assumptions about bird numbers and ages at the wind farm, attribution of birds at the wind farm to source populations, sizes and age structure of source populations, flight behaviour and avoidance rates. Data specific to the project and species being assessed are usually collected on seabird numbers and flight heights, judged by eye, but these estimates are subject to substantial uncertainties, variability and potential biases (Johnston et al. 2014), including:
1.accuracy of input variables is rarely quantified, is often poor, and the CRM outputs are highly sensitive to the values used, including flight speed (Masden 2015), and avoidance rate estimates;
2.in many cases, birds at risk are not attributed to source populations because recently developed tracking technologies are either not deployed at all or not on a sufficient scale for robust estimation;
3.count and flight height data are usually insufficient in quantity and quality for precise estimation of seasonal variation, age structure and age differences (Band 2012).
Total avoidance rates used for CRM calculations for seabirds, including within-wind farm avoidance of individual turbines and macro-avoidance by movement of birds around the turbine array, are most often based upon judgement or extrapolation from other contexts rather than pertinent data. Empirical values are only available from a few species (mostly gulls and terns) and usually extrapolated from studies of onshore wind farms, where different circumstances prevail (Cook et al. 2014). Robust direct estimates of within-wind farm avoidance rates are lacking for seabird species frequently present in and near planned and consented offshore wind farms in the UK, such as northern gannet Morus bassanus and black-legged kittiwake Rissa tridactyla (Cook et al. 2014). Macro-avoidance and displacement rates have been estimated using radar, visual surveys and imaging, but robust quantitative estimates...
By the way, birds and bats are only part of the reason that the wind industry sucks, but it is, I think, an important part.
The wind and solar industries are nothing more than fig leafs for the dangerous gas industry, and the dangerous natural gas industry is killing us as surely as the dangerous coal industry is.
This post won't get the more than 60 recs a post on this website got for a poorly reported blurb about how wonderful the wind industry is for, um, mussels, but I think if we cannot question our own assumptions, cannot rethink our biases, we will not serve humanity.
Don't be rote. Think.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
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... much as smokestacks were frequently seen as a symbol of progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90716345/
Most people don't see wind turbines as industrial litter.
Smokestack industries were romanticized in a similar way.
I shouldn't be surprised but I am. Conflating smokestacks and wind turbines is absolutely laughable,,,,
Here are two smokestacks that would be at least a somewhat closer association even though it would still be a dishonest comparison but nowhere on the level you surmised.
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lanthanide processing facility in China. From Lim, Nature 520, 426–427 (23 April 2015)[1]
XiaoZhi Lim, Nature Vol. 520 Issue 7548 (2015) pp. 426-427
Even the Chinese find the lanthanide industry "particularly dirty." And let's be clear, without lanthanides, the wind industry would even be more useless than it already is, and it is useless. Climate change is getting worse, not better, since people began squandering resources on this trash.
Our bourgeois types who are so in love with this awful industry, the wind industry - to the point that no amount of information can actually make them question themselves - of course, couldn't care about the conditions under which Chinese mine, refine and isolate the lanthanides for their useless and trivial "green" scam.
The absurd thing is that the capacity utilization of the wind industry is garbage, which means that these materials are being used inefficiently. There is a difference between a generator with neodymium ferrite boron magnets connected to a turbine that runs at maximal capacity and one which runs maybe 30% of the time, requiring yet another redundant generator from a gas plant to be there when the wind isn't blowing, a generator which will also require even more neodymium (or dysprosium) to be mined.
The justifications for this horrible investment in waste, the consequences of which are, as usual, dumped on the poorest of the poor, fully delineates the ethical universe in which these people live.
What is worse than what they are doing to our contemporaries in China however, is what they are doing to all future generations with their fantasy.
The wind industry is not progress. It's a useless scam which after 50 years of cheering, can't even match for all the average continuous power it has assembled since the 1970's, the yearly increase in the use of natural gas.
It didn't work; it isn't working; and it won't work. It's trash.
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More than a hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste stored in the tailing ponds is constantly producing large amount of toxic gases and nuclear radiation that contaminate the environment. The dumped nuclear waste remains radioactive and dangerous for millions of years.
Suffering from congenital deformity, Mohan, 19, has six toe fingers. His father, a miner in the uranium mines, died of lung cancer.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/gallery/indias-nuclear-graveyard-haunting-images-10871818
Great stuff we have there.
By total volume, there's more toxic non-radioactive industrial waste, crap that has a half life of FOREVER.
Failure to acknowledge this makes one an unwitting shill of the fossil fuel industry.
Maimed or dead from radioactive waste is no different than maimed or dead by non-radioactive waste.
I don't have any religious beliefs about nuclear power or radioactive waste. Your images are very evocative of Christian images of hell.
My personal religious crusade is against automobiles. I could post pictures of people ruined in car wrecks, I could post pictures of people dying of cancers caused by particulate pollution they inhaled, of jungles opened up and destroyed by fossil fueled vehicles and chain saws... etc... etc...
...but I won't.
If hybrid wind/gas electric grids work, if they are profitable, more will be built and the overall consumption of natural gas will increase.
There are billions of people on this planet who haven't yet been invited to participate in the affluent high energy industrial consumer economy.
As an affluent person it's immoral to say I get to burn the gas, but you don't.
My own electricity comes from Pacific Gas and Electric. PG&E's greenhouse gas emissions are in the low range for the industrial world. Yeah, 24% is nuclear.
Furthermore, PG&E rates our household a "smile" emoji 
for energy efficiency, that in spite of the 24/7 pumps of our water garden. (The water for these gardens is waste from our reverse osmosis system... we are totally first world affluent in some ways. I like to watch birds and fish. Occasionally birds eat the fish, but more often it's raccoons.) I guess the LED lighting and my disdain for central heating and cooling make up for the energy used by the pumps. But I'll never convince my wife we could live without the refrigerator, even though I've lived without one for long periods myself, as a kid and young adult.
Another way of reducing one's environmental footprint is to avoid meat, but we're total hypocrites about that because we have animal shelter rescue dog family and don't expect them to be vegetarians.
But I guess its nice that you have come up with the answer to getting rid of gas electricity, just get rid of wind and solar. Sure, that will work. 
Here are the two scenarios.
1. More gas plants with solar and wind.
2. more gas plants.
If each equal 100.
Then 1. is what, 70% more gas and 2. is 100% gas with each new plant opened.
You choose. You can say whatever you want to say, we should do this or that, but this is what is happening. Right now we are buying time. Solar and wind gives us that time. Without it we have less time. Hopefully it gives us the time to figure this out, because we have to. I just want to add, for some reason countries are growing in solar and wind at a large percentage, and they are not with Nuclear. I am sure it is because of the large scale demonstrations against nuclear across the world. Could it be because it economically doesn't make sense compared to renewable energy and gas energy? I mean, we know that energy companies are real sensitive to the prevailing thought and don't follow the money. As I have stated before, I havenothing against Nuclear energy, I just don't think that it is necessarily better than solar and wind. Both have their pro's and con's. I am in the camp of lets do what is best for humanity but to ignore Nuclear problems while bashing solar and wind is the height of ignorance.
I lied, I just want to add one more thing, you put this in your post "It's apparent gas is a desirable energy source for many people, even anti-nuclear activists," and I am really tired of you insinuating that is what I believe. I am really tired of you putting words in my mouth. I just want any jury to read this entire thread before you judge what I am about to say, Hunter, you are a despicable excuse for a human. You continue to ascribe things that I have never said to me, insinuate that I am anti-nuclear, pro-gas when all I have done is argue the benefits of solar and wind while accepting the problems those pose while pointing out the problems Nuclear poses are at least equal, You use republican talking points against renewable energy and are generally just a fucking twat. You cant even answer a simple yes or no question because you know it will show your hypocrisy. If I didn't know any better I would think you were a PR person for the Nuclear industry. If you aren't, you should be, you would fit in perfectly.
