Professor makes stunning discovery as to why dead whales keep washing up on East Coast beaches
For the best part of half a century, a 41-foot humpback whale named Luna swam up and down the East Coast. Then on Jan. 30, 2023, Luna washed up dead on Long Island, New York.
He was the tenth whale to strand on beaches in New York and New Jersey in nine weeks. Environmentalists, politicians and ordinary citizens loudly wondered if the construction of offshore wind turbines was killing them.
Apostolos Gerasoulis, a Rutgers professor emeritus of computer science who co-created the search engine that powers Ask.com, now says the answer is yes. ‘Absolutely, 100 percent, offshore wind kills whales,’ he says.
Early in 2023, Gerasoulis began researching whale deaths. That summer he started building a software system to identify any relationship between the dead whales and offshore wind survey vessels, which use loud blasts of sonar to map the seabed for the installation of offshore wind turbines and high-voltage cables.
He named the system Luna.
But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is responsible for protecting marine animals and their habitats insists there is no connection.
‘To date, no whale mortality has been attributed to offshore wind activities,’ said Lauren Gaches, NOAA Fisheries public affairs director shortly after Luna’s body was found.
Whale deaths had started increasing several years earlier. NOAA declared ‘unusual mortality events’ for humpback whales in 2016, minke whales in 2017, and North Atlantic right whales also in 2017.
The death count is now up to 534 for these species.
Wind farm developers started sending out sonar vessels to blast the ocean floor with high-intensity sound waves to map it for offshore wind farms in 2016.
But NOAA still denies any connection.
‘At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys or pile driving could potentially cause whale deaths,’ Katie Wagner, NOAA public affairs specialist, told DailyMail.com.
‘There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.’
But according to Gerasoulis, NOAA data reveal that humpback whale deaths in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island waters went from an average of two per year before 2016 to 10 in the years since.
Last year, 21 humpback whales died in the region. ‘You have 20 dead whales. You used to have two, and now it's 20,’ Gerasoulis said. ‘So I started looking at this from every perspective.’
He loaded NOAA data on whale deaths, the zigzag courses of survey ships and even wave action into his computer system. Luna revealed patterns that Gerasoulis believes point to offshore wind survey vessels as the cause of the whale deaths.
Gerasoulis is an expert in computational sciences, search engines, high-performance computing and data analytics. ‘There are five people in the world who build search engines,’ Gerasoulis says. ‘I’m one of them.’
Last year he founded Save the East Coast to investigate the impact of offshore wind on oceans, marine life, fishermen and shore communities.
The Luna software system that Gerasoulis built integrates NOAA data on whale, dolphin and porpoise deaths with vessel traffic data from MarineCadastre.gov. He believes it is the first system of its kind.
Luna generates maps of the U.S. East Coast and plots the locations of offshore wind farms; deaths of whales, dolphins and porpoises; and the routes taken by various survey ships. Luna can display any specific geographic area, time frame, marine mammal species or ship, depending on the query.
For example, from 2017 through 2023, a total of 286 whales, dolphins and porpoises died along the New Jersey and New York shores. Luna shows exactly where they were found.
Luna visually displays the zigzag routes taken by offshore wind survey vessels. During January and February 2022, there was little survey boat in the area. Six vessels traveled a total of 4,213 miles. One humpback whale died.
January and February 2023, however, showed a tremendous increase in survey vessel traffic in the waters off New Jersey and New York – 13 vessels traveled a total of 11,977 miles. Seven humpback whales died, including Luna.
In August 2022, survey boat traffic was minimal off the New Jersey coast. Two survey vessels worked near Asbury Park and two more worked off Atlantic City. They traveled a total of 5,469 miles. There was plenty of open water around the two survey areas and no humpback whales died.
August 2023, however, was a different story. Sixteen different offshore wind survey vessels moved slowly back and forth off the coast. They covered a total of 16,812 miles, triple the amount of the previous August. Six whales died that month.
In the summer of 2022, Trisha DeVoe, a conservation biologist on the Miss Belmar whale watching boat, first spotted a two- to three-year-old male humpback whale. He became No. 0260 in the New York-New Jersey humpback whale catalog run by Gotham Whales.
‘He was just a typical, healthy young humpback whale,’ DeVoe says. ‘We observed him several times during that whale watching season over the summer.’
But the last time Miss Belmar passengers saw No. 0260, in October 2022, half of his tail fluke was missing. It looked like it had been chopped off by a boat propeller.
‘We honestly didn't know if he would survive such an injury,’ DeVoe says. ‘We didn't know if he would be able to continue to swim and forage and behave like a whale with just half a tail fluke.’
Humpback whales stay in New Jersey waters for an average of 38 days, DeVoe says. In the fall they swim to the Caribbean to breed and give birth. She didn’t know if the young whale would make it.
The following July, DeVoe was thrilled to see 0260 back at the Jersey Shore.
‘Not only did he survive, he was thriving,’ DeVoe says. ‘He made that long migration down to the breeding grounds, and he came all the way back up, thousands of miles, so he was able to swim. He was so resilient.’
On July 24, 2023, DeVoe photographed the whale breaching off the Jersey shore.
‘They use their tail flukes to gain speed and propel them to lift their massive bodies out of the water, and he was able to do that with half a tail fluke,’ she says. ‘We were just overjoyed.’
Two and a half weeks later, on Aug. 12, 2023, DeVoe was out on the Miss Belmar when she and her passengers spotted the whale. He was floating dead in the water.
DeVoe was heartbroken.
‘He was able to survive everything he went through — the major injury and amputation and come all the way back up here. He was so strong, but unfortunately, he wasn't strong enough to survive the next onslaught that he was going to face in our ocean,’ DeVoe says.
‘We really believe that what is killing these whales is the surveying work that they're doing. It's the only thing different in our ocean. We never had whales dying like this.’
DeVoe and other local environmentalists were devastated by the loss of the whale and wanted to honor him with a name, rather than just a number. They started calling him ‘Saint.’
‘He was this whale, in human terms, who was a lot like a saint. He suffered a lot at the hand of humans. He suffered that massive injury and he survived, and he thrived, and he continued on with his life. But then he unfortunately went on to his ultimate death at the cause of human activity.
‘So, we feel like he was just a saint during his time here.’
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Solar Farms are an environmental as well as economic mistake.
The actress Tracy Ward objects to her ex-husband the Duke of Beaufort building a 2,000-acre solar farm in Gloucestershire:
“Solar panels should be on roofs, along motorways, or industrial sites,” she says. “Be careful what the climate change fear-mongering will lull us into accepting.”
Spot on.
While solar panels on roofs can (almost) make sense, huge solar farms are an environmental as well as economic mistake.
The whole point of farmland is that it is already a solar farm, and a green one at that.
It turns sunlight into food energy for people, insects, voles and birds. “The fact that some green campaigners would rather have low grade electricity than high quality British farm produce shows how bizarrely irrational environmentalism has become,” says Dr John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation.
Ah, say solar-energy fans, but you can have both: you can graze sheep under the solar panels or allow weeds to flourish. This is nonsense: the whole point of solar panels is that they catch the sunlight — the clue is in the name – which plants would otherwise use to grow.
On a normal summer’s day, perhaps 10 percent of the sunlight might get missed by the solar panels and caught by the plants’ solar panels (leaves) instead. It’s a zero-sum game.
It is debatable whether we need home-grown electricity more desperately than home-grown food these days: reliance on imports of both are increasing sharply. But you cannot currently make bread or lambs any other way than by using land; the same is not true of electricity.
Solar power needs around 200 times as much land as gas per unit of energy and 500 times as much as nuclear.
Reducing the land we need for human civilisation is surely a vital ecological imperative.
The more concentrated the production, the more land you spare for nature. Going back to using the landscape to provide energy, as they did in the Middle Ages (through wind, water and hay for horses), would be a disaster for nature.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-power-of-power-density
Britain currently vies with New Zealand each year to break the record for wheat yield: our combination of soil moisture and summer day length is ideal. But it’s right at the bottom of the heap for solar-power potential.Around 1-2 kilowatt-hours a day of “direct normal irradiation” falls on the average square metre in Britain. Most of Australia experiences 5-8 times as much.
According to one study, it is not even clear that the energy generated by a typical solar farm in Europe north of the Alps is greater than what went into building it, let alone replacing it every 15 years.
https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517302914
To match UK electricity demand from solar on a June afternoon would mean covering 5-10% of the entire country with solar farms but they would be useless at night and in winter.British solar output peaks at precisely the times we least need it: in the middle of the day in the middle of summer.
It contributes the square root of sod all in December, and spring and autumn it stops generating just when demand starts to peak in the evening.
The more solar power we add to the grid, the bigger the evening ramp-up demand for gas. It is expensive to keep so much back-up ready. Batteries will not help much.
If we relied on solar power, it would take many billions of pounds to install enough batteries to tide us over a single night, let alone a winter.
Then there is the demand for materials. There is probably not enough silicon, silver or copper being mined and smelted in the world to build a solar farm big enough to supply Britain.
The material demands of solar power are about six times greater than for gas, per megawatt of capacity (though half those of offshore wind).
Much of this material comes from China, a significant vulnerability in terms of economic security and environmental damage.
Solar’s fans are fond of saying that the cost of solar panels is falling fast, but solar panels account for just a quarter of the costs of a solar farm: the cost of the rest of the infrastructure, and the land, is rising.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-power-of-power-density
Planning guidance on solar farms needs to change fast to stop these duke-lucrative, subsidised eyesores gobbling up more of our green and pleasant land.https://principia-scientific.com/solar-farms-are-taking-us-back-to-the-dark-ages/
**************************************************23 State Coalition Challenges New Federal Regulations on Washing Machines
I have always been glad we do not have these stupid regulations in Australia
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is leading a 23-state coalition of attorneys general opposing another Biden administration regulation on home appliances, this time on washing machines.
They did so as the U.S. House is poised to vote on two bills this week that would restrict Biden administration regulations on dishwashers and refrigerators, among other household appliances. Republicans say the regulations will only further drive up costs and make them less affordable than they already are, The Center Square reported. House Democrats have been encouraged to vote against the bills, arguing they are a political ploy.
A new U.S. Department of Energy regulation on washing machines is the “latest overreach into the livelihoods of middle-class Americans,” Moody said. The administration is now “weaseling its way into laundry rooms in an attempt to further its radical energy policies by implementing harmful and costly standards on washing machines.”
The AG coalition sent a letter to DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm, asking her to abandon a new rule the DOE promulgated or “proceed with notice and comment rulemaking” before enacting it.
The DOE proposed new energy conservation standards for residential clothes washers in March 2023 through a new federal rule as part of an overall energy conservation program. The DOE received numerous comments supporting and opposing it and after months of impasse the rule went nowhere. Then, advocacy organizations and home appliance manufacturers agreed to a joint statement in September 2023 and the DOE finalized the rule in March 2024.
The Energy Policy and Conservation Act “grants DOE the power to regulate residential clothes washers for energy conservation,” the AGs explain. “That grant of authority is not limitless. DOA must also consider the economic burden such regulations will impose on consumers and manufacturers, and whether such burden is economically justified.”
By statute, DOE “may only issue direct final rule if a joint statement is submitted by interested parties who fairly represent the relative points of view and satisfy the standards,” they said. Because the joint statement “was the result of administrative arm-twisting, it did not address issues raised by important stakeholders during the period for comments on the proposed rule,” they wrote to Granholm.
The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers stressed the rule would “eliminate consumer features, reduces choice, significantly increases cost, and/or negatively impacts product performance.”
A study it conducted with Bellomy Research found that the rule would negatively impact low-income households. More than half of U.S. households wouldn’t be able to afford purchasing a more energy efficient washer, the research found, resulting in households purchasing used washers or not purchasing one at all.
Whirlpool argues the rule is not economically justified. Its research found a 25% increase in cost for consumers and a potential 31% loss in industry net present value, which could result in more than 8,000 American job losses. It also criticized DOE for failing to conduct a supply chain analysis in North America.
The joint statement includes advocacy groups like the Alliance for Water Efficiency, the Natural Resource Defense Council, Earthjustice and Others that “do not represent the interests of everyday consumers, and their input should not be given significant weight by DOE,” the AGs argue.
While states like California and Massachusetts support the rule, “many states do not,” the 23 AGs argue. “DOE cannot cherry pick the States with which it is politically aligned to circumvent the ordinary rulemaking process.”
Referring to the rule as “Biden’s war on washing machines,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the president “continues his attack on Louisiana citizens. This time, his bureaucratic tyrants want to dictate how you wash and dry your clothes. I’ll continue to push back on these ill-conceived policies that only hurt hardworking Louisianans and how they operate their households.”
U.S. Rep. Debbie Lasko, R-Arizona, who introduced the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act, said she was “saddened that we would need such a bill.” After the U.S. House passed the bill in May, she said, “No government bureaucrat should ever scheme to take away Americans’ appliances in the name of a radical environmental agenda, yet that is exactly what we have seen under the Biden administration.”
The bill requires that any new energy efficiency standards be cost-effective and prevents household appliances from being banned by the federal government based on fuel usage. It is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Depending on Granholm’s response, the coalition is expected to sue to ask a federal court to halt the rule from going into effect, arguing it is illegal.
https://climaterealism.com/2024/07/9369/
***************************************************GM receives $500 million federal grant to convert Michigan plant
The Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant of General Motors has been awarded a $500 million grant toward preparation to become a producer of electric vehicles.
It comes from the U.S. Department of Energy, led by Secretary Jennifer Granholm – former governor of the Great Lakes State.
The Lansing plant has been in operation more than 20 years, but with a Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grant, it will begin to produce electric vehicles in addition to its current Cadillac CT4 and CT5 series. The decision is a part of a broader company plan to invest in onshore production of electric vehicle components.
“GM’s investment and this Department of Energy grant underscore our commitment to U.S. leadership in manufacturing and innovation, making sure we’re competitive at home and abroad,” said Camilo Ballesty, GM vice president of North America Manufacturing and Labor Relations. “Our Lansing Grand River team produces incredible vehicles for our customers, and we’re proud to bring our commitment to performance and quality into our EV future.”
https://www.thecentersquare.com/michigan/article_37f5f016-4081-11ef-851e-efc400379f50.html
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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