TGO Challenge 2013: Cheese & Wine Parties

In the past we have issued the invitations for the cheese & wine parties after the closing date for routes submissions. However, a few Challengers had complained that this meant they stood very little chance of being able to join us.

With this being Phil’s tenth Challenge, we decided that for one year only we would publish the invitations well before routes were due. This will mean that if folk really do want to join in, then there is plenty of time for them to design their routes to accommodate the soirées.

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So, this year we are hoping for large gatherings to celebrate Phil’s tenth crossing.  All are invited. They need only bring a nice bottle and some of their favourite cheese, with perhaps some nice biscuits or fresh rolls. The first will be held on Tuesday 14th May at Lochan Uaine, 3,000ft up, just below Creag Meagaidh and the second a couple of days later, due east, on Thursday 16th May at the Allt Coire Bhran, 1,700 feet up in the middle of nowhere.

It’s a nerve wracking time. Who will turn up? What cheeses will be available? What shall we wear? Us girls do like to be at our best at the parties….

Dress code: Smart casual.

Thanks, Phil, for creating the invitation with your usual flair.

Monadhliath Ring of Steel: Update III

Since I last wrote about the industrialisation of these magnificent wild hills back in September, there has been more bad news. ‘Can it get any worse?’ I hear you say.

Well, yes.

A planning application has been put into Highland Council for three wind masts for Inverwick Forest. Under the current regime of the SNP government what this means is that the Inverwick wind power station is now a virtual certainty. 

The Monadhliath and Loch Ness area will now look this:

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Grrls and Boyz on the TGO Challenge

If you haven’t already found Mick Blackburn’s wonderful TGO Challenge statistics over on “M&G go for a Walk,” then before you do anything else, drop everything and wander over and take a look.

There will now be a short pause while we wait for those to go and read that post….

***

Okay. Back with us? Good. Fabulous, isn’t it? Right, now to the point of this post. My pal Humph saw Mick’s statistics and was horrified to note that Mick had missed a vital piece of data. He had forgotten about sex.

There are grrls and boyz that take part in the Challenge. Humph felt compelled to discover the differences between the sexes. This is vital work, and, for the modern Challenger, Humph delved deeply into the data. I will paste below the results of his statistical endeavours. You will need to click on the image to enlarge it.

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TGO Challenge 2013: The route

Lord Elpus has far too much time on his hands. Almost as soon as we hear that Sierra has picked our names out of the Coordinator’s hat, our route sheet is winging its way to his inbox. And a fine route it is, too.

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As you can see, after a short sea cruise, we spend a considerable time wandering in a northerly direction before finally weakening and turning east. There are nine big hills included on the route (eight Munros and a Corbett) and, more importantly, two cheese and wine parties in the middle of sod all. Hopefully a few hardy souls will make it to join us at these delightful soirées.

Wind farms on peat soils save no Carbon Dioxide

It’s true: Wind farms built on peat soils produce absolutely no Carbon Dioxide savings at all. Just let that thought settle in for a while.

No CO₂ savings at all.

Repeat it a few times. Go on. It’s unbelievable isn’t it?

For the last twenty years the IPCC has been warning you of the impending terrors of  anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) or “man made global warming”. Apparently this is all your fault, for needlessly driving to the shops, cooking roast dinners every Sunday and sitting in front of the fire in the winter when it’s a bit chilly. Because of your selfishness, according to the environmental Taliban, the sea levels are going to rise, the earth is going to warm by six degrees, weather will behave in a far more erratic manner and your hair will catch fire.

But don’t worry, because the green brigade have come up with a cunning plan: In Britain we are going to shut down all those nasty coal-fired power stations that pollute the world with the evil CO₂ and build wind powered power stations instead. Tens of thousands of them. All over your countryside. What’s not to like about that? They’ll add to the visual interest in the muddy places outside the cities.There’s nothing there of any interest to the green urbanite anyway! Wind power stations are “carbon free” and provide us with limitless free energy. Problem sorted then!

What’s that? You don’t want your countryside littered with gargantuan industrial turbines? Now then, don’t complain because, remember, “it’s all your fault. If you hadn’t been using all that energy in the first place we wouldn’t need to do any of this. This is for your own good. Trust us. We know best!”

That’s the line we have been sold by our governments, Friends of the Earth, WWF, Greenpeace and all the other charlatans who profess to know a hell of a lot more about this than you.

In Scotland, such is the sway of these green intellectuals, that Alex Salmond has promised to supply 100% equivalent of Scottish energy needs from renewables by 2020. He’s gone about this with gusto (sorry!) and has rammed huge wind farms through the planning system, riding rough-shod over local communities’ wishes.

The Scottish Government went out of it’s way to prove that wind farms were jolly good things for saving the planet, and published a study in June 2008, which was updated with corrections in June 2010 to show how the the CO₂ calculations were made. It is a highly technical document which provides a tool to calculate the CO₂ balance of a wind farm, from construction through its operation and then its final decommissioning. If you have the mind for it, it can be utilised on a case-by-case basis for every single wind farm, so each case can be determined on its own merits.

However!

With many thanks to the Scottish Wild Land Group’s magazine, I have found that the very same authors of these two reports have now come up with a startling discovery: I quote:

“The Scottish Government’s renewable energy strategy has been called into question by a letter published in the high-profile academic journal Nature. The majority of wind farms in Scotland are built on peatlands in windy upland areas, and are justified by their supposed ability to reduce carbon emissions from electricity production.  This justification depends on an earlier study by the authors of the letter to Nature, in which they concluded that wind farms would help to reduce carbon emissions, especially when sited on mineral soils but also when sited on well-managed peatlands.
 
Now, however, the authors have found that wind farms built on peatland are unlikely to provide any reduction in carbon emissions after all, even when the peat is not drained
and is restored after construction, and write that “the construction of wind farms on non-degraded peats should always be avoided”.  This is a hugely significant conclusion, and one that undermines the basic rationale of the UK wind industry.  If it is not possible to build wind farms on peat without releasing more CO2 than you save, how can their continued construction be justified?  It now appears more than ever that Scotland’s renewable energy strategy is nothing more than a fig leaf to hide politicians’ lack of action on climate change – and an economically and environmentally ruinous one at that.” 

So, Alex Salmond can stick his wind turbines where the sun don’t shine. They don’t do what they say on the tin!

Another Scottish ridgeline trashed

Beinneun wind farm was approved yesterday by Scottish Energy & Tourism Minister, Fergus Ewing. LINK

Beinneun is a 25 x 132m turbine wind farm and will sit westwards of the existing 21 turbine Millennium wind farm, thus creating a wind farm over 6 miles long above Loch Garry in the Western Highlands of Scotland.

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Here it is in greater detail:

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TGO Challengers may wish to know that this new huge wind farm is just to the north east of the Tomdoun Hotel, and bites deeply into the Western Highlands. It will be massively visible for miles around.

I would stress that Fergus Ewing, the Energy Minister who approved this is the same chap as the Fergus Ewing who is Minister for Tourism. It beggars belief that VisitScotland (that comes under Ewing’s control) now agree that wind farms are bad for Scottish tourism and yet Ewing still rams more wind farms into the Highlands of Scotland. It’s a complete stitch-up.

Some November bliss

Look. It’s my blog and I’ll play some music if I want to.

I watched a film tonight that had me in floods of tears, as it did the first time around. It never fails to move me. Absolute bliss.

Video footage of snares in the Scottish countryside

This film from Onekind, starring Bill Oddie, demonstrates the extent of snaring in the Scottish countryside. Snares uncovered: Killers in the countryside, shows Bill's disbelief at the number of animal snares placed on a typical estate, as well as his shock at the indiscriminate nature of these cruel devices. PLEASE NOTE: This film does include OneKind library footage of animals caught in snares, which you may find distressing. Take action at www.onekind.org