Filed under: Africa, Environment, Global Warming, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Change, Climate Gate, Vice President Al Gore
Netherlands newspapers and news sites broke the story today about the findings of a research team led by Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damste — a leading molecular paleontologist at Utrecht University — about the icecap on Mount Kilimanjaro, which has become a symbol of anthropogenic global warming.
Their research shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was never the result of cold air, but rather of large amounts of precipitation which fell about 11.000 years ago, at the beginning of the Holocene period. The melting and freezing of moisture on top of the mountain appears to be part of “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The current melting is not the result of manmade environmental damage.
In the dry period between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago, Kilimanjaro was ice-free. At the end of this period, a dramatic climate change from dry to very wet took place — driven by changes in solar radiation — which resulted in the creation of an icecap.
The website of Elsevier magazine, the most widely circulated Dutch political weekly carried the headline “Dutchman discredits Al Gore’s climate evidence.”
Al Gore will not be attending the climate conference in Copenhagen.
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Junk Science, Law, The Elephant's Child | Tags: ClimateGate, Democrat Demagogues, Media Scandal, Political Scandal
The term “ClimateGate” was reluctantly coined 13 days ago by James Delingpole in the Telegraph. He was reluctant because “Gate” has become trite from over use, but on the other hand it quickly and clearly indicates “Scandal.” And scandal is what we have.
I just checked on Google, and the term “global warming” has received 10,400,000 hits, “climate change” has received 22,800,000 hits, and “ClimateGate” in only 13 days has received 28,600,000 hits. Pretty amazing.
What it points out, I think, is that ordinary people don’t like being lied to. At the same time, the absence of the whole thing from the pages of most newspapers is notable. The subject mostly does not cross the lips of our elected representatives who are in complete denial.
Senator Barbara Boxer is quite sure that she knows who the real villains in the ClimateGate scandal are. And to no one’s surprise, they are not the scientists who have hidden data, fudged numbers, discarded evidence, committed widespread scientific fraud, and suppressed the views of scientists who disagreed with them.
No, the problem is the hacking of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and she sees it as a “criminal matter” that is worthy of investigation by the United States Senate. Her committee wants to get to the bottom of the matter. Well, she had a lot invested in climate change, cap-and-trade, green jobs and everything green.
The consensus seems to be that it probably was not a “hacker” but an internal whistleblower. And exposing fraud is a good thing, isn’t it?
Filed under: Capitalism, Energy, Environment, Freedom, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Being "Green", Climate Change, Congressional Lies, Democrat Demagogues
Most people get angry when they discover that they have been lied to, or made fools of, or simply deliberately misled. The lie alone is bad enough, but problems arise when you act upon false information.
We are just beginning to see the repercussions of ClimateGate. Careers have been damaged, publication dishonestly refused and skeptical scientists have received death threats. Environmental journalists have made careers of transcribing what those who share their ideology say, slandering those who do not, and ignoring the scandal.
All the individual damage pales before the attempts of officeholders across the world who have used junk science as a pretext for increasing their personal power and control and expanding their control and their take from international energy markets. They have a lot invested in their power grabs, and they’re not going to give it up peacefully.
If climate change is a natural phenomenon — which I believe that it is — and carbon dioxide is a natural fertilizer for plants which will help us feed the world — which I believe that it is — then just think of all the things that we don’t need to be doing.
We can stop the silly war on coal and create all sorts of jobs. We can drill for our own natural resources and increase refinery capacity — creating even more high-paying jobs, and worry a lot less about price hikes in the petroleum markets. We can build nuclear plants. We can stop making cars lighter and less safe in order to meet some mpg standard designed to cut our use of carbon-based fuels, and stop pushing the electric cars that nobody wants.
We can stop subsidizing wind farms and solar arrays that are completely inefficient and save enormous sums of money. We can stop hoarding incandescent lightbulbs for fear of the onset of those nasty twisty bulbs. We can stop worrying about the polar bears who are just fine.
And just possibly, we can stop being assaulted with the demand that we be “green.” I am so fed up with businesses informing me about how environmentally sensitive they are, how pure, how conscious of Mother Gaia — aaaack! The more they attempt to patronize with their environmental wonderfulness, the more I take my business elsewhere. No, I will not use cloth bags in the grocery store. No, I will not buy “organic” food, organic cosmetics or organic cotton. I will not pay extra on my power bill to buy “green” power from some hideous wind farm that cannot produce any energy at all without massive subsidies. And we can get rid of Barbara Boxer and Henry Waxman, for they are of no use at all.
There. I got that off my chest!!
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Global Warming, The Elephant's Child | Tags: ClimateGate, Enormous Scandal
ClimateGate continues to be fascinating. Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has stepped down, at least “temporarily.” The CRU has apparently discarded, deleted, or otherwise disposed of their core data so, conveniently, it cannot be checked. Phil Jones and the CRU have received something around $20 million in grants, which gives an idea of the monetary rewards of fiddling the books.
Pennsylvania State University has announced that it will “investigate” Michael Mann. Dr. Mann became Director of a Climate Department when he moved from the University of Virginia. Although it has long been noted that you could enter the phone book in his “hockey stick” program and you would still get the same hockey-stick shape, the graph has been central to the work of the UN’s IPCC. The goal of the IPCC has always been to prove that global warming is real and caused by humans.
Science students don’t spend a lot of time taking English classes or history. This is unfortunate, for if they had they would be aware that hiding the Medieval Warm Period would be more complicated than just nudging numbers. There were real Vikings who farmed in Greenland. A well-preserved Viking farm was discovered in 1991, and the Viking presence is well established in history, literature and museums.
New Zealand is implicated in ClimateGate for falsifying figures. The Kiwi’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research has made “adjustments” to the graphs that indicate a preference for warming.
Australia’s Senate rejected an Emissions Trading Scheme for a second time . Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s favored $114 billion green tax on everything was dumped. Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull who favored the plan lost his job.
The Danes were caught fiddling their carbon credits. Queens University has Northern Ireland tree-ring data that they are refusing to release.
Lawsuits are in the offing by scientists — one British, one Canadian, for criminal fraud. Their case is that the scientists implicated in ClimateGate have gained funding and career advancement by twisting data, hiding evidence, and shutting out dissenters by corrupting the peer-review process.
In general, as far as the mainstream media, big business and the federal government are concerned, there’s nothing to see here, just move along. There is plenty of information available on the web. Climate Depot and Anthony Watts Whats Up With That, and Stephen McIntyre’s Climate Audit are all following developments closely. Lord Christopher Monckton has written a comprehensive summary of ClimateGate and cold facts about global temperature change after the scandal.
Filed under: Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Catastrophe, Climate Change, Richard Lindzen
We call them “Alarmists,” or “Warmists,” because they depend on an aura of crisis to enlist you in their campaign to “save the earth.” You have heard it over and over. The polar bears are drowning. The seas are going to rise, Manhattan Island under water.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of disasters have been blamed on global warming. Al Gore led it off with his movie and his power point speeches raising fears about the rise of the oceans while he purchased a waterfront condo in San Francisco. His most recent claim was that we have only 10 years to save the world. Global warming has been very rewarding for Mr. Gore.
Contrast the alarmist voice with the calm tone of Richard S. Lindzen, one of our most respected scientists, writing today in the Wall Street Journal. Lindzen is a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode.
The article is not long, and if you have worried about global warming, should make you feel much better. Do read the whole thing. Dr. Lindzen is marvelous at explaining how we got so far off track.
Filed under: Economy, Energy, Environment, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Statism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Taxes, The Deficit, The National Debt, Unemployment
Rasmussen Reports that 71 percent of Americans are Angry at the federal government. That figure includes 46 percent who are Very Angry.
The latest national telephone survey finds that only 27 percent are Not Angry about the government’s policies, including 10 percent who are Not at All Angry.
Men are angrier than women. Voters over 40 are more angry than those who are younger. A majority of those over 40 are Very Angry. Only 25 percent of under-30 voters share that view. And the data suggests that the level of anger is growing. The 46 percent who are Very Angry is up 10 percentage points since September.
Only nine percent of voters trust the judgment of America’s political leaders more than the judgment of the American people. Americans now view being a member of Congress as the least respected job one can hold. Ouch!
Well, polls come and go, but if I were a member of Congress debating the health care bills now being considered, these polling results might just make me stop and think — or then again, maybe not. And that might be the very reason why voters are so very, very angry.
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Freedom, Science/Technology, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Gate, Meteorology, Roy Spencer PhD
Dr. Roy Spencer is the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He is also a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. (Try getting all that on a business card). They supply the temperatures that we can count on. He has testified before Congress a number of times, and he is the author of Climate Confusion , a perfectly splendid book that we recommend in the sidebar.
In the book, Dr. Spencer explains in simple terms just how the climate system works and what we know about it and what we don’t know. No wild claims, a mild voice for a climate skeptic, that much denigrated type of individual, quite a few cartoons, and only a couple of simple graphs — the kind devised for laymen. It is a good read, and illuminating in the nicest way.
Dr. Spencer has a website where he both talks about the latest global temperature anomaly, but also explains “Global Warming 101.” He has a great sense of humor as well, as a visit to The Eco Enquirer will show.
Here are a few of his comments on the elitist roots of global warming alarmism:
The hundreds of e-mails being made public after someone hacked into Phil Jones’ Climatic Research Unit (CRU) computer system offer a revealing peek inside the IPCC machine. It will take some time before we know whether any illegal activity has been uncovered (e.g. hiding or destruction of data to avoid Freedom of Information Act inquiries).
Even mainstream journalists, who are usually on board with the latest environmental craze, have commented on this blatant display of hypocrisy. It seems like those participating – possibly the best example being Al Gore — are not even aware of how it looks to the rest of us. (…)
A few of the CRU e-mails suggest that manipulation of climate data in order to reduce the signature of natural climate variations, and to exaggerate the supposed evidence for manmade climate change, is OK with these folks. Apparently, the ends justify the means. (…)
Hopefully, the scientist is more interested in discovering how nature really works, rather than twisting the data to support some other agenda. It took me years to develop the discipline to question every research result I got. It is really easy to be wrong in this business, and very difficult to be right.
Skepticism really is at the core of scientific progress. I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong about all my views on manmade global warming. Can the IPCC scientists admit the same thing?
Year after year, the evidence keeps mounting that most climate research now being funded is for the purpose of supporting the IPCC’s politics, not to find out how nature works. The ‘data spin’ is increasingly difficult to ignore or to explain away as just sloppy science. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…
You can find the whole essay here, as well as the guide to Global Warming 101.
Filed under: Economy, Energy, Environment, Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: ClimateGate, Computer Climate Models, Religion of Global Warming
Attaching the “gate” syllable to any hint of scandal, is a quick but trite way to say “pay attention, this is a scandal.” ClimateGate is a big one, but easily misunderstood. Climate “skeptics” do not claim that there has been no global warming. They quite agree that over the 20th century the earth warmed by around one degree.
The earth is always warming and cooling. The argument exists entirely about computer climate models that project a drastic warming in the future. Skeptics point out that the earth has been cooling since 2003, as the sun has gone quiet with almost no sunspots and there has been no warming at all for at least ten years. Climate models are unreliable, unable to predict today’s climate.
Skeptical scientists point out that increases in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere follow increases in temperature, and therefore cannot be the cause of global warming. As the earth has cooled , the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to climb. But not to worry, CO2 is not a pollutant, only a trace gas. The much-feared “greenhouse gases” are composed largely of water vapor — clouds, fog, mist.
Scientists are human, and have all the flaws that the rest of us have. Greed, covetousness, laziness, ambition and a tendency to make mistakes. Some of the best hypotheses just don’t prove out. The emails and documents of ClimateGate indicate a fair amount of that, but some fraud and attempts to silence those who disagree as well. The big deal is what governments and the media have done with the misinformation.
The quantity of things on which governments have rushed to spend trillions to prevent climate change, banish carbon dioxide, prevent dangerous rise of the seas, ban the drilling for carbon-based fossil fuels, tax the economy into poverty with cap-and-trade laws — is almost endless. The list goes on and on. I saw a photo yesterday of a Dutch ship spraying sand which the tide would carry in to reinforce the dikes that protect the Netherlands against the rise of the seas predicted by computer climate models. This is costing billions, and the seas won’t rise.
Europe is far deeper into the religion of global warming than we are, but governments believe far more than their people do. It is hard to tell if government bureaucracies actually believe that climate change is a real problem, or if they just believe in using a ‘crisis’ to gain power and increase taxes. I think it is safe to assume that our representatives do not go home at night, after a hard day of failing to read the legislation they vote for, to study up on the science of climate change.
Carol Browner, socialist climate czar, said that “the science is settled.” Nothing to see here — just move along. She added that she would stick with the “consensus” of the 2,500 (what?) climate scientists on the IPCC. (Ms. Browner, the UN’s IPCC states clearly on their website that they do not do original science). And there is no “consensus” in science. See Scientific Method.
Well, there you have it. Obama will go to Copenhagen and promise to reduce CO2, which will only happen if the economy falters further. The EPA and the Department of Energy will spend vast sums encouraging solar energy, which will produce small amounts of energy only when the sun shines. They will spend even more on wind energy, which will continue to produce only a miniscule amount of our energy needs when heavily subsidized. Nothing will change. The “science is settled,” and “consensus” rules.
Filed under: Environment, Junk Science, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Science/Technology, The Elephant's Child, United Kingdom | Tags: Global Warming Fraud, Scientific Scandal, Taxpayer Funded Fraud
An enormous scandal is roiling the scientific world. A researcher, investigating the climate numbers behind anthropogenic global warming, had filed a Freedom of Information request to look at the data behind recent claims, from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), and was met with stalling, refusal, files not available, that sort of thing.
A hacker broke into the University’s CRU and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. The files include 1,079 emails and 72 documents exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing the anthropogenic global warming theory. Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed in an interview that they are genuine.
The emails suggest manipulation of evidence, destruction of evidence, private doubts about whether the world is really heating up, efforts to force dissenting scientists out of the peer-review process, attempts to delegitimize journals that allowed publications by skeptical scientists, and manipulation of IPCC reports.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988 as a political organization to publish special reports on climate. They do issue occasional reports, and more importantly issue a summary of each report written by bureaucrats and politicians which is usually the only thing read by governments and the media, for the actual report comes along months later.
Much of the drama in the IPCC reports came from a graph of global temperatures over many centuries by Dr. Michael Mann. It showed temperatures going along without much variation for hundreds of years and then suddenly shooting up in the late 20th century, like the blade of a hockey stick. Here was cause for real alarm. If temperatures were climbing, so was the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Correlation does not mean causation, but that rule was quickly tossed to the winds, for hated fossil fuels are clearly the greatest source of carbon. Governments wanted to know how bad, and what to do. Vast amounts of money flowed from governments all over the world to scientists who would establish how humans were causing the warming. Scientists in every field were suddenly writing grant proposals. Career advancement, prestige, money, university distinction.
Canadian researchers got interested in the data behind Dr. Mann’s “hockey-stick” graph. After all, it eliminated the Medieval Warm Period — a time when the climate was much warmer, when the Vikings farmed in Greenland, wine grapes grew in England and civilization flourished. They found statistical errors that would have produced a “hockey-stick” graph no matter what data was entered. The graph was in error.
Then James Hansen, head of the Goddard Center at NASA, was found fudging data in the claim that October of 2008 was the warmest year on record. Anthony Watts enlisted hundreds of citizen volunteers to photograph the temperature stations around the United States and measure and describe their location. Situated next to parking lots, air-conditioner exhausts, trash burners, reflective concrete walls, busy streets their location precluded any accurate temperature being recorded. The surface temperature records were flawed, and recorded temperatures much higher than actuality.
Stephen McIntyre, the aforementioned Canadian researcher, looked into tree-ring data from an examination of tree rings from 12 trees from a Siberian peninsula that seemed to be proof of warming. When rings from 35 nearby trees were included, temperature anomalies disappeared. A senior researcher at the EPS’s National Center for Environmental Economics, Alan Carlin, dared to say that “available observable data..invalidate the hypothesis” that humans cause dangerous global warming. He was silenced.
Viscount Monckton is furious about the content of the leaked CRU emails and says you should be too:
The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up.
It is fraud for the EPA to claim that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that should be regulated. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on studies of global warming and poured into agencies that have encouraged the global warming fraud. Christopher Horner, author of Red Hot Lies said that the initial revelations “give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer-funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides.”
Don’t bet on a quick or easy resolution. Careers, reputations, money, funding are all involved along with government and media exposure. Nobody is going to give up easily, and governments are inclined to protect their own.
The most thorough coverage be followed at Climate Depot, and at Anthony Watts website where you can find a video from Dr. Timothy Ball. Dr, Roy Spencer’s comments can be found on his website. Climate Depot has constantly updated links to the emails, the documents and comments from all over the world.
Filed under: Environment, Global Warming, Science/Technology, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Change, IPCC, Scientific Uncertainty
The October 2009 issue of the “Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,” has a new survey that indicates that a significant number of professional meteorologists doubt that manmade sources of greenhouse gases are the cause of global warming. The survey was vetted by an advisory board of climate experts, including representatives from several climate-science organizations as well as the EPA, the Pew Center and many members of the AMS.
- When asked about the UN’s IPCC statement that “Most of the warming since 1959 is very likely human-induced,” a full 50% either disagreed or strongly disagreed. 25% were neutral, and only 24% agreed or strongly agreed.
- 52% of the meteorologists disagreed with the statement that “Global climate models are reliable in their projections of a warming of the planet.” Only 19% agreed with the statement.
- Almost a third agreed or strongly agreed that “global warming is a scam.”
- When the meteorologists were asked to identify “the greatest obstacle to reporting on climate change,” their top answer (41%) was “too much scientific uncertainty.”
The credibility of theories of global warming and the accompanying alarmism, or any notion that international climate controls are either desirable or possible are fading. The president has admitted that no climate treaty will be signed in Copenhagen this year. This will mean another fortuitous nail driven into the coffin of proposed U.S. climate legislation such as the Waxman-Markey bill in the House or the Kerry-Boxer bill in the Senate.
Every nail is well-deserved.
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Science/Technology, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Models, Climate Science, Temperature Records
Dr. John Christy is a prominent University of Alabama in Huntsville climate scientist. He has testified before Congress many times, and often begins a speech by reminding his audience that “consensus is not science.” Dr. Christy spoke to the Huntsville Rotary last week, and the Huntsville Times outlined his basic argument, clear and simple, which is worth sharing:
* The data being used to predict catastrophic warming is suspect.
* Models generated from that data “overstate the warming” actually taking place. The earth is warming, but not that much, and it has warmed and cooled for eons.
* The Earth’s atmosphere is nowhere near as sensitive to carbon dioxide as some environmentalists believe.
* Any “solution” to perceived global warming must balance the growing worldwide demand for energy against cutting carbon dioxide output.
* Fleet mileage requirements now proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency “would reduce global temperatures by about 1/100th of a degree,” Christy said.
* You would need to replace 1,000 coal-fired power plants with 1,000 nuclear plants to change global climate even .15 of a degree, he said.
” This is the scale (of global climate) we are talking about,” Christy said.
In his talk, Christy also took aim at several other widely discussed pronouncements.
* One cost of mandating harsh energy controls is the migration of industry to areas where requirements are less, Christy said.
* Temperatures in the Arctic have increased over the last 100 years, he agreed, but that’s only because 100 years ago “was the coldest it’s been in a long time.”
* Arctic ice has melted, but ice has grown in Antarctica. Between the two, there’s about as much ice as always.
* There are more polar bears now, not fewer. Canada issues 800 bear-hunting permits each year, he pointed out.
* Temperatures may be warmer in Greenland, but scientific experiments with ice fields show “that 4,000 years ago, it was warmer in Greenland than it is today.
* Greenland did not melt,” Christy said.
* Why is the apocalyptic view of climate change so widespread?
“Funding comes if you have an alarming story,” Christy said.
He also cited “group think” and said scientists revel in the attention their views about climate brings. “It’s almost a drug,” Christy said.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Economy, Energy, Environment, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Jobs in China, Stimulus, West Texas Wind
Since the beginning of September, of the $1 billion in clean-energy stimulus money, $850 million has gone to foreign wind companies. Doesn’t take a hastily planned “jobs summit” to discuss why this possibly isn’t the way to create American jobs.
The eleven U.S. wind farms that received money from the Treasury are importing 695 of the 982 wind turbines to be installed, creating 4,500 jobs — overseas. That’s way more than the number of jobs created in the United States.
A joint venture of American and Chinese companies has unveiled plans for a new $1.5 billion, 36,000 acre, wind farm in West Texas consisting of 240 Chinese-made turbines. The project is seeking government stimulus funding for 30 percent of its costs. Best estimate is that all this money will create a grand total of 30 permanent jobs.
Bailouts and stimulus funds always fail to work as advertised. (There is a history to be studied). And they always cause more problems than they solve.
Wind energy is always subject to vast amounts of hype. They talk in “rated-capacity” instead of actual energy. Jon Boone explains at Master Resource:
A wind project with a rated capacity of 100 MW, for example, with 40 skyscraper-sized turbines, would likely produce an annual average of only 27 MW, an imperceptible fraction of energy for most grid systems. More than 60% of the time, it would produce less than 27 MW, and at peak demand times, often produce nothing. It would rarely achieve its rated capacity, producing most at times of least demand.
William Tucker explains that the “Age of Renewables” will really be an age of natural gas, or we’re not going to have much electricity:
Windmills and solar plants generating base-load power are little more than a nuisance to electrical-grid operators. They’re very difficult to incorporate because they’re intermittent and unpredictable. It’s like trying to walk a high wire and having somebody shake the wire…
Wind, however, comes and goes. It’s hard to predict for more than a few hours in advance — an unpredictability aggravated by the physics of windmills. Electrical output varies with the cube of wind speed.
There’s a simple solution, however — couple wind and solar with natural gas turbines. These are basically jet engines bolted to the ground. They don’t boil water so they can be started and stopped in just a few seconds. It’s a very expensive and inefficient way to generate electricity but good for short-term output. Most utilities have “peakers” that sit around all year waiting to meet those few hours during the summer when utilities strain to meet peak demands.
So the solution to wind and solar’s intermittency is to put a natural-gas turbine next to each windmill and solar panel. They can even be hooked up by computer. Then every time the wind dies down or the sun goes behind a cloud, the gas turbine can be fired up. That way consistent voltage balance can be maintained. (If voltage on the grid varies by more than 5 percent it can either cause blackouts or damage electrical equipment.
This works only with very large subsidies. No big subsidies, no renewable energy. Across the world without government subsidy, wind farms shut down. But they are such a lovely Utopian ideal. Trouble is the hopenchange crowd just do not learn from facts, physics or history. They keep insisting that this time it will work!
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Environment, History | Tags: Al Gore, Czech Republic, The Cold War, The Free Market
I have often recommended the videos of the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge. Each is about 7 minutes long, presented one each day, for a week. Peter Robinson interviews serious people with serious ideas about current events and history.
This week’s guest is Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic. He was born in Prague in 1941 during WWII, grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. After earning a doctorate in economics he pursued a career in academia and at the Czechoslovak State Bank. Immediately after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Klaus entered politics. A founder of the Civic Democratic Party, he served 1992 to 1997 as prime minister of the Czech Republic. In 2003 he was elected president, a position to which he was reelected in 2008.
The first segment concerns the events of 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. The second segment is about the parallels to be drawn between a united Europe and the late Warsaw Pact. In the third, Mr. Klaus takes on Al Gore and points out the similarities in ideology between communism and environmentalism. And the Thursday segment is about how he became an advocate for the free market while studying economics under communism.
The previous interview was with Victor Davis Hanson, classical scholar and military historian and Robert Baer, former CIA agent who served in the Middle East, discussing with Peter Robinson the problem of Iraq. It is a stunning conversation.
All of the previous Uncommon Knowledge interviews are available in the NRO archives. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Try one segment of your choice. I’ll bet you get hooked!
Filed under: Environment, Global Warming, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Change, Environmental Activists, True Believers
Regular visitors would not be surprised to hear that I am indeed a skeptic about the “crisis” of climate change. Most people who grew up rural are skeptical. Dr. Ian Plimer, Australia’s best-known and most highly honored geologist, has also noticed that rural people don’t fall for much of the nonsense.
I grew up in the western foothills of the Rockies, surrounded by National Forest and BLM land. I have been snowed in, experienced flood, fire and earthquake, -20° weather, killed rattlesnakes, had lightening strike too close for comfort and spent hours staring at the Milky Way undimmed by any lights at all.
When one has experienced weather from 20° below to 112°, you don’t get excited over 1° of warming over a hundred years. At 20° below, you put on a lot more warm clothes, and when it is really hot, you take them off, get a cold drink and sit in the shade, or go stick your feet in the river. We adapt. The climate has always warmed and cooled. We adapt, and the polar bears adapt too.
That said, it is fascinating how angry urban true-believers become when you do not agree that if we do not end the terrible pollution of increasing CO2 we are doomed.
Brendan O’Neill had a marvelous piece in Planet Gore at NRO today.
If a climate-change skeptic suggests that the Sun, rather than man, is responsible for climatic variations he is denounced as evil, a heretic, someone whose words are so foul and twisted that they will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead.” In other words, question the environmentalist consensus, and you are endangering life itself — your words are literally poisonous.
Yet when a climate-change activist openly calls for calamitous events and the deaths of thousands of people as a way of focusing our leaders’ minds on the problem of climate change, no one bats an eye. You can fantasize about the outbreak of disease as a means of “reducing the population” or dream about natural disasters (which should be as “traumatic as possible” in order to wake people from their consumerist-induced stupor), and your fellow activists will nod along in agreement. So warped is environmentalist morality that those who raise legitimate questions about politics and science are accused of killing people with their words, while those who actually talk about the need for people to die are patted on the back.
Do read the whole thing. There is an odd kind of hubris involved. We people who are living right now are responsible for everything wrong with the planet, and if only we live in the way of our most remote ancestors, lightly upon the earth, never really touching anything can we redeem ourselves.
You would think that they would be delighted to hear that the earth is not in danger, that CO2 is what we exhale, and that the “greenhouse effect” simply does not exist. But they have deep faith that the world is suffering from the blight of humans upon it, and they and their comrades’ life work is to save it. Or something like that. Lighten up, people.
Filed under: Economy, Environment, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Corruption, Economy, Politics, Socialism
Every time I think that there is not another word to be said about the “Cash for Clunkers” program, another bit of information turns up, demanding to be mentioned:
WASHINGTON — The most common deals under the government’s $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, aimed at putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road, replaced old Ford or Chevrolet pickups with new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by the Associated Press.
The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F 150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade in their old trucks for new Ford F-150s. They were 17 times more likely to buy a new F-150 than, say, a Toyota Prius. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, and improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.
Well, that worked out well. You might want to keep this bit of Congressional competence in mind. It’s not getting better as the bills get bigger.
Filed under: Environment, Global Warming, Law, National Security, The Elephant's Child
Lord Christopher Monckton was a science adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He speaks and writes frequently on environmental policy. He sued to prevent Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” from being forced into British classroms…and won. The justice ordered that 9 serious inaccuracies in the film be corrected before the film could be shown in schools. Lord Monckton travels the globe, speaking to educate people on the myth of global warming.
Many of Lord Monckton’s papers and videos are available at The Science and Public Policy Institute.
