Hotter Than the Fourth of July!
It was widely reported recently that July 4th, 2023 was the hottest day in Earth's recorded history.
Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute stated: “It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial.” And, of course, it was reported that it was our fault due to our "sins of emission."
This didn't meet the smell test for the scientists at the CO2 Coalition. We know that previous warm periods were warmer than our modern temperatures. For example, during the Roman Warm Period there was citrus being grown in the north of England and barley was grown by Vikings on Greenland 1,000 years ago. Why aren't they grown there now? It's quite simple: Lower modern temperatures.
So, here at the CO2 Coalition, we did what scientists are trained to do:
We looked at the available data. Our Science and Research Associate Byron Soepyan reviewed temperature data from the US Historical Climatology Network and found that both the number of weather stations reporting temperature over 100 degrees F and the Maximum Average Temperature for July 4th were slightly declining since the record began in 1895 – not increasing – as Ceppi claimed.
newsletter@co2coalition.org
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The Energy Transition Isn't
We are inundated with claims about the “energy transition.”
In February, E&E News, reporting on the State of the Union speech said, “President Joe Biden laid out his vision for the energy transition Tuesday night.” In March, a reporter for Politico declared “The U.S. energy transition is well underway.”
Also in March, during a speech at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that "As this transition progresses, our energy mix will change." Or consider the March 9 press release from the White House, which said “The Administration is continuing to implement the Inflation Reduction Act, which is already galvanizing our clean energy transition and making clean and energy efficient technologies more affordable for American families.”
I could list many more examples like the ones above. But the hard truth is this: the energy transition isn’t. The numbers from the just-released Statistical Review of World Energy show, once again, that despite rapid growth in wind and solar, those two forms of energy are not even keeping pace with the growth in hydrocarbons. That’s true both globally and in the U.S.
In 2004, hydrocarbons provided 86% of global primary energy. The balance came from hydro, nuclear, and biomass. By 2022, hydrocarbons’ share of global primary energy had dropped by four percentage points, to 82%, wind and solar made up 5%, and the balance came from hydro, nuclear, and biomass. But in absolute terms, hydrocarbon consumption grew by 110 exajoules, (EJ), while wind and solar grew by just 32 EJ. Thus, the growth in hydrocarbon use over that time frame was 3.4 times faster than what was seen in wind and solar.
And here’s the key point: hydrocarbons are prevailing despite staggering amounts of spending on wind and solar. According to a January report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, some $6.7 trillion was spent on alt-energy globally between 2004 and 2022, with the vast majority of that, some $4.8 trillion spent on renewables. And the vast majority of that $4.8 trillion — about $4.1 trillion — was spent on wind and solar.
I’ll come back to the U.S. numbers — which like the global numbers, show hydrocarbon growth outstripping wind and solar — in a moment.
Before I do so, it’s important to provide some context and to understand why we are hearing so much — call it what it is, propaganda — about the energy transition.
First, the context. Yes, wind and solar are growing rapidly. In 2022, nearly all of the growth in global electricity generation (about 645 terawatt-hours) was met by the surge in wind and solar production, which grew by 251 and 263 TWh respectively. Global wind output grew by 13% in 2022 and solar increased by 24%. The U.S. saw almost identical percentage increases, with wind and solar generation growing by 15% and 24%, respectively. Those are impressive increases. As the EIA reported on March 27, in the U.S., “generation from renewable sources — wind, solar, hydro, biomass, and geothermal — surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time.” It also noted that generation from all renewables “surpassed nuclear generation for the first time in 2021.”
These increases are important. But electricity only represents about a fifth of final energy demand. (Final energy, as Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data explains, is what “a consumer buys and receives, such as electricity in their home, heating, or petrol at the fuel pump.”) So if growth in hydrocarbons is outstripping the growth in wind and solar, why are we being flooded with claims about the energy transition? The short answer: it’s part of a media campaign that has surged under the Biden Administration.
Evidence of the marketing effort can be seen in the number of times the phrase in question has appeared in the New York Times over the past few years. From 2015 to 2020, “energy transition” occurred only a few times per year. But in 2021, the year Biden took office, the mentions doubled, and then tripled to 146 mentions in 2022.
The energy transition claims are increasing because that narrative is relentlessly promoted by alt-energy NGOs like the Rocky Mountain Institute (2022 revenue: $115 million) that have massive budgets and scads of sympathetic reporters at legacy media outlets. Those NGOs are part of the anti-industry industry, which is collecting untold millions of dollars in dark money to push claims about the energy transition and the fiction that the global economy can be run solely on wind, solar, batteries, and a dollop of hydropower and hopium.
Last month, the Rocky Mountain Institute published a report which claimed “this is the pivotal decade in the energy transition,” and that “solar and EVs will rise to dominate sector sales by 2030” and renewables will hit “price tipping points in every major area of energy demand.”
It's essential to note that the Colorado-based NGO has been leading the effort to implement a nationwide ban on the use of natural gas in homes and businesses.
Despite the fortunes being spent by the climate claque to promote claims about renewables and the energy transition, global hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions continue to rise. That’s also true here in the U.S.
In 2022, the U.S. had the world’s third-largest increase in CO2 emissions, 57 megatons. (U.S. emissions last year totaled 4,826 Mt.) The U.S. followed only Indonesia (172 Mt) and India (131 Mt) in that category. China’s emissions fell slightly, by 0.1% or 13 Mt, in 2022. That said, China’s emissions are, by far, the biggest in the world, at 10,550 Mt.
According to BNEF, between 2004 and 2022, U.S. spending on wind and solar totaled some $591 billion. Despite that massive investment, just the growth — repeat, just the growth — in natural gas consumption in 2022 was twice the growth in wind and solar combined. Coal demand fell by 0.7 EJ. Oil use grew by 0.6 EJ and gas grew by 1.6 EJ. Thus, the net growth in hydrocarbon use in the U.S. in 2022 was 1.5 EJ, or 1.9 times the growth seen in wind and solar combined. (An exajoule, an SI unit, is 1018, or 1 quintillion joules. An exajoule is roughly equal to one quadrillion Btu. It’s also roughly equal to the energy contained in 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.)
Domestic gas use in 2022 jumped by a whopping 5.4% and hit a record 85.3 billion cubic feet per day. In March, the Energy Information Administration reported that gas consumption set monthly records in 9 of 12 months in 2022. Not only did annual use hit a new record, but the U.S. also set a new record for daily high demand. On December 23, U.S. gas use hit 141 billion cubic feet. The previous record was 137 billion cubic feet per day.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-energy-transition-isnt
**********************************************Solar industry facing bankruptcies, leaving many with roof panels that don't workNobel Laureate Dr. John Clauser: “I Don’t Believe There is a Climate Crisis”
Nobel laureate Dr. John Clauser, a CO2 Coalition Board of Directors member, delivered a keynote lecture at Quantum Korea 2023 Seoul on June 26, 2023.
Regarding climate, Dr. Clauser stated “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis” in his keynote address.
From Seoul Economic Daily:
“In the era of AI, scientists should play the role of discerning truth from falsehood.”
“The world we live in today is filled with misinformation. It is up to each of you to serve as judges, distinguishing truth from falsehood based on accurate observations of phenomena.”
He stated, “Misinformation is being spread by those with political and opportunistic motives.” Furthermore, he remarked, “Even chatbots like ChatGPT can be better at lying than humans,” emphasizing that “distinguishing truth from falsehood is a challenging task for both humans and computers.”
During his keynote speech aimed at young Korean scientists and engineering students, Dr. Clauser urged scientists to fulfill their social role by verifying facts and informing the public, particularly in light of the potential drawbacks of interactive artificial intelligence (AI) systems that generate and provide unverified information to users. He emphasized the importance of scientists in society and called upon them to engage in fact-checking and dissemination of information.
He delved into the controversial subject of quantum mechanics and used his past research experience to illustrate his point, stating, “True truth can be found through the observation of natural phenomena.” He continued, “Scientists have obtained information through careful observation and experimentation, and they have prevented the spread of misinformation through papers and peer reviews.” He added, “In an era of rapid advancement in AI technology, the role of scientists as judges is necessary.”
Dr. Clauser, known for his stance against climate change, diagnosed the current situation as not being a climate crisis and criticized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for spreading misinformation. He stated, “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis” and expressed his belief that “key processes are exaggerated and misunderstood by approximately 200 times.” Dr. Clauser, who is recognized as a climate change skeptic, also became a member of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition last month, an organization that argues that carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial to life on Earth.
Dr. Clauser received the Nobel Prize in Physics for experimentally elucidating the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which forms the theoretical basis for quantum cryptography. He majored in physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and worked as a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley campus. As a keynote speaker at Quantum Korea 2023, he delivered a keynote lecture on the topic of quantum entanglement and also personally awarded prizes to students who won quantum-related competitions
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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