Droughts, Hurricanes, Wildfires Aren’t Living Up to Alarmists’ Expectations
H. Sterling Burnett
Just before the beginning of summer last year, I wrote a Climate Change Weekly article titled “It’s Climate Catastrophe Du Jour Season, Again!,” warning of what I predicted would be a coming tidal wave of stories claiming the then-extended drought and expected hurricanes and wildfires would be blamed on climate change. I was right. Hundreds if not thousands of stories were published by both the mainstream and progressive fringe media last year blaming the drought, every hurricane, and large wildfire season on climate change.
This despite there being no evidence that long-term trends in droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires showed any increase in number or severity. Absent such upward trends, it’s hard to honestly link one or a few years of extreme weather events to climate change, but then honesty has never been a strong point for climate alarmists or at the heart of the climate change debate.
With the current summer coming to an end, let’s revisit the dread three seasons—drought, hurricanes, and wildfires—and see how they went in 2023.
Headline stories on drought have been nearly nonexistent this year. That’s because, as I write on August 29, the U.S. Drought monitor reports nearly 57 percent of the United States is exhibiting no drought whatsoever despite a long, admittedly hot summer. Another 16 percent is recorded as “abnormally dry,” and only 27 percent of the country is listed as being in any category of drought, from moderate to extreme (5 percent) or exceptional (1 percent). Three months ago, at the beginning of summer, 66 percent of the nation was completely drought-free, with only 16 percent of the country listed as facing moderate, severe, extreme, or exceptional drought.
As El Niño left, it dumped huge amounts of precipitation across the country, and especially in the historically drought-prone western United States, much of it in the form of record-setting snow, resulting in a nearly record-low percentage of the country being considered very dry.
At the beginning of the “water year” in September 2022, the U.S. Drought Monitor recorded just 36 percent of the country was at any level of drought. As of September 27, 2022, more than 41 percent of the U.S. was experiencing some degree of drought—25 percent with severe, extreme, or exceptional drought—and 63 percent of America was listed as abnormally dry, at a minimum.
Oh, what a difference a year makes, not in climate but in weather—and in media coverage of claims of climate-induced drought!
With the Maui wildfire a recent memory and Hurricane Idalia hammering Florida’s Gulf Coast, it may seem an inopportune time to bring up wildfires and hurricanes, but that’s not so. As I’ve previously discussed, neither the wildfire in Maui, nor those in Canada, nor the ones that scorched Greece this summer, were caused by climate change: nature combined with human error, malfeasance, or evil was behind each of these devastating fires.
As of August 11, data showed wildfires in the United States in 2023 are the fourth-lowest in nearly 100 years of recordkeeping. Globally, over the past two decades of modest warming (but heightened fearmongering), satellite data from NASA show a 25 percent decrease in acreage lost to wildfires since 2003.
That leads us to the 2023 hurricane season and Hurricane Idalia. Although the global average temperature, a made-up metric if ever there was one, has increased modestly over the past 150 years, neither the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change nor hard data shows any increasing trend in the number or severity of tropical cyclones. Over the past 50 and 100 years, if anything, the data indicates there has been a modest decline in the yearly number of hurricanes and major hurricanes on average, according to multiple studies.
What’s true for the whole world is true also for the United States and Florida. From 2009 through 2017, America experienced the fewest hurricane strikes in any eight-year period in recorded history. And it was just in 2016 that Florida, America’s most vulnerable state for hurricanes, concluded an 11-year period without a landfalling hurricane, the longest such period in recorded history.
The “official” hurricane season runs from June 1 through the end of November. This year, until the past week, tropical storm numbers and accumulated energy or sustained wind speeds were below normal. The hurricane season typically peaks in late-August through mid-September, so there is absolutely nothing unusual about multiple storms forming during this short time span.
Idalia forming and strengthening now is not only not outside the norm, it fits the historic pattern perfectly.
This year’s climate disaster de jour season has been a bust so far. This is good for people but bad for those who hype the narrative that “climate change causes everything.” That is not true now, nor has it ever been.
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Net Zero is condemning more Brits to energy poverty
Here’s another great idea from the net zero establishment: only heat your home when it is warm and sunny outdoors. In its Sixth Carbon Budget paper, the government’s Climate Change Committee advises homeowners to turn their heating on in the afternoon, so that they can turn it off again during the evening when demand for electricity is higher. ‘Where homes are sufficiently well-insulated,’ it says, ‘it is possible to pre-heat ahead of peak times, enabling access to cheaper tariffs which reflect the reduced costs associated with running networks and producing power during off-peak times.’ In other words, boil yourself when the outdoor temperature is relatively warm, and with any luck you might still be tolerably warm when it is freezing outdoors at eight in the evening.
The advice is an admission of where we are headed. At the moment, for most of us, there is no difference between the price of electricity during the afternoon and the evening – it is only at night that we can buy off-peak electricity. That is not how it looks like being in the future. A big part of the plan for decarbonising the electricity system is to manage demand by varying tariffs throughout the day. That is the whole point of smart meters. We had a foretaste of this last winter when customers with smart meters were offered small discounts if they agreed to turn off appliances during the early evening on days when demand was high but, thanks to a lack of sun and wind, renewable energy was in short supply.
That, however, is only the beginning. At the moment, with the help of back-up from gas plants, we don’t have a huge problem in balancing demand and with supply. But by 2035 (2030 in the case of the Labour party) the government wants to remove all fossil fuels from the electricity grid. What do we do then? No-one seems able to explain. Investment in – very expensive – energy storage isn’t coming along at anything like the pace it would need to if we are going to be able to enjoy an uninterrupted supply of power throughout the day. Given that the supply of wind energy can fall away to virtually nothing during calm periods, and solar energy falls to zero every evening, we have a very serious problem. The tendency for still periods to concur with the coldest winter nights exacerbates the problem – especially if the country does as the government wants and switches to heat pumps.
As you can see, from the report of the Commons Business Select Committee ‘demand-side response’ is a big part of the energy industry’s plans. But it isn’t going to be nice little incentives like those offered to householders last winter in the form of £10 vouchers and the like. In future there will be a lot less carrot and a lot more stick – with surge pricing structures akin to those used by companies like Uber. Just think of the price of electricity is going to have to be jacked up to match supply and demand on a cold, still winter’s evening when – in normal times – demand would be at its highest.
In Britain’s net zero future it won’t just be a case of turning your heating on a few hours early to pre-heat your home. Many customers face being priced out of the electricity market altogether when supply of renewables is weak. On a sunny, windy afternoon you may be able to turn on your heating with abandon, even if you don’t need it on. But freezing, still evenings? Maybe there will be a special deal on woolly jumpers.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/net-zero-is-condemning-more-brits-to-energy-poverty/
*********************************************Fresh proof that New York’s ‘climate plan’ is pure fantasy
In a fresh sign that New York’s state climate agenda is pure fantasy, contractors key to making good on a major piece of the so-called plan just filed to charge 54% more to build their offshore wind farms.
Taxpayers won’t be on the line for that, but ratepayers will.
That’s the bottom line of New York’s “net zero” climate plan to drastically reduce carbon emissions.
It aims is to stop burning natural gas and other fossil fuels (even for cooking and heat), vastly increasing the use of electricity — even while magically switching the state’s electricity generation from mostly fossil-fuel-based to all-alternative energy.
Since we can’t add significant hydro power and won’t build more nuclear plants, that means ginormous increases in solar and wind power — plus new transmission lines.
And vast energy-storage capacities, for which affordable technology doesn’t even exist yet.
State officials pretend this will “only” cost a few hundred billion bucks (it’ll actually cost far more) but don’t dare appropriate enough tax dollars for it, which means they’re mandating outlays that must eventually show up in utility bills. (That’s what “Con Ed will pay” means, since it and other utilities have nowhere else to get the cash.)
This is the truth about the state Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act; recent hikes in your utility bills are just a taste of what’s coming unless and until the law gets changed.
That is: State law orders bureaucrats to shut down fossil-fuel power plants and utilities to get ever-more power from alternative sources that mostly aren’t even on the drawing board yet.
And as the wind-farm price-hike “request” filed in the runup to the holiday weekend (plainly so that few would notice it) indicates, the state’s leaders even lowballed the cost of the early rounds of building that alternative capacity.
Even if they weren’t going to soar past initial estimates, the costs to New Yorkers don’t remotely match the benefits to them.
Fact is, making New York and California and New Jersey and every other blue state — heck, the whole country — carbon-neutral will make only a minuscule dent in global carbon emissions: China’s still building coal plants at a record clip and doesn’t even pretend it’ll stop any year soon.
By the way, no one’s even talking about the big risks to New York’s plan.
One of them is the simple fact that the transition means the peak electric load will stop being in the summer, when power’s needed to run air-conditioning.
Instead, if the plan works as intended, most blackouts will come in the deepest part of winter, when everyone’s relying on electricity for heat.
Extreme cold already kills more people than extreme heat; that death toll will now grow.
Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state lawmakers imposing this idiocy will be long out of office when the bills in dollars and blood really start coming due.
They’re now just telling eco-conscious voters what they want to hear, trusting the public to forget that everything always costs more and takes longer, with fewer benefits, than politicians (and the bureaucrats who answer to them) claim.
The only real question is how much harm is done by this madness in the name only of fighting climate change before New Yorkers wake up to the truth and put a stop to it.
https://nypost.com/2023/09/04/contractors-up-the-price-by-54-for-offshore-wind-farms/
****************************************************Australia: Coal still needed in NSW
The NSW government will seek a deal with Origin Energy to prolong the lifespan of the state’s largest coal generator beyond 2025 after the state government said it has accepted the recommendations of an independent report that Eraring coal power station would need to stay open to safeguard electricity supplies.
Origin Energy’s Eraring coal power station was set to retire in 2025, but an independent report said such a closure at that time would expose the state to possible blackouts and further price increases.
NSW premier Chris Minns said affordability and guaranteeing electricity supply was paramount.
“One of the biggest challenges facing NSW is ensuring we can keep the lights on while managing the biggest change in energy mix and consumption in the shortest period of time in our nation’s history,” Mr Minns said.
Australia has endured two years of consecutive price rises of more than 20 per cent, a key driver in an affordability crisis.
Should a deal be struck, NSW will be the second state to move to guarantee a coal power station remains in the system as Australia’s energy transition falters.
To strike a deal, however, NSW will likely have to underwrite Eraring – leaving NSW taxpayers on the hook for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. Origin has said Eraring requires an annual spend of about $200m-$250m plus the cost of buying coal to run, though it earns money from selling electricity.
Eraring is, however, on course to be losing money as soon as next year when the emergency coal price cap finishes.
The federal government in conjunction with state counterparts introduced a $120 a tonne cap on the price of coal, a scheme designed to put downward pressure on household and business bills.
The scheme will end in 2024 and Origin’s supply costs will spike, likely plunging the facility back to a loss-making operation.
NSW taxpayers would likely have to cover the losses until the state has developed sufficient sources of renewable energy to compensate for the retirement of Eraring in Lake Macquarie.
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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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