Weird, It’s Cold In Winter Again
If the continental United States had on Nov. 1 been on average 11°F warmer than normal, or even if on Halloween North Dakota alone had been 44°F warmer, the usual suspects would have no difficulty explaining the phenomenon
Instead it’s that much colder (as North Dakota was 44°F below average on Oct. 31) prompting National Geographic to scratch its wise old head and wonder if cold weather can come out of nowhere, even brutally.
As we’ve observed before, the science is totally settled on climate while weather is mysterious.
And thus it is that NG, shivering in the unseasonable cold, rediscovers the unspeakably frosty winter of 1709. They write “In today’s newsletter, we examine our early chill and the mystery freak winter of 1709” that “disrupted two wars, broke church bells, froze Venice’s canals, and turned the Baltic Sea into horsepaths.”
And the punchline? “What caused it? We still don’t know for sure.” Whereas the hot summer of 2023 was just like totally certainly ‘man-made climate change’.
As the link from that newsletter to the main story asks of the sudden, severe, protracted cold spell in 1709: Could it happen again?” Of course the answer ought to be no. The air is full of “heat trapping” man-made “carbon pollution” thus heating the place to the global boiling era of fire.
And if it turns out to be yes, well, don’t worry, the theory is obviously right, it’s just the facts that are mysteriously wrong.
We would like to gloat briefly here, because we actually wrote about that winter a year ago.
We can’t taunt them too much, though, because we did so because of a piece in, um, National Geographic. Which we noted at the time, “in a rare nod to reality” admitted that unusually cold weather is a catastrophe causing famine and disease, a stark departure from orthodoxy that says warmth is horrible in every dimension from agriculture to health (despite abundant evidence to the contrary) and gosh if only it hadn’t warmed up since pre-industrial times.
On the plus side, we can taunt them a bit because they recycled the same story because, well, gosh, the fall of 2023 is turning out to be extremely cold in North America. Exactly as the global warming theory NG is normally all in on didn’t predict.
As we have suggested, standard global warming theory did not predict this summer’s conditions and could not. It pounced on them once they hit, of course. But its take is that there’s something like a linear relationship between atmospheric CO2 and warming, so a sudden discontinuity either way doesn’t fit.
Don’t take our word for it. Well, do. But not ours alone. In a different context, responding to man-made warming icon James Hansen’s claim that warming is accelerating and is about to accelerate as well, no less a man-made warming icon than Michael Mann insisted that it’s not what the theory says:
“Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that Hansen and his co-authors are ‘very much out of the mainstream’ in identifying an acceleration in surface heating that has ‘continued at a remarkably constant rate for the past few decades’.”
Well OK then. If it’s been remarkably constant, and in a stable relationship with atmospheric CO2, what explains the apparent spike this past summer? And a strong possibility for the unusual warmth this past summer is that the early 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano underwater filled the air with water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas.
Such an event certainly could cause a temperature spike lasting somewhere between half a year and two years, as powerful above-ground eruptions can cause similar temperature drops.
If so, the effects would be fading away now, and if they are, the summer of 2024 won’t be as warm. (That’s called a testable prediction, folks, of exactly the sort the AGW enthusiasts routinely fail to make.)
It’s also possible that this coming winter will be colder than expected, because of the fading of that effect, some other cause, or both.
Unlike climate, which always does what the computer models say even if you have to torture the data to make it confess, weather is unpredictable.
Finally, we note with a sour smile that the piece also says of 1709 that:
“In the absence of weather forecasting, the authorities had no time to prepare for what became known as ‘Le Grand Hiver,’ and thousands succumbed to hypothermia before measures could be taken to help them.”
Nowadays of course with modern scientific modeling, we have no idea what it will be like in three days except the conditions forecast in our ubiquitous pocket telephone weather apps will not arrive as forecast.
https://principia-scientific.com/weird-its-cold-in-winter-again/
*****************************************************The Impact Of ‘Green’ Energy On Wildlife And The Environment
We’ve been told repeatedly by the media that electricity produced by ‘renewables’ is clean, essentially free energy, better for the environment than traditional sources such as coal and natural gas
But is that true? Maybe we should look at the facts.
Wind turbines injure, maim, and kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats each year in clear violation of federal law.
The Golden Gate Audubon Society in California reported that the wind farm at Altamont was killing about 10,000 birds, including over 1,100 birds of prey, each year.
Strangely, wind farm enthusiasts ignore the numbers and types of birds killed by wind turbines, even those who call themselves “environmentalists”.
Offshore wind turbines have similar impacts on marine birds, and, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, offshore wind farms also impact fish and other marine wildlife.
Currently, the construction of an offshore wind farm about 15 miles off the coast of Massachusetts is underway. The foundations for the huge wind turbines, called monopiles, are being driven into the seafloor by pile drivers.
Pile-driving noise can deafen, injure, or even kill marine mammals. At least fourteen dying humpback whales were recently washed up on beaches in this area.
The people building these projects are fully aware of the damage to marine life that they are causing and will cause.
Although killing such creatures is illegal, these companies have been given special permission by the government to injure or kill hundreds of whales and thousands of other marine mammals, including dolphins.
“It is hard to see how this hell can be allowed under present laws, such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act,” noted David Wojick of the Heartland Institute.
In May of 2022, Sean Hayes, a NOAA scientist, issued a warning that “the development of offshore wind poses risks to these species [whales]” and that “these risks occur at varying stages, including construction and development, and include increased noise, vessel traffic, habitat modifications, water withdrawals associated with certain substations.”
Steve Gray, a former congressional candidate, wondered:
”Where are the environmentalists? No outrage. No protests against a Democrat-led Government backing offshore windmills.
The hypocrisy is deafening. Fourteen dead whales and counting.”
As if this isn’t bad enough, hundreds of square miles of forests have been clear-cut to provide space for wind farms, causing extensive environmental damage. It’s been estimated that wind and solar farms require 400 – 800 times the amount of land to produce the same amount of power as conventional power plants.
Modern wind turbines depend on rare earth minerals mined primarily in China, which has a poor record of environmental stewardship. The process of extracting these minerals imposes wretched environmental and public health conditions on China’s people.
It takes a tremendous amount of material to produce one wind turbine. A typical wind turbine, over 500 ft. (50 stories!) tall, contains more than 8,000 different parts, made of steel, fiberglass, cast iron, concrete, and oil.
One important component is a magnetic material made from neodymium and dysprosium, mined almost exclusively in China.
In the Chinese village of Dalahai, where the dumping of waste materials occurred, villagers’ teeth had begun falling out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases.
Children were born with soft bones, and cancer rates had skyrocketed. There were also unusually high rates of cancer, osteoporosis, and skin and respiratory diseases reported. The nearby lake’s radiation levels were ten times higher than in the surrounding countryside.
An article in the Daily Mail stated that every wind turbine contributes to “a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China.”
Added to these problems are the adverse health effects of living anywhere near these wind turbines.
The incessant grinding noises they make have been known to cause tinnitus [ringing in the ears], vertigo, panic attacks, migraine headaches, sleep deprivation, and even heart disease, according to Dr. Nina Pierpont, a leading New York pediatrician.
The construction of photovoltaic panels also causes great harm to the environment. An estimated 70 percent of the world’s photovoltaics are made in China, much of it with slave labor in Uighur Muslim concentration camps.
The New York Times reported in 2014, “Although China may be a cheaper place than Europe for producing solar panels, the savings come at a higher cost to the environment.”
“Sometimes the environmental costs of solar panel production can be lost among the drive to encourage the development of clean energy,” declared Huang Xianjin, a Nanjing University professor who studies land use.
Huang and two other professors submitted a letter to the journal Nature arguing that China needed to take significant action to offset the environmental damage the solar industry is causing there.
A solar panel manufacturer in Zhejiang Province halted its operation after residents complained about serious air and water pollution caused by their production.
The Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Company produces a highly toxic byproduct of polysilicon used in solar panels called silicon tetrachloride.
“The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place… It is like dynamite — it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it,” declared Ren Bingyan, a professor at Hebei Industrial University in China.
Due to lax standards, these companies are cutting corners with hazardous waste disposal. Although polysilicon producers in other parts of the world recycle this compound, Chinese companies prefer to dump it to avoid the high cost of recycling.
Michael Shellenberger expressed his concern about environmental hazards resulting from discarded solar panels. Typically they contain cadmium, lead, and other toxic chemicals that can’t be extracted without taking the whole panel apart.
Such panels left in landfills break apart and release toxic waste into the ground or bodies of water. In a 2016 study, the Electric Power Research Institute concluded, “Solar panel disposal in regular landfills [is] not recommended in case modules break and toxic materials leach into the soil.”
Over a while, rainwater will wash cadmium out of solar panels and into the environment. This fact was brought up when local people in Virginia rejected a proposal to construct a 6,350-acre solar farm in Spotsylvania County.
Sean Fogarty of Concerned Citizens of Fawn Lake stated, “We estimate there are 100,000 pounds of cadmium contained in the 1.8 million panels.”
Mining and processing the materials needed for lithium-ion batteries used in EVs is also an environmental disaster.
Producing just one EV battery requires 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, and 200 pounds of copper, in addition to 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic.
The production of this one battery requires 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for the copper, all of which takes about half a million pounds of the Earth’s crust.
In Indonesia, where nickel for EV batteries is produced, polluted air and water reportedly cause respiratory problems and destroy forests and fisheries.
Lithium mining is one of the most ecologically destructive activities on the planet. At just one lithium mine, 35-40 Caterpillar trucks use nearly 18 million gallons of diesel per year.
Battery-powered vehicles (EVs) use much more aluminum than conventional vehicles. Ford’s F-150 battery-powered truck contains 682 lbs of aluminum, mostly mined and refined in Brazil.
There is a class action lawsuit going on there against Hydro, a Norwegian company. Here bauxite [aluminum ore] is mined and converted to alumina, a toxic residue that leaches into rivers and creeks.
“The alumina made here is produced at the cost of a lot of misery,” proclaimed Ismael Mores, a lawyer working on this lawsuit.
Because lithium-ion batteries are full of toxic chemicals, they can’t just be dumped into landfills. Like solar panels, they require recycling, a complicated process. If this isn’t properly done, the heavy metals involved will contaminate water and soil.
Another fact hidden from the public: extracting lithium from a used battery is five times as expensive as the cost of mining it. Does anyone think these batteries will be recycled?
This article has just scratched the surface of the disaster facing the world. Considering these facts, it is incomprehensible that anyone embracing these ‘climate change’ ‘solutions’ could ever be called “green”.
We need to stop referring to these people as “Green”. We must get this information to as many people as possible, especially our elected representatives.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-impact-of-green-energy-on-wildlife-and-the-environment/
*****************************************************Bad climate data from urban heat islands leads to wrong conclusions
Two new internationally peer-reviewed studies published in major scientific journals have documented misleading Northern Hemisphere temperature data and attribution analyses indicating inadequate considerations of Urban Heat Island (UHI) influences on climate records and dominant influences of the sun in producing warming and cooling changes.
Published in August by the journal Climate, the first of these studies concludes that global warming influences on people could be mostly an urban problem associated with a well-known UHI phenomenon whereby structures, including paved surfaces and concrete buildings, absorb heat during the day and release it at night.
Although urban areas account for less than 4% of the global land surface, they contain many of the weather stations where temperatures are collected, which substantially skew the bigger record picture.
Whereas the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that UHI accounts for less than 10% of global warming, the new study suggests that urban warming might account for up to 40% of the recorded change since 1850.
To arrive at this assessment, 37 scientists from 18 countries led by Dr. Willie Soon at the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES-science.com) deleted temperature data from Northern Hemisphere cities and towns and concentrated attention on “uncontaminated” rural temperatures, which collectively show a rather small overall warming for the past 150 years.
As expected, the records showed routine episodes of both warming and cooling throughout the mid-to-late 19th century, 20th century, and first quarter of the 21st century.
The CERES research team reached conclusions similar to a separate scientific peer-reviewed study involving many of the same co-authors published in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, which took a different approach to analyzing climate changes during the same general period.
The team of 20 climate researchers from 12 countries led by Dr. Ronan Connolly, also at CERES, concluded that in addition to contaminated urban warming bias based largely upon weather station locations, the IPCC may have substantially underestimated the sun’s natural role in climate changes since the 1850s.
Whereas the IPCC only considered one estimate of solar activity for its most recent (2021) evaluation of the causes of global warming, Connolly and colleagues compiled and updated 27 different estimates along with three additional temperature estimates that were used by the scientific community.
Several of these different solar activity estimates suggested that most of the warming observed outside urban areas (in rural areas, oceans, and glaciers) could be explained in terms of the sun, along with some estimates suggesting a mixture of human and natural factors and others that agreed with IPCC findings.
When the authors analyzed the temperature data only using the IPCC’s solar dataset, they could not explain any of the warming since the mid-20th century.
On the other hand, different solar activity estimates applied by the broader scientific community revealed that most rural warming and cooling trends could be explained in terms of the sun’s influence.
As lead CERES investigator astrophysicist, Dr. Soon points out, “The Sun is the sole energy giver to all things on Earth, including the energy for photosynthesis and all the energy to drive the air and water and vegetation.
So it is without a doubt that any, however small, changes in the Sun will lead to consequential effects on Earth’s weather patterns and climate change. In addition, computer climate modelers have yet been unable to fully account for the slow changes in the orbital motion of the Earth around the Sun.”
Whereas changes in the Sun’s output were able to explain most, if not all, changes in rural temperatures based upon uncontaminated heat island records, CERES researchers were unable to correlate any influences of rising atmospheric CO2 with patterns of warming and cooling over the past 150-170 years.
Given that humans have no apparent influence over the Sun, conclusions of these two studies should give reasonable people pause in declaring that “the science is settled” regarding a human-caused climate crisis warranting draconian limits upon the sorts of energy we use and dictates regarding the cars we drive.
Dr. Soon of the first study emphasizes that using bad data that are swarmed by UHI effects will not only be scientifically misleading but, in fact, cause pain and chaos in everyone’s lives — especially in terms of increasing costs for food and heating and cooling our home as well as paying for the gasoline for our cars and other transportation.
He states: “If the IPCC had paid more attention to open-minded scientific inquiry than trying to force a premature ‘scientific consensus,’ then the scientific community would be a lot closer to having genuinely resolved the causes of climate change. Hopefully, our new analysis and datasets can help other scientists to get back to doing real climate science.”
Dr. Connolly, lead author of the solar study, agrees: “In scientific investigations, it is important to avoid beginning your analysis with your conclusions decided in advance. Otherwise, you might end up with a false sense of confidence in your findings. It seems that the IPCC was too quick to jump to their conclusions.”
As CERES co-author professor Ana Elias, director of the Laboratorio de Ionosfera, Atmósfera Neutra y Magnetosfera (LIANM) at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Argentina, explained: “This analysis opens the door to a proper scientific investigation into the causes of climate change.”
That proper scientific investigation is long overdue.
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Australia’s energy system can handle extreme summer if system holds up, market operator concludes
No reserves
Australia’s energy system faces a once-in-a-decade spike in electricity demand this summer – as well as an increased bushfire risk and extreme heat – as the country’s market operator warned the system cannot afford any unexpected outages or supply shocks.
The Australian Energy Market Operator in August warned the country’s energy system could be stressed to near breaking point as soon as this summer, and Victoria and South Australia could both experience blackouts as there was a heightened threat that there would be insufficient generation to meet demand.
The warning had triggered emergency measures, which the AEMO said has eased the shortfall threat, but there is little capacity for any unexpected problems to Australia’s ageing coal generators.
The AEMO’s executive general manager operations, Michael Gatt, said months of planning with industry has gone into preparing the nation’s power systems for a possible summer of extreme demand.
“Our extensive planning with industry, governments and network businesses aims to have enough generation and transmission available year-round to meet consumers’ electricity needs,” Mr Gatt said.
“This year’s summer forecast is for hot and dry El Nino conditions, increasing the risk of bushfires and extreme heat, which could see electricity demand reach a one-in-10-year high across the eastern states and in Western Australia.”
The AEMO said in September it had asked for commitments of extra generation for both SA and Victoria, and tenders from heavy users who could be paid to lower demand when the grid was strained so much that blackouts could occur.
The AEMO said it is also bolstered by additional capacity as major generators return to operations. The market operator said an extra 1500MW of scheduled generation will be online this summer compared to the previous one, and it now expects an extra 2000MW generation capacity from new wind and solar projects will be available.
In WA, the market operator said nearly 50MW of extra scheduled generation is expected to be available. “The increase in generation availability and additional reserves being procured will help navigate reliability pressures, should they eventuate,” Mr Gatt said.
The additional capacity will largely come from Queensland and NSW, with several major generators on course to complete repairs and maintenance.
Coal is still the dominant source of electricity, providing around two-thirds of the nation’s power. But many of the coal generators are approaching the end of their technical lifespan, leaving many exposed to faults.
Many of Australia’s largest power station operators have undertaken intensive maintenance to ready their units for the spike in demand, but industry sources said recent history showed a spate of issues.
The Callide C power station, one of Queensland’s largest coal power plants, is on course to come back in January, the plant’s operator said earlier this year, while AGL Energy’s Bayswater and Origin Energy’s Eraring coal power stations are both set to return to full capacity after units were taken offline for required maintenance.
However, while the increased generation will ease concerns about insufficient electricity supplies, the AEMO said there remains an elevated threat as an El Nino weather system is expected to bring soaring temperatures and a significant rise in demand for electricity for cooling.
Australian authorities have warned of a heightened risk of bushfires, which could damage or destroy high-voltage transmission lines, which could create serious problems for the nation’s electricity grid.
Elevated demand could also cause further pain to Australian households. While AEMO said it now expects to have enough electricity generation to meet demand, increased usage will likely push up wholesale electricity prices.
Wholesale prices – the cost of electricity – are the biggest component in how much household and business bills rise by in 2024.
Australian households, struggling under high inflation and 13 interest rate rises in little more than a year, have endured two years of electricity and gas price increases of more than 20 per cent.
A record number of Australians are already struggling to pay their electricity bills, and further increases will prove deeply unpopular, and will not be welcomed by the federal Labor government, which has seen its polling slide substantially amid the cost-of-living squeeze.
Increases in utility bills could also fuel inflation, forcing yet more interest rate rises from the Reserve Bank of Australia, which has vowed to bring inflation back to its target by the end of 2025.
Energy market executives fear continued increases in electricity bills will also temper public support for Australia’s energy transition.
Labor has set the ambitious target of having renewable energy generate more than 80 per cent of the country’s electricity by the end of the decade, a key pillar in the plan to reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030.
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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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