A fun bit of Warmism

A rather attractive woman at a British regional university that was originally a school of art has put out an article (below) in which she compares the arguments put out by climate skeptics to the self-justifications used by criminals. So the intent is clearly derogatory.

She offers no numerical estimate of how similar the two types of statement are, however, so the article lapses into pointlessness or at best arbitrariness.

She classifies skeptical arguments quite well and clearly regards them all as illegitimate in some way -- but she offers no evidence or argument -- not even a reference -- for that opinion.

She appears to rely on the old "97% consenus" tale but has obviously not read the foundational paper for that claim  -- by John Cook et al.  I will quote her just one sentence from that paper: "66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW".  In other words only ONE THIRD of climate scientists could be shown to support global warming.  That's  a long way from 97%.  Richard Tol has more on that.

I will resist blonde jokes and simply observe that there are certainly some dim bulbs among Warmists


Climate Change Counter Movement NeutralizationTechniques: A Typology to Examine the Climate Change Counter Movement

Ruth E. McKie


Abstract

The Climate Change Counter Movement has been a topic of interest for social scientists and environmentalists for the past 25 years (Dunlap and McCright, 2015). This research uses the sociology of crime and deviance to analyze the numerous arguments used by climate change counter movement organizations.

Content analysis of 805 statements made by climate change counter movement organizations reveals that the theory "Techniques of Neutralization" (Sykes and Matza, American Sociological Review 22(6):664, 1957) can help us better understand the arguments adopted by these organizations.

Taking two observations from two time points, the author examine not only the composition of the messaging adopted by Climate Change Counter Movement (CCCM)organization, but how these messages have changed over time. In all, there were 1,435 examples of CCCM neutralization techniques adopted by CCCM organizations across these two points in time. This examination of the movement provides valuable insight into the CCCM and the subsequent environmental harm that is partly facilitated by theiractions.

SOURCE





The Modern Automobile Must Die. If we want to solve climate change, there's no other option

First they came for your plastic bags, then your straws, then your balloons… Now your cars!  Fat chance they have. Around half of the passenger automobiles sold in America today are SUVs.  But SUVs are big and heavy so can't go far on batteries.  And even normal cars can't go far on batteries in Northern winters as heating is a big battery drainer too

Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the kind of bold, aggressive climate goal scientists said was needed in all developed countries. If Germany could do it, it would prove the target possible.

So far, Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 27.7 percent—an astonishing achievement for a developed country with a highly developed manufacturing sector. But with a little over a year left to go, despite dedicating $580 billion toward a low-carbon energy system, the country “is likely to fall short of its goals for reducing harmful carbon-dioxide emissions,” Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday. And the reason for that may come down not to any elaborate solar industry plans, but something much simpler: cars.

“At the time they set their goals, they were very ambitious,” Patricia Espinosa, the United Nations’ top climate change official, told Bloomberg. “What happened was that the industry—particularly the car industry—didn’t come along.”

Changing the way we power our homes and businesses is certainly important. But as Germany’s shortfall shows, the only way to achieve these necessary, aggressive emissions reductions to combat global warming is to overhaul the gas-powered automobile and the culture that surrounds it. The only question left is how to do it.

In 2010, a NASA study declared that automobiles were officially the largest net contributor of climate change pollution in the world. “Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it,” the study read. “In contrast, the industrial and power sectors release many of the same gases—with a larger contribution to [warming]—but they also emit sulfates and other aerosols that cause cooling by reflecting light and altering clouds.”

In other words, the power generation sector may have emitted the most greenhouse gases in total. But it also released so many sulfates and cooling aerosols that the net impact was less than the automobile industry, according to NASA.

Since then, developed countries have cut back on those cooling aerosols for the purpose of countering regular air pollution, which has likely increased the net climate pollution of the power generation industry. But according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. emissions,” while “in total, the U.S. transportation sector—which includes cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships, and freight—produces nearly thirty percent of all US global warming emissions ... .”

In fact, transportation is now the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States—and it has been for two years, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group.

There’s a similar pattern happening in Germany. Last year, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions decreased as a whole, “largely thanks to the closure of coal-fired power plants,” according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the transportation industry’s emissions increased by 2.3 percent, “as car ownership expanded and the booming economy meant more heavy vehicles were on the road.” Germany’s transportation sector remains the nation’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but if these trends continue, it will soon become the first.

Clearly, the power generation industry is changing its ways. So why aren’t carmakers following suit?

To American eyes, Germany may look like a public transit paradise. But the country also has a flourishing car culture that began over a hundred years ago and has only grown since then.

Behind Japan and the United States, Germany is the third-largest automobile manufacturer in the world—home to BMW, Audi, Mercedes Benz, and Volkswagen.* These brands, and the economic prosperity they’ve brought to the country, shape Germany’s cultural and political identities. “There is no other industry as important,” Arndt Ellinghorst, the chief of Global Automotive Research at Evercore, told CNN.

A similar phenomenon exists in the United States, where gas-guzzlers symbolize nearly every cliche point of American pride: affluence, capability for individual expression, and personal freedoms. Freedom, in particular, “is not a selling point to be easily dismissed,” Edward Humes wrote in The Atlantic in 2016. “This trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no schedule but its owner’s. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even Uber makes riders wait.”

It’s this cultural love of cars—and the political influence of the automotive industry—that has so far prevented the public pressure necessary to provoke widespread change in many developed nations. But say those barriers didn’t exist. How could developed countries tweak their automobile policies to solve climate change?

For Germany to meet emissions targets, “half of the people who now use their cars alone would have to switch to bicycles, public transport, or ride-sharing,” Heinrich Strößenreuther, a Berlin-based consultant for mobility strategies told YaleEnvironment360’s Christian Schwägerl last fall. That would require drastic policies, like having local governments ban high-emitting cars in populated places like cities. (In fact, Germany’s car capital, Stuttgart, is considering it.) It would also require large-scale government investments in public transportation infrastructure: “A new transport system that connects bicycles, buses, trains, and shared cars, all controlled by digital platforms that allow users to move from A to B in the fastest and cheapest way—but without their own car,” Schwägerl said.

One could get away with more modest infrastructure investments if governments required carmakers to make their vehicle fleets more fuel-efficient, thereby burning less petroleum. The problem is that most automakers seek to meet those requirements by developing electric cars. If those cars are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, they create “more emissions than a car that burns petrol,” energy storage expert Dénes Csala pointed out last year. “For such a switch to actually reduce net emissions, the electricity that powers those cars must be renewable.”

The most effective solution would be to combine these policies. Governments would require drastic improvements in fuel efficiency for gas-powered vehicles, while investing in renewable-powered electric car infrastructure. At the same time, cities would overhaul their public transportation systems, adding more bikes, trains, buses and ride-shares. Fewer people would own cars.

At one point, the U.S. was well on its way toward some of these changes. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s administration implemented regulations requiring automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by the year 2025. But the Trump administration announced a rollback of those regulations earlier this month. Their intention, they said, is to “Make Cars Great Again.”

The modern cars they’re seeking to preserve, and the way we use them, are far from great. Of course, there’s the climate impact—the trillions in expected economic damage from extreme weather and sea-level rise caused in part by our tailpipes. But 53,000 Americans also die prematurely from vehicle pollution each year, and accidents are among the leading causes of death in the United States. “If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered,” Humes wrote. It’s getting more dangerous by the day.

SOURCE





Another Greenie nuisance

In recent months, a new and controversial climate activist has surfaced in the media. Richard Wiles has quickly become the go-to commentator for news stories surrounding a series of copycat lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies liable for the effects of climate change.

On the surface, Mr. Wiles appears to be a well-meaning climate expert.

But an Energy In Depth investigation reveals his involvement in the larger coordinated scheme to attack energy companies and force the industry to pay for global warming.

Wiles is involved in all aspects of the climate litigation campaign – from running a news outlet dedicated to promoting the lawsuits and coordinating a social media effort to attack the industry, to overseeing the research utilized in many of the lawsuits and pressuring additional cities to bring cases of their own.

Richard Wiles heads Climate Liability News (CLN), a dark-money “news” site set up in 2017 to promote climate lawsuits across the country.

Though CLN doesn’t disclose its funders, its founding editor is Lynn Zinser, a transplant from InsideClimate News who worked on the original #ExxonKnew articles, which were paid for by the Rockefeller Family Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Rockefellers are key players behind both the #ExxonKnew and climate litigation campaigns. Coincidentally, CLN just happens to have a unique page on its website dedicated to advancing this fringe environmentalist effort.

Kert Davies and Alyssa Johl, a former attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), serve alongside Wiles on the CLN board of directors.

Davies and members of CIEL attended a secret meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund in January 2016, which sought to “delegitimize” ExxonMobil and portray it as a “corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”

Behind the scenes, Wiles facilitates this “news” site through a 501(c)3 organization called Climate Communications & Law.

Established in 2017, the organization has no website and no publicly available financial disclosures to the IRS (form 990s).

It appears to serve as a shell organization for other powerful players to funnel undisclosed funds to CLN, which means it serves as a de facto public relations component of #ExxonKnew. CC&L is operated out of Wiles’ own home.

Wiles also directs the Center for Climate Integrity, a project that “supports meritorious climate cases aimed at holding fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters liable for the damages they have caused.”

This support includes coordinated social media posts with #ExxonKnew, an initiative by 350.org, and a PR campaign that is pressuring other cities like Houston and Miami to bring lawsuits of their own.

These tactics seem to stem directly from the agenda at the aforementioned Rockefeller Family Fund meeting in 2016:

Part of the memo for the January 2016 meeting at the offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund where activists plotted their #ExxonKnew strategy

Not only is Wiles leading a PR campaign in support of these lawsuits, he also oversaw the research utilized in many of the cases seeking damages from fossil fuel companies.

Wiles is the founder of Climate Central, a Rockefeller-funded organization that researches and reports on the impacts of climate change.

Between 2008-2017, Wiles served as the organization’s Sr. Vice President for Strategic Communications and Research, where he supervised numerous studies cited in the lawsuits represented by Sher Edling.

Climate Central has been involved in the conspiracy to delegitimize the fossil fuel industry from the very beginning: Claudia Tebaldi, a climate statistician for Climate Central, attended the now infamous La Jolla conference on behalf of the organization in 2012.

Portrayed by the media as a dispassionate expert, Richard Wiles is a deeply ingrained collaborator in the climate conspiracy against the energy industry.

He is facilitating a coordinated PR campaign and running a “news” organization to further these baseless attacks, alongside some of the most well-documented #ExxonKnew conspirators.

He even oversaw research conducted after the La Jolla Conference that was later used in the very lawsuits he continues to promote.

Wiles has managed to operate multiple facets of the campaign to undermine the industry while maintaining a public perception as an outside expert.

It’s unclear if Mr. Wiles has any other notable affiliations with the climate litigation campaign, but the additional investigation may yet reveal more to this story.

SOURCE




‘The Time For Action Is Now’: Zinke Orders California To Stop Wasting Farmers’ Water

Sacramento-San Joaquin DeltaInterior Secretary Ryan Zinke directed staff to draft a plan within 15 days that would “maximize water supply deliveries” to farmers south of California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, The Sacramento Bee reported.

California’s State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) is holding public hearings Tuesday on a proposal that would divert less water from the San Joaquin River for use in farms and roughly 3 million households.

The SWRCB wants to increase the amount of water flowing from the river into the ocean in order to help fish populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta recover from historically low numbers.

“The State of California is now proposing additional unacceptable restrictions that further reduce the Department’s ability to deliver water to Federal contractors,” Zinke wrote in an Aug. 17 memo to department staff, according to The Sacramento Bee.

“The time for action is now,” the Interior secretary wrote, insisting that more water should be made available south of the delta for use by farms, homes, and businesses.

Further limiting Californian’s use of the water would force thousands to look for a supply underground, straining the state’s already depleted aquifers, critics of the state’s plan say.

Environmentalists oppose the secretary’s plan.

“It’s indicative of a more bullying and hysterical tone,” Natural Resources Defense Council California water program director Doug Obegi told the Los Angeles Times.

The fight between the Trump administration and California over the state’s water policy ratcheted up recently as result of record wildfires sweeping through the state. President Donald Trump has blamed “bad environmental laws” for adding to the wildfires’ severity.

Environmentalists and agriculture interests have fought over the appropriate use for water in the San Joaquin River. Farmers argue that the water is needed for irrigation and to sate California’s high demand for water.

Environmentalists say diverting water from flowing into the delta is harming stocks of fish, particularly the endangered delta smelt.

SOURCE 





Marc Morano: My Viral Climate Change Video Was Smeared as Fake News. Here Are the Facts.

Morano attacker Dana Nuccitelli is a rather crafty Warmist.  He usually backs up his statements by a display of "facts".  When you trace those facts back however you find that the "facts" are just conclusions (read: opinions) of his fellow Warmists

An environmental scientist who writes a column for The Guardian has claimed that my video on climate change “spreads climate denial misinformation” to millions of viewers on Facebook. Not so.

Here is my point-by-point rebuttal to Dana Nuccitelli’s claims in the British newspaper based on my video, which has attracted more than 8 million views and 139,000 shares on Facebook. The video has so alarmed climate activists that they’re using it to pressure Facebook to ban “climate deniers.”

Claim: “Basically, [Marc Morano’s] critique is that the study sample size was too small to make a conclusive determination about the level of expert consensus. That’s a valid point … ”

Response: So Nuccitelli admits my point about “77 anonymous” scientists making up the alleged 97 percent consensus is “a valid point.” Good. Let’s move on.

Claim: “In fact, the authors of seven separate [climate] consensus studies using a variety of approaches (some with very large sample sizes) teamed up in 2016 to publish a paper concluding that the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is between 90 and 100 percent. So, this critique is invalid when considering all the available consensus research.”

Response: Climate Depot, the website I founded, has covered and debunked the claims of these so-called “consensus” studies, which were a rehash of the same claims but packaged together to appear comprehensive. Chapter 3 of my book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” is devoted to debunking the 97 percent claims.

As I have detailed before: These claims “really confirm that it is easier to get papers published if they support the narrative of man-made global warming.”

Responding to these “consensus” surveys, I told the Media Research Center: “These types of ‘consensus’ surveys are meant to provide talking points to politicians and the media in order to crush dissenting voices and ban skeptics from the mainstream media. It frees the climate crisis promoter from having to research any scientific points and instead allows them to say, ‘90 percent of scientists agree. Case closed!’”

Nuccitelli, as seen here and here, has a history of skewing climate science to fit his political narrative.

Claim: “Morano also critiques the consensus study that my colleagues (including John Cook) and I published in 2013. He does so simply by quoting economist Richard Tol saying our 97 percent figure ‘was pulled from thin air.’ Tol argued that the methodology in our study was flawed, but when we applied his critiques in a follow-up paper published in 2014, we found that the consensus was still 97 [percent, plus or minus 1 percent].”

Response: Here are Tol’s own words on Cook’s claim of 97 percent consensus, and readers can judge whether I accurately quoted him:

The 97 percent estimate is bandied about by basically everybody. I had a close look at what this study really did. As far as I can see, the estimate just crumbles when you touch it. None of the statements in the papers [is] supported by the data that’s in the paper. The 97 percent is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.

Tol continued to be unimpressed with Cook’s claims even after his follow-up paper published in 2014. In 2015, Tol again ripped Cook’s continued claims of a 97 percent consensus. “Cook’s analysis is a load of old bollocks,” he wrote.

(I debated Cook in 2015 at the U.N. Paris climate summit. Listen here.)

Claim: “In short, Morano’s only evidence to dispute the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is to quote an economist who agrees the consensus is 90 to 100 percent, and that the experts are correct that humans are responsible for global warming.”

Response: Tol has pushed back on claims that he cited a consensus of 91 percent.

PolitiFact to Tol in 2015: “The 91 percent endorsement rate is a direct quote from your paper: ‘The headline endorsement rate would be 91 percent in that case.’ (Cook cites it multiple times in his reply to your paper.)”

Tol rebuffed this, writing back to PolitiFact: “Do check the grammar: ‘would […] in that case’ does in no way indicate my agreement with the number. In fact, I make it very clear that any number based on Cook’s data is unreliable.”

In addition, Nuccitelli’s claim in The Guardian that my “only evidence” is Tol is not correct. In the 2-minute Facebook video, I alluded to Tol’s comment and to the other key “consensus” study. But in my book, I devote a whole chapter to debunking all of the various 97 percent consensus claims.

Also see this and this. And past climate “consensuses” have changed dramatically, as seen here and here.

Claim: “Morano claims that we’re not actually in the midst of the hottest period on record, and that ‘hottest year’ claims are ‘merely political statements’ because for example, he claims, scientists can’t say with 100 percent certainty that 2016 was hotter than 2015 due to the margin of uncertainty in the data. This claim is similar to one made on Fox News that earned a ‘Pants on Fire’ rating from PolitiFact based on consultation with climate scientists. The years 2014 through 2017 are indeed the four hottest years on record, outside the range of uncertainty.”

Response: First off, citing PolitiFact as a climate science authority is beyond the pale, even for The Guardian. Second, the media has been forced to admit that “hottest year” claims are statistical noise.

In 2015, the Associated Press issued a “clarification,” stating in part:

The story also reported that 2014 was the hottest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, but did not include the caveat that other recent years had average temperatures that were almost as high—and they all fall within a margin of error that lessens the certainty that any one of the years was the hottest.

“Hottest year” claims are purely political statements designed to persuade the public that the government needs to take action on man-made climate change.

In Chapter 7, my book deals with “hottest year” claims and their statistical significance.

Claim: “Morano argues that the experts are wrong because there are hundreds of factors influencing Earth’s climate, and that carbon dioxide ‘is one of these factors that gets essentially drowned out, and you can’t distinguish its effect from natural variability.’ That claim is entirely false, as elegantly illustrated in this graphic created by Bloomberg.”

Response: The claim here is that carbon dioxide can have a warming impact on the atmosphere, but this does not mean CO2 is the control knob of the climate.

Philip Stott, University of London’s professor emeritus of biogeography, rebuts the notion that carbon dioxide is the main climate change driver, writing:

As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets.

Climate is the most complex coupled nonlinear chaotic system known to man. Of course, there are human influences in it, nobody denies that. But what outcome will they get by fiddling with one variable (CO2) at the margins? I’m sorry, it’s scientific nonsense.

Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer in development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, has declared (as quoted in my book): “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”

Claim: “Human-caused global warming now [is] far outside the range of natural variability. In fact, we’re now warming global temperatures more than 20 times faster than Earth’s fastest natural climate changes.”

Response: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever points out that “.8 degrees is what we’re discussing in global warming. [Just] .8 degrees. If you ask people in general what it is, they think—it’s 4 or 5 degrees. They don’t know it is so little.”

Climatologist Pat Michaels explained that in any case the world’s temperature “should be near the top of the record given the record only begins in the late 19th century when the surface temperature was still reverberating from the Little Ice Age.”

“We are creating great anxiety without it being justified … there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic,” award-winning climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

As climatologist Roy Spencer wrote in 2016:

Global warming and climate change, even if it is 100 percent caused by humans, is so slow that it cannot be observed by anyone in their lifetime. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and other natural disasters have yet to show any obvious long-term change. This means that in order for politicians to advance policy goals (such as forcing expensive solar energy on the masses or creating a carbon tax), they have to turn normal weather disasters into ‘evidence’ of climate change.

University of Pennsylvania geologist Robert Giegengack, as I write in my book, noted in 2014:  “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”

Claim: “And of course, climate scientists have observed human fingerprints all over climate change … ”

Response: As Spencer wrote, “There is no fingerprint of human-caused versus naturally-caused climate change … To claim the changes are ‘unprecedented’ cannot be demonstrated with reliable data, and are contradicted by some published paleoclimate data which suggests most centuries experience substantial warming or cooling.”

Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist, said that believing CO2 controls the climate “is pretty close to believing in magic.” Climate Depot revealed the real way they find the “fingerprint” of CO2.

Nuccitelli’s “fingerprint” argument in The Guardian echoes claims by the Associated Press from 2017, when AP science reporter Seth Borenstein wrote: “There’s a scientifically accepted method for determining if some wild weather event has the fingerprints of man-made climate change, and it involves intricate calculations. Those could take weeks or months to complete, and then even longer to be checked by other scientists.”

I responded to Borenstein’s claims by writing that he seems to believe “there is some kind of arcane black box that finds the fingerprint of man-made global warming” and it is available only to a select few.

Claim: “It would be absurd to take Marc Morano’s word over the evidence published in peer-reviewed studies by climate scientists at NASA and other scientific institutions around the world.”

Response: I wholeheartedly agree. There is no reason to take the word of either The Guardian’s Nuccitelli or me. We have science, data, and the geologic history of the Earth to handle that.

Current NASA climate claims (under Gavin Schmidt and formerly James Hansen) are steeped in politics and funding. Former NASA scientists have criticized the agency (see here and here).

Other prominent scientists reject carbon dioxide fears.

Ivy League geologist Robert Giegengack, former chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke out against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Al Gore and others. Giegengack noted that “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.”

He explained:

[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. … It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2.

In 2014, Giegengack told Climate Depot: “The Earth has experienced very few periods when CO2 was lower than it is today.”

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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The latest global warming fraud

There a lot of versions of the graph below online but I could find none that included calibrations. It's a thoroughly dishonest piece of work as, for any graph to be interpretable, it has to include calibrations.  I have in fact never before seen a graph without calibrations.

It would ruin the Warmist story if calibrations were included because what is not mentioned is that the differences in temperature between the time periods illustrated are in mostly in hundredths of one degree only, which is practically meaningless.

There HAS been overall warming over the last century or so but it has been only in isolated spurts and is in total less than one degree Celsius. IF such warming continues it would cause as little trouble as the warming we have had so far. It is trivial




IS IT a work of art in a gallery? A chart? It’s neither and both, and it shows a big change in Australia.

IT LOOKS like a piece of art. Or maybe a very brightly coloured barcode. Or even a duvet cover. But the striped image is a visual representation of Australia’s average temperature each year over the last century.

A climate scientist from the UK has released a series of images that depict the warmest and coldest temperatures since records began places all over the globe.

University of Reading climate scientist Professor Ed Hawkins calls the pieces “warming stripes”. He has created them for parts of England, Germany, Toronto, Australia and the world as a whole.

“Each stripe represents the temperature of a single year, ordered from the earliest available data to now,” Prof Hawkins on the website Climate Lab Book.

The coldest years recorded are a dark blue and the hottest a deep red with everything in between a different shade depending on whether it’s over or under the long-term average.

If the average temperatures regularly fluctuated from hot to cold, you could expect to see red and blue stripes relatively evenly distributed.

In the graph for Vienna, for example, which covers a period from 1775 — 2017, the first half of the image seems to be fairly random with lots of reds and blues. But in recent years, the Vienna chart is mostly red denoting hot years.

For the stripes showing the annual global average temperatures, it’s a smooth transition from dark blue to dark red; from record cold years to record hot years.

There’s less data to go on for Australia as records only go so far back. But there’s still a century or so to compare.

Prof Hawkins took Bureau of Meteorology data from 1910 — 2017: “The colour scale goes from 20.7°C (dark blue) to 23.0°C (dark red),” he said.

The lowest annual temperature was recorded in 1917. The highset, more than 1C above the overall average, was in 2013.

In the last 20 years in Australia, only three years have seen annual temperatures dip below average. And during those years it’s dipped only slightly below the line.

But many of the most recent years that have seen above average temperatures that have soared over the line.

SOURCE




Nancy Pelosi Mocks Coal Power In U.S., Then Drops A Threat

House Minority Leader mocked coal power plants in America on Wednesday, and not-so-subtly threatened to forbid more coal-fired plants in the United States.

During a discussion on energy policy at the Public Policy Institute of California, Pelosi began by pretending to be religious and spoke about preserving God’s creation on Earth.

After mentioning how she fought off Democrats when the nation’s capital was fueled by coal, she said “with all due respect to West Virginia,” that’s never going to happen again.

“And it really is a moral issue if you believe as I do that this is God’s creation [and] we have to be good stewards of it. We have evangelicals and others with us — er, some, those who believe in God’s creation. So, in any case this was a big thing for us. I had to fight some Democrats. Senator Byrd had a coal powered plan fueling the Capitol, you know… I … that’s gonna go, with all due respect to West Virginia we’re not gonna have a coal power plant floating around.”

Pelosi’s comments are eerily similar to many made by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, where the former secretary of state made it clear to many that she wanted the coal industry to wither away.

“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Clinton shouted at a March 2016 town hall in Ohio.

Pelosi’s comments on Wednesday were reminiscent of that, where she all-but vowed to do everything she can to prevent coal power plants from moving to the capital and, presumably, other parts of the nation.

Ironically, one day before she mocked coal power plants, workers, and West Virginians, the White House announced plans to scale back Obama-era rules stifling coal-fired plants in America.

The Trump administration plans to scale back Obama’s regulations on coal power plants. Former President Barack Obama’s war on coal was catastrophic, but the industry has been booming since Trump took office — which has helped ignite the already booming economy.

Aside from Pelosi’s insulting remarks on Wednesday, this isn’t the first time the out-of-touch California Democrat has made headlines for making embarrassing comments.

Last month, Pelosi came under fire for referring to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 — which led to roughly 3,000 innocent Americans being killed — as an “incident.”

Before that, she stuttered herself into embarrassment, suffered a brain freeze, and struggled to remember Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s name, forcing an aide to finish her sentence and help her.

Pelosi has stuttered several times in recent interviews, where she was unable to cite simple Bible verses, got busted for lying about the economy under Trump, and defended MS-13 gang members after the president called them “animals.”

While many conservatives are thrilled that this bizarrely behaving woman continues to be the face of the Democratic Party, Pelosi continues to make the perfect case for why we need congressional term limits.

And with the crucial midterm elections less than 70 days away, she has resorted to mocking coal plants and workers. This is what the Democratic Party represents.

SOURCE 





Weepy Gov. Inslee Wants To Sue Trump For Air Pollution Deaths That May Or May Not Occur

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee threatened to sue the Trump administration for rolling back Obama-era regulations on coal plants, going so far as to label President Donald Trump as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in air pollution deaths that haven’t, and may not, happen.

“Even under the rosiest assumptions by his own agencies, would conclude that this would cause the premature death of 1,400 people a year, every year,” Inslee, a Democrat, said at a press conference Wednesday. “That’s the population of Kittitas, Washington, suffering premature death every year.”

“I think it is fair to say that Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in the premature death of 1,400 people every year if this misbegotten plan went into place,” Inslee said. “We find this unacceptable.”

Inslee is riding a wave of liberal criticism of the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule popularized by The New York Times — keeping coal plants open longer would result in 1,400 more deaths from air pollution every year.

It’s also not true EPA’s “rosiest assumptions” predict 1,400 premature deaths a year from fine particulate matter or PM2.5. It’s actually the upper range of estimated PM2.5-induced deaths based on a 2012 study — only one of a range of estimates based on different assumptions.

The Times’ report, though, only presented one upper estimate of future air pollution deaths, not giving readers the full context of EPA’s figures. The Times’ reported figure is also based on public health modeling that’s come under increased scrutiny in recent years.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed to put ACE in place of the Clean Power Plan, which was imposed by the Obama administration in 2015. The Clean Power Plan never went into effect, however, because the U.S. Supreme Court blocked its implementation in early 2016.

EPA’s regulatory analysis showed billions of dollars would be saved, but it also gave a range of public health costs, including premature deaths in 2030 from coal plant pollution.

Estimates of premature deaths, however, are based on two studies for which the underlying data was never made public, which Republicans have labeled “secret science.”

Estimates of premature deaths from air pollution are also just that, estimates based on epidemiological studies looking for strong statistical relationships between PM2.5 levels and reported deaths.

EPA says PM2.5 can cause lung disease and premature death, which is certainly what most studies claim, but new research has called into question that relationship.

EPA is also looking 15 years into the future, and cannot take into account future innovations or technologies that could reduce premature deaths from air pollution.

There’s also a lot of uncertainty around estimated deaths at low levels of PM2.5, but EPA’s estimate of 1,400 deaths assumes there’s no safe level of fine particulates.

Democrats and environmentalists opposed ACE, saying the Clean Power Plan was necessary to fight global warming and improve air quality. Virtually all opponents of ACE cited the NYTimes’ report of increased air pollution deaths.

Inslee promised legal action against the Trump administration if they finalize the ACE rule. Other Democratic states and environmentalists are likely to follow suit.

“And if you want to know why this is a terrible idea take a look out your window because we are choking on dirty air, and he would give us dirtier air to breathe,” Inslee said.

However, the “dirty air” hovering over Washington is the product of wildfires raging along the West Coast. More than one million acres have been consumed by wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington this year.

So, far from being the product of coal-burning or Trump, it’s the years of poor forest management by federal and state officials that allowed dead trees and debris to pile up.

Todd Myers, the director of the Center for Environment at the Washington Policy Center, pointed out Inslee’s administration has not met its own “forest treatment” targets. In fact, they’ve failed so badly, the administration hasn’t updated its efforts since 2015.

SOURCE 





Tesla has Mere 14% of Cars Pass Inspection

Newly leaked internal documents show that Elon Musk’s Tesla continues to face production woes, with only 14 percent of cars passing first inspection, as opposed to industry targets of 80 percent.

Business Insider recently reported on leaked internal Tesla documents which show that the company had to rework more than 4,300 of the 5,000 Model 3 vehicles that it manufactured in the first week of June, when the company announced that they had reached their self-imposed production milestone. Tesla reportedly reworked 4,300 cars during the week of June 23 with each car taking an average of 37 minutes to repair.

Car manufacturers refer to cars that exit the manufacturing process without requiring any rework as part of the production lines “first pass yield,” (FPY) this means that during the week in which Tesla claimed that they had successfully produced 5,000 Model 3 vehicles, only 700 cars could truly leave the factory. In simpler terms — only 14 percent of Model 3’s produced by Tesla that week required no additional work before being sent to customers. In the same week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly told workers to stop performing a critical brake test as the company rushed to produce cars in a tent they had erected in a field outside their production facility.

Ron Harbour, a consultant at Oliver Wyman and the founder of  “The Harbour Report,” a worldwide guide to manufacturing, commented on Tesla’s first pass yield rate stating: “A competitive plant will pass 80%-plus vehicles that do not require repair. I would say the average plant is about a 65-80% range.” Harbour also stated that the amount of rework required per vehicle can affect the production plant’s overall productivity saying: “It’s a direct impact on their labor productivity if they have to add additional labor hours for repair.”

A representative of Tesla commented on their low FPY rate stating that many cars only require minor reworking: “Our goal is to produce a perfect car for every customer. In order to ensure the highest quality, we review every vehicle for even the smallest refinement before it leaves the factory. Dedicated inspection teams track every car throughout every shop in the assembly line, and every vehicle is then subjected to an additional quality-control process towards the end of the line. And all of this happens before a vehicle leaves the factory and is delivered to a customer.” The Tesla representative also claimed that the number of labor hours per Model 3 vehicle produced had decreased by approximately 30 percent since last quarter.

SOURCE 





The Warmist Arctic obsession again

A few days ago:



With the Arctic full of ice, they had to work pretty hard to find something to lie about.



SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Who's the "Cleanest" of Them All

Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no.

The answer to that question is the U.S. of A. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never ratified the Kyoto Treaty some two decades ago. We never enacted a carbon tax. We don't have a cap-and-trade carbon emission program. That environmental villain Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord that was signed by almost the entire rest of the civilized world.

Yet the latest world climate report from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy finds that in 2017, America reduced its carbon emissions by 0.5 percent, the most of all major countries. That's especially impressive given that our economy grew by nearly 3 percent — so we had more growth and less pollution — the best of all worlds. The major reason for the reduced pollution levels is the shale oil and gas revolution that is transitioning the world to cheap and clean natural gas for electric power generation.

Meanwhile, as our emissions fell, the pollution levels rose internationally and by a larger amount than in previous years. So much for the rest of the world going green.

The world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions is China. According to the invaluable Institute for Energy Research, "China produces 28 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. India is the world's third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide and had the second-largest increment (93 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide emissions in 2017, more than twice as much an increase as the U.S. reduction."

This means it doesn't really matter how much America reduces its greenhouse gases because China and India cancel out any and all progress we make. Those who think they are helping save the planet by purchasing an electric car or putting a solar panel on their roof are barking up the wrong tree. There is no way to make progress on greenhouse gases without China and India on board — which they clearly are not.

This latest data also proves that despite all of the criticism across the globe and in the American media, Trump was right to pull the U.S. out of the flawed Paris climate accord. Nearly every nation that signed on to Paris and has admonished America for not doing so, has already violated the agreement. According to Climate Action Network Europe, "All EU countries are failing to increase their climate action in line with the Paris Agreement goal." All but five countries have even reached 50 percent of their current targets.

So there you have it. The countries in the Paris climate accord have broken almost every promise they've made and the nation (the U.S.) that hasn't signed the treaty is doing more than any other nation to reduce global warming. Yet, we are being lectured by the sanctimonious Europeans and Asians for not doing our fair share to save the planet. It's another case study in how the left cares far more about good intentions than actual results. What matters is that you say that you will wash the dishes, not that you actually do it.

SOURCE 




Trump’s Rollback of CAFE Mandates Is a Big Win for Car Buyers, Consumer Choice

The Trump administration recently proposed the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule. The proposed rule offers modifications to Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards with a “preferred alternative” for model years 2021 through 2026.

Without a doubt, the Trump administration’s proposed revision is a welcome victory for consumers’ wallets and for consumer choice.

The Obama administration implemented fuel-efficiency mandates that would force auto manufacturers to have a fleetwide fuel-economy average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The new rule’s “preferred” change would maintain the existing fuel-economy mandate through 2020 (increasing to 37 mpg) and keep the level at 37 mpg through 2025.

New fuel-efficiency standards create a number of unintended consequences, including higher prices for new cars and costly retooling of existing auto plants.

A 2016 Heritage Foundation analysis estimates the Obama fuel-economy mandates increased new-car prices $6,800 more than the pre-2009 baseline trend, and that eliminating the more aggressive standards would save 2025 car buyers at least $7,200 per vehicle.

As my colleagues detail, “Economists and engineers accurately predicted that the [model year] 2016 standards would hurt consumers by at least $3,800 per car.”

Consumers—not government bureaucrats—should make decisions about what cars they drive.

If consumers value saving money on gasoline, they will simply choose to purchase more fuel-efficient cars, and automakers will meet that demand without a federal mandate. If consumers value other attributes—vehicle weight, engine power, safety—Washington shouldn’t force automakers to ignore consumers’ preferences.

In fact, a 2011 paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that if vehicle weight, horsepower, and torque were held constant at 1980 levels, fuel efficiency would have increased 60 percent from 1980 to 2006 instead of the 15 percent increase that did occur.

The reason fuel-efficiency increase occurred at 15 percent instead of 60 percent is because auto manufacturers met buyers’ demands for heavier vehicles with more torque and horsepower. When the federal government comes in and says we need to have a fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon, regulators override those preferences.

Congress established fuel-economy mandates in the 1970s as a response to the Arab oil embargo. A fear existed that the world was running out of oil and that America was too dependent on foreign oil.

CAFE standards were sold under the false notion of scarcity. It makes no sense now that we have an abundance of oil.  But even if the world were running out of oil, fuel-economy mandates were not a good policy then and are not a good policy now.

CAFE standards are not just a relic of the past, but a systemic problem of the way policymakers, regulators, lobbyists, and pundits treat energy markets. Policies and regulations are based on alleged expertise and on making bold predictions about the future of energy supply and demand.

Rather than rely on regulations to tell producers and consumers what to do, we have price signals for that. Higher gas prices communicate information to energy producers to drill for more oil. They communicate information to entrepreneurs to invest in new extraction technologies, alternative vehicle technologies, or more fuel-efficient cars.

Prices also communicate information to energy users to buy more fuel-efficient products, to carpool, or to find other modes of transportation.

When Obama-era regulators set CAFE standards and estimated the alleged savings to consumers, they demonstrated the same level of hubris our politicians did in the 1970s.

When crafting these standards, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that gas prices would be $3.87 per gallon in 2025, increasing to $4.24 per gallon by 2040. They used these price projections to project how much money consumers would save on fuel costs.

While those price-projection scenarios are certainly plausible, increases in supply could also certainly drive prices down, and consumers would save less money on gas by purchasing a more fuel-efficient car.

Alternatively, gas prices could rise even higher than the government projections, and consumers could save even more money from mandated fuel efficiency.

The reality is, we don’t know. It is difficult to project gas prices 22 weeks ahead, let alone for the next 22 years, and it’s dangerous to base policy on those predictions.

Trump’s course correction on CAFE is a welcome step. Congress should demonstrate similar courage and recognize that we don’t need to mandate energy use for cars, dishwashers, or even clocks on microwaves, and scrap these standards altogether.

SOURCE 





Don’t subsidize coal; just stop trying to kill it off

When President Trump speaks Tuesday on energy policy, he is speaking on an industry utterly changed in the past 20 years.

At the turn of the century, Americans fretted over how much we depended on foreign oil. We worried so much about running out of gas that import terminals were built so that foreign firms could ship liquefied natural gas for use in our pipelines.

How things have changed. U.S. dependency on foreign oil isn’t even an issue anymore, as the U.S. approaches its new role as a net exporter. And natural gas has proven to be so abundant, thanks to fracking, that prices have plummeted. Not only are those import terminals being refitted to serve as export terminals, but gas has also overtaken coal as the largest source of electrical generation in the U.S.

This has mostly come about thanks to market forces. But there was an unfortunate interlude — the Obama administration’s concerted effort to bankrupt ( as former President Barack Obama himself put it) coal generators. His overt effort to drive coal out of existence through regulation, heedless of its effect on local communities, left very bad feelings toward Obama and Democrats in some regions of the country and led directly to the election of Trump.

Where Obama wanted to obliterate coal, Trump’s response has often been no better. He has actually proposed bailing out the coal industry, whose chief advantage as a fuel until now had been its economy. His idea is to somehow use national security as an excuse for mandating above-market prices for coal.

This is every bit as bad as similar schemes for so-called green energy, by which ratepayers are fleeced so that politically correct but unfeasible sources of energy are used. Coal, like all other fuel sources, must be allowed to sink or swim on its own economic strength. If it cannot survive in the market, it deserves to be replaced, just like anything else.

There are still ways to help the coal industry today and yet respect this basic principle. That begins with the repeal of unreasonable regulations that Obama created in order to kill the industry as fast as possible.

The abandonment of the Clean Power Plan is a good start in this regard. Trump announces today from West Virginia his intention to let states make their own decisions about carbon regulation. After all, control of carbon was only handed over to the EPA in the first place by a dubious 5-4 Supreme Court decision, in which only two of the current justices voted with the majority, claiming that the Clean Air Act required the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide (the stuff we exhale and trees inhale) as a "pollutant."

Environmentalists are skittish and seem to believe that state regulation will cause hundreds of new coal power plants to spring up overnight. Their concerns only reflect their persistent and wrong-headed mentality that prizes government regulation over actual results. U.S. carbon emissions from electrical power have been falling since the mid-to-late Bush era. There’s a reason no one was rushing to build new coal plants, even before Obama’s regulatory assault on the industry. Utility customers generally don’t pay higher prices just to make a point, unless government stupidly makes them do so.

Which is to say, government should not prop up coal, but nor should government tear coal down unnecessarily.

Trump should drop all ideas about subsidizing coal. If the market demands, coal should be allowed to make a graceful exit. If coal cannot even survive in a friendly regulatory environment, then it simply cannot be saved. This is, as they say, the way the world works.

If that proves to be the case, then workers in the industry whose jobs are threatened by modern developments must adapt, as in all other industries that automate or fall afoul of consumer demand. That might mean making career a move to natural gas or some other related energy industry. But it is not the role of government to keep entire dying industries alive, just to satisfy political or other ambitions.

SOURCE 





ALGF Releases Report on the Problems of Solar Energy

Today, Americans for Limited Government Foundation released a study entitled, “Solar Power Harms Taxpayers and Consumers and Endangers the Reliability of the Grid.” The study points out the problems with solar energy from taxpayer-funded subsidies and increased costs for utility customers to grid reliability concerns.

Solar energy receives heavy federal subsidies that are far more generous than the subsidies for natural gas, coal, or even wind. In addition to federal support, states have also enacted policies to prop up solar power. State renewable energy mandates have encouraged the generation of solar energy. In dozens of states, utility companies are forced to compensate solar panel owners for the excess electricity that they supply to the grid. Those programs are funded by other utility customers.

But in the rush to increase solar power generation, some of the disadvantages of solar power are being overlooked. The intermittency of solar power is a particular problem. This intermittency necessitates the availability of ample backup power plants to ramp up when clouds obscure the sun. Solar power’s intermittency also complicates the job of grid operators to keep the grid adequately supplied with electricity.

The money spent on solar subsidies and new solar plants would be better spent on maintaining and upgrading the creaky, aging grid. After all, huge portions of the grid are at or beyond their expected service life.

“The mandates and incentives to build solar plants and install solar panels have to stop. Taxpayers are being fleeced, working class consumers are subsidizing their wealthier neighbors’ solar panels, and the reliability of the grid is being threatened,” said Richard McCarty, Director of Research at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

“The money being spent to build new solar power plants in remote locations, to connect them to the grid, and to maintain backup power plants would be much better spent on upgrading our aging grid,” said Richard Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government.

SOURCE 




Australia: Time to Clean the Stables in Canberra

Viv Forbes

Australia is facing an energy/infrastructure crisis caused by years of bipartisan stupidity and driven by a global green agenda. This mess becomes worse and more obvious every day. The Canberra stables are full of horse manure and need cleaning.

Fix Real Infrastructure, Dump Green Grandstanding

Here are two messages for Canberra:

Firstly, Australia does not have a problem with too much carbon dioxide going to the sky – we have a problem storing enough of the water coming from the sky.

Secondly, Australia does not have a shortage of wind and solar “farms” - we have a shortage of water, stock feed and low-cost electricity on real farms.

Politicians fritter our money on dubious “research”, climate propaganda, foreign adventures and handouts for trendy, vote-seeking green causes. But they have not built a serious water supply dam since the 1980’s, and the last big coal-fired power station was opened 11 years ago. For a country with a growing population, abundant supplies of coal and uranium, and a history of severe droughts, these are serious omissions.

The Snowy Mountain Scheme (opened nearly 50 years ago) was a visionary project that produced large volumes of low-cost water for irrigation plus reliable hydro-power for industry.

The new Snowy 2.0 Scheme is a fraud – it will produce no extra water and will be a net consumer of power. Its sole purpose is to try to plug the holes and fluctuations in electricity supply caused by a bi-partisan love affair with expensive green energy toys producing unreliable, intermittent electricity.

Cease this baseless war on carbon fuels. Carbon dioxide does not drive global warming – it is driven out of sea water by ocean warming.

Australia should cancel Snowy 2.0, withdraw from all Paris and Kyoto Climate Treaty obligations, dump the NEG “plans”, remove all green energy subsidies and start building some real power stations and real water supply dams and pipelines.

No matter what the weather does, we will need more cheap, reliable water and electricity.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Sea level rise is already costing property owners on the coast

This is a thoroughly dishonest piece of writing below.  The key word -- subsidence -- is not mentioned once.  There is a great deal of subsidence -- sinking of the ground -- on the East coast in both the USA and England -- particularly in Florida.  And we read here that Charleston land IS part of that sinking.  So it is reasonable to dismiss the  attribution to climate change below.  Subsidence could of course be due to both effects but the article below is too biased to be a guide to anything


Elizabeth Boineau's 1939 Colonial sits a block and a half from the Ashley River in a sought-after neighborhood of ancient live oaks, charming gardens and historic homes. A year ago, she thought she could sell it for nearly $1 million. But after dropping the price 11 times, Boineau has decided to tear it down.

In March, the city's Board of Architectural Review approved the demolition — a decision not taken lightly in Charleston's historic district.

"Each time that I was just finishing up paying off the bills, another flood would hit," Boineau said.

Boineau is one of many homeowners on the front lines of society's confrontation with climate change, living in houses where rising sea levels have worsened flooding not just in extreme events like hurricanes, but also heavy rains and even high tides. Now, three studies have found evidence that the threat of higher seas is also undermining coastal property values, as home buyers — particularly investors — begin the retreat to higher ground.

On a broad scale, the effect is subtle, the studies show. The sea has risen about eight inches since 1900, and the pace is accelerating, with three inches accumulating since 1993, according to a comprehensive federal climate report released last year. Scientists predict the oceans will rise another three to seven inches by 2030, and as much as 4.3 feet by 2100.

In addition, the overall effect on prices appears to be surprisingly small, said Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

"You could turn it around, almost," Wachter said. "Despite all the discussion of sea level rise, and despite the tremendous increase in the number of events over the last years and the destructiveness of the events, coastal building continues and coastal property appreciation continues."

Indeed, beachfront property is not necessarily declining in value. Rather, the studies suggest that more-exposed properties - including properties that have not yet experienced direct flooding - simply are not appreciating as rapidly as their inland neighbors.

Boineau lives in Harleston Village, one of the neighborhoods that has been hardest hit. In October 2015, flooding on the Ashley River damaged gardens and homes after an extreme rain event dropped about 20 inches on the city. Not a month later, an 8.7-foot tide flooded the neighborhood again.

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew drove a 6-foot storm surge into the city. And in 2017, the remnants of Hurricane Irma again flooded some Harleston Village homes, including Boineau's.

"I definitely feel like something has changed," Boineau said when asked about sea level rise and whether flooding in Charleston is getting worse. "And I think that we all have a lot to be concerned about."

"There was no discussion of flooding when we moved into this house in 2004," said Susan Lyons, 75, a retired journalist who lives two blocks from the river and has had to file insurance claims three times to replace flood-damaged ducts. "We've all been blown away by the amount of water that comes from the river."

Boineau put her house on the market last August priced just shy of $1 million, after repairs from two straight years of flooding that had come up under the house but left the interior largely unaffected. Then in September, the remnants of Hurricane Irma inundated the first floor of the house with 8 inches of water.

Even when a property has flooded, local real estate agents said homeowners can reassure buyers by waterproofing electrical systems, moving ductwork and, at the extreme, elevating the entire house — a pricey endeavor.

Boineau made ductwork and other repairs after the first two flooding events, but after the third, she dropped the price down to $599,900 and went through a lengthy process to get permission for demolition.

Now, Boineau says, a new buyer can build a new elevated property on the lot. When that's done, her real estate agent, Robin Reeves, said the property should "go for 1.3 to 1.4 million dollars."

SOURCE 





The Facts about China’s Energy Commitments

Anybody who thinks China is rapidly shifting to renewable energy needs to look at the latest electricity data from the China Energy Portal.

Whilst wind and solar generation has increased by 51 TWh year-on-year in Q2, thermal has increased by 176.9 TWh.

It was a similar situation in Q1:

To put the figures into perspective, total generation in Q2 was 3194 TWh, so the increase of 51 TWh from wind/solar represents just 1.6%. However, because total generation increased by 245 TWh, demand for coal and gas generation increased even more.

In total, wind and solar accounted for 6.6% of generation in the quarter, compared to 5.5% a year ago.

Year-on-year, installed thermal capacity has risen by 4.1%, following an increase of 4.6% in 2017.

SOURCE 




The changing climate of science

By Anthony J. Sadar, a certified consulting meteorologist 

Have mathematical models replaced good old-fashioned scientific testing?

An understanding of the big picture in a field of study helps to frame and give essential perspective to that field. Take the field of natural science for instance. A big-picture look at the overall operation of the natural science profession has traditionally been seen in the “scientific method,” which consists of observation, hypothesis and testing. Rigorous testing of a hypothesis eventually leads to a “theory.”

This makes sense from an objective point of view. Although there is no particular set order to the arrangement of observation-hypothesis-testing, a good example of scientific practice would be the observation of a phenomenon in nature, hypothesizing the cause of the phenomenon, then testing (many times in many ways) the hypothesis. Sufficient confirmation of the hypothesis results in a theory that is tentative, subject to any future negation.

Of late, mathematical modeling, an essential investigative tool, appears to have taken over the world of natural science. And with the ascension of modeling, the focus in scientific endeavors — particularly in the practice of atmospheric science — may have shifted away from the rigor of testing to verify a hypothesis and toward constructing a model to represent a theory.

Here’s a climatic example of the traditional observation-hypothesis-testing arrangement. Based on an observation of increasing global average temperatures over a decade, a hypothesis may be proposed, such as: “Excessive carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere will lead to long-term, catastrophic, global warming.” Given the extended nature of climate, which is officially based on 30-year means, a reasonable testing period can be set up to see if the hypothesis can be substantiated.

This example fairly matches recent history. With the milestone 30-year anniversary of the declaration by James Hansen of NASA at a June 1988 congressional hearing that “the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now,” there has been a minimal amount of time to begin to test the hypothesis of disastrous climate change.

So far, comparing dramatically increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 with a substantially smaller than expected increase in global average temperatures and typically mixed extreme weather events across the globe, it can certainly be said that the jury is still out on what long-term catastrophic effects, if any, increasing CO2 has on the planet.

Yet, climate hysteria continues with increasing alarm. After all, the worst is yet to come, so say climate crusaders buttressed by their faith in climate models — the same models that performed dubiously when predicting the global-mean temperature trend during the past 30 years.

At least part of the problem of predicting reality can be attributed to the apparent abandonment of the observation-hypothesis-testing construct and replacing the hypothesis component with theory and the testing component with modeling.

And yet, models have a big role to play in our understanding of the atmosphere.

In the introduction to his acclaimed book, “A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming” (MIT Press, 2010), Professor Paul Edwards, a supporter of the “consensus” view of climate change, asserts that “Everything we know about the world’s climate — past, present, and future — we know through models.” He also notes that “without models, there are no data.”

Models have become integral to modern scientific practice. In many fields, Edwards says “computer models complement or even replace laboratory experiments; analysis and simulation models have become principal means of data collection, prediction, and decision making.”

Such is the contemporary world of science aided by the powerful tool of modern computers. The three basic components of the scientific method — observation, hypothesis, and testing — still hold, but in many cases the testing portion has been abetted, if not in some cases usurped, by models.

Still, when it comes to running models to foresee the Earth’s distant future climate, the eminent atmospheric scientist, Reid Bryson, probably gave the best observation: Making a forecast is easy. Being right is the hard part.

SOURCE 




Plastic Bans: More Harm than Help

In Santa Barbara, Calif., restaurant workers caught serving a banned plastic straw after their first offense can get six months in jail. That penalty may be hard to top, but cities anxious about their environmental impact may be willing to try. Next July, San Francisco will outdo Seattle’s recent prohibition on plastic straws in bars and restaurants by banning the straws completely. Such efforts, however, are fundamentally misguided, according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart and Policy Fellow Brian Isom.

“The substitutes for plastic cost substantially more without being significantly better for the environment,” Shughart and Isom write in an op-ed running in the Sacramento Bee and elsewhere. Paper straws are far more expensive than plastic straws (as much as 22 percent costlier). Moreover, paper substitutes often leave a significantly greater environmental footprint than the plastic versions they’re meant to replace (in the case of shopping bags, up to 43 times more impactful, according to the Danish environmental agency).

Governments can do better than enacting costly mandates of dubious benefit. “If lawmakers want to promote meaningful change,” Shughart and Isom write, “they should focus on creating incentives and good institutions for managing plastic waste and leave it to private businesses to change the way Americans consume plastic.” Above all, they should avoid “unduly burdening smaller businesses and the people who work for them,” the authors conclude.

SOURCE 




Australia: Massive solar farm plan has residents up in arms over project that would be bigger than their town

Residents in the Camperdown district in south-west Victoria are concerned about the scale of a solar farm proposed to be built on farmland near the town.

Camperdown, population 3,300, covers about four square kilometres.

The planned Bookaar Solar Farm, to be located 10km north-west of the town, would occupy about six square kilometres.

"It's unbelievable," local dairy farmer Andrew Duynhoven said of the size of the solar farm.

"The sheer scale of this … it's actually bigger than Camperdown itself."

Mr Duynhoven is part of a growing group of residents concerned about renewable energy company Infinergy Pacific's ambitions in the region.

Power of the sun

The Bookaar Solar Farm would feature 700,000 panels, each measuring about two metres by one metre and standing four metres high.

It would be capable of generating roughly 200 megawatts of electricity, or enough to "supply clean energy to power the equivalent of 80,000 average Victorian homes each year", according to Infinergy Pacific's planning application.

The developer's website states the solar farm would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 400,000 tonnes and save about 700,000 megalitres of water compared to a coal-fired power station.

The plans for the project have been put out for public comment by Corangamite Shire Council, with councillors expected to consider their next step regarding the proposal at their September meeting.

Corangamite Shire mayor Jo Beard said she and her fellow councillors would take on board any concerns raised by residents.  "With any project when involved with agricultural land, it's always going to be questioned," Cr Beard said.

"That's no different to whether it's been a tourism project we've looked at, or even people wanting to subdivide — it always comes back to what are the implications [for] farming land. "From what I can gather so far, that has certainly been the big question."

Conflicts of interest

One councillor who won't be involved in the decision-making process is Bev McArthur. The proposed solar farm is on land owned by her family.

Cr Beard said Cr McArthur declared a conflict of interest and had not been part of any council discussions or briefings on the project.

Cr McArthur may not be part of the council for long though — she was preselected by the Victorian Liberal party last weekend for the Upper House seat of Western District, potentially taking the seat that was occupied by outgoing MP Simon Ramsay.

Cr McArthur refused to answer questions about the planned solar farm.

Mr Duynhoven and the newly formed group opposing the project have a shopping list of concerns and queries.

These include visual amenity, road use during construction, glint and glare, fire risk and firefighting access concerns, the effect of night lighting, the impact on wildlife, drainage issues, noise, nearby property devaluations, and the possibility of micro-climate changes.

But one of the main concerns the group has is the loss of prime agricultural land. "[Most of Australia is] in drought — we're not in drought so we're the food bowl," he said. "We're the most secure food producing [area in Australia].

"[If they approve] this large-scale solar farm, what precedent does it set in the protection of prime agricultural land?"

The planning permit application seeks to address many of the groups claims, saying that noise and glint would be minimal, drainage would not be impacted, and visual amenity would be somewhat mitigated by a vegetation screen.

Bookaar Solar Farm project manager Richard Seymour said proponents of the project were working with the CFA to write up a fire plan.

Mr Seymour confirmed the site was previously earmarked for a wind farm, but when the proponents dropped out, "Infinergy Pacific assessed the feasibility of site and concluded that a solar farm would be the most appropriate form of development".

He said the property had "characteristics that make it a good place for a solar farm" such as flat topography, nearby transmission lines, good sunlight, and no significant environmental constraints.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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CBS Scares Viewers With Predictions of Climate Change Causing West Coast Hurricanes

Even as NBC’s Today show recently reported that climate change would actually cause fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic during the 2018 season, on Saturday, CBS This Morning warned viewers that warming ocean temperatures could potentially lead to hurricanes in the Pacific hitting the coast of California.

“Hurricanes are well known in the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, but scientists in California are concerned that changing climate conditions could soon bring hurricanes to the west coast,” proclaimed fill-in co-host Elaine Quijano as she introduced the segment.

The headline on-screen blared: “Gathering Storms? Warmer Oceans Increase Risk of West Coast Hurricanes.”

Correspondent Jamie Yuccas began her report by invoking images of deadly east coast storms: “Irma, Harvey, and Katrina are among the hurricanes that have ravaged the east coast and the Gulf of Mexico. But here in California, hurricanes are virtually unheard of.”

She acknowledged hurricanes that regularly form in the Pacific, but pointed out that such storms “usually don’t make it past Baja California,” in Mexico, and that “only one managed to reach as far as San Diego in 1858.”

Sounding the alarm, Yuccas continued: “However, there’s now the potential this rare event could strike the San Diego area again.”

Scientist Art Miller, a researcher for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, fretted: “It could happen, especially if the ocean temperatures continue to stay in this anomalously warm state.”

Yuccas noted: “Scientists at the Scripps Pier have been recording historic temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, as high as 79.5 degrees. That’s about ten degrees above normal.”

Miller argued: “That potentially increases the likelihood that a hurricane might track just a little bit further north than it would have.”

After Yuccas concluded her report, co-host Anthony Mason worried: “Those rising ocean temperatures are startling.”

Quijano agreed: “Startling. And when you think about ten degrees difference, as she pointed out, you think about it’s been a year since Hurricane Harvey. It was this time last year, right? And it was warm ocean waters fueling that as well.”

In August of 2017, CBS repeatedly blamed climate change for causing Hurricane Harvey and intensifying its devastation in Texas.

In November of that year, Mason, while serving as a temporary anchor for CBS Evening News, bemoaned that a lack of environmental activism from the Trump administration meant “saving the world has been harder.”

It’s one thing to claim climate change as the cause when a severe weather event actually occurs, it’s quite another to preemptively argue that any potential future storms would be the result of global warming.

SOURCE 






New York Times hysterical over global greening

by William Happer

When the history of global warming hysteria is written in the future, one of the bizarre examples of that delusion will be the New York Times essay of July 31, 2018, "Global Greening Sounds Good, In The Long Run It's Terrible."

The article begins with a photograph of a vigorous patch of kudzu, presumably stimulated to threatening, unnatural growth by increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), and about to strangle a pine forest. The good news is that the New York Times has finally permitted its readers to hear that the whole world is greening from more atmospheric CO2.

The bad news is that the rest of the article is devoted to demonizing this essential gas, despite the fact that H2O (water) and CO2 are the main building blocks of living things.

As is usual with such "science," the article begins by vilifying any who mistakenly welcomes a greener Earth. They are labeled as "climate change denialists," whatever that is supposed to mean. Who denies that climate is changing now, has changed in the past and will continue to change in the future?

The article then launches into a limp attempt to turn good news into bad by claiming that plants growing with CO2 enrichment will lead to widespread malnutrition because crops will have deficiencies of "nutrients such as nitrogen, copper and potassium." In fact, crops already have these deficiencies, and that is why farmers buy fertilizer, containing nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and if needed, copper, iron, zinc and other trace nutrients. More CO2 will indeed increase the need for fertilizer, but less land will be needed because of higher productivity.

Plants benefit from more CO2 for two main reasons. First, more CO2 allows land plants to use water more efficiently and tolerate greater aridity. This is why global greening is most pronounced in arid areas. Secondly, more CO2 mitigates "photorespiration," that limits photosynthetic efficiency for most (C3) plants at today's low CO2 and high oxygen levels.

Continuing the demonization of CO2, the article refers to China as "the biggest global polluter." Let's be clear, CO2 is not a "pollutant." The average human breathes out about 2 pounds of CO2 per day. Over most of geological history, CO2 levels have been much higher than today's approximately 400 CO2 molecules per million air molecules (ppm). Operators of commercial greenhouses routinely increase CO2 levels to 1000 ppm or more, if they can afford to pay for the CO2.

We should welcome the fact that CO2 has risen to "levels not seen on Earth for millions of years," even if the "fact" is less certain than you might believe. Plants have been trying to cope with a CO2 famine for millions of years, a famine that is finally ending. With self-assurance worthy of Dr. Pangloss, the article implies that pre-industrial CO2 levels, around 280 ppm, were the "best of all possible worlds." But 280 ppm is much closer to (sea-level) starvation levels of about 150 ppm, when many plants die, than to the optimum levels for plant growth, which greenhouse operators already know are greater than 1000 ppm.

There is fossil evidence of CO2 starvation at the end of the last ice age, when CO2 levels dropped to below 200 ppm. Even today's 400 ppm is far too low for optimum plant growth.

The article ends with the silly claim that the "six warmest years on record occurred after 2010." The alleged record warmings are tenths of a degree or less, comparable to the statistical error. Thermometers have only existed for a few centuries and there are still no reliable networks of thermometers to measure global surface temperatures, although satellite measurements do provide a pretty good global average for the lower atmosphere since the year 1979. There is excellent proxy evidence that Earth's temperature was warmer than today on several occasions since the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago.

The real news is that more CO2 is already benefiting the world and even more would be better.

SOURCE 





Trump says conserving oil is no longer an economic imperative

Conserving oil is no longer an economic imperative for the United States, the Trump administration declares in a major new policy statement that threatens to undermine decades of government campaigns for gas-thrifty cars and other conservation programs.

The position was outlined in a memo released last month in support of the administration’s proposal to relax fuel mileage standards. The government released the memo online this month without fanfare.

Growth of natural gas and other alternatives to petroleum has reduced the need for imported oil, which ‘‘in turn affects the need of the nation to conserve energy,’’ the Energy Department said. It also cites the now decade-old fracking revolution, which has unlocked US shale oil reserves, giving ‘‘the United States more flexibility than in the past to use our oil resources with less concern.’’

With the memo, the administration is formally challenging old justifications for conservation — even congressionally prescribed ones, as with the mileage standards.

The memo made no mention of climate change. Transportation is the single largest source of climate-changing emissions.

President Trump has questioned the existence of climate change, embraced the notion of ‘‘energy dominance’’ as a national goal, and called for easing what he calls burdensome regulation of oil, gas and coal, including repealing the Obama Clean Power Plan.

Despite the increased oil supplies, the administration continues to believe in the need to ‘‘use energy wisely,’’ the Energy Department said, without elaboration. Department spokesmen did not respond Friday to questions about that statement.

Reaction was quick.

‘‘It’s like saying, ‘I’m a big old fat guy, and food prices have dropped — it’s time to start eating again,’’’ said Tom Kloza, longtime oil analyst with the Maryland-based Oil Price Information Service.

‘‘If you look at it from the other end, if you do believe that fossil fuels do some sort of damage to the atmosphere . . . you come up with a different viewpoint,’’ Kloza said. ‘‘There’s a downside to living large.’’

Climate change is a ‘‘clear and present and increasing danger,’’ said Sean Donahue, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund.

In a big way, the Energy Department statement just acknowledges the world’s vastly changed reality when it comes to oil.

Just 10 years ago, in summer 2008, oil prices were peaking at $147 a barrel and pummeling the global economy. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was enjoying a massive transfer of wealth, from countries dependent on imported oil. Prices now are about $65.

Today, the United States is vying with Russia for the title of top world oil producer. US oil production hit an all-time high this summer, aided by the technological leaps of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

How much the US economy is hooked up to the gas pump, and vice versa, plays into any number of policy considerations, not just economic or environmental ones, but military and geopolitical ones, said John Graham, a former official in the George W. Bush administration, now dean of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University.

‘‘Our ability to play that role as a leader in the world is stronger when we are the strongest producer of oil and gas,’’ Graham said. ‘‘But there are still reasons to want to reduce the amount we consume.’’

Current administration proposals include one that would freeze mileage standards for cars and light trucks after 2020, instead of continuing to make them tougher.

The proposal eventually would increase US oil consumption by 500,000 barrels a day, the administration says. While Trump officials say the freeze would improve highway safety, documents released this month showed senior Environmental Protection Agency staffers calculate the administration’s move would actually increase highway deaths.

‘‘American businesses, consumers and our environment are all the losers under his plan,’’ said Senator Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat. ‘‘The only clear winner is the oil industry. It’s not hard to see whose side President Trump is on.’’

Administration support has been tepid to null on some other long-running government programs for alternatives to gas-powered cars.

Bill Wehrum, assistant administration of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, spoke dismissively of electric cars — a young industry supported financially by the federal government and many states — this month in a call with reporters announcing the mileage freeze proposal.

‘‘People just don’t want to buy them,’’ the EPA official said.

Oil and gas interests are campaigning for changes in government conservation efforts on mileage standards, biofuels and electric cars.

In June, for instance, the American Petroleum Institute and other industries wrote eight governors, promoting the dominance of the internal-combustion engine and questioning their states’ incentives to consumers for electric cars.

Surging US and gas production has brought on ‘‘energy security and abundance,’’ Frank Macchiarola, a group director of the American Petroleum Institute trade association, told reporters this week, in a telephone call dedicated to urging scrapping or overhauling of one US program for biofuels.

Fears of oil scarcity used to be a driver of US energy policy, Macchiarola said.

Thanks partly to increased production, ‘‘that pillar has really been rendered essentially moot,’’ he said.

SOURCE 





Solar Power Harms Taxpayers and Consumers and Endangers the Reliability of the Grid

The appeal of solar energy is understandable. Who would not want clean, domestic electricity provided for free by the sun? Who would not want high-paying, high-tech jobs producing, installing, and maintaining solar panels?

Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that solar energy is harming taxpayers and utility customers and soaking up funds that would be better spent on maintaining and upgrading the grid. This report explains why politicians, regulators, and the utility industry should halt the rush toward more solar energy production.

America’s Advantage

America’s relatively cheap and reliable electricity gives it a competitive advantage over many other countries where electricity is unreliable or more expensive. To keep this advantage, we must choose dependable, cost-effective sources of electricity to supply the grid and expand capacity as necessary. The alternative of rushing government-favored technology into production before it is ready and before the costs and ramifications of the new technology have been thoroughly examined is a recipe for disaster.

Hidden Costs of Green Energy

While many people applaud green energy construction projects, they may not be aware of all the costs associated with green energy.

“In 2016, an analysis by Strata Policy found subsidies for intermittent energy sources create unseen costs for electricity consumers. First, Americans subsidize the building and operation of wind and solar projects through their taxes. Second, they pay for the electricity these projects produce. Finally, consumers pay the extra costs associated with ensuring reliability as more intermittent sources are deployed.”[1]

Solar power is often generated 100-200 miles from cities.[2] To transmit the electricity from these plants to far-off customers, costly new high-voltage transmission lines must often be built.

Due to its variability, adding more solar energy to the grid necessitates an increase in reserve electric generating capacity. And this reserve capacity must be able to be quickly brought online or ramped up to make up for any lull in solar energy production.

“VG [variable generation] also is not always completely predictable, even on short timescales. This can increase the potential for mismatches between generation and load and, hence, the need for increased regulating reserves.”[3]

Typically, this need for reserve capacity is met by natural gas-fired power plants, which can ramp up much more quickly than coal.

Wasting Needed Funds

The money spent on additional backup power plants and miles of high-voltage transmission lines would be better spent on trimming trees near power lines, replacing aging equipment, securing the grid from hackers, and shielding the grid against solar storms. For 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. energy infrastructure a grade of D+ and wrote,

“Most electric transmission and distribution lines were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50-year life expectancy, and the more than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity.”[4]

Government Support for Green Energy

Government subsidies and mandates have fostered investment in green energy.

“There are a number of drivers for sustained high investment in renewables. A primary driver is RPS [renewable portfolio standard] goals and mandates. Currently 37 states, four US territories, and the District of Columbia have RPS or voluntary goals that require a certain percentage of electricity sold by utilities be from renewable sources by a target date. The target years range from 2015 to 2045 and renewable percentage goals vary widely. Some of the most ambitious are California’s mandate to reach 50 percent by 2030, Vermont’s goal to reach 75 percent by 2032, and Hawaii’s target of 100 percent by 2045.” .....

“Companies that build renewable generation know they can often sell the power to other utilities at higher prices than fossil fuel-generated power, since many utilities have requirements to purchase electricity from renewable sources to meet state RPS.”[5]

Without incentives, relatively few consumers would be interested in investing tens of thousands of dollars in solar panels when it is unclear if the panels will ever save them much money.[6] For example, in Nevada when incentives were dialed back, the solar panel industry imploded.[7] After the Nevada Public Utility Commission voted to end a generous subsidy program, three companies stopped selling solar systems in the state,[8] and over 2,600 solar industry jobs were lost.[9]

Solar Energy Is Heavily Subsidized

While boosters of green energy will often tout the fact that the cost of solar energy has been declining, it is important to keep in mind that it still benefits from very generous subsidies. According to a study by the University of Texas at Austin, the coal industry received federal subsidies of $1.06 per megawatt hour in 2016; the oil and natural gas industry received federal subsidies of $0.91 per megawatt hour; the nuclear industry received federal subsidies of $1.30 per megawatt hour; and the wind industry received federal subsidies of $12.74 per megawatt hour while the solar industry received federal subsidies of $61.31 per megawatt hour.[10] Heavy subsidies for solar energy are also projected for next year. “A study by the University of Texas projected that U.S. energy subsidies per megawatt hour in 2019 would be $0.5 for coal, $1- $2 for oil and natural gas, $15- $57 for wind and $43- $320 for solar.”[11] So while some green energy advocates will complain about subsidies for coal and natural gas, it is clear that those subsidies are miniscule when compared to the subsidies for solar.

Utilities Pushed to Overpay Solar Customers

One of the most common solar incentives offered by utility companies is net metering, which is funded by utility customers. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) describes net metering as, “allowing residential and commercial customers who generate their own electricity from solar power to feed electricity they do not use back into the grid.”[12]

According to SEIA, 38 states[13] have adopted state-mandated net metering systems putting the government’s thumb on the scale toward mandatory payment rates benefitting solar users. In some states, power companies pay customers the wholesale rate for the power they supply to the grid; but in the majority of states, power companies are compelled by state governments to pay customers the full retail rate.

Utility companies purchase electricity from a number of competing sources at wholesale rates with those rates fluctuating throughout the day based upon demand. The wholesale cost does not include purchasing or electricity delivery costs. The retail cost is what the residential or business consumer pays for electricity that is purchased and then delivered using the electrical grid.[14] Yet with retail net metering requirements, solar households use the grid to transmit electricity to and from their home, but do not pay their fair share for it.

Net Metering Unfair to Non-Solar Customers

It is unfair for solar customers to be paid the full retail rate for their excess electricity because the retail rate covers the cost of infrastructure and overhead, not just the value of the electricity itself. When states require utilities to purchase excess electricity back from solar customers at the retail price, they create a distorted one-sided market where the utility can neither reject the product because it is unneeded, nor pay the provider the true worth of the product.

Too often, lower-income customers, who are unable to afford the installation of solar panels on their own homes, wind up subsidizing the electric bills of their wealthier neighbors. Warren Buffett, whose holding company owns NV Energy, recognizes and opposes the cost-shifting from solar customers to non-solar customers. “‘We do not want the nonsolar customers, of whom there are over a million, to be subsidizing the 17,000 solar customers,’ Buffett said, talking about NV Energy’s customers in Nevada.”[15] At a bare minimum, taxpayers and ratepayers should get to choose whether or not they subsidize their neighbors’ solar panels.

More Solar Customers, More Problems

If there are only a relatively small number of consumers supplying energy to the grid, then the cost to utility companies and their customers is minimal. But as the number of customers benefiting from net metering grows, the costs to power companies and their customers grow too. The obvious impact is to create a greater strain on non-solar residential customers whose rates would have to increase to cover the electricity grid maintenance and updating costs avoided, at least in part, by solar customers.

As intermittent solar power is added to the grid, the grid has to be upgraded to ensure its stability and reliability. It is crucial for there to be a balance on the electrical grid between energy production and energy consumption; and one of the stressors on the electrical grid is unreliable solar energy.[16] One minute, the sun is shining brightly and solar panels are churning out excess electricity that is being supplied to the grid; and the next minute, the sun is behind clouds; and the output from solar panels collapses. When solar energy production drops, either additional electricity from another source must be added to the grid or customers’ power must be cut to avoid damaging the grid.

Free-riding solar customers force utilities to pay for the maintenance and upgrading of the electrical grid while relying upon fewer ratepayers. The perverse effect is that solar customers benefit when retail electricity rates are necessarily forced higher for non-solar consumers.

This cost-shifting can be easily visualized with the following simplistic example. Suppose the cost of maintaining the grid were $100 for 100 people and each paid $1 to cover the cost. Then suppose that 10 of those customers adopted solar and stopped contributing to the maintenance costs. In that case, the remaining ninety customers would have to pay $1.11 each, rather than $1. Obviously, if 50 of these customers no longer paid for the grid, that increase in costs to the remaining 50 would jump to $2 to maintain the grid that they all use. And, of course, if everyone were a free-rider, the grid would eventually cease to exist. When the sun went down, those customers who were not able to store enough electricity for their own needs would be without power until the sun rose again.

Endangering the Reliability of the Grid

The job of grid operators is important: maintaining a balance between the supply of electricity and demand for electricity to avoid damage to the grid. Demand for electricity is stochastic, which means that it varies and that it is not possible to predict exactly how much electricity will be needed at any one time. Unfortunately, solar energy is also stochastic, which further complicates the job of grid operators.

Nor is the intermittent nature of solar energy is the only problem.

“The addition of substantial levels of wind and solar resources to an electric energy grid raises significant reliability concerns at the transmission system level because these resources operate intermittently and, unlike other generating resources, they do not spin in synchronism with the grid…  Dependable rotating generation operating in synchronism across the power system enabled the evolution of the modern grids.  Without due regard to the issues of intermittency, voltage control, frequency control, and grid inertia an electric grid cannot operate reliably and stably.  If the first world continues to expect affordable electricity, when we want it and in whatever quantity we want, these needs must be met.”[17]

Conclusion

So we see that solar energy is failing in multiple ways. After years of generous, tax-payer-funded subsidies, solar energy is still unable to compete on a level playing field with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Regrettably, solar energy’s higher costs have a human impact making it tougher for less affluent people to stay cool in summer and warm in winter. With so many affordable, reliable energy resources in this country, there is just no excuse for the government to be mandating and subsidizing green energy production. Finally, unreliable solar energy often requires expensive changes to the grid and endangers the reliability of the grid.

SOURCE 




Australia: NSW Drought In Perspective

Just a couple more comments on the NSW drought. I have worked out the YTD rainfall in NSW, although this is a pretty artificial measure. This year is the fourth lowest on record, behind 1902, 1965 and 1940 (in that order).

 

If we look at the 12 month figures, this year ranks as 8th driest, behind 1901, 1902, 1919, 1927, 1929, 1940 and 1965.

It is easy to see why how farmers say this is the worst drought in memory, because it is exactly that. Whereas these sort of severe droughts used to come along every decade on average, there has been nothing like it since 1965.

This year the drought has been largely confined to parts of NSW and South Australia:

This certainly was not the case in some of those earlier droughts, which were far more extensive:

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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