Day: February 1, 2023

From Watts Up With That?

Guest “My sincere apologies to whoever (or is it whomever?) originally coined the phrase, If wishes were horses,” by David Middleton

[I]f the Texas drilling industry drilled as many geothermal wells as it currently does oil and gas, about 15,000 per year, the state could run itself off geothermal power by 2027.Saul Elbein, Sustainability Reporter The Hill

• If the “Texas drilling industry” drilled as many CCS wells “as it currently does oil and gas wells,” the state could sequester more CO₂ than is emitted from all fixed emission sources, nationwide.
• If the “Texas drilling industry” drilled as many deep disposal wells into crystalline basement rock “as it currently does oil and gas wells,” the state could safely dispose of every last bit of high level radioactive waste in these United States.
• If wishes were horses, we’d all get ponies for Christmas.

Firstly, “Texas” doesn’t have a “drilling industry.” Secondly, if the drilling industry that currently drills oil & gas wells in Texas could make more money drilling geothermal wells than drilling oil & gas wells, we would be drilling geothermal wells rather than oil & gas wells.

Here are some “highlights” from the article:

EQUILIBRIUM & SUSTAINABILITY
Geothermal energy could be off-ramp for Texas oil
BY SAUL ELBEIN 01/24/23

AUSTIN, Texas — Four years of drilling for energy deep underground would be enough to build Texas a carbon-free state electric grid, a new study by an alliance of state universities has found. 

The state’s flagship universities — including the University of Texas at Austin, Rice University and Texas A&M University — collaborated with the International Energy Agency to produce the landmark report.  

[…]

“Rock is a great heat battery, and the upper 10 miles of the core holds an estimated 1,000 years’ worth of our energy needs in the form of stored energy,” Wisan added. 

Most of the state’s population lives above potentially usable geothermal heat — as long as there’s a will to drill deep enough.  

Superheated trapped steam that is nearly 300 degrees Fahrenheit — the sweet spot for modern geothermal — is accessible about three to five miles below the state capital of Austin and 2 1/2 to 3 miles beneath its most prominent city of Houston, the report found. 

[…]

According to the Energy Information Agency, the state’s substantial renewable potential is meeting part of this growth: Texas leads the nation in wind energy and has near-leading solar potential. 

But the Republican-dominated legislature…

[…]

The International Energy Agency declared in May 2021 that for the world to meet global climate goals, new oil and gas production would have to cease, as The Hill reported.

Since that warning, global oil and gas production has continued to increase — and is on track to hit record levels in 2023. But Tuesday’s report, which the global energy watchdog helped produce, suggested that geothermal energy could be a politically palatable offramp for the industry.  

The report found that if the Texas drilling industry drilled as many geothermal wells as it currently does oil and gas, about 15,000 per year, the state could run itself off geothermal power by 2027.

[…]

[E]ventually, the fossil fuel industry began to drill and advance. “And then sure enough, now we’re drilling in 5,000 feet of water offshore with billion-dollar, technically complex wells,” Beard said. 

“And that is what we could do for geothermal, right?” she said. “We could go for the deepwater of geothermal, and we can do it in the next few decades.”The Hill

The “landmark report” can be downloaded from the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute. I downloaded the report. It’s not awful. The sections on the geology are actually quite well done.

I have nothing against geothermal energy, where an economic resource exists.

This sort of thinking doesn’t reflect economics:

Superheated trapped steam that is nearly 300 degrees Fahrenheit — the sweet spot for modern geothermal — is accessible about three to five miles below the state capital of Austin and 2 1/2 to 3 miles beneath its most prominent city of Houston, the report found. The Hill

Three to five miles beneath Austin? That’s 15,840 to 26,400 feet. There haven’t been a lot of oil & gas wells drilled in Travis County and I don’t think any have been drilled in Austin city limits. Considering that the average depth of wells drilled in Travis County is only about 800 feet, I’m fairly certain that none of them were drilled to depths of 15,840 to 26,400 feet. And I’m fairly certain that no wells will ever be drilled that deep under the city of Austin.

Austin is at the southeast end of this cross section. Paleozoic basement rock is less than 2,000′ below the surface.

Figure 1. Geologic cross section B-B’ northwest of Austin (Hunt et al., 2020)

That sort of “thinking” would conclude that the Kola Superdeep Borehole was a good start… Although, the idea of converting coal-fired power plants into geothermal power plants, connected to Superdeep boreholes, drilled by Doctor Evil “laser” beams, is a pretty cool idea, from a bad science fiction movie perspective.

Radical Plan To Make Earth’s Deepest Hole Could Unleash Limitless Energy
TECH
09 March 2022
By MIKE MCRAE

Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth’s crust than anybody has dug before.

Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start that could potentially make geothermal power accessible to more populations around the world.

The company’s vision for getting closer to the center of the Earth is to combine conventional drilling methods with a megawatt-power flashlight inspired by the kind of technology that could one day make nuclear fusion energy possible.

[…]

To date our best efforts at chewing our way through the planet’s skin have bottomed out at around 12.3 kilometers (7.6 miles). While the Kola Superdeep Borehole and others like it may have reached their limit, though, they nonetheless represent amazing feats of engineering.

[…]

Born out of nuclear fusion research at MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Quaise’s solution is to use millimeter long waves of electromagnetic radiation that force atoms to melt together.

Devices called gyrotrons can efficiently churn out continuous beams of electromagnetic radiation by shaking electrons at high speed inside powerful magnetic fields.

By hooking a megawatt-power gyrotron up to the latest in cutting tools, Quaise expects to be able to blaze its way through the toughest, hottest rock, down to depths of around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in a matter of months.

[…]

By 2028, the company hopes to be able to take over old coal-fueled power stations, transforming them into facilities powered by steam instead.

[…]Science Alert

$63 million and just the right attitude:

A truly equitable clean energy source, abundantly available near every population and industrial center on the planet.Quaise

How we got here

Carlos Araque spent fifteen years working at one of the world’s foremost providers of drilling services to the oil and gas industry. Seeing the negative impacts of that industry firsthand made him want to do something to help make things better. Quaise’s deep drilling technology is the result of a decade of research conducted by Paul Woskov at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. 

Aaron Mandell knew both Paul and Carlos and put them all at the table together. Once the first conversation started everyone knew it was a once-in-a-generation idea. Vinod Khosla was the first backer, bringing our ideas to life. Two years later, The Engine, a venture fund built by MIT, led the seed round to help take our technology to market.

View TimelineQuaise

According to their timeline, by 2024, they’ll have built the “first full-scale hybrid drilling rig combining conventional rotary drilling and millimeter wave drilling capabilities.” By 2028, they will have drilled enough super-deep wells to convert a coal-fired power plant to “equitable” geothermal power. Good luck with that! The company seems to be an MIT project, largely funded by MIT. Has MIT ever drilled a well? Anywhere?

McMoRan’s 29,000′ Davy Jones well took nearly five years to reach its objective.

The first Davy Jones well has to be most expensive well ever drilled. McMoRan says its “investment in drilling, completion and other costs specifically attributable to Davy Jones No. 1 approximated $339.4 million as of March 31, 2013” and that its total investment in the Davy Jones complex, “which includes $474.8 million in allocated property acquisition costs, totaled approximately $1.0 billion at March 31, 2013.”Forbes, 2013

The Davy Jones well was actually drilled in shallow water (~20′). The well found exactly the sort of pressure and temperature conditions that the geothermal pioneers are looking for. They might have even found a significant volume of very dry natural gas. It was never produced because they couldn’t get the well to flow, despite very high reservoir pressures. The extremely heavy drilling mud required for those conditions solidified into solid rock (more or less).

But McMoRan has run into trouble completing the first Davy Jones well. In short, the bottom of the wellbore, which at 30,000 feet deep is no bigger than your fist, got all gummed up with heavy drilling mud that McMoRan had to pump down to control the well’s massive pressures. The gunk solidified and has stymied McMoRan’s efforts to complete the well and test its flow.Forbes, 2013

While using their Doctor Evil “laser” to vaporize rock, will solve the problem of circulating the well cuttings up to the surface, it’s probably not going to contain the pressures. It will also make mud logging rather impossible and I don’t think logging while drilling tools will work very well either, without drilling mud, and with a Doctor Evil “laser” at the end of the drill string.

There’s no doubt that there is a huge technical geothermal resource under Texas. Is any of it economically recoverable? Probably.

If wishes were horses, we’d all get ponies for Christmas: Geothermal Edition

Oil & gas companies generally do look for other ways to make money. Many, if not most, oil & gas companies are actively evaluating the possibility of making money drilling CCS wells. However, this won’t be a “transition” away from oil & gas any more than the catalytic converter was a transition away from internal combustion engines. The industry would love to turn a profit by drilling for over-pressured, super-heated brine. Such a resource is actually relatively easy to find. The industry has actually developed methods of drilling, evaluating, completing and producing high pressure, high heat (HPHH) wells (shut in pressures greater than 15,000 psi and flowing surface temperatures greater than 350°F). There are prolific dry natural gas reservoirs in HPHH environments, like the Norphlet formation in Mobile Bay. However, the industry is not going to suddenly switch from drilling oil & gas wells to drilling geothermal wells.

The report does a good job covering the geology and engineering, along with the legal and regulatory hurdles. It goes off the track when if gets into climate propaganda and academic cheerleading and at times becomes self-contradictory:

We Don’t Need a Sexy Moonshot. We Need Fast, Incremental Steps:
In 100 years of small steps, the oil and gas industry has progressed from mining oil from pools on the surface of the Earth, to deep and ultra-deepwater oil and gas exploration. The incrementality, and indeed necessity of the steps in between these two should not be overlooked. To make the jump from land-based drilling to offshore drilling, just as an example, drillers started by building wooden platforms in ten feet (three meters) of water, and caught rides with shrimping boats out to their rigs in the morning. Now, decades later, industry drills the most technically complex wells in the world with price tags in the billions, from offshore rigs the size of small cities, in 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) of water…The Future of Geothermal in Texas, page 352

While deepwater wells are expensive to drill and semi-submersible rigs are drillships are huge, I don’t know of any individual wells “with price tags in the billions” or “offshore rigs the size of small cities”… at least not in the Gulf of Mexico. Although, the Davy Jones disaster may have cost over $1 billion.

However the pertinent point is that it took us over a century to go from drilling relatively shallow onshore wells, based on surface geology, where gushers were good things, to drilling wells based on advanced 3d seismic surveys in >5,000′ water depths, to objectives at >20,000′ depths, where gushers were environmental catastrophes. No amount of Silicon Valley lingo cheerleading could have sped up that process.

Disruptors Gonna Disrupt:
Startups are leading the way with big, bold ideas, and new innovators are entering the space faster than we could incorporate them into this Report. Disruption results in step-changes, which geothermal desperately needs. So charge forward, lead the way, and forget business as
usual, disruptors.The Future of Geothermal in Texas, page 353

While a lot of the technology that was developed during the oil industry’s growth from the 1800’s to the 2020’s will be applicable to the exploitation of geothermal resources and many oil & gas companies are evaluating the geothermal resource potential in their areas of operation, a combination of climate hysteria-driven activism and government intervention won’t lead to this:

An ‘Apollo’ Style Mobilization of Stakeholders Could Drive Sufficient Global Scale for Geothermal to Supply a Majority of Global Demand for Electricity and Heat by 2050:

[…]

If we follow the roadmap of the greatest human achievements in our approach to collaboration and cooperation across industries, disciplines, and even party lines, we can achieve or even exceed global decarbonization goals with geothermal by 2050.
So let’s go.The Future of Geothermal in Texas, page 354

In two pages they went from “We Don’t Need a Sexy Moonshot” to “An ‘Apollo’ Style Mobilization of Stakeholders…”

If they skipped the “Disruptors Gonna Disrupt” cheerleading, they would have produced a very solid report. Buy, hey… It’s a lot better than this:

“Several million degrees…”

If wishes were horses… A classic!

References

Beard et al, 2023. The Future of Geothermal in Texas: The Coming Century of Growth & Prosperity in the Lone Star State. The University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute.

Hunt, B.B., Cockrell, L.P., Gary, R.H., Vay, J.M., Kennedy, V., Smith, B.A., and Camp, J.P., 2020, Hydrogeologic Atlas of Southwest Travis County, Central Texas: Barton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Conservation District Report of Investigations 2020-0429, April 2020, 80 p. + digital datasets.

By Jo Nova

The science is settled except we only just realized that the benzene and toluene gas over the vast Southern Ocean were not man-made pollutants after all, but were made by industrious phytoplankton. For the first time someone went and measured the benzene and toluene in the water and discovered that instead of being a sink for human pollutants in the air above, the ocean was the source.

This matters because these two gases increased the amount of organic aerosols by, wait for it, between 8% and up to 80% in bursts. And all that extra aerosol matters, of course, because aerosols seed clouds, which change the weather.

And the expert climate models, upon which a $1.5 Trillion dollar industry depends on for its’ very existence, did not know this. If hypothetically there has been less phytoplankton in the worlds oceans in the last few decades, there may also have been less cloud cover, and thus more warming. But who knows?

The modelers are always saying climate change can’t be natural because they can’t think of anything else that could have could have caused the warming, then people keep finding another factor they forgot to put in the models…

“In any case “climate models will have to consider benzene and toluene emissions from the oceans if they want to get the clouds right in climate projections for both the past and the future,” says IQFR-CSIC researcher and head of the atmospheric modeling part of the study Alfonso Saiz-López.”

This is an image of rolling eddies of blooms of phytoplankton in 2017 between the Antarctic peninsula and South America. Like a giant artist was marbling patterns in the worlds oceans.

Southern Ocean drives massive bloom of tiny phytoplankton 2017.  On January 13, 2016, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this view of extensive phytoplankton blooms stretching from the tip of South America across to the Antarctic Peninsula.*

Does this sound like a mature field ready to have a $7 trillion dollar carbon market set up around it?

New study highlights the impact of two new marine gases on climate models’ accuracy

PhysOrg

“If we don’t get the clouds right, we won’t get the climate right,” says Charel Wohl, ICM-CSIC researcher and lead author of the study. “We are just beginning to unveil the multiple ingredients that form cloud seeds,” he adds.

The work, published in the journal Science Advances, describes the first measurements of benzene and toluene in polar oceans and indicates that these compounds have a biological origin. Until now, their presence in polar marine air was thought to be a proof of the extent of human pollution from coal and oil combustion or solvent use, among others.

A biological origin

The only way to know how the atmospheric composition was regulated before the profound changes generated by human activity in the industrial era is to study those regions where the air is still clean, such as the polar areas.

To carry out the study, the team measured the concentrations of benzene and toluene in surface water and air during the course of two oceanographic campaigns: one in the Arctic and the other in the Southern Ocean. The distribution of these gases, their relationship to the amount of phytoplankton, and the fact that the ocean was constantly emitting them into the atmosphere rather than capturing them from it, led the researchers to conclude that they were of biological origin.

Then, by incorporating the data into a global atmospheric chemistry and climate model, the scientific team realized that benzene and toluene emitted by the ocean contributed significantly to aerosol production. This was especially true in the extremely clean and unpolluted atmosphere of the Southern Ocean, where these two gases increased the amount of organic aerosols by 8% and up to 80% in transient situations.

The ocean is a net supplier — it’s outgassing far more than it absorbs

From the paper: Benzene is the top row, and clearly, in this two month period in 2019 there are big fluctuations, which could affect cloud cover (Click to enlarge. ) The fluxes of gases are shown in C and D and most of the time the ocean is neutral or outgassing.

Fig. 2. Underway measurements from the Southern Ocean.
Hourly underway surface seawater concentrations and atmospheric mole fractions of benzene and toluene in (A) and (B), respectively. Interpolated air mole fractions are also shown in (A) and (B). The calculated sea-to-air fluxes are shown in (C) and (D). Positive fluxes indicate ocean outgassing, i.e., sea-to-air fluxes. The other plots show the wind speed (WS) (E), underway sea surface temperature (SST) (F), and Chl a and surface seawater salinity (SSS) (G). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add9031

This unique combination of measurements points toward a biological source for these two compounds previously thought to be predominantly released to the environment from anthropogenic activity.

Chlorophyll concentrations marks out where phytoplankton were in a three month period. The highest concentration blooms are marked in red.

Ocean Chlorophyll Concentrations (Southern Hemisphere)  | NASA

Secondary Organic Aerosols (SOA) may have a big effect on cloud formation:

Concurrent high-resolution measurements in the surface seawater and the overlying atmosphere showed that both the Arctic and the Southern Ocean were highly supersaturated in benzene and toluene, and their emission fluxes rivalled those of other atmospherically relevant marine trace gases, such as isoprene or monoterpenes, although the particle yield of benzene and toluene is much higher than that of previously well-researched marine trace gases. Implementing these ocean emission fluxes in a global chemistry-climate model, we estimated that ocean-leaving benzene and toluene made substantial contributions to SOA mass concentration in the polar regions, with the largest effect over the pristine Southern Ocean (7.7% increase in SOA as the average effect and up to 77.3% increase using the highest measured emission flux).

Our findings also call for expanding both the measurements and the model representations of other, hitherto overlooked, gas precursors of SOA in the marine atmosphere

If phytoplankton have more of a role controlling Earth’s climate, then CO2 has less of a role.

REFERENCE

Charel Wohl et al, Marine biogenic emissions of benzene and toluene and their contribution to secondary organic aerosols over the polar oceans, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add9031

NASA Chlorophyll Concentrations in the Southern Ocean.

*Wikimedia. The image was built with data from the red, green, and blue wavelength bands on VIIRS, plus chlorophyll data. A series of image-processing steps highlighted the color differences and more subtle features, such as nearly a dozen eddies of varying sizes.

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

UPI News posted an article which claims that deadly parasites, diseases, pesticides, and climate change are killing honey bee colonies across the United States. This is only partially true. Parasites, mites, possibly pesticides, and occasional damaging weather events have been linked to the decline of some honey bee populations, however no losses can be attributed to climate change.

The article, “Parasites, pesticides, climate change linked to loss of honey bee colonies,” written by Joe Fisher with UPI News, describes a recent study which claims that honey bee colony die-offs are occurring across the United States due to “climate change, parasitic mites and pesticides,” among other variables.

Research discussed in Climate at a Glance: Bees and Climate Change shows that a variety of factors are contributing to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a condition where bee hives suddenly experience massive die-offs; climate change is not among them.

Among the causes of CCD listed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are:

• Honey bee killing, invasive varroa mites;
• New and emerging insect viruses;
• Pesticide poisoning;
• Habitat changes and lack of food sources;
• Combinations of the above factors.

Temperature and precipitation may also have an effect on bees, but there is no data showing that periods of intense, bee-killing heat is occurring more frequently, and precipitation increases in the United States have been modest and gradual, with no sign of increasing intense rainfall, or drought.

One of the authors of the study referenced in the UPI News piece stated in an interview that “changing climate and high-profile extreme weather events like Hurricane Ian — which threatened about 15% of the nation’s bees that were in its path as well as their food sources — are important reminders that we urgently need to better understand the stressors that are driving honey bee colony collapse and to develop strategies to mitigate them.”

In reality, Hurricane Ian, while destructive, was not evidence of an increasing trend of severe tropical storms. As discussed in exhaustive detail in a Climate Realism post, here, the best available data show that there is no trend of increasing hurricane frequency or intensity. (See figure below).

There is no increase in hurricanes, therefore, an increase in hurricanes cannot be responsible for honey bee declines.

Additionally, despite frequent reports about declining honey bee numbers, as described by H. Sterling Burnett in a Climate Realism post, “Wrong, Tasting Table, Popular Foods Are Doing Well, Not Failing Under Climate Change,” global honey production has increased amid modest global warming, even as U.S. production has declined somewhat because of CCD. (See figure below).

Since climate change is a global, logic would suggest that there should be a global impact on honey supplies, but there is not. In fact, modest warming and carbon dioxide fertilization are contributing to global greening, increasing the amount of available food sources—pollen and nectar—for honey bees.

The fossil record suggests that early bees evolved around the same time as flowering plants, during the Cretaceous period, and more modern bees likely showed up around the Miocene, but possibly as far back as the Oligocene. In all of these periods, there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than today, as well as higher average global temperatures. Bees perform best when there are flowering plants to pollinate.

Solid research ties bee declines to a variety of factors, but because are no trends of worsening global weather patterns, there is equally no evidence that recent climate change is a contributing factor to honey bee deaths or CCD. UPI News and researchers would serve themselves, the public, and the bees, better if they focused their attention on the established causes of CCD and how to mitigate or prevent it, rather than trying to garner headlines by jumping on the climate crisis bandwagon by misleadingly tying the decline of bees in the United States to climate change.

Linnea Lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”

Linnea Lueken

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

.

h/t Robin Guenier

A couple of days ago BP’s Spencer Dale warned that the world would still be needing fossil fuels for 20% of its energy, according to their latest Energy Outlook. But it turns out that even this is grossly over-optimistic:

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/energy-outlook.html

.

Let’s take a closer look at the report.

The first thing to note is that all of the projections are based on three scenarios:

• New Momentum
• Accelerated
• Net Zero

Net Zero produces the biggest emission cuts, and this is what Spencer Dale’s 20% figure was based on, New Momentum gives the least emission cuts. but as the name suggests it still assumes emissions are much less than Business As Usual (based on existing national pledges), which curiously is missing from the report.

The clue to this omission possibly lies in the first of the Core Beliefs:

There is of course no “Carbon Budget”, and the rest of the world would certainly not recognise it had any relevance to them anyway. The fact that BP even mention it shows that this is not an objective, realistic analysis, but instead is a politically motivated attempt to put some clothes on the naked emperor!

But I digress!

The first chart shows how utterly unrealistic the Net Zero scenario is. Nobody seriously believes the whole world will have to all intents and purposes eliminated CO2 emissions by 2050. And the Accelerated one is barely more credible::

One reason why those two scenarios belong in the waste bin is that they both assume that energy consumption will fall drastically after 2030. This is just silly, and it reflects poorly on BP that they should have put their name to this rubbish. (I do accept by the way that they are right to project what a Net Zero strategy would look like, but they should have emphasised its sheer impracticability, instead of passing it off as a plausible outcome).

The whole idea that China, India and the rest of the developing world is going to give up the extra energy their economies need to grow is absurd, even if energy efficiencies are built in. What we need to remember is that the developed world has made immense strides over the decades in energy efficiency, but overall consumption still rose as people became richer and consumed more.

We then come to oil and gas. BP don’t seem to have tried to estimate consumption by regions, but they have looked at import trends, These show that gas and oil imports fall away sharply in the EU, primarily because of the war in Ukraine. But in China and India, their use remains pretty much where it is today even by 2050. (BP’s logic for using imports as an indicator is that countries won’t want to rely too much on imports for energy security reasons; as there is limited reserves of oil and gas domestically, so the logic goes, they will be forced to rely on renewables instead):

And the upshot of all of this?

Under the only rationall projection, New Momentum, fossil fuels will still be supplying 55% of the world’s energy in 2050, with renewables well down the list at 35%.

From climatechangedispatch.com

 By VIV FORBES

According to the clerics of the Green Cult, once we blow up our last coal mine, send all diesel engines to the wreckers, stop using concrete, reinvent sailing clippers, cover the grasslands and hills with solar clutter and wind machines, and then slaughter all of our cattle… global climate will become serene – not too warm, not too cold.

Wild weather will cease, and there will be no more droughts, floods, cyclones, or snowstorms and no more plant and animal extinctions.

But the records written in the rocks tell a far different story about climate changes. Even when nature was in full control, it was not a serene place.

Long before the first steam engine puffed along the first railway, the Earth was periodically battered by natural disasters – earthquakes, tidal waves, pole shifts, magnetic reversals, volcanic eruptions, wild weather, and droughts.

Huge areas were covered by suffocating continents of ice, desert sands, massive flows of mud and lava, beds of salt, and thick coal seams. Thousands of species disappeared including dinosaurs, mammoths, and Australia’s megafauna.

Modern humans are not immune to the threat of extinction, but it will not come from today’s warm, moist atmosphere or from the gas of life, carbon dioxide.

It will probably come from the next glacial climate cycle of this era, where long bitter glacial eras are separated by short warm periods. These global weather cycles are triggered by changing orbits in the solar system.

In every short warm era like today’s Holocene, the warming oceans expel enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to support the abundant plant and animal life that currently surrounds us.

But never has this “global warming” prevented the cyclic return of the ice. The Holocene warm era in which we live has already passed its peak and long before we reach Net Zero Emissions, the cold will return.

When blizzards blow and glaciers grow, the great ice sheets will spread again. Carbon dioxide will be removed from the atmosphere into the cooling oceans and most of mankind will be threatened by frosts, droughts, crop failures, and starvation.

A lucky few living in equatorial regions or clustered in shelters and hothouses around coal or nuclear power stations may survive.

Those still able to extract uranium, coal, oil, or gas may manage to generate enough warmth and carbon dioxide plant food to partly offset the cold sun, the permafrost, and the dry, barren atmosphere.

And a few with appropriate skills and tools may become hunters and gatherers again (but most Neanderthals did not survive the last glacial cycle).

We should celebrate, not fear the Modern Warm Era and give thanks for the many benefits gained from using those marvelous natural stores of hydro-carbon and nuclear energy to warm our homes, pump water, recharge batteries and feed our animals and plants.

These good times will not last forever.

When the ice returns, derelict wind turbines and snowbound solar panels will remain as stark tombstones in the graveyard of the failed Green religion.

---

Viv Forbes has studied science and climatology and reads climate records as written in the rocks of Queensland.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

From Wind-Europe:

 

The problem is inflation, with costs rising at a higher rate than prospective revenues. Investors are also being turned away by unhelpful national interventions in electricity markets.

The EU must make Europe an attractive place for renewables investments again – the forthcoming market design proposals must address this. The fall in investments and turbine orders is also compounding the problems faced by Europe’s wind energy supply chain. The Net-Zero Industry Act can’t come soon enough.   

WindEurope latest data on wind turbine orders in Europe in 2022 paints an extremely worrying picture. Total orders for new wind turbines in 2022 fell by 47% on 2021. The EU saw only 9 GW worth of new turbine orders. This reflects a fall in new investments in wind energy that were announced last year: the first 11 months saw final investment decisions for only 12 GW of new wind farms.** The EU needs to build 30 GW of new wind farms a year under its new energy and climate security targets.

The EU has big ambitions for offshore wind: to get from more than 15 GW today to over 100 GW by 2030. Several offshore wind farms were expected to reach financial close last year, but final investment decisions were delayed due to inflation, market interventions and uncertainty about future revenues.

Inflation impacting investments

Inflation in commodity prices and other input costs has raised the price of wind turbines, by up to 40% over the last two years. But the prospective revenues of those planning to build wind farms have not kept pace with this. Many governments index the prices paid for wind energy (usually determined in auctions), but not enough. And the long time-lag between developers deciding their auction bids and their turbine suppliers actually procuring their components doesn’t help either. Governments need to ensure full indexation.

Investments in wind energy are down – Europe must get market design and green industrial policy right

The simple truth is that wind power has only thrived in Europe because of the generous subsidies doled out. It will never be competitive in a free and open market, because its intermittency makes it worthless.

From Roy Spencer, PhD.

February 1st, 2023 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

The Version 6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for January 2023 was -0.04 deg. C departure from the 1991-2020 mean. This is down from the December 2022 anomaly of +0.05 deg. C.

The linear warming trend since January, 1979 now stands at +0.13 C/decade (+0.11 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).

Various regional LT departures from the 30-year (1991-2020) average for the last 13 months are:

YEAR	MO	GLOBE	NHEM.	SHEM.	TROPIC	USA48	ARCTIC	AUST
2022	Jan	+0.03	+0.06	-0.00	-0.23	-0.13	+0.68	+0.10
2022	Feb	-0.00	+0.01	-0.01	-0.24	-0.04	-0.30	-0.50
2022	Mar	+0.15	+0.27	+0.03	-0.07	+0.22	+0.74	+0.02
2022	Apr	+0.26	+0.35	+0.18	-0.04	-0.26	+0.45	+0.61
2022	May	+0.17	+0.25	+0.10	+0.01	+0.59	+0.23	+0.20
2022	Jun	+0.06	+0.08	+0.05	-0.36	+0.46	+0.33	+0.11
2022	Jul	+0.36	+0.37	+0.35	+0.13	+0.84	+0.55	+0.65
2022	Aug	+0.28	+0.31	+0.24	-0.03	+0.60	+0.50	-0.00
2022	Sep	+0.24	+0.43	+0.06	+0.03	+0.88	+0.69	-0.28
2022	Oct	+0.32	+0.43	+0.21	+0.04	+0.16	+0.93	+0.04
2022	Nov	+0.17	+0.21	+0.13	-0.16	-0.51	+0.51	-0.56
2022	Dec	+0.05	+0.13	-0.03	-0.35	-0.21	+0.80	-0.38
2023	Jan	-0.04	+0.05	-0.14	-0.38	+0.12	-0.12	-0.50

The full UAH Global Temperature Report, along with the LT global gridpoint anomaly image for January, 2023 should be available within the next several days here.

The global and regional monthly anomalies for the various atmospheric layers we monitor should be available in the next few days at the following locations:

Lower Troposphere:

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt

Mid-Troposphere:

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tmt/uahncdc_mt_6.0.txt

Tropopause:

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/ttp/uahncdc_tp_6.0.txt

Lower Stratosphere:

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tls/uahncdc_ls_6.0.txt

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Another Met Office scam!

1 in 3 chance of a new monthly rainfall record in at least one region each winter.

In the last few years several rainfall events have caused widespread flooding in the UK. In winter 2013/14 a succession of storms hit the UK leading to record rainfall and flooding in many regions including the south east. December 2015 was similar, and Storm Desmond hit the north-west causing widespread flooding and storm damage.

By their very nature extreme events are rare and a novel research method was needed to quantify the risk of extreme rainfall within the current climate.

Professor Adam Scaife, who leads this area of research at the Met Office said “The new Met Office supercomputer was used to simulate thousands of possible winters, some of them much more extreme than we’ve yet witnessed. This gave many more extreme events than have happened in the real world, helping us work out how severe things could get.”

Analysing these simulated events showed there is a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter. When other regions of England and Wales are also considered this increases to a 34% chance.

Dr Vikki Thompson, lead author of the report, said “Our computer simulations provided one hundred times more data than is available from observed records. Our analysis showed that these events could happen at any time and it’s likely we will see record monthly rainfall in one of our UK regions in the next few years.”

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2017/high-risk-of-unprecedented-rainfall

I probably covered this at the time, but it includes this graphic, which Ben Pile’s video highlighted today:

Note this bit, which effectively means past data is irrelevant, and is replaced with made up “virtual observations”:

There is in fact ample data, with for instance the England & Wales series going back to 1766. If these trends were so obvious the Met Office would not have to concoct their own “data” to find them.

So why do they do it? Because the actual data does not support their claims of increasingly extreme weather.

Take the South East, which they use in their example. The actual data clearly shows that winter monthly rainfall is not becoming more extreme, making a nonsense of their claim that there is a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-and-regional-series

The wet winter of 2013/14 was the trigger for this pathetic exercise, but as we can seethe winter of 1913/14 was even wetter. But it is evident that all of the really wet months, other than 2013/14, occurred decades ago – the last with over 180mm being as long ago being December 1934.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr. — February 1, 2023

“The Houston Chronicle editorialists can cancel me, but they cannot cancel energy density and the perils of dilute, intermittent substitutes for real, stock energies. Reality bats last, and climate alarm and the ‘energy transition’ are doing very poorly outside of getting government favor to keep the mirage going. It is sad that political cronies are the only winners in the futile crusade, and real challenges, opportunity, and need are foregone.”

My longtime hometown paper, The Houston Chronicle, always left-of-center, has gone fully climate alarmist and glowingly reports about the “energy transition”. The paper reports as a PR department with some real energy news (the booming fossil fuel industries) thrown in. Nothing bad about wind and solar except that there is not enough subsidy to make it go faster against the entrenched fossil fuel interests.

I smell a rat. In addition to Progressivism per se, why is the Chronicle so adamantly pro-wind, solar, batteries and anti-stock energies, the ones that consumer naturally choose (affordability, dependability) that leave taxpayers alone? Are there some grants from environmental foundations for “environmental reporting” to improve profitability at the Chronicle?

And why does the Chronicle brass wink at the blatant conflict of interest with its business editorialist Chris Tomlinson, married to a wealthy wind and solar dealmaker?

Tomlinson does not like me for calling out his biases and copy. But how does one deal with a badly conflicted journalist who doesn’t even care to question his premises or research what is wrong with both climate alarm and the forced energy transformation? He is as closed-minded as they come. And a bully too.

I once wrote opinion-page editorials for the Chronicle.

• “ExxonMobil on Right Path” (June 14, 2009)
• “Climate-Change Alarmism Runs into a Reality Check” (January 9, 2009)
• “False Alarms and Climate Change” (March 30, 2008)
• “Al Gore’s Telling Whoppers Again” (June 4, 2006)
• “Shoppers: There is a Bright Side to Rising Gas Prices” (April 18, 2002)
• “President is Correct to Ignore Climate Alarmists” (May 14, 2001)
• “Fear Not: The Energy Malthusians Are Wrong” ( April 21, 2000)

But after years of op-ed submissions only to have them die with nary a response, I no longer have the inspiration to try to set the record straight. That leaves me with letters-to-the-editor, which are quick and easy. But they too no longer see the light of day, little doubt because the paper’s decision-makers know that I blow the whistle on a closed-minded, angry Tomlinson.

Here are four LTEs that I have submitted that fell into the abyss of the politically incorrect. I write, you decide. They may die at the Chronicle but, for the record, they live here at MasterResource.

Tomlinson on “Exxon Knew” (January 18, 2023)

Chris Tomlinson’s editorial (“Exxon knew about climate change; Big Oil cannot be trusted,” January 18, 2023) deserves a second look. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, two bigger issues were global cooling and Peak Oil, respectively.

Also, the “spot on” temperature forecasts cited by Tomlinson are spot off compared to the satellite data, which since 1979 have shown much less warming than surface thermometers and climate model predictions.

The higher-ups at Exxon did not “know” about elevated global warming because the science was embryonic. Exxon also did not study the cooling offset of aerosols, much less the CO2 fertilization effect and other benefits (warmer winters) from growing fossil fuel usage. How much warming, good or bad warming, public policy tradeoffs … that would be for the next generation to study and debate.

Natural Gas Reliability for Power Generation (January 9, 2023)

“State must take basic steps on gas reliability” (editorial, Houston Chronicle, January 9, 2022) states Texas is a free market when it comes to electricity and natural-gas generated power.

The opposite is closer to the truth. ERCOT is a centrally planned wholesale power market covering 90 percent of the state. State and federal laws govern all aspects of electricity, directly or indirectly.

A true free market in power would repeal a bevy of state-federal laws to eliminate franchise protection, rate regulation, transmission access edicts, entry or exit mandates, and industry-structure limitations. Also, preferences to renewable energies would significantly improve the economics of thermal power plants.

One can debate the wisdom of policy reform, but the fact is that electricity is one of the most regulated industries in Texas and the United States.

Grid Reliability (July 25, 2022)

Re “May heat wave exposed the myth of fossil fuel reliability,” by Dennis Wamsted and Seth Feaster (Houston Chronicle: July 26, 2022)

The argument that fossil-fueled electricity in Texas is unreliable—thus taking the heat off renewables—misses the elephant in the room. Fossil-fired generation has been reliable for well over a century, but what gives in the Lone Star State?

We know all about intermittent renewables when the wind stops blowing and the sun does not shine. But on its strong days, wind and solar weaken the grid by idling reliable generation and otherwise lowering margins. The ‘Atlas Shrugged’ situation has three parts: prematurely retired generation, a lack of new capacity, and undermaintained existing capacity.

The recovery of the Texas grid (same for California too) requires an end to preferential subsidies to wind and solar. That way, gas- and coal-fired generation (and nuclear power as well) will be incentivized to reliably perform.

Electricity Rates (June 8, 2022)

Chris Tomlinson (“Electricity bills leap by 70% over impact of disastrous freeze,” Chronicle, June 8, 2022) erroneously attributes rates to fuel costs and not reliable supply—and thus sides with wind and solar for rate relief in the future.

True, wind and solar have no fuel costs. But they have the highest capital (up-front) cost, as well as the worst reliability. They cause grid problems not only from intermittency but also by backing out reliable generation and lowering margins. The result is retired and poorly maintained natural gas and coal capacity, contributing to shortages and price spikes at the peak.

————————-

The Houston Chronicle editorialists can cancel me, but they cannot cancel energy density and the perils of dilute, intermittent substitutes for stock energies. Reality bats last, and climate alarm and the ‘energy transition’ are doing very poorly outside of getting government favor to keep the mirage going. It is sad that political cronies are the only winners in the futile crusade, and real challenges, opportunity, and need are foregone.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Why did they train the AI initially using climate models? Why not ignore the models, and directly use the observations to directly train the AI`s?

AI research predicts planet will warm faster than expected

By CNN 11:27am Jan 31, 2023

…

The study estimates that the planet could reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels in a decade, and found a “substantial possibility” of global temperature rises crossing the 2 degrees threshold by mid-century, even with significant global efforts to bring down planet-warming pollution.

Data shows average global temperature has already climbed risen around 1.1 degrees to 1.2 degrees since industrialisation.

“Our results provide further evidence for high-impact climate change, over the next three decades,” noted the report, published on Monday in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

…Read more: https://www.9news.com.au/world/climate-change-artificial-intelligence-dire-forecast-for-planet-future/764893d8-2a02-4214-8980-d1e4a4b5ca87

The abstract of the study;

Data-driven predictions of the time remaining until critical global warming thresholds are reached

Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Elizabeth A. Barnes

Edited by Michael Mann, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA; received April 25, 2022; accepted December 14, 2022

January 30, 2023

120 (6) e2207183120

Significance

The United Nations Paris Agreement aims to hold global warming well below 2 °C and pursue 1.5 °C. Given the clear evidence for accelerating climate impacts, the time remaining until these global thresholds are reached is a topic of considerable interest. We use machine learning methods to make truly out-of-sample predictions of that timing, based on the spatial pattern of historical temperature observations. Our results confirm that global warming is already on the verge of crossing the 1.5 °C threshold, even if the climate forcing pathway is substantially reduced in the near-term. Our predictions also suggest that even with substantial greenhouse gas mitigation, there is still a possibility of failing to hold global warming below the 2 °C threshold.

Abstract

Leveraging artificial neural networks (ANNs) trained on climate model output, we use the spatial pattern of historical temperature observations to predict the time until critical global warming thresholds are reached. Although no observations are used during the training, validation, or testing, the ANNs accurately predict the timing of historical global warming from maps of historical annual temperature. The central estimate for the 1.5 °C global warming threshold is between 2033 and 2035, including a ±1σ range of 2028 to 2039 in the Intermediate (SSP2-4.5) climate forcing scenario, consistent with previous assessments. However, our data-driven approach also suggests a substantial probability of exceeding the 2 °C threshold even in the Low (SSP1-2.6) climate forcing scenario. While there are limitations to our approach, our results suggest a higher likelihood of reaching 2 °C in the Low scenario than indicated in some previous assessments—though the possibility that 2 °C could be avoided is not ruled out. Explainable AI methods reveal that the ANNs focus on particular geographic regions to predict the time until the global threshold is reached. Our framework provides a unique, data-driven approach for quantifying the signal of climate change in historical observations and for constraining the uncertainty in climate model projections. Given the substantial existing evidence of accelerating risks to natural and human systems at 1.5 °C and 2 °C, our results provide further evidence for high-impact climate change over the next three decades.

…Read more: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2207183120

To their credit they have published their code on github. “… Code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/eabarnes1010/target_temp_detection (60) and is archived on Zenodo at the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7510551 (61).”.

My understanding is the researchers are attempting to use the AI to identify climatologically significant geographic regions, or distributions of observations, to try to filter out the noise and reduce the uncertainty of predictions.

My concern with this approach is if the data was sufficient for tuning predictions, the AI`s could be trained directly on the data, the AI`s could infer climate models directly from the data.

Using a simulation or model allows a large number of training runs to be packed into a short period of time, and constrains the output of the AI. But the AI is then tainted by the model, it effectively becomes an extension of the model.

I guess time will tell whether their approach has yielded increased predictive skill.