Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The handling of this complaint sums up in a nutshell everything that is corrupt about the BBC’s complaints procedures. The whole system is crooked, and will continue to be until it is put in the hands of a genuinely independent body.
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit have now responded to my complaint about their fake “Reality Check”, which claimed that “there’s evidence hurricanes are getting more powerful”. Unsurprisingly they have rejected my complaint, without ever actually addressing the facts I presented.
I won’t go into all of the graphs and documentation that In based my complaint on – you can read them here. But I will show this one, which summarises all major hurricanes world wide. There is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate the BBC’s claim:
And even the IPCC can find no evidence of long term trends in “intensity-based metrics”
IPCC AR6
It really should be an open and shut case – the BBC were wrong.
The ECU’s response dismissing my complaint mainly consists of “projections” and “computer models”, neither of which are evidence of anything. They also refer to IPCC claims that rapid intensification events have become more frequent. Whether this is true or not, the issue is irrelevant, if the frequency/ratio of major hurricanes has not increased.
The only actual data they were able to provide to back up their claim was a 2016 study of typhoons in the Western Pacific, which according to the BBC said:
“over the past 37 years, typhoons that strike East and Southeast Asia have intensified by 12–15%, with the proportion of storms of categories 4 and 5 having doubled or even tripled”.
Which is all well and good, except the data record back to 1951 shows a marked dip in super typhoons in the 1970s and 80s, but no long term trend:
In any event, given that the global frequency of major hurricanes has not increased since 1980, this increase in typhoon activity must be matched by reduced activity elsewhere.
Even the IPCC did not find it worth mentioning that paper, instead merely highlighting “substantial inter-decadal variations in the Western Pacific”:
IPCC AR6
The ECU finishes by saying:
Except that my complaint was not about what “scientists predicted”, it was the claim that “there is evidence that hurricanes are getting more powerful! They have not addressed this at all.
Running out of names
I also complained about the statement in the Reality Check that “the hurricane season has been so busy, they’ve used up the list [of names] and had to start again”
I pointed out that the reason why more names are needed nowadays is the fact that we can observe many storms with the help of satellites, which we could not do in the past, along with the fact that many extra-tropical storms are now named, which did not use to be the practice. It has nothing to do with more hurricanes becoming more frequent.
The ECU did not even bother to address these issues, and doubled down by pointing out that “the number of named storms had risen in the last 50 years”
Apparently viewers would not have been misled by the misinformation, despite the fact that most will now be convinced that hurricanes are becoming more frequent, when they are not!
The handling of this complaint sums up in a nutshell everything that is corrupt about the BBC’s complaints procedures. The whole system is crooked, and will continue to be until it is put in the hands of a genuinely independent body.
Even though the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere has been going up all over the world, average temperatures in the Antarctic have not gone up in the last 70 years.
Even though the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere has been going up all over the world, average temperatures in the Antarctic have not gone up in the last 70 years. In fact, 2021 was the coldest 6-month winter since records began in 1957.
Scientists are trying to figure out why Antarctica hasn’t warmed recently and almost certainly much longer. The unproven idea that the carbon dioxide humans put in the air is the main cause of climate change is weakened by the fact that a large part of Earth is not getting warmer.
The global warming theory states that both poles should be getting warmer. Not just one.
Because climate science is “settled,” the important debate about the inconvenient Antarctica data has to happen far away from the prying eyes of the mainstream media.
Promoting the Net Zero political agenda, The Guardian and The Hill made its readers even more worried by saying that “unimaginable amounts of water will flow into oceans” if temperatures in the region rise and ice buffers melt. But it isn’t getting warmer.
Justin Rowlatt, who is in charge of the BBC’s environmental work, flew over parts of the area and saw “an epic vision of broken ice.” He said that Antarctica is “where climate change is happening first.”
Most people don’t pay attention to the fact that the South Pole had its coldest six-month winter since records began in 1957. After that story did make the press, Reuters “fact checked” what people were saying about the event on social media. It was said that “six months is not enough time to confirm a climate trend.”
And the 70 years of no warming is covered up. Almost no one knows this because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The Arctic and Antarctic are a “conundrum” when it comes to understanding how climate change is happening now. Because the Arctic is warming, and the Antarctic is not and may even be getting colder.
Alarmists dishonestly point to a small area of Antarctica that is getting warmer. Which is caused by warmer ocean waters because of at least 90 undersea volcanoes.
Alarmists have been very interested in the Thwaites glacier, which they call the “Doomsday Glacier.” Which is located over this warmer ocean water.
See the picture below, red means warmer and blue means cooler than the base time period of 1950 to 1980. You can see the rest of Antarctica is cooling and the Thwaites area is warming. Remember this is a vast continent, Antarctica is bigger than the United States.
Mean surface temperature anomaly over years 1984–2014 (compared to the base period 1950–1980) over the Antarctic from the NOAA-MLOST
A group of oceanographers found that Florida-sized Thwaites had moved back in the past at twice the rate than it has now. CO2 couldn’t have been the cause back then. This doesn’t fit the climate change narrative of doom. If it has done this in the past several times, why is now unusual?
A lot of climate science is affected by confirmation bias, and we have pal review. This means that other “scientists” just agree with whatever is put forth as long as it fits the narrative. Even those that discover inconvenient facts that do not agree, always add the disclaimer that climate change is real, caused by CO2 and must be dealt with.
If they do not, they can not get published or make it through the “peer” or pal review process.
Few grants are given to people who don’t begin with the idea that burning fossil fuels is the main or only cause of climate change.
They start with the bias in mind. There are many current, past, and paleoclimate observations that don’t show a clear link between CO2 levels and temperatures. In the distant past, the gas that makes life possible (CO2) used to be 20 times higher in the atmosphere without burning fossil fuels.
Soon we will be told by alarmist publications that warming causes cooling. Or that climate change causes both warming and cooling. And somehow weather will be better if we just stopped emitting CO2.
The climate and weather are always changing. It has warmed and cooled in the past and will again in the future, no matter what man does.
CFACT policy advisor Frank Lasee is an expert on energy and environmental issues.
His articles have appeared in the Washington Examiner, Washington Post, Real Clear Energy, Town Hall. He has been a guest on TV and radio news. He is the president of Truth in Energy and Climate.
Frank Lasee served as a Wisconsin State Senator and in Governor Scott Walker’s Administration.
Could anybody possibly be stupid enough to believe the line that wind and solar generators can provide reliable electricity to consumers that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels?
Could anybody possibly be stupid enough to believe the line that wind and solar generators can provide reliable electricity to consumers that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels?
It takes hardly any thought about the matter to realize that wind and solar don’t work when it is calm and dark, as it often is, and particularly so in the winter, when it is also generally cold.
Thus a wind/solar electricity system needs full backup, or alternatively storage — things that add to and multiply costs. Surely, our political leaders and top energy gurus are fully aware of these things, and would not try to mislead the public about the cost of electricity from a predominantly wind/solar system.
If you think that, you must have missed the State of the Union Address yesterday. Nor is Presdident Biden alone in peddling the preposterous fantasy of cheap electricity from the wind and sun The internet is filled with seemingly authoritative voices asserting with complete confidence that wind and solar generators are the answer to providing consumers with cheaper electricity.
No amount of pointing to the failed experiments of places like Germany, the UK and California seems to get any traction. We need to demand a working demonstration project of a fully wind/solar system so that the full costs can be shown for all to see.
Look, the Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis. Lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, and leading the world to a clean energy future.
It’s so spectacularly contrary to reality that it doesn’t nearly do it justice to call it just a “lie.”
In Germany and the UK, energy transition fantasies have led to electricity bills three times and more the U.S. average, and continuing to increase, and millions of ratepayers thrown into energy poverty.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the costs explode.
They can build thousands of wind turbines and solar panels, but they can’t get rid of any of the dispatchable power plants because they are all needed for backup. So now they are paying for two duplicative systems.
Then they must pay the dispatchable plants enough to cover their capital costs at half time usage. Then they must buy the fossil fuels for backup on spot markets where production has been suppressed by, for example, banning fracking.
But as I said, it’s not just President Biden who is too dumb to figure this out. Consider Mark Z. Jacobson, Professor at Stanford and tireless promoter of his WWS (water, wind and solar) system as the “low cost” way of the future. No amount of debunking of Jacobson’s models can keep him from endlessly repeating the same ridiculous claims. He got another shot just yesterday in the Guardian, headline “We don’t need ‘miracle’ technologies to fix the climate. We have the tools now”:
Wind, water and solar energy is cheap, effective and green. We don’t need experimental or risky energy sources to save our planet.
Jacobson goes on with endless mumbo jumbo about how his fantasy system can deliver electricity at low cost. Excerpt:
When combined with electricity storage, heat storage, cold storage and hydrogen storage; techniques to encourage people to shift the time of their electricity use (demand response); a well-interconnected electrical transmission system; and nifty and efficient electrical appliances, such as heat pumps, induction cooktops, electric vehicles and electric furnaces for industry, WWS can solve the ginormous problems associated with climate change at low cost worldwide.
Is there any such thing as a demonstration project on any scale — small, medium, or large — to vindicate these claims that such a future system would be “low cost”? Absolutely not.
I would say that everybody with even half a brain knows that Jacobson is a charlatan. But then we have our President, not to mention the entire federal bureaucracy backed by trillions of dollars of annual taxpayer largesse, buying into his nonsense.
Nobody would be happier than me to see a demonstration project built that showed that wind and solar could provide reliable electricity at low cost.
Unfortunately, I know too much about the subject to think that that is likely, or even remotely possible. But at least the rest of us need to demand a demonstration project from the promoters of these fantasies.
People get paid to write research articles with supposedly climate-friendly ideas, however bizarre they may sound. Here they want, in their own words, to ballistically eject dust grains from the Moon.
People get paid to write research articles with supposedly climate-friendly ideas, however bizarre they may sound. Here they want, in their own words, to ballistically eject dust grains from the Moon. – – – Abstract
We revisit dust placed near the Earth–Sun L1 Lagrange point as a possible climate-change mitigation measure.
Our calculations include variations in grain properties and orbit solutions with lunar and planetary perturbations.
To achieve sunlight attenuation of 1.8%, equivalent to about 6 days per year of an obscured Sun, the mass of dust in the scenarios we consider must exceed 10^10 kg.
The more promising approaches include using high-porosity, fluffy grains to increase the extinction efficiency per unit mass, and launching this material in directed jets from a platform orbiting at L1.
A simpler approach is to ballistically eject dust grains from the Moon’s surface on a free trajectory toward L1, providing sun shade for several days or more.
Advantages compared to an Earth launch include a ready reservoir of dust on the lunar surface and less kinetic energy required to achieve a sun-shielding orbit.
Featured are 2 young adults, Pascal (35) and Tamara (28), who were led to believe by government officials and health institutes that the vaccine was safe, effective and free of side effects.
These two young, fit persons were at the prime of their physical lives, and the risk of being severely ill from the COVID virus was extremely low. However, the medicine they believed would add insurance ended up in reality severely injuring them.
Even though they had just been vaccinated, they didn’t immediately tie their sudden illness to the shots – not until they discovered the mRNA vaccines indeed were not as safe safe as many of us were led to believe.
Today the University Hospital Marburg now has a waiting list of 6500 seeking therapy for their injuries.
The Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) now claims 0.02% of the vaccinated have suffered serious adverse effects. But as the video explains, most doctors just shoo away vaccine-injury patients who complain of serious side effects and don’t bother reporting them. The real rate of vaccine injured is likely 10-100 times higher. So far about 192 million COVID shots have been administered in Germany, but few are allowing themselves further shots. Less than 15% have gotten a 4th shot.
For Germany’s vaccine-injured, the search to get help has become a nightmare as doctors and authorities dismiss them and want nothing to do with them. “It’s psychosomatic…just be patient and everything will be okay.”
Some insist that the injuries have nothing to do with the vaccine and it’s just a coincidence. Young, athletic persons suffering sudden paralysis happens all the time!
Even Dr. Schieffer of the University Hospital in Marburg still supports the vaccination and believes its’s still mostly safe and effective.
As much as the government, its health officials and doctors wish the vaccine injury crisis to be dismissed and forgotten, the injured are not going away.
Urbanization Effects on GHCN Temperature Trends, Part II: Evidence that Homogenization Spuriously Warms Trends
In Part I I showed the Landsat satellite-based measurements of urbanization around the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) land temperature-monitoring stations. Virtually all of the GHCN stations have experienced growth in the coverage of human settlement “built-up” (BU) structures.
As an example of this growth, here is the 40-year change in BU values (which range from 0 to 100%) at 1 km spatial resolution over the Southeast United States.
Fig. 1. The 40-year change in urbanization over the Southeast U.S. between 1975 and 2014.
How has this change in urbanization been expressed at the GHCN stations distributed around the world? Fig. 2 shows how urbanization has increased on average across 19,885 GHCN stations from 20N to 82.5N latitude, at various spatial averaging resolutions of the data.
Fig. 2. Average forty-year change (1975 to 2014) in Landsat-based urbanization (BU) values over 19,885 GHCN stations from 20N to 82.5N at five different averaging scales of the 1 km BU data.
NONE of the 19,885 GHCN stations experienced negative growth, which is not that surprising since that would require a removal of human settlement structures over time. In all of the analysis that follows, I will be using the 21×21 km averages of BU centered on the GHCN station locations.
So, what effect does urbanization measured in this manner have on GHCN temperatures?And, especially, on temperature trends used for monitoring global warming?
While we all know that urban areas are warmer than rural areas, especially at night and during the summer, does an increase in urbanization lead to spurious warming at the GHCN stations that experienced growth (which is the majority of them)?
And, even if it did, does the homogenization procedure NOAA uses to correct for spurious temperature effects remove (even partially) urban heat island (UHI) effects on reported temperature trends?
John Christy and I have been examining these questions by comparing the GHCN temperature dataset (both unadjusted and adjusted [homogenized] versions) to these Landsat-based measurements of human settlement structures, which I will just call “urbanization”.
Here’s what I’m finding so far.
The Strongest UHI Warming with Urbanization Growth Occurs at Nearly-Rural Stations
As Oke (1973) and others have demonstrated, the urban heat island effect is strongly nonlinear, with (for example) a 2% increase in urbanization at rural sites producing much more warming than a 2% increase at an urban site. This means that a climate monitoring dataset using mostly-rural stations is not immune from spurious warming from creeping urbanization, unless there has been absolutely zero growth.
For example, Fig. 3 shows the sensitivity of GHCN (absolute) temperatures to increasing urbanization in various classes of urbanization, based upon well over 1 million station pairs separated by less than 150 km.
Fig. 3. Computed bin-average change in temperature with change in urbanization (BU), in 2-station BU average bins of 0-2%, 2-5%, 5-10%, 10-20%, 20-30%, 30-40%, 40-50%, 50-60%, 60-70%, and 70-100%, for four seasons and all GHCN stations in the 30N-70N latitude band. Solid lines are for adjusted (homogenized) GHCN data, and dashed lines are for unadjusted data.
By far the greatest sensitivity to a change in urbanization in Fig. 3 is in the 0-2% (nearly rural) category. We also see in Fig. 3 that the homogenization procedure used by NOAA reduces this effect by only 9% averaged across all seasons, and by even less (2.1%) in the summer season.
If we integrate the sensitivities in Fig. 3 from 0 to 100% urbanization, we get the total UHI effect on temperature (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4. Seasonal average UHI effects across all GHCN stations between 30N and 70N by integrating the dT/dBU values in Fig. 3 from 0% to 100%, for adjusted (homogenized) temperature data (solid) and unadjusted data (dashed). The black curve is a power law relationship with temperature increasing as the square root of urbanization.
The temperature data used here is the average of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures ([Tmax+Tmin]/2), and since almost all of the urban heat island effect is in Tmin, the temperature scale in Fig. 4 would be nearly doubled for the Tmin UHI effect.
The black curve in Fig. 4 is a square-root relationship, which seems to match the data reasonable well for most of the GHCN stations (which are generally less than 30% urbanized). But this is not nearly as non-linear as the 4th root relationship Oke (1973) calculated for some eastern Canadian stations, using population data as a measure of urbanization.
But what I have shown so far is based upon spatial information (the difference between closely-spaced stations). It does not tell us whether, or by how much, spurious warming exists in the GHCN temperature trends. To examine this question, next I looked at how the NOAA homogenization procedure changed station trends as a function of how fast the station environment has become more urbanized.
NOAA’s homogenization produces a change in most of the station temperature trends. If I compute the average homogenization-induced change in trends in various categories of station growth in urbanization, we should see a negative trend adjustment associated with positive urbanization growth, right?
But just the opposite happens.
First let’s examine what happens at stations with no growth in urbanization. In Fig. 5 we see that the 881 stations with no trend in urbanization during 1975-2014 have an average 0.011 C/decade warmer trend in the adjusted (homogenized) data than in the unadjusted data. This, by itself, is entirely possible since there are time-of-observation (“Tobs”) adjustments made to the data, adjustments for station moves, instrumentation types, etc.
Fig. 5. GHCN station temperature trend adjustments from the homogenization procedure inexplicably increase the station temperature trends as growth in urbanization occurs, rather than decrease them as would be expected if NOAA’s homogenization procedure was removing spurious warming from urban heat island effects.
So, let’s assume that value at zero growth in Fig. 5 represents what we should expect for the NON-urbanization related adjustments to GHCN trends. As we move to the right from zero urbanization growth in Fig. 5, stations with increasing growth in urbanization should have downward adjustments in their temperature trends, but instead we see, for all classes of growth in urbanization, UPWARD adjustments instead!
Thus, it appears that NOAA’s homogenization procedure is spuriously warming station temperature trends (on average) when it should be cooling them. I don’t know how to conclude any different.
Why are the NOAA adjusments going in the wrong direction? I don’t know.
To say the least, I find these results… curious.
OK, so how big is this spurious warming effect on land temperature trends in the GHCN dataset?
Before you jump to the conclusion that GHCN temperature trends have too much spurious warming to be relied upon for monitoring global warming, what I have shown does not tell us by just how much the land-average temperature trends are biased upward. I will address that in Part III.
My very preliminary calculations so far (using the UHI curves in Fig. 4 applied to the 21×21 km urbanization growth curve in Fig. 2) suggest the UHI warming averaged over all stations is about 10-20% of the GHCN trends. Small, but not insignificant. But that could change as I dig deeper into the issue.
“Al Gore was right about one thing in his rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos: CO2 emissions have continued to climb and show no sign of being affected by ‘climate policy’.” (Jenkins, below)
In less than 800 words, Holman Jenkins, Wall Street Journal editorialist (Feb. 4 – 5, 2023), cut the whole global warming mania down to size. Basically, it’s all over but the shouting. The science is “looking up,” (it never looked down, actually), for reasons that Jenkins only partially examines. And ExxonKnew as a PR stunt is exposed.
Below, I parse Jenkins’s op-ed with subtitles and let his words speak for themselves.
The Al Gore Problem
Al Gore was right about one thing in his rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos: CO2 emissions have continued to climb and show no sign of being affected by “climate policy.”
He didn’t mention his own contributions to this outcome, intervening in the early Obama years to turn climate policy into an excuse for protectionist pork barrel, with no real effect on climate. Nor that he was the seminal author of a brand of green hyperventilation that almost guaranteed real climate action would become a polarizing dead letter.
He also didn’t mention his singular stroke of luck in the history books, which will let him off more kindly than he deserves because the science now paints a less dire picture of our climate future.
Comment: The Al Gore problem is that he is a walking, talking hypocrite (check energy usage in his fiefdom) and his obvious exaggerations. For a decade or more, many on both sides of the debate believe he hurts his cause by being so public and hyperbolic.
“ExxonKnew”
The climate press proved the point, amid his Alpine Vaudeville, by collapsing critically in front of a newly-released “Harvard” study allegedly revealing that Exxon 40 years ago predicted today’s warming with “breathtaking,” “stunning,” “astonishing” accuracy.
These adjectives aren’t in the study itself, which is merely tendentious, sponsored by the activists at the Rockefeller Family Fund. But the timing probably wasn’t an accident. In fact, Exxon’s results were identical to those of other scientists because it collaborated with them. Its findings weren’t hidden “behind closed doors,” as one report alleged. They were published in peer-reviewed journals. Apparently, to get to its desired result, the “Harvard” study also had to attribute to Exxon outside research that its scientists merely “reported.”
This retread builds on Rockefeller’s previous greatest hit, paying journalists in 2016 to flaunt Exxon’s decades-old scientific efforts. Exxon was accused of “emphasizing the uncertainty” when uncertainty was the crucial scientific output. No matter what Exxon said, not sellable to policy makers at the time was spending unknown trillions to reduce future temperatures maybe by 4.5 degrees Celsius, maybe by 1.5 degrees. Yet this was the best guidance science could provide for four decades. Rockefeller prefers to stress the $30 million Exxon once spent on climate-skeptical think tanks. This money, not the scientific uncertainty or humanity’s desire for cheap energy, explains the failure to enact meaningful CO2 reductions. It’s all Exxon’s fault.
OK, studies like this one sponsored by Rockefeller and served up by provocateurs at the Harvard history department and Germany’s Potsdam Institute exist to exploit media shallowness. They wouldn’t exist otherwise.
Comment: Putting Exxon’s old study in historical context refutes what the PR campaign is trying to convey. Exxon’s CO2-climate investigation came at a time when global cooling was the climate news, and Peak Oil and Peak Gas were the corporate fears. Climatology was an infant profession whose predictions came from back-of-the-envelope investigation, not formal models.
Exxon did not study the temperature offset of aerosols or the positive effects of CO2 concentrations, such as plant fertilization and warmer winters. Meanwhile, solar power, wind power, and electric vehicles were not industries that offered the prospect of an “energy transition.” (More arguments can be found here.)
Climate Models
The hindsight fallacy abounds. Climate modelers, if their forecasts are borne out, can’t know if they were right for the right reasons. The study also perilously juggles apples and oranges due to the difference between equilibrium and transient climate sensitivity.
Comment: I believe that climate models, by imparting false information, are worse than nothing.
Opportunity Cost
More to the point, nothing here redeems Rockefeller philanthropic money being poured down a Greta Thunberg rathole when real needs go unmet. Never mind.
Comment: It is not only wasted philanthropy “when real needs go unmet.” The colossal waste is the ‘climate dollars’ that could have been spent on resiliency and adaptation. It is the resource misdirection associated with government-forced duplication of the power grid and the transportation network. And it would be less spending, smaller budget deficits, and less currency inflation.
After 40 years, an authoritative U.N. panel, which once shared Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize, has made real progress on the uncertainty puzzle, not only narrowing the consensus range of likely climate outcomes, more importantly reducing the estimated risk of worst-case warming.
This upshot of its long-awaited Sixth Assessment Report in 2021-22 goes unreported by the same press that gobbles up Rockefeller’s Exxon hate-mongering. It significantly uprates the likelihood that human society will weather the expected changes handily. In turn, as I noted recently, scientists have been able to refocus usefully on outlier risks and geoengineering solutions if those outlier risks should materialize.
Comment: Homan Jenkins’s interpretation of the IPCC science is more from the body of the report and less from the (biased) Policy Summary–and still less on the media exaggeration of the 6th assessment.
Jenkins will be pleased to know that 1) recorded satellite temperatures are showing much less warming that model-predicted; 2) the mainstream has turned against the upper-end warming models that the IPCC family; 3) reality-based temperature reconstructions indicate warming of roughly 1.5C-2.2 C for a doubling of CO2 (see here, here, and here) versus the IPCC’s AR6 range of equilibrium climate sensitivity of 2.0-4.5C.
Public Policy Failure
Hooray. This is progress. In the meantime, though, thanks to Rockefeller, Mr. Gore and others, we ended up with policy option C— spend X trillion to have no effect on climate.
Comment: Has the anti-CO2 crusade actually increased emissions? The low marginal costs of wind and solar have ruined the economics of nuclear capacity, causing premature retirements. Same for gas plants. And the reliability/price problems from dilute, intermittent energies have increased coal and oil and wood burning around the world. Energy density rules.
Our obsessive focus on green energy subsidies pleases many constituents but incentivizes more energy consumption overall. The human appetite for energy, after all, is limitless if the price is right. Meanwhile, unused and even denigrated by the left is the only tool that was ever likely to reduce meaningfully the path of emissions, a carbon tax.
Comment: Forgive Jenkins for his club-in-the-closet, a CO2 tax. Does he know the “right” price? Are we willing to implement international trade barriers to prevent ‘leakage’? Government failure and analytic failure far more than negates “market failure” in this regard.
Oh well. Climate policy is effectively over and that’s probably fine. The energy machine will certainly incorporate new technologies, including renewables; there won’t be a major shift in emissions from the path they would have taken anyway.
Comment: Worry about the next century’s ‘problems’ in the next century–and enjoy affordable, plentiful, dependable energy in the meantime. And the global lukewarming might even be an insurance policy against a global cooling from a string of volcanoes or from the natural forces that we know so little about.
Mr. Gore will continue his angry prophet act. Politics will continue to fuel a sacred pork scramble. The climate press will balance on its noses whatever memes are tossed its way. And humanity will adapt to the climate it gets, which the best current guess says will probably be another 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer over the next century.
Final Comment: Global greening and other benefits from CO2 enrichment will continue and expand. The mitigation strategy of the United Nations, the UK/EU, and the Biden Administration has failed. The path forward is anticipation and adaptation to weather/climate, which points toward free markets and societal wealth, not global energy statism.
Up to 15 million people face risk of catastrophic flooding from glacial lakes which could burst their natural dams at any moment, a new study finds.
The study led by Newcastle University is the first global attempt to map potential hotspots for such floods.
As the climate warms, glaciers retreat and meltwater collects, forming lakes………………….
Dr Harrison added that the research was only a first step towards better understanding of the impact of climate change on what are known as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).
That relationship is complex and made harder to prove by what scientists suspect to be a long time lag between cause and effect.
A glacial lake at the foot of Jomolhari mountain in Bhutan.
So millions are supposedlyat risk of these floods, but there has been no such increase yet?
Sounds like more scaremongering to me!
But we also learn these floods were also increasing a century ago, a natural event long before man-made global warming. And as any glaciologist worth his salt would tell you, the real danger of glacial floods arises when glaciers are advancing:
HH Lamb: Climate, History & The Modern World
But as ever money talks. So called climate scientists are kept in a job producing these ludicrous studies, and the BBC can use it as more propaganda.
Charging at home is a favored feature of electric vehicles (EVs). But public charging stations are needed for long trips and to maximize market penetration of EVs. However, it’s unlikely that charging fees can cover the capital and operating costs of public chargers or make money for investors.
Charging at home is a favored feature of electric vehicles (EVs). But public charging stations are needed for long trips and to maximize market penetration of EVs. However, it’s unlikely that charging fees can cover the capital and operating costs of public chargers or make money for investors.
According to Kelly Blue Book, Americans purchased more than 800,000 new electric cars last year, or about 5.8 percent of all new cars sold. EV sales grew by 65 percent over 2022. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 extended and expanded tax credits for EV purchases and for residential and commercial charging stations. Some predict that electric vehicles will become more than half of the vehicles on the road by 2050.
Last week, Travel Centers of America, or TA, announced that it would open 1,000 EV charging stations in 200 locations over the next five years. TA’s announcement follows similar announcements from convenience store chains Pilot and Love’s. These new chargers will add to the more than 160,000 currently in operation in the US.
Most people charge their electric vehicles at home. Home charging accounts for about 80 percent of charging in the US and Europe.
Home chargers are 120 volt, 3.3 or 7.4 kilowatt (kW), AC chargers that can charge an electric car up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) of range in about three to seven hours. Today, about 80 percent of US public chargers are 240 volt, 10 or 22 kW AC chargers that can charge an EV to 100 kilometers in one to three hours. Experience shows that these existing AC public chargers are two slow, so most new public chargers being installed are DC fast chargers. DC fast chargers of 50 kW or 120 kW can charge an EV in 30 minutes or less.
But the business case for public charging service is poor. Because most charging is done at home, public charger utilization rates are low. Fast DC chargers needed for public charge points are expensive. Most studies find that charging stations can’t pay for themselves over a 10-year period.
Let’s compare a traditional gas pump to a fast DC charger. A gas station fuel pump costs about $20,000 and can serve a customer in less than six minutes. A 50-kilowatt fast DC charger costs about $100,000 and can serve an EV customer in about 30 minutes. The pump can serve five times as many customers for one-fifth of the capital cost of a high-speed charger.
Electrify America (EA) is the second largest charging company in the US behind Tesla. Last October, EA announced that it had 3,500 charging stations at the end of 2021, which provided 1.45 million customer charging sessions during the year. This means that, on average, each EA charging station supported just over one charging session per day. While this will increase with more EVs on the road, EA charging stations will never recover their investment costs with such low levels of charging.
Tesla sold more than 60 percent of new electric cars in the US in 2022. Tesla provides a network of almost 17,000 chargers in the US and more than 40,000 worldwide. The firm’s chargers are 90 kW up to 250 kW fast DC chargers. But Tesla’s charger network is paid for by revenues from car sales.
Charging is problematic for residents of multi-unit housing. About 32 percent of US residents and 46 percent of Europeans have apartments. Will apartment building owners install chargers that are money losers?
Most charging stations today reside at unmanned locations. Many drivers won’t want to wait a half hour to charge a vehicle in a remote parking lot location after dark. Remote locations also encourage thieves to cut off charging cables to steal the copper, even while a vehicle is being charged. Public chargers may need to be at manned sites, further increasing costs.
The cost of electricity is a key factor in the price of electric mobility. As part of the world energy crisis, Europe’s electricity cost rose by a factor of six in the last 18 months. Running an EV is now more expensive per mile than a petrol car in many locations in Europe.
It’s unlikely that commercial charging of electric vehicles will become a sustainable free-market business. Look for charging stations to eventually be owned by electric utilities, paid for by higher electricity prices and government subsidies.
Steve Goreham is a speaker, author, and independent columnist on energy, sustainability, climate change, and public policy. More than 100,000 copies of his books are now in print, including his latest, Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.
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